Mainlining Christmas

We all remember Muppet Babies. Even those of you who have never seen Muppet Babies seem to know it exists and remember it in some strange way. That's the magic of Muppet Babies. That's its power . But no one remembers Baby Looney Tunes. And, having just seen an episode, I can unequivocally assert that it's better that way. Because this show is awful . Not just awful; it's humorless, tedious, boring, and pointless. It drags on, offering no justification for existing nor even seeming to try. You feel as though every step of its creation was undertaken in a dimly lit room, that the people working on it had a scotch in one hand and a pencil in the other, and the words, "What have I done with my life?" must have been scribbled around the margins of every script, every character design. It could have better, is what I'm saying. The premise of the series is almost precisely the premise of Muppet Babies, to the degree that I can only assume they weren

I remember the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, but I either forgot or never heard of its sequel, Super Mario World. Actually, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 was the first sequel, and I either forgot about or never knew about that one, either. But Super Mario World, the series intended to tie-in to the Super Nintendo, is the one with the Christmas-in-July (technically August, but let's not split hairs) episode, and by extension the one we need to talk about. This is a half-episode, and it aired alongside Captain N, which sucked for entirely different reasons than Super Mario World. Sadly, Captain N never gave the world a Christmas episode, so we'll have to set it aside and get back to the crappy series at hand. If you've never seen any of these series and are wondering how anyone would convert Super Mario Bros. into a television series, don't bother asking the writers of this episode, because clearly they never figured it out. The premise is ostensibly bas

When we decided to tackle more Christmas in July media, I did a search for books. The main one that came up when I searched was a romance: Christmas in July (A Christmas, Colorado, Novel: Book 2) by Debbie Mason. Romance isn’t a preferred genre for me, but sometimes I like it, and this book was available through my local library, so I decided to dive in. At the beginning, I was intrigued. The book (and, I imagine, the series) takes place in a town called Christmas. The main character, Grace, is a baker. Her signature dessert is a Sugar Plum Cake with a “wish” hidden in the decorations. Her husband, Jack, was in the army, but he’s been MIA for over a year, and she’s finally decided to move on. So far, a nice dash of holiday theme and an interesting premise. Of course, this is the moment when her husband and his crew are found alive. But he has amnesia, and doesn’t remember her, and he’s been attracted to this other woman in the meantime. And all of that could actually have

Camp Candy was, apparently, an animated series where John Candy voices a character based on himself at a fictitious summer camp he runs. I don't recall ever having seen or heard of this series before in my life, though if I still remember this episode an hour from now, I'll be both surprised and disappointed. The Christmas in July episode opens the same way Wikipedia assures me every episode in this series starts, with Candy trying to teach the kids a sport, leading to a flashback of something that happened earlier in the summer. This is portrayed as a story being told by Candy, though it's unclear why he's telling the kids about an adventure they were present for. It's also unclear how he's able to provide descriptions and commentary for other characters' dream sequences. Actually, this episode features dreams within dreams within a story. But don't get excited: it was all crap. Once we're firmly entrenched within a flashback, the kids and C

There's a lot of resentment in the air tonight. I resent the executives who decided to try to squeeze more money out of an existing property. I resent the people who spent months making this. I resent this cheap DVD for existing, and I resent this blog for making me sit through it when I absolutely have better things, even CHRISTMASSIER things, to do with my time. What I'm trying to be clear about is that there could have been a kinder, gentler version of me that would cut this special some slack. She is not here today. The worst thing, beyond the horrible plot and the terrible music (seriously, did they hire a committee of failed third-grade teachers to slap this together?), about sitting through this is that I like A Year Without a Santa Claus. Erin wasn't very nice to it in his review , but I'm fond of it. I like Mrs. Claus, I like the story, I love the music. This new special isn't fun, and it sucks most of the fun out of the world of the original.

Fuck this movie. I know, I know. I generally try to keep this site in PG-13 territory. Though it's generally agreed you can say the F-word once before something stops being PG-13, so I guess I'm still fine. You know what? Fuck it. This fucking movie distributed by Rick-Fucking-Santorum's fucking production company can go fuck itself. Because, for about half its run time - maybe more - we were on board. We were engaged, intrigued, and curious to see where it was going. Then, in the last act, a magical Christmas angel gathered up all the good-will the movie had pulled together and took a steaming Christmas shit on it. There. I just synopsized the whole movie for you without dragging you through the bullshit plot twists and reveals. Now go. Get out of here. Stop reading. Seriously. Get. Why are you still here? Why are you still reading? Is it because you heard Sylvester McCoy, the seventh Doctor and Radagast the Brown has a minor role in this thing? Or are you really

