Mainlining Christmas

This is a special, double-length episode of a show I knew existed (as I often have a vague sense of programming affiliated with PBS) but had never seen. I had the impression it was educational. I’m not sure about that, but it is boring. It starts off relatively inoffensive, if bland. Nick and Sally are two kids who are friends with the Cat in the Hat, and they arrive at his Christmas party and are promptly put to work as waiters while he sings about how awesome his party is. They think this is awesome. Kids at home: when doing favors for your “friend” is the super-fun part of your relationship, maybe rethink the friendship. Anyway, all the guests are animals, and a bunch of them are introduced during the song and subsequent party games. These include an annoying young caribou/reindeer, a mouse, a crab, and a bunch of other animals in passing (I wasn’t paying close attention, it didn’t seem important). The guests leave, and the kids offer to help clean up, but the Cat sends them h...

Picture us sitting on the couch, trying to figure out what in the heck we’re watching. It’s ugly flash animation, it’s hard to follow, the writing seems to have been dashed off by a middle schooler pressed for time. I don’t have any huge historical fondness for Transformers as a franchise, and even I can tell something is terribly wrong. Apparently this is a series about the loser bots who couldn’t make the cut, and Optimus Prime found a backward town to dump them in so they could learn to be subservient to humans. It’s funny because I wrote that as a joke, but I just looked up the premise of the show, and it’s basically that. So in this episode, the kid (there’s always a kid) is teaching the robots about seasons, because they’re space-faring life forms that somehow don’t understand orbits and weather. It’s summer and very hot, and one robot asks why they can’t have snow in the summer. Cue lightbulb. The kid goes to visit a guy who is apparently the local mad scientist? There...

Mr. Christmas is a short documentary about Bruce Mertz, a retired electrician in Concord, California who spent more than three decades building elaborate holiday light displays in his yard. At a cursory glance, his display wasn't much more impressive than hundreds of other throughout the country: there were animated displays, a large number of bulbs, and the whole thing was synced to music - we've seen things like that . What set Mertz apart from those wasn't scale - his yard was modest-sized, even if he filled it with lights - it was artistry. The documentary only provides a brief look at how he built and maintained his display, but it's incredible to see. There's no laptop managing the whole thing: it's all done using analog dials and timers. And all the pieces were made by Mertz himself, down to the paint covering the lights (he wasn't satisfied with the longevity of the color on store-bought lights, so he developed his own paint mixture). The docu...

This is one of those times I stumbled across a few Christmas episodes while watching a series. I saw Arrow's pilot back when it originally aired. I actually liked it quite a bit on its own merits, but was underwhelmed by the move away from comic book tropes. It felt like a really good dark and gritty take on a superhero origin, but I'd kind of had my fill of those. I decided not to follow it but to pick it up later if I heard it was worth it. What actually got me back on board was The Flash, which was much more in line with what I wanted from the genre. A handful of crossovers convinced me Arrow would head in a more interesting direction given time. Besides, like I said before, the pilot was actually quite good for what it was. Years End (2012) The first Christmas episode occurs a little less than halfway through season one. The season started strong with a few missteps. But a few episodes before Christmas, it took a dive for the worst, and this one doesn't do muc...

The Swan Princess Christmas is the third of four direct-to-video sequels to The Swan Princess, a movie which failed to make ten million dollars during its entire theatrical run and has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 44%. This is the first and only installment of the franchise I've ever seen, so I can't attest whether the abysmal writing, direction, and animation were par for the course, or if this fails to live up to the series's pitiful legacy. Assuming Wikipedia is right, this was the first in the series to be computer animated. For the majority of this movie's run time, the plot is essentially incomprehensible. The two leads, Derek and Odette, are getting ready to spend their first Christmas together. They have three talking animal sidekicks who almost never interact with them: a puffin, a turtle, and frog trying to get women to kiss him. And there's a cat who's working with the ghost of the villain from the first movie. To get a Christmas tree, Derek goes ...

For better and for worse, I found a DVD at the library called Scooby-Doo: 13 Spooky Tales - Holiday Chills and Thrills. It’s interesting, at least, containing a mix of ‘winter’ episodes and actual Christmas content from several of the various Scooby-Doo series. (For example, it included this one .) Haunted Holidays is a special that was produced direct-to-DVD for this compilation, and I rather liked it. Or at least it wasn't awful. The premise is more than a bit sketchy: Fred, Daphne and Velma are helping with a Christmas parade for a big toy store, for some reason, when it’s attacked by a crazed evil snowman. The thing has freezing breath and shapeshifting; it’s actually almost scary when it turns into a snow-spider-beast or a snow-alien-mouth-tentacle-thing. See? Despite Shaggy and Scooby’s reluctance, as usual the gang tries to get to the bottom of the mystery, which involves a supposed ‘curse of the sinister snowman’ placed on the toy store by the guy who owned th...

