Mainlining Christmas

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 ...

This one might be a little controversial. The Christmas elements are pretty subtle, though they do bookend the movie. While it's possible to argue that the movie's plot might have tied into a pre-Christian fixation on the winter solstice, this was never stated outright or even implied beyond the seemingly coincidental timing, so it's admittedly a stretch. Still, for a movie that barely touches on its timing, it seems to bend over backward to be set in December. The story is told, as is traditional, by Watson, who arrives at his new school about two weeks before Christmas. This is obviously odd timing from a narrative point of view, since it would have been easier to explain him arriving at the start of a semester. Throughout the film, London is always covered in a thin coat of snow, which even I know is ludicrous for the season. There's also a rather baffling detail involving a killer who wears bells which are extremely reminiscent of sleigh bells. At the end, the m...

This year, I am taking on The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries , a 674 page tome containing 59 individual stories about the Christmas season. Conveniently, it’s broken up into blog-post sized sections. (Part one , two ) Today I’ve finished the third and fourth sections; they’re a bit shorter than the others. A Sherlockian Little Christmas A Scandal in Winter , Gillian Linscott - Ridonkulously cute. The Christmas Client , Edward D. Hoch - Well constructed pastiche if a bit too convenient with the names of secondary characters. The Secret in the Pudding Bag & Herlock Sholmes’s Christmas Case , Peter Todd - Why would anyone write or read this ever? Christmas Eve , S. C. Roberts - Charming. Slightly kinder than the originals but very well done. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle , Arthur Conan Doyle - Still love it. This was an interesting section, all stories that connected to both Christmas and Sherlock Holmes. "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle", being ori...

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 ...

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...

I'm trying to remember what these were going for last year before they were marked down after Christmas - $2.99, I think, but it actually might have been more. The packaging simply advertises this as "Batman," though the color theme and holly over the Bat-symbol are there to make it clear this is Christmas-themed. Somehow. The character designs on the left are "New 52" style (translated into non-nerd, that means the design revisions are only a few years old). There's a Justice League shield in the upper right, suggesting this was supposed to be part of a series. Fortunately, I haven't seen any others appear in these colors. Red and gold are sort of Christmas colors, but only at a stretch. I guess there's a point to be made that a red/green or gold/silver color scheme would have been gaudy and ugly, but so is this. I mean... look at it. His bat-a-rang is pink , for Grodd's sake: It's actually difficult to capture the co...

Two suitors are trying to woo the same woman on Christmas Eve. One steals the flowers the other sent, so we know not to root for him. They both show up at a Christmas party dressed as Santa in order to impress the woman. At the same time, another character with a sick wife decides to rob the party. He holds up the guy we're not rooting for, locks him in a closet, then steals the sack of presents he had with him. The other suitor runs into the thief outside the house, gets him to renounce his ways, then sends him off with some money. Then the suitor enters and distributes the gifts. After, he proposes to the woman, and the rival is freed from his closet just in time to learn about the engagement. It is entirely possible the synopsis I've just laid out is the plot for the 99-year-old silent movie, "Santa Claus vs. Cupid." But I really wouldn't swear to that: I found it hard to follow due to the sparse use of speech cards. Clearly, the intent was for the audien...