Mainlining Christmas

Background information on this special is sparse. It's an animated half-hour story providing a fictitious origin for the song of the same name. It features Phil Hartman, though he's warping his voice to a degree I couldn't even tell which character he was playing (not surprisingly, it's the lead). This is narrated by a partridge and concerns four named characters: King and Princess Silverbell, Sir Carolboomer, and his squire, Hollyberry. If you read those names and thought to yourself they were hilarious, I've got some good news for you: there's a special floating around Youtube you're going to love. Unfortunately, I've got some bad news for you, too: there's almost certainly a two-foot spike sticking out of your forehead that's impairing normal cognitive function. Seek immediate medical help (after watching the special, of course). The plot is thin to a degree that the very term "plot" is a generous overstatement. The special sta

Mixed Nuts is a mid-90's comedy starring Steve Martin ostensibly about a non-profit suicide-prevention line on Christmas Eve. I say "ostensibly" because the premise isn't actually all that central to the movie. It's somewhat baffling, actually: they set up the idea of a suicide prevention line, use it to deliver a handful of jokes, then more or less abandon the concept halfway through. It's not "officially" dropped - there's no plot reason for it to be removed; it's more like they ran out of material. Instead, we focus on a series of subplots revolving around the characters. First, there's Steve Martin's crumbling life. His girlfriend dumps him, he's in danger of losing the office location (and by extension, the non-profit), and he starts doubting his ability to help people. There's no drama here: it's mostly an excuse for him to do his usual shtick. Next, there's Rita Wilson, playing a fairly boring love interes

I imagine that the people who own the Looney Tunes IP, or anything like it, are always over a certain barrel. You have these iconic characters that people love, or at least feel affectionate nostalgia for. But they’re tied to these very pat, repetitive plots. Smart character outwits dumb character, who gets blown up/dropped off a cliff/something heavy dropped on them. Prey character outwits or out-lucks predator character, who gets blown up/dropped off a cliff/attacked by bigger character/otherwise injured. Rinse. Repeat. So if you’re looking to make something new with these characters, you have to wonder: do you stick with the tried-and-true formula, despite the fact that it’s not really enough to sustain a longer-than-three-minute runtime? Or to you step out of the box and give the characters more depth, more backstory and different, more complicated plots? Or, as is the case here, do you try to have your cake and eat it too? This show has an extremely odd premise. The main cha

Try and stay with me for a minute: this one gets a little confusing. Technically, we watched the 2002 direct-to-DVD movie, A Very Merry Pooh Year . However, after a brief introduction, the first half of that movie is a slightly edited version of the 1991 special, "Winnie the Pooh and Christmas Too," which is the finale of the series The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh . If it weren't for the intro, these would just be two desperate specials featuring the same characters, but - for some reason - they must have thought it would work better as an integrated feature. For the most part, they were hilariously wrong. More on that in a moment. First, let's back up and say a few words about The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh . The series ran from 1988 to 1991; I was born in 1979, so I was certainly watching Saturday morning cartoons when it was around. When I wasn't able to find something more violent on TV, I'd occasionally turn it on. I remember liking it

So I discovered this hidden, uh, 'gem' the way you do these days: by following a series of clicks down a black hole of the internet and reading about  Disney Acid Sequences . And I was skimming the list of examples, and I said, wait. Adventures in Wonderland . That sounds oddly familiar… A little YouTube later and I established that I not only had seen this crime against good aesthetics when it came out, but that there was a Christmas Episode. This show is… weird. It’s weird on a lot of levels. Not just the super early-90’s look to Alice and the others, although that’s a lot of it (The White Rabbit zips around on black rollerblades and Tweedledee and Tweedledum dress like break-dancers). It’s got a sort of tell-it-super-straight vibe that I associate with television aimed at the youngest of the young, but the word usage and speed of the plot implies an audience of at least 6-8. Okay, so the episode starts with Alice whining about how it’ll be a rotten Christmas if she

Please begin by noting, I read and enjoyed A Christmas Memory . I have a small, tiny, miniscule amount of sympathy for the person who thought this was a good idea. I mean, Breakfast at Tiffany’s doesn’t seem like a filmable story either at first glance. But at least that story has things, and these things happen to the characters. Is this tv-movie adaptation irredeemable? Probably not. It might have been a lovely 15 minutes, though, and instead it is a dragging, tedious, bloated 96. The only strength is in the visuals. The production values are strong enough that everything looks period-accurate and has depth and texture. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the writing. Adapting a stream-of-consciousness piece that’s all setting and emotional vignettes to live action is not a light task to undertake. Despite the actors giving it a good shot, words that lilt and float as thoughts on the page fall dead when spoken aloud. Also, they tried very hard to give it a plot. And i

The most disorienting aspect of While You Were Sleeping now is knowing that Sandra Bullock would eventually star in Gravity , which is a good film but - sadly - not a Christmas movie. While You Were Sleeping , on the other hand, is just the opposite. For those of you lucky enough to have missed the 90's, the decade was full of movies like this. The rom-com was about as common then as superhero movies are now. This one's no worse than most, but that's a relatively low bar. This movie starts by introducing us to Sandra Bullock, who plays a character whose main character trait is that she's lonely. Yes, it's Christmas, and she has no one to share it with other than her cat. Also, she wants to travel. Her job is to collect tokens from people boarding the Chicago subways. The one bright part of her day is when this one random guy comes by. She's never spoken to him, but she falls for him anyway, because she has serious emotional issues. On Christmas mornin