You might think a direct-to-video sequel to A Christmas Story would have no chance of living up to the original, but I thought it was a worthy successor. Granted, I consider the original one of the most overrated pieces of crap ever produced, but I think it says something that WB's home entertainment division was able to meet the same level of quality. Specifically, it says they're two-bit hacks who could barely figure out which way to point the camera, and even then I spent most of movie wishing they'd get that wrong and save me from at least a scene or two of utter agony. Watching this on DVD is enough to make one nostalgic for the days of televised movies, where you at least get the soothing respite of a commercial break to dull the pain. A Christmas Story 2 , referred to in its trailer as  A Christmas Story 2: The Official Sequel is set 6 years after the original, and Ralph is about to turn 16. If such a thing is possible, the plot is slightly less defined than it ...

Do you remember the scene in the first Home Alone movie where Kevin tied a bucket of paint to a rope and swung it at the robbers? Have you ever stopped to consider what the entire movie would have been like from the perspective of the paint inside the bucket? I mean, I assume it would have started absolutely still and sat that way for hours on end, before being slightly jostled. Then, a few hours later, it would have sloshed around, before splashing against the wall. Finally, it would have settled again. Mostly, it would have just been still. It would probably have dried a little as the movie progressed. Not a lot and certainly not quickly, but an imperceptible quantity of paint would have dried up. While that's not the plot of the fifth Home Alone movie, I think it offers a nice encapsulation of the experience of sitting through the film. That's another way of saying this movie isn't as shockingly awful as its predecessors. And that this improvement is a very, ver...

Lindsay and I reached dramatically different conclusions on this; probably as extreme as anything we've ever seen for this blog. That said, we can't actually point to many details we're in complete disagreement on: we simply weighed the positive and negative aspects of the special differently. Extremely differently. This is a sequel to The Snowman , a British Christmas special that's been around for three decades. The original is hands-down the best animated holiday special that I've ever seen, and I've seen damn near all of them. If you haven't seen The Snowman , just... no. Stop reading this, track it down, and watch it. I don't care if it's late, if you're tired, if you came across this write-up in the middle of April, or any other excuses. It is required viewing. It's also something that, by all rights, should never be touched again. Before we put this on, the very notion of a sequel didn't just feel unnecessary: it was blasp...

So once upon a time there was a gorgeous piece of art, The Snowman . And some people saw T he Snowman , and thought, hey, we should do a sequel! We’ll get the creator on board, it’ll be great. Two years later, The Snowman and the Snowdog was born. And.. it’s not terrible. GOD F*CKING D*MN IT. Because if it were terrible, I could just tell you it was terrible and we could all move on. But no. I enjoyed it. However, as I told Erin after the movie: “I liked it the way I feel emotional at Pixar movies even if the scene isn’t actually any good.” The writers did an excellent job checking off all the boxes and twisting the emotional beats to create a perfect facsimile of The Snowman . It’s like the uncanny valley. It’s almost perfect, but there’s something unsettling. Something wrong. This version stars a new little boy, which I liked. And I liked a lot about the animation. The building of the snowman especially was very well done. This was clearly carefully created. I was ...

When right-wing pundits rant about "The War on Christmas," there's one group they always leave out, and that's Christians who boycott the holiday due to its pagan roots and lack of Biblical origins. These groups are incredibly inconvenient for both sides of the holiday debate: the right wants to paint a picture where atheists are attacking Christmas, and non-Christians certainly don't want them as allies (these groups tend to be even more hell-fire and brimstone than the ones they're battling). But Christians who don't celebrate Christmas are a significant group - about 5% of Protestants fall into this category . I'm going to be considerate to these people and say that Jim Staley's reasons shouldn't be considered representative for the larger group. Staley is the pastor for "Passion for Truth Ministries." He seems to be trying to recreate a more primal version of Christianity inline with what its founders believed. This 2-hour vid...

I don’t know what the message of this movie was supposed to be. I mean, I know it must have had one, it’s the type of movie that has a feel-good message to tie everything up in a bow at the end. It’s an ABC Family Original. But I watched the movie, and I’m not sure what the message was. It should have been that Christmas is about being with people who care about you, or that singing is about enjoying yourself, not beating someone else. Or about seeing what’s important in life. However, it all got a bit muddy in between montages. Because, while I kind of enjoyed this movie, in a so-cheesy-it’s-almost-good kind of way, it was quite a bit lacking in actual plot or character. Holly wants to join the singing group, the Snow Belles. She wants to do this because her mother founded the group. Even though the woman currently running the Snow Bells (Marci) is a horrible person and has obvious delusions of grandeur, and the most important thing this group of women does is sing at the ma...

The best thing I can say about this episode is that it isn't, strictly speaking, unwatchable, and even then the statement is made at what I consider my most generous of moods. But it is, of course, Christmas, and at Christmas we should be charitable and giving. So I will give the Robertsons this: their Christmas episode was not literally unwatchable. It was merely crappy. Idiotic. And stupid. I should most likely add this represents my first real experience watching the Robertson clan, unless you count the Youtube video that got Phil Robertson suspended from A&E for a few weeks. The experience was not quite what I'd expected. The only thing I really understood about the series Duck Dynasty was that it was a reality show staring a family of millionaires bearing an odd resemblance to ZZ Top who'd made their fortune producing duck calls. As it turned out, I was slightly off: this wasn't remotely a reality show. It pretended to be a reality show, but the ...

