Mainlining Christmas

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.

Well, the good news is that this is the best best episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force I've ever seen. The bad news is that doesn't mean much. The premise of the show - if you've never seen an episode - revolves around anthropomorphic fast food items living in New Jersey. I've seen several episodes and have never really figured out what they're going for, if anything. Maybe there's a statement about fast food icons like Ronald McDonald. Or maybe the showrunners just got high and put this together. Regardless, the comedy generally comes off as weird for the sake of weird. This episode is no different, but it is kind of Christmas themed. So here we are. The plot centers around a robot alien showing up at the home of Carl (the next door neighbor of the main characters). The robot claims to be the ghost of Christmas and fills Carl's pool with blood. The majority of the episode is devoted to the robot providing a nonsensical explanation as to why he's done

This is the DVD cover, because the movie poster is silly and misleading. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the sixth James Bond movie, based on the tenth James Bond book. It’s a quieter movie than a lot of the others, it follows Bond’s relationship with one woman, Tracy, and an unaffiliated mission to track down Blofeld. This is the only movie starring George Lazenby as Bond, and there are a couple internal nods to the fact that this is the same character with a different actor. The romance between Tracy and Bond is fairly poignant, if occasionally as over-the-top as the rest of the movie. The action plot revolves around Bond posing as a genealogist to infiltrate Blofeld’s stronghold in the Alps. Blofeld has a fairly silly plot to use a bunch of hypnotised young women to damage the world’s food supplies (this made slightly more sense in the book), but the important thing for our purposes is that it’s Christmas! So there is a ski chase which is sometimes very exciting and someti

I'm pretty sure Here Comes Peter Cottontail represents Rankin-Bass's first attempt to push into a holiday other than Christmas. This largely forgotten artifact features Danny Kaye as the narrator (as well as a handful of other voices) and Casey Kasem as the title character, which means you'll spend most of the special expecting Peter to ask for a Scooby snack. No, that's not quite right: you'll probably spend most of the special looking for a ledge to jump off of. But you'll also notice that the main character has Shaggy's voice. The special, which is based on some book called "The Easter Bunny That Overslept," starts in the magical land of April Valley, which I'm assuming is a reference to Baum's "Laughing Valley." Either that, or it's just stupid. Regardless, all the Easter Bunnies live in April Valley, where they color eggs using paints brought to them by Seymour S. Sassafrass, who grows the plants to... you know what

A while back, some test footage for a proposed live-action Marvin the Martian movie appeared online, along with some for Hong Kong Phooey. Unless watching a CG dog voiced by Eddie Murphy drink from a toilet sounds like fun to you, you'll want to skip the Hong Kong Phooey clips. But the Marvin the Martian footage is a little more interesting. It's a short - and a Christmas-themed one, no less - featuring the character. I was going to embed it, but it looks like it's been taken down. The good news is that you're not missing too much. A disappointed kid unwraps a Christmas present and discovers Marvin, who's come to Earth to destroy Christmas. He mistakes Marvin for a toy (understandable, as the martian is packaged as such), and goes to put it on Ebay. Things get uncomfortable when he discovers the error, and Marvin breaks free and nearly vaporizes him. The tree gets hit instead, and the clip ends with the kid extremely excited by the possibilities Marvin's gun

Spoilers below for Doctor Who Series 7 (2012-2013) through this episode. This is the first episode in the Pond-less era of Doctor Who. As such, it devotes quite a lot of time to mourning the loss of the Doctor's last companions, particularly Amy. The episode begins in Victorian England, where the Doctor's more or less retired. His friends, Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint, and Strax are attempting to break him out of his depression, but not having much luck. Enter Clara Oswald, an energetic young woman with a dual identity as a barmaid and a governess. Oh. There's also a curmudgeon who's being followed around by an army of evil snowmen from outer-space, but that's just the plot. Honestly, you could have cycled him out for just about anything without changing the core of the episode, which is about the Doctor coming to grips with the loss of Amy and Rory Pond. Which is, frankly, a little silly. I understand that he cared deeply for these characters, but he's

You knew we were going to get to these eventually. They’ve actually been on the list since the beginning, we have them on DVD, but we kept holding off on them, keeping Doctor Who as a sort of fallback option for when we ran out of other stuff or got too tired of terrible things. And then that didn’t happen. So one day last week we just decided to finally re-watch these. Doctor Who: The Christmas Invasion (2005) I have very fond memories of the first time I watched this episode. It introduced David Tennant’s Doctor and I loved it. I loved it a little less on this viewing. The murderous robot Santas and trees are still fun, but a lot of this hour is humans being whiny. Whenever Tennant is on it really picks up, but there’s a big boring chunk in the middle without him. The writers were still sort of trying things out with Ten at this point; his character doesn’t solidify for a bit, and that adds to the surreality of watching this episode. Plus the end with Harriet Jones is kinda nas

