Mainlining Christmas

Hey, look, two new holiday shorts from Simon's Cat! WHOO!

I love Goldfish crackers. I think the classic cheddar fishes are a practically perfect food. Of course, there are special holiday Goldfish varieties; we'll look at the four I was able to find today. Let's start simple: Standard Cheddar, but holiday shapes.  Here's the back of the bag, with a game to play with Finn (the cheddar goldfish) and Gilbert (the pretzel).  Gilbert didn't have his own holiday product, so he's playing second fiddle here. Here are the crackers. Not that exciting, really. They taste basically like normal Goldfish, if a little less fluffy because of the flattened special shapes. Next up: Holiday Graham Goldfish, in exciting Holiday Vanilla Cupcake and Hot Cocoa. The back of both bags is the same. You might not be able to tell, but that's a lady graham goldfish named Coral that looks almost the same as the pretzel, but is not the pretzel acting as Finn's lackey on these. Once a

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

Read Part One Symphony of Illumination (2011) Theres a nice punchline on the cold opening on this one and some pretty okay jokes about Christmas music. Unfortunately, the episode drags badly in the middle and the B plot is awful. Many of the characters drifted into over-caricaturization here, it was jarring and boring. The end of Robin’s plot has a really nice dark tone though. The Over-Correction (2012) There are three, count them three, episodes set at Christmas that ran back-to-back-to-back in 2012. Unfortunately, our early thought on this episode was: ‘Hey, we found where the show jumped the shark,’ There’s a lot of bad randomness in the early parts of this episode. (WHY IS COBIE SMULDERS CRAZY NOW? Also, the lack of coherency in the emotional arcs isn’t just me with no context:  AVClub gave this one a C+ .) Finally the plot of the episode comes together and it builds for a while into some honest laughs. Christmas ornaments featured heavily in the best running gag of the

How I Met Your Mother is one of those shows that I’ve seen a few minutes of here and there, and I know it’s decent, and I know people who really enjoy it. It seems like exactly the kind of show that I would watch if it were on, but I wouldn’t seek it out. You know the show I mean, you turn on the TV and flip around, and say “Hey, it’s How I Met Your Mother/The Simpsons/Seinfeld/Scrubs/Good Eats/NewsRadio That’s usually okay, let’s watch the rest of that.” The problem with that is I never turn on ‘actual’ TV these days unless I know exactly what show I’m tuning in for, so shows that I would watch haphazardly like that aren’t shows I end up seeing at all. I really enjoyed the chance to get a sampling from across the seasons by watching just the Christmas episodes. Sure, I’m missing some running gags, but I’m also getting a crash course in how the show changed over time. How I Met Your Mother: How Lily Stole Christmas (2006) This is almost really great. The big (BIG) problem fo

Once you've heard every Christmas song ever recorded, you've heard them all. I'm not sure whether I'm quite there yet, but I'm a hell of a lot closer than most people would ever want to be. Since last year, I've assembled quite a few additional holiday CDs from the clearance racks of used book stores, yard sales, and occasionally from Amazon. Now that everything's been ripped, I'm ready to start the annual tradition of listening to the new and reporting what how it's different from what I already had. Spoiler alert - with very few exceptions, it isn't. So, without further ado, here's the "new" music: We Wish You A Metal XMas and a Headbanging New Year (Various) This is exactly what it sounds like - metal versions of Christmas songs. It's a compilation which includes Alice Cooper, along with a bunch of musicians I've never heard of because I don't own a lot of metal. My one complaint is that s