Mainlining Christmas

Remember two years ago when I wrote five short stories for the blog in the midst of trying to review dozens of crappy specials and movies, and by the end of it I was almost ready to put my head through a brick wall? Good times. But at least my hard work was appreciated. I mean, just check out these enthusiastic quotes about the free compilation I dumped on Smashwords afterward ( download yours today! ): Nothing cheery about these Christmas stories. Would not recommend it. -Anonymous reviewer on Barnes & Noble's website Though this collection of short stories was better than the other free books/short stories I've purchased on my nook, I still will not say it was very much worth reading. -Reviewer on Goodreads If the people want more, who am I to say no? With that in mind, I'm ready to announce something a little special this year. After slacking last year (three stories - really, I am embarrassed), I felt like I owed you a bit more this holiday. That'

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

Deck the Halls Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark, 2000 I found this book on a list of books tagged “Christmas” on goodreads. Apparently the Clarks, mother and daughter, have written a list of novels together all set at Christmas. Premise: Two successful novelists decide to cram all their popular characters together in the space of 200 pages. For Christmas. This book was an absolute mess. As I said above, it appears to be that both women took the protagonists of their successful suspense series and put them in a book together. This book is so short that you don’t get a sense of any of the characters, just told “this is person X and they are a Y” and the fact that you should care about them is assumed. The villains are petty and boring, the heroines sort of useless and bland. There are really useless, dull red herrings, and none of the sundry investigators do anything productive that actually leads to the resolution. On a certain level, there was something a little cr

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

Let's get one thing straight from the start. The Small One is an animated piece directed by Don Bluth (and very much in his style) when he worked for Disney. Nestor the Long Eared Christmas Donkey is a stop-motion special by Rankin-Bass.  Both of these pieces are about the origins of the donkey who carries Mary to Bethlehem. Both of these pieces are not very good.  However, The Small One is only mediocre, so compared to the steaming pile of excrement that was Nestor, Small One comes out pretty far ahead in the donkey-story quality scale. There are aspects of this special that aren't terrible, even. The story follows a young boy forced to sell his beloved but undersized donkey, who just wants to find his friend a new home. The animation is quite well done, both the boy and the donkey are cute, and there are some sweet interactions between them. The story ends with the purchase of the donkey by Joseph. We don't follow them to Bethlehem, we never actually see Mary. Th

If you're a serious Lego collector (and, statistically speaking, you're almost certainly not), you already know about Lego's line of blind-packed minifigures, which are being sold damn-near everywhere for about three bucks a pop. Series 8 includes a ton of cool characters, but the only one I was really interested in was Claus here. That left me with three options: 1) Buy a veritable shitload of overpriced Lego minifigures in the hopes of getting what I wanted, 2) Head on over to eBay and pay an even more inflated price for one that had been opened, or 3) Try and game the system using the almost indistinguishable code of raised bumps on the back of the pack. Yeah. Tough call there. So, I was probably standing in the toy section of Fred Meyer for ten minutes, painstakingly comparing the bumps on each pack to picture on my cell phone I'd gotten from a toy review site (is this a good time for a shout out to the always fantastic blog, " A Year of Toys &q

When you pick up a made-for-TV movie called "Santa Who", starring Leslie Nielsen as an amnesiac Claus who takes a job as a mall Santa, on a VHS tape for fifty cents, you brace yourself for what you assume will rank among the worse movies ever made. But I was actually pleasantly surprised. That doesn't mean this was great or necessarily even good, though it treads shocking close to that line. There are a few short sequences that are awful, several that make literally no sense, the entire ending is a mess, and the production values are just shy of what you expect from college film projects these days. And yet... it's oddly appealing. The script showed shocking care and restraint in developing its characters. Sure, they're all tired cliches, but they don't come off as unbelievably stupid or simplistic (well, at least not until the last ten or fifteen minutes, when the whole thing starts unraveling). The main character is your usual Scrooge stand-in, but he