The Guardians decide to get Peter a very special present…

Christmas tie-ins are a strange beast. They exist almost wholly as a spin-off tied to a specific holiday period in which all religious content is removed and replaced with sentimentality, schmalz and messages about the importance of family. This is normally at the expense of the actual franchise. They can be good, average or terrible.

After Marvel’s successful Halloween entry this year which managed to skate the line between seasonal focus and a decent story rather nicely we have the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.

I cannot think of another team or group of heroes who could be the focus. There’s no Avengers team at the moment in the MCU and can you imagine the Eternals celebrating Christmas? Seems like it might be super awkward.

This entry has all the tropes of a Christmas Special in play – tragic backstory, broken family, yearning for meaning and people making decisions in the hope others will be happy. We have cameos, dad jokes and enough sentimentality to sink a battleship.

It’s a good job Thanos has been dealt with because he’d be clicking his fingers as quickly as possible to make it end. But then he’s a Grinch.

Having said all the above – for a Christmas Special it largely works. It’s not demanding in any way and has no message beyond the ‘we should try to be nice and feel good’ that is the staple of this subgenre. Yet it is funny and, surprisingly, largely consistent with the Guardians both in terms of characters but also in terms of what we know about the world they inhabit.

For us, as a family, we laughed, told each other how cheesy it was and moved on – which really is all you want from a Christmas Special. Will we watch it again next year? No. Did it fill some time this year while we decorated the Christmas Tree? Yes, and I’m not sure we could ask for more.

Rating? 6 awkward family members out of 10.

Stewart Hotston