I'm having a very hard time resolving how lazy the construction of the individual scenes of this movie was with the fact that the premise was a relatively ingenious re-imagining of The Odyssey built around an eighteen year old trying to get home for the holidays. It's worth noting I'll Be Home For Christmas did this a few years before O Brother, Where Art Thou? got a lot of attention for a similar gimmick (though - needless to say - O Brother did it much, much better). Jonathan Taylor Thomas plays Jake, the Odysseus character. Like his archetype, he's a pathological liar and conman. At the start of the movie, Jake is at college in Los Angeles, along with his girlfriend, Allie, who comes from the same town on Long Island (it's a plot point later that her family only lives a few blocks from his). If this seems absurdly unlikely, it's worth noting that you'll also have to suspend your disbelief around the film's portrayal of college, a place where nerds

Bush Christmas is an 1947 kid's adventure set in Australia. The movie's filmed on location, which is the most positive thing I have to say about the production. I understand where the movie's set, but I'm a little unclear on when. This opens with school wrapping for Christmas break, and the children immediately grab their horses for the ride home. I really can't say for certain that there weren't areas in rural Australia where kids used horses to commute to and from school in 1947, but it seems a little antiquated. My assumption is that this was supposed to be set in the past. Maybe early 1930's? The clothes look fairly modern, and there were a few cars, so it couldn't have been much earlier than that. Instead of going directly home like good children, a few of them go for a ride. On the way, they run into a pair of horse thieves. The kids, mistaking them for something else, accidentally mention their father owns a valuable mare. The robbers send

Somehow, in year six, there are still Rankin-Bass stop-motion Christmas specials that we hadn't seen. I don't know how this happened either. This one is just as boring as its predecessor , but it does have nicer animation. It picks up where the first left off, Baby Jesus suitably entertained by Aaron and his magic drum. Aaron wants to do something more (further undermining the message of the original song) and Melchior drags him off to town to help look for some bellmaker. Melchior looks a bit more Middle-Ages-Europe king than first-century-Damascus king to my eye. Just saying. The bellmaker, Simeon, has been telling people that Jesus is coming, and while they haven't believed him, he has cast a set of giant silver bells in preparation. At this point, Erin can attest that I gave the screen some incredible side-eye at the idea that they would co-opt, even just by reference, one of my favorite holiday songs for this dreck, but it never went further than that refer

This is the tragic story of a couple, leading happy if unexamined lives, who get sucked back into the drama of their dysfunctional families and thereby are re-indoctrinated into old-fashioned scripts for what adults should want out of life. They make irrevocable choices based on the trauma of this experience that they will surely regret. Conveying the soul-crushing pain of acquiescing to their broken families' value systems is truly a masterful performance by both leads, and... Oh, someone is telling me this was supposed to be funny. Well, that's just sad. In seriousness, Four Christmases is a boring holiday rom-com that was dated when it came out. Now it's just painful, all the more so because it doesn't just suck. There could have been an interesting movie here, but it's full of missed opportunities: both narrative opportunities for the audience and health/self-care opportunities for the characters. In that spirit, I'm going to sneak a little internet th

Call Me Claus is a made-for-TV movie about an aging Santa Claus recruiting a home-shopping network executive to take his place. The concept, as these things go, could have been worse. The execution really couldn't have been. The executive is played by Whoopie Goldberg, and Nigel Hawthorne plays the old Santa. This was Hawthorne's last role: he passed away a few weeks after this premiered. It's really hard not to make a joke right now. The movie opens in 1965. A young girl asks a mall Santa to bring her father, who's serving in the military, home for Christmas. He waffles, but lets the kid try on his hat. The hat glows, but no one notices. When the girl returns home, a pair of army officers are waiting to give her mother some bad news. This entire sequence was shot with all the emotional resonance of an online tax tutorial. Maybe less, now that I think about it. The story jumps ahead to the present day. Well, it jumps to 2001, which used to be the present d

Okay, we already watched the Christmas episode in season three . Here's the rest of them.   A Girl and Her Cat (1996) First we have to backtrack to episodes in seasons one and two. In this episode Salem throws a hissy fit (pun intended), stays out to make the family worried, and ends up catnapped by a little boy who wants a pet. There's a painfully obnoxious montage in this one as well, as Sabrina and her aunts (Hilda and Zelda) search for Salem. The highlights are references to Salem's backstory (he was originally human, but turned into a cat for trying to take over the world), and a scene where Sabrina steals Salem back by dressing as Santa and teleporting into the kid's closet, knowing no one will believe him. Also, Coolio has a cameo as a poster brought briefly to life. Oh, if you've never seen this show, you might not know that Salem is played at times by a truly ugly puppet cat and at times by a real cat. It's very strange. Sabrina Claus (1997)