We watched another Christmas-themed Twilight Zone episode last year , and thought it was pretty decent. This one was slightly less good, but still okay. Actually, knowing that this is a Christmas episode has a decent shot at giving away the twist, but it’s not that awesome of a twist. The plot, such as it is, follows five amnesiac strangers who are trapped in a featureless room together. They know their occupations, they know a little about the world, but they don’t know who they are or how they got there. The Army Major is the most recent one to arrive, and he pushes the others to try various crazy escape plans. The rest of them seem rather content to just pass the time. Some of the acting is pretty interesting, the clown and the dancer have some neat moments, but the major has too much over-the-top bluster. He’s a bit one-note, and he’s the main character. We did really enjoy the characters working through all the obvious and not-so-obvious theories about where they were. It’

This is probably the strangest installment on the "Disney Channel Holiday" DVD we found on clearance, and believe me: that's saying quite a bit. I'd assumed it was the pilot from the episode's subject matter, along with the fact it's technically included as a Bonus Feature on the disc, but it turns out this was from the second season. That was kind of a let down: the episode felt like it had some good ideas behind it but was unpolished. Turns out, this was what the show was like after it was polished - I can only imagine what it was like beforehand. Don't interpret that to mean the episode was bad. Actually, I can't decide whether it was bad or good. Hell, I'm not even sure it wasn't brilliant or horrible. Let's start with the show's premise. Apparently, Phil of the Future is about a family from a few hundred years in the future marooned in the present when their time-Winnebago broke down in the middle of their vacation. This epis

Okay, so I had never seen an episode of That’s So Raven, although I had heard of the show. So I had no idea that the main character is psychic. Yeah, she gets flashes of the future. They seem pretty useless, but there’s your premise. Psychic drama queen with misfit friends and a permanent laugh track. This episode follows a stock sitcom plot that is nearly always unpleasant. Character does something slightly dumb (opens her Christmas present early, even after her psychic powers let her know what it is), compounds it with something dumber (wears the expensive necklace to school) and finishes off with completely implausible (necklace gets flung out a window and under a lawnmower). So now that she’s “ruined Christmas”, she and her friends try replacing the necklace before her parents know it’s gone, while avoiding their evil teacher who’s moonlighting as a mall Santa. And they manage it, through slapstick and shenanigans. And there’s a few bits where it’s almost actually funny. But

The short explanation for Christmas Do-Over is that it's a made-for-TV Christmas rip-off of Groundhog Day. The longer explanation is that it's a quasi-remake of a made-for-TV movie called "Christmas Every Day," that's almost certainly also a rip-off of Groundhog Day, but is also a quasi-adaptation of a 19th century story of the same name. But I'm pretty sure the only thing important here is Groundhog Day. The premise of Christmas Do-Over is that the main character is visiting his ex-wife's family on Christmas to see her and his son. Due to a boulder falling on the only road out of their town (which isn't nearly small enough to plausibly have only one road out), he's forced to spend the entire day, instead of just a few minutes. He meets his ex's new boyfriend, who gives her a car for Christmas, goes to a Christmas fair where his ex-father-in-law is competing, has Christmas dinner, goes caroling with the family, and watches his ex agree to

Phineas and Ferb's second Christmas special was quite a bit smaller and less ambitious than their first. I also liked it quite a bit more. This is essentially a half-episode, which is a format the series is used to: most Phineas and Ferb episodes are broken into two unconnected 11 minute shorts. This differs from the norm in that it's a standalone: there's no "second short" following it. My guess is it was produced to be aired along with the much longer special from the prior year (with commercials, they should fill out an hour together). The plot to this episode is intentionally thin: the boys are putting on an old fashioned Christmas TV special in the middle of summer. While this ostensibly uses the show's normal formula, it doesn't really commit to it. The sequences with Perry and Doofenshmirtz are far shorter, and Candace's attempt to bust Phineas and Ferb is tacked on. I don't think this is a problem: in fact, it demonstrates the writers

I actually considered skipping the write-up for this two-parter or combining it with the following year's Christmas episode, How the Ghosts Stole Christmas , but decided it really needed to be considered in its own right. The first half focuses entirely on Scully, who's gone home to spend Christmas with the members of her family who weren't killed in earlier episodes. Scully is shocked to receive a phone call from her dead sister, who simply says that someone needs her help. Apparently calling rates from the great beyond are low enough to allow ghosts to place calls but just a little too high for them to have time to offer any useful details. Scully immediately has the call traced and finds it was placed from a house where a woman has just apparently killed herself and not been murdered at all. Later investigation will reveal - I hope you're sitting down for this - that she actually was murdered, and that the murder was made to look like a suicide. As I recall, th

Thanks to a clearance DVD called "Disney Channel Holiday," we wound up with a bunch of holiday episodes of shows from the Disney Channel. Several are absolutely abysmal, but a few are fascinating. It was difficult to focus on this one since the lead is portrayed by an extremely young Shia LaBeouf portraying the exact same character he played in Transformers. It was actually kind of surreal. The episode itself had highs and lows. Surprisingly, the highs were really quite good. The plot started with Louis (LaBouf) locating the Hanukkah presents and opening them early. In a botched attempt to conceal them afterward, he inadvertently destroyed them and was (of course) punished. He then wished he'd never been born, transitioning to a "Wonderful Life" story. What should have been derivative was saved by some innovative twists. When they introduced the "guardian angel" stand-in as a stereotypical old Jewish grandmother, I cringed for the worst, but I wa

