User blog comment:JeremyCreek/The Great Christmas Specials Bracket Tournament/@comment-419569-20180112210007

Now that this tournament has concluded, allow me to provide my personal commentary on the results.

As I mentioned in a reply to an earlier comment, I had hopes that A Muppet Family Christmas would ultimately win the tournament, particularly after A Charlie Brown Christmas 's surprising loss in the third round. After all, my inspiration to do this was the Cartoon All-Stars Madness tournament that was hosted by Saturday Morning Rewind and Disney Afternoon Forever, one of the reasons being that the winner of that tournament was not Bugs Bunny as I expected, but rather Darkwing Duck. Plus, ToughPigs.com recently posted this article about why A Muppet Family Christmas is better than the 1960s classics, so if A Muppet Family Christmas had won this tournament, it certainly would've made that article hilarious in hindsight. Of course, I did expect that A Charlie Brown Christmas would sweep the tournament, so I guess I can say I was surprised that the Peanuts gang more characteristically suffered defeat at the hands of the red-nosed reindeer.

When I started up Round 2, I initially found myself regretting my choice of sticking all of the 1960s standards in the first bracket, since all of them had basically swept Round 1. But as I soon saw, this allowed the match-ups that followed to be much more interesting than if I had spread the 1960s standards across the four brackets. If I had done that, the 1960s stuff would probably have won all the matches!

Other surprise results in my opinion:
 * A Chipmunk Christmas managed to make it farther into the tournament than I expected, considering it was up against Adventure Time 's Christmas episode in Round 1, Bugs Bunny in Round 2, and A Flintstone Christmas in Round 3, before finally losing to Mickey's Christmas Carol. I guess it is fitting, though, that a trio of characters created for a Christmas song would ultimately lose to a special starring a character originally created for a Christmas comic.
 * I expected Phineas and Ferb Christmas Vacation! to make it to Round 2 and was pretty surprised to see it lose to A Flintstone Christmas. Perhaps the opposite outcome would've occurred if I had done this tournament in 2012 when Phineas and Ferb was still running.
 * Although I wasn't surprised that "Hearth's Warming Eve" ultimately won against Christmas Comes to Pac-Land, Pac-Man apparently put up a pretty good fight, to the point that when it came time to get Round 2 started, I had to ask someone to provide a tie-breaker vote on that particular match.
 * What I found more surprising, though, was that the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon's Christmas episode lost to Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol in the very first round, given that TMNT has always been more popular than Mr. Magoo, not to mention the fact that the TMNT franchise is still going strong today (Michael Bay's movies notwithstanding) while Mr. Magoo's last new project was in 2006.

In conclusion, I am mostly pleased with how this tournament came out, even if I do wish that it had ultimately ended on a less predictable final result than the one seen above.