This shows up on several lists of Christmas movies, but I think that's a stretch. Several key scenes take place at Christmas, but they're all at the beginning and don't amount to more than fifteen or twenty minutes of the total run time. Most of the movie revolves around Valentine's Day. That said, there's enough holiday cheer to warrant some feedback from Mainlining, so here we are. After a quick prologue taking place a year and a half beforehand, the movie opens with a Christmas dinner with Meg Ryan's character's family where she announces her engagement to Bill Pullman's character. The scene features some foreshadowing that her relationship won't work (just in case you missed the fact Tom Hanks is headlining). I'd add that all the foreshadowing revolves around shockingly superficial issues. We're talking things like food allergies and a dull story on how they met: there's nothing wrong with this guy, Ryan just doesn't find him

I just came across this 7 minute short on Youtube. Stylistically, it feels a lot like Powerpuff Girls, with some great homages to the Adam West Batman and 60's spy shows. I particularly like the super-spy spin on Mrs. Claus, who isn't stuck at the North Pole this time.

Earthworm Jim was both a series of absurdist video games and a short-lived animated show. This was actually the last episode. The humor and style owes a lot to The Tick , although Earthworm Jim is more random, I think. In this episode, the cold opening shows us what happens if you write secret hideout on your roof with Christmas lights. The main plot follows The Evil Queen Pulsating, Bloated, Festering, Sweaty, Pus-filled, Malformed Slug-for-a-Butt, as she learns about Santa (from Earth TV) and decides to kidnap and brainwash him, so that he will help brainwash all the children of the world into doing her bidding. Jim, Peter Puppy and Princess What’s-Her-Name set out to save Santa This was hilarious. Highlights include the dark side of working for Santa (including a drunken rant from Rudolph in a bar for anthropomorphised concepts), and how Jim et. al. find out about the Queen’s plan (via the psychic beard link between Santa and all mall Santas) Sure, there was a joke here an

The premise of Die Hard 2 is incredibly similar to that of the original: John McClane is meeting his wife on Christmas Eve, only for her to be taken hostage by terrorists along with others. McClane has a short amount of time to figure out their plans and save her. I grew up thinking this was written to be a facsimile of part one, but a few minutes on Wikipedia reveals that the truth is a bit more complicated. Die Hard 2 was based on a novel called 58 Minutes, which wasn't in the same series as the book the first Die Hard was based on. 58 Minutes was published a year before Die Hard came out, meaning it couldn't have been inspired by the movie's success. I suppose the writer might have been inspired by the novel "Nothing Lasts Forever" (there are a lot of parallels), but I don't see any evidence for that. Interestingly, both novels involved the hero (whose name wasn't John McClane in either) trying to save his daughter. The movies changed it to his w

Life is sometimes unfair. So it serves to reason that Christmas is sometimes unfair. If this were not so, if we truly lived in the best of all possible Christmases as Leibniz thought, then Jingle all the Way would have no defenders, and Santa with Muscles wouldn't be entirely unknown. While it probably doesn't need to be said, I will state it now for the record: Santa with Muscles is not a good movie. It is - objectively - pretty bad, a vehicle for Hulk Hogan produced years after the wrestler's fame had waned. When it opened, it made $120k in its opening weekend and closed after two weeks. However, unlike 99% of zany holiday comedies, it is absolutely watchable. There are even moments when the filmmakers attempted to be funny that resulted in funny scenes. If you don't watch many movies in this genre, you'll be forgiven for not realizing how rare this is. The movie opens with a girl writing a letter to Santa. The girl's town is being terrorized by some sor

The Knights of Christmas Suzanne Barclay, Margaret Moore, Deborah Simmons, 1997 Crossposted from The Blue Fairy’s Bookshelf Yup, it’s officially a theme. MORE SHORT STORIES. These ones are a little more like novellas, though. This is a Harlequin Historical compilation, three short works set at Christmas. I thought it might be a somewhat entertaining read: a bit of fluffy medieval holiday romance. Well, I was right, sort of, in that it was fluffy (in a shallow way) and medieval (in its uneasy gender roles). The first story, Kara’s Gift , was the one I actually liked. It has in common with its sibling stories awkward and somewhat off-putting description in the sex scenes, but the characters are at least likable, the story super-cliche but amusing. Duncan is a landless knight, back from the crusades with enough treasure to wed his childhood sweetheart, but instead he’s swept up in a Scottish clan-war and a wild-hearted pagan lass. It’s actually kind of sweet by the end, and th

