There is no amount of acoustic pain that composer Christopher Lennertz would not endure for his buddy of 30 years Eric Kripke, the current showrunner of The youngLennertz listened to endless amounts of boy band stuff before writing the single Super-Sweet “Rock my kiss” for Season 3 and challenged himself to write the most emotional song imaginable for Starlight’s pop star moment, “Never really disappear”, and now he’s back with the fourth season of “Let’s Put the Christ Back in Christmas.”
“If I can say something about The youngit’s about us doing our research,” Lennertz tells Polygon, with minimal eye blinking.
Former fraternity brothers who set off for Hollywood together with no money and a high tolerance for Taco Bell, Lennertz and Kripke have, thanks to years of Supernatural And revolutionSo the writer knew he could only give minimal direction for what he wanted for the planned “Vought on Ice” sequence in Season 4, Episode 3, “We’re Raising the Red Flag Here,” Lennertz says.
“I literally get a short paragraph that says, ‘Homeland and Maeve come out as figure skaters, sing a Vaught-produced song about the war on Christmas, there’s a nativity scene and Jesus, and then everyone gets killed.’ And then it says something about ‘putting Christ back in Christmas.’ That’s the whole job.”
The dynamic between showrunner and composer is more about moods. When Lennertz began working on “Let’s Put the Christ Back in Christmas,” he watched video after video from Ice Capades, Disney on Ice, Frozen on Ice and any other source that might influence the finished dance. “I knew I needed sleigh bells and that it had to be fast,” he says. Then the vought of everything Kripke is good for pours in. Around the time Lennertz was combining high notes with laser noises, his old friend started sending him articles about the latest anti-Christmas fearmongering. Lennertz remembers the message from Candace Cameron Bures Deal with the Great American Family network
“[Eric] has very little patience for such silliness, just like me,” says Lennertz. “We are pretty open people. So that was our job from the beginning, so to speak.”
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Photo: Jasper Savage/Prime Video
Lennertz’s big dream for the sequence was to be bigger than anything else The young had done it before. This was not his first major showstopper number – Lennertz previously worked with music legends Alan Menken and Marc Shaiman to Hawkeye‘s fake Avengers show Rogers: The Musical into a real stage event for Disney California Adventure – and he immediately thought of Broadway to cast the singers for the song. While the actors on screen are all ice skating pros, the song features Andrew Rannells (The Book of Mormon) as Homelander, Shoshana Bean (Hairspray, Hell’s Kitchen) as Maeve and James Monroe Iglehart (Aladdin, Hamilton) than Jesus.
“I texted Eric and said, ‘Can we reach out to big Broadway stars and make this a big cameo?'” he recalls. “And as soon as I got permission to do it, I thought: Well, that must be AndrewAnd then we have James Monroe Iglehart, a black Jesus, who Vought later turns into a white Jesus, which is so Vought. […] Luckily, they all said yes. And they were all my first choice, every single one of them. I was really lucky.”
The finished version of “Let’s Put the Christ Back in Christmas” is painfully real as far as cheesy ice skating dance numbers go. Then it just gets… painful. You can watch the untainted version above, but for the full bloody affair, head to Prime Video, where the first three episodes of The young Season 4 is currently streaming.