I watched this show back when it aired, and I remember enjoying it. So, it's true, you can never go home again. This incredibly long-feeling half hour had a unnecessarily complicated plot. I'm going to sum up. Sabrina, being a teenager, isn't feeling the whole happy-family Christmas vibe Her aunts decide to double down on cheesy Christmas activities Cue montage that starts funny and goes on too long Sabrina is invited to a Christmas Eve party in the magical realm She goes, only to find out that it's an anti-Christmas party about mocking the holiday (The fact that she doesn't seem to know anyone there doesn't make much sense either.) She stops them from spying on and mocking people celebrating on Earth and storms out Only to discover that she has inadvertently deleted the holiday entirely She tries to convince people to remember Christmas Cue montage that doesn't start funny, only goes on too long She finally visits Santa/Father Christmas,

Watching movies for Mainlining Christmas is an enlightening process. We have become professionals. We are resistant to all but the worst writing, acting, directing and design. Today, I’m pleased to share some of our tips for keeping your mental health while watching holiday dreck. The defense mechanisms we’ll be practicing in this session are “Plausible Alternate Plot”, “Identifying Fakeconomics” and “Advanced Foreshaming”. A Princess for Christmas is a Hallmark Original movie that never believes in subtlety when you could be describing your emotions out loud, and is a great training ground for all of these techniques. Early on, the movie is full of easy targets for Identifying Fakeconomics. Main character Jules works in a small antique store in Buffalo, New York. She is the primary caretaker of her deceased sister’s two kids, Milo and Maddie. Even with survivor’s benefits of some type, there is no way she could maintain that large, well-appointed house and a full-time nanny on o

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

BoJack Horseman is a Netflix animated series about a washed-up actor with a horse's head who had a successful sitcom a few decades earlier. I have, to date, seen exactly one episode, and that's this one. After watching it, I have no plans to watch any more. To be fair, it was difficult to get a read on the series from just the Christmas special, which - based on episode descriptions on Wikipedia - seems to be extremely different from the rest of the show. This one almost entirely consisted of two characters watching a Christmas episode of BoJack's old show. Given the premise is that the sitcom in question was abysmal, you can probably guess how that went. The frame story just focused on BoJack and his roommate at Christmas. BoJack's depressed, his roommate eats giant candy canes, and... that's about all you get until the end, when BoJack suddenly realizes the importance of spending the holiday with someone. Heart warming, I know. The sitcom episode concern

We came across a crappy-looking DVD titled, "Chanuka & Passover at Bubbe's" on a shelf of Chanukah (/Chanuka/Hanukkah) books at the local library and decided to throw ourselves on the grenade and save some poor kids from the experience. Naturally, we didn't bother watching the Passover section (we're Mainlining Christmas, not Mainlining Easter), but we sat through the forty-two minutes of low-rent puppetry constituting the Chanukah portion. I should mention that this thing has neither a Wikipedia page nor an IMDB entry, though it seems to be up on YouTube (at least at the moment), and it has at least one fan . We're not 100% sure of the date - the end of the credits cites 1988, but we're not actually sure whether that's when it was released, aired, or finished. Like a lot of children's entertainment, this is more premise than plot. It centers around two puppet children bringing their friend to their grandmother's for Chanukah. For rea

I am not a fan of Grumpy Cat. I know that the cat is fine, healthy, and as happy as you can consider a cat to be, but I find the actual cat off-putting because of the same physical differences that have made her an internet star. I am a fan of the smart people who are making lots of money off their mutant cat. You do you, and put your kids through school. Congrats. I’m proud of my maturity that I can say that, even after watching this…. thing. Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever is “of the moment” in the worst possible way. The filmmakers plainly knew that not a single person would care about this movie in six months, and so they stuffed it full of in-jokes and winking, nodding references to the meme, internet culture, and the movie’s own stupidity. I’m not talking subtle, here; I’m talking the cat asking the camera “Why are you still watching?” The problem is that constantly calling out the fact that the movie is stupid doesn’t actually A) make it somehow not stupid or B) absolv

The Nutcracker Scoob is notable for being the final episode of The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries, which is primarily significant for being the last time the character of Scrappy-Doo was inflicted on audiences as a series regular. As such, it was a tad anti-climatic. At the very least, they could have re-enacted the resolution of Old Yeller than turned on the laugh track. Now that would had gotten some ratings. Instead, they told a relatively straight-forward Scooby-Doo tale centered around a Christmas pageant at a children's home. Of course, the place is in danger even before the faux ghost shows up: a cruel, oddly Victorian businessman named Winslow Nickelby is trying to force them to sell him the building on Christmas Eve. It would be easier to feel for the owners if there was some indication the home contained anything other than a theater. Pretty soon, the monster of the week shows up. This one is called the "Ghost of Christmas Never," and she's cloaked in whit