It's strange that it took me so long to see The Ref . It's relatively well known, but somehow it always slipped below my radar. But it finally came up on my Netflix queue. The plot revolves around a thief who takes a dysfunctional family hostage on Christmas Eve to hide out from the cops. By and large, comedies about families with issues are just about the worst genre holiday entertainment has to offer, but miraculously, The Ref is actually pretty good. While there's a long list of things this movie did wrong, the filmmakers made several extremely smart decisions that elevate this to something worth watching. First of all, they cut the slapstick down to a minimum. Second - and maybe more important - they wrote some depth into the main characters. If the husband and wife had been two-dimensional, this thing would probably have been as bad as Surviving Christmas . Well, maybe not that bad, but you get the point. Fortunately, the husband and wife were well cast (Judy D

This isn’t a full episode, just a short. The nice thing about shorts is they don’t overplay their gimmick. In this piece, Dexter disbelieves in Santa, while DeeDee says he’s real. To prove his sister wrong, Dexter sets up a series of elaborate traps to prove that their father is Santa. I, uh, may sympathize with this a little too much . Due to classic cartoon logic, Santa is real, and Dexter ends up chasing him all over town using a rocketship built in their chimney. He’s convinced until the very end that it’s his dad, breaking out the special effects to trick the kids. This ends badly for all involved. It’s not brilliant, but it’s an amusing few minutes. If you want to hunt it down, it's part of Episode 37 in Season two.

The name on this thing is somewhat ambiguous - the DVD is simply labeled "Saturday Night Live Christmas", but the special includes the word "Past." I'm going with that, because it's a more interesting name. I'm pretty sure I saw this compilation when it aired in 1999 (the selection of shorts was really familiar). It's a mix of old stuff, along with stuff that was new when it aired, but is now just slightly less old. In total, there are 18 skits on this DVD, which comes out to around an hour-fifteen. They didn't bother including any extras, which is a little baffling. The skits aren't all great, but with twenty-four seasons of holiday shows to pick and choose from, they were certainly able to find some entertaining bits. Like most SNL compilations, this makes the show look a hell of a lot better than it's ever actually been. There are a handful of high points, including "The Lost Ending of It's a Wonderful Life," wher

It turns out I remember Nicktoons better than I thought I did, because I remembered this episode as we watched it. That’s always an odd feeling. It was also odd that it never once came up in this heavily Christmas-themed episode that one of the adults is Jewish, and the main kid is thus half-Jewish. At first I thought: maybe they hadn’t decided that about the characters at this point in the show (The Rugrats Chanukah special didn’t hit ‘til 1996) but a little googling tells me that it was in the first episode. So… that’s weird. I guess they didn’t think the viewing kids could handle more than one religion at a time. And anyway, this one’s all about Santa. For most of the episode, it’s actually quite well done. The episode is just packed with intertwining plots. Angelica’s dad is concerned about her being traumatized by the unmasking of a mall Santa (she’s just pissed that the toys the store gave her for her temper tantrum aren’t the expensive stuff she wants). Chuckie is afraid

This was highly ranked on a list over at Rotten Tomatoes , so I decided to check it out. It's a Christmas war movie, which seems to be a fairly sparse sub-genre, especially when compared to the almost absurdly large Christmas action movie genre. It's a stark and fascinating film, at times sad, beautiful, and funny. It's got some issues which hold it back from being a bona fide classic, but it's still worth watching. The movie follows a unit of "whiz kid" soldiers in World War II who are sent to gather intelligence. When the movie opens, half of their unit is already dead and most of the rest are sick of combat. Every synopsis I've seen focuses on the movie's second act, when they have a series of bizarre encounters with a German squad culminating in a Christmas celebration. There's some good film making on display here. These scenes are tense, funny, and engaging. Gradually, we learn the Germans want to surrender, but there are some complicat

This special episode of T he Magic School Bus was equal parts awesome and awful; a bizarre work of propaganda that removes the education from edutainment, yet is strangely intriguing. There's a moment in this episode where the titular vehicle is hit by its own recycling-nullification ray and transforms into junk. That's an absolutely perfect metaphor for the episode. Maybe for the series. But damned if it isn't fun to watch. The episode begins right before holiday break. It's definitely a 90's conception of the "holiday," too, complete with pine trees, green and red decorations, multicolored lights, and an near endless number of Christmas tunes with new recycling-themed lyrics. I don't think they said the word, "Christmas" once, though they did mention Hanukkah several times. My favorite shot in the special is one of a chalkboard with a picture of a menorah and other Hanukkah paraphernalia surrounded by a Christmas garland. They tried s

This is a collection of South Park episodes I found on Netflix. I guess it was released on DVD originally. I'm not the world's biggest South Park fan, but I've seen a handful of episodes, some of which were brilliant. Others... not so much. Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo (1997) Jesus, really? All right, the premise of this episode revolves around magical, talking Christmas poop. I think there's supposed to be some sort of message about political correctness or something, but mostly it's just juvenile humor about poo. Oh. Okay. Wikipedia sheds some light on this. Apparently, Mr. Hankey was supposed to be the main character of the show. Not this episode; I'm talking about South Park as a whole. An earlier version of their pitch was for "The Mr. Hankey Show." Yeah. That would have been much, much worse. Merry Christmas, Charlie Manson (1998) This was a little better, thanks in no small part to Mr. Hankey playing a far smaller role. The epis