Just to recap, this is the sequel to the spin-off of the Christmas-themed installment of the direct-to-video series that was spun-off of the direct-to-video sequels of two theatrical movies loosely based on a dog who played Comet on Full House. Got it? Good. You bet your ass there'll be a test later. This one's... complicated, actually. There are three credited writers on IMDB, which doesn't surprise me. Because, believe it or not, I think one of those writers might have been competent. That isn't to say the script or movie are good, per se. Most of the movie is utterly painful, there are astonishingly stupid plot decisions, the characters are vapid, and there are real reasons to think that the people who wrote this didn't even bother watching the prior films (not that I blame them). But, all that said, there were a handful of scenes where the quality of dialogue climbed substantially, and there were a few choices that were - dare I say - not idiotic in natu...

Throw The A-Team and Ocean's Eleven into a blender and hit puree, and you get Leverage , a series about four semi-reformed thieves teaming up with a semi-unreformed insurance investigator in order to take on corrupt politicians, heartless corporations, and rich crime bosses to steal back what they've taken from "the little guy." If the concept sounds a touch sappy, rest assured the series itself is a lot of fun. A sentence or two of cheesy moralizing every episode is a small price to pay for great characters (any one of the show's five leads could hold down a series of their own), tightly-plotted stories, and hilarious situations. In other words, the series is definitely worth your time. The Christmas episodes are, as well, though they're not the best jumping-on points. "The Ho, Ho, Ho Job" starts like most episodes, with a guest star showing up with a sob story. This time, the wronged individual is a mall Santa Claus who's been framed fo...

Do not make the same mistake we made: do not start with this episode. I've always kind of liked Scooby-Doo as a concept and as an early attempt at animated horror/comedy. But I've never actually seen an approach that worked. The originals had some cool designs on some of the monsters, but the stories were never interesting. Well, this is where that changes. Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated updates the concept and characters in a way that remains true to the show's original concept and history, while simultaneously offering extremely intelligent writing, complex character and relationship development, as well as multi-season plot arcs with satisfying payoffs along with way. I don't just mean "satisfying for a cartoon," either: this is the kind of in-depth, multi-dimensional story telling that's rare on live-action TV. We, of course, stumbled across it because of the Christmas episode. Only it's not really  a Christmas episode, at all. The hoo...

If you're like most people who have seen Prometheus, you're likely wondering why I'm talking about it on a blog devoted to Christmas. Actually, if you're like most people who saw the movie, you're probably more interested in when you're going to get the two hours you wasted watching it back. Well, I can't help with the second question, but I can shed some light on the first: I'm talking about Prometheus here because it's a Christmas movie. No, really. The crew of the ship wake from cryo-sleep a few days before Christmas. One of them sets up a Christmas tree. There's some subtle Christmas music in at least one scene. The sole survivor flies away on New Years Day. Oh, and the movie is about Christmas. That last statement is 100% true and at least twice as meaningless. This is because Prometheus is about a lot of things. It's about faith as it pertains to God and the concept of God as it doesn't pertain to faith. It's about sacri...

There are other Power Rangers Christmas episodes, but this is the one that Erin found on Netflix. It’s a humdinger. I knew something was drastically wrong after the Rangers defeated a monster in the first 5 minutes of the episode. Then their giant robot loses power and it becomes an excuse for a really crummy clip show. You can have no idea how terrible this was. The acting was beyond ridiculous. The ‘comic relief’ was horrible, and the action/drama was hilarious. There is tons of terrible, extraneous Christmas-pun flavored banter. Only it’s not banter when you’re just yelling ‘quips’ (using that term extremely loosely) at a red-and-green monster. Yes, the monster is red-and-green, and has what looks like a giant ear around one shoulder and a mouth on the other. I laughed a lot and very loudly while watching this episode, but it was not at anything that the creators intended to be funny. The kids say over and over how sad they are to be trapped in their giant robot on Christmas...

Read Part One Symphony of Illumination (2011) Theres a nice punchline on the cold opening on this one and some pretty okay jokes about Christmas music. Unfortunately, the episode drags badly in the middle and the B plot is awful. Many of the characters drifted into over-caricaturization here, it was jarring and boring. The end of Robin’s plot has a really nice dark tone though. The Over-Correction (2012) There are three, count them three, episodes set at Christmas that ran back-to-back-to-back in 2012. Unfortunately, our early thought on this episode was: ‘Hey, we found where the show jumped the shark,’ There’s a lot of bad randomness in the early parts of this episode. (WHY IS COBIE SMULDERS CRAZY NOW? Also, the lack of coherency in the emotional arcs isn’t just me with no context:  AVClub gave this one a C+ .) Finally the plot of the episode comes together and it builds for a while into some honest laughs. Christmas ornaments featured heavily in the best running gag of...