God, Home Alone 3 is a strange movie. Wikipedia sheds a little light on this thing: originally, they wanted Culkin back. He'd have been a teenager at this point, which would have explained the escalation with the villains. Obviously, they couldn't get him to return, so they wound up relaunching with a new character, who was about as old as Culkin in part one. This led to the second most disorienting aspect of the movie (I'll get to the first in a minute): the discrepancy between the tone and the threat the villains supposedly represented. Along with Culkin, the robbers from the original two were gone this time around. In their place was a team of elite espionage professionals fighting to regain a computer chip they'd stolen from the US Air Force only to lose because they failed to exercise common sense when going through airport security. The implication seemed to be that their employer would have them killed if they failed to recover the object. The computer chip

I knew that this show existed, although I don't recall ever seeing an episode before. It's odd, but kind of charming. From what I gathered of the premise, Holmes has been awoken/resurrected in the far future, Captain America style, except with even more super-science. Watson is rebuilt as some kind of robot, and the new Lestrade is a lady cop. I liked her, she seemed to be the muscle. Overall I enjoyed this. It had some awkward made-for-children 'humor' and some cut corners in production here and there, but as a rather unique version of Holmes, I'm actually really on board with this. The tone of the setting was really interesting, and the whole pastiche seemed to be right on the best line between taking the source material seriously while being delightfully tongue in cheek when appropriate. I was wholly amused with the adaptation of the Blue Carbuncle story, in this case a popular animatronic toy with a program hidden inside, rather than a goose with a gemst

I'm a recent convert to Phineas and Ferb. The series is evocative of Dexter's Laboratory, almost to the point of feeling like a rip off. But - frankly - Phineas and Ferb eclipses Dexter's Lab. The show's concept may feel derivative, but its use of tone, subtlety, and complex characters built on a deceptively simple backdrop consisting of an intentionally repetitious formula make it stand out as one of the best animated series to come along in a long time. Fortunately, there are a couple of Christmas episodes: an extended special in season two and a half-episode in three. I'll tackle the short at a later date; for now, I'm focusing on the 33 minute "Phineas and Ferb Christmas Vacation". In addition to being longer than any of the previous episodes, this also has the distinction of being the first episode of Phineas and Ferb that doesn't take place over summer vacation. Not surprisingly, they've animated a special opening, which is basicall

Continuing our string of Christmas episodes on the "Christmas Cartoon Collection" from series I've never heard of, we reach "Gadget Boy's Adventures in History," which is apparently a spin-off of the series "Gadget Boy and Heather," which I've also never heard of. You may be asking yourself, "What the hell is Gadget Boy?" And the answer is, "You don't want to know." But since I'm a horrible person, I really want to tell you. Gadget Boy is basically a reboot of Inspector Gadget, only instead of being an incompetent adult cyborg inspector who's constantly being saved by a brilliant human child, he's an incompetent child android constantly being saved by a competent adult woman. In case you were still wondering, he's still voiced by Don Adams. So, let's review: Inspector Gadget was an animated spin on Get Smart, itself a parody of the spy genre. The Adventures of Gadget Boy and Heather was an a

Before we wrap up our second year of Mainlining Christmas, we really need to correct an oversight. We've been meaning to get around to covering the three Futurama Christmas specials since day one, but we kept putting it off. Ironically, we were putting them off because we wanted to save them for when they were needed. Say, when we'd exhausted our supply of holiday specials and were waiting for Netflix to ship us something. Well, it turns out that's never going to happen. Contrary to our naive assumptions, the internet contains hundreds if not thousands of hours of holiday cheer. I dare say we could run this blog every Christmas for a decade and not run out. Lucky us. So, rather than rob our list of reviews of these three for yet another year, we're tackling them now. After some of the crap we've seen recently, these are a welcome relief. XMas Story (1999) This was the first of the Futurama holiday specials, and it introduced us to Robot Santa Claus, voice

I remembering watching this show back when it started. I saw the first season, but gave up after a few episodes in the second, so I never got to this one. Before I go on, I'd like to point out that seeing Joseph Gordon-Levitt when he was that young is really messing with me. To think that kid grew up to become Cobra Commander. The episode is entertaining enough, and thanks to the series' concept, is actually about Christmas, not just set during the holidays. Like pretty much every single episode of the series, this was a comedy of errors about the disguised aliens trying and ultimately failing to understand our strange world. Ahem. That's why I got tired after a season back in the 90's. Fortunately, having not seen an episode since then, I was ready to jump back in. You get subplots for each of the main characters, though Dick clearly had the most screen time. He was cast as the episode's Scrooge, though he was always kind of Scrooge, so that's not a