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Book Review: Jingle Belle - The Whole Package

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Jingle Belle - The Whole Package Paul Dini, et al., 2016 Premise: Santa’s got a daughter, and she’s been a rebellious teenager for longer than most humans live. Apparently Paul Dini has been writing short comic adventures starring Jingle Belle, Santa’s spoiled teenage daughter, off and on since 1999. This thick volume collects nearly all of them: 28 short pieces according to the credits pages. I was actually pleasantly surprised by some of the early stories - despite being very slapstick on the surface, Jingle’s mix of anger, mischief, caring and defiance often felt like a fairly honest representation of a teenage girl. Jingle’s been a teenager for a long time, too. Her mother is queen of the elves and her father is Santa, so she’s been “sixteen” for many years. She doesn’t have patience for holiday sappiness, and she’s usually lazy, thoughtless and out for herself. She’s eternally frustrated that no one in the world at large knows about her. When she does try to be “good,”

Unexpected Peppermint 2016: Andes Peppermint Crunch Thins

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A few years ago we chronicled some of the odd uses of peppermint that appear in stores around this time of year. Here’s another for the list. Andes Mints are, of course, already mint, but these are both explicitly peppermint and in shiny red packaging. Between this and the Peppermint Crunch Junior Mints (which are back this year, by the way), we've learned that the way you make something mint more Christmassy is by adding crunch .  I did not know Christmas was crunchy.  I assume that in both cases it's intended to be like bits of broken candy cane?  The candy wrappers definitely have a candy cane thing going on. The actual mints are... okay. They aren't as good as normal Andes Mints, the white chocolate-ish substance is okay, but the crunchy bits actually take away from the texture. This is actually my favorite part. The package has some extra cardboard on the sides to prevent the mints from getting crushed (I believe this is the case

Target: The Toycracker (2016)

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Depending on how generous you're feeling, The Toycracker can either be described as a live-action short film, an extended commercial, or the fourth seal of the apocalypse slowly peeling away to open the floodgates and usher in the end of days. It's not exactly bad, per se; it's more that it's something that should not be. Its very existence is an affront to the world we know and the already fractured boundary between entertainment and advertisement. It's the final stage in the unnatural evolution that started decades ago when toy companies infected Saturday morning cartoons. As the name sort of implies, The Toycracker is ostensibly a re-imagined Nutcracker. It starts out that way in a semi-clever scene where a modern Clara sings about losing WiFi on Christmas Eve to Waltz of the Flowers. Then she falls asleep and wakes in a version of the classic "giant Christmas tree" set, where she meets the Nutcracker, played by Chrissy Teigen, who starts singing

Trapped in Paradise (1994)

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We’ve had a lot of firsts here at Mainlining Christmas. Our first movie, our first book review, our first watch-all-the-holiday-episodes-in-a-series binge… but this one is special. This is our first Christmas movie starring Nicolas Cage. Trapped in Paradise is the story of how Erin and I were trapped in hell for a very long two hours. The movie follows Bill (Cage) and his two idiot brothers, who are getting out of prison early for Christmas. One brother (Alvin, Dana Carvey) is apparently a kleptomaniac and the other (Dave, Jon Lovitz) is a liar and schemer. Bill hates them, yet is too stupid too see through a series of pathetic ploys that send them all fleeing New York for Paradise, Pennsylvania. Ostensibly, they’re there on behalf of a fellow inmate, who asked Dave to intercede with his estranged daughter. In fact, they’re there to pull an easy bank job and steal the town’s Christmas fund. Or something. The explanation for what the money is and how the town functions is pret

Happy Endings: Grinches Be Crazy (2011) and No-Ho-Ho (2012)

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According to the internet, a lot of people were devastated when this series was cancelled after its third season. This knowledge leads me to one of three conclusions: 1. This is one of those shows you need to watch for a while before it gets good. 2. This is a case where some episodes are much stronger than others. 3. This show's fan are extremely generous viewers. We absolutely hated these two episodes. The characters felt two-dimensional and dull, the stories were absurdly idiotic, and the tone didn't gel with the writing. I kept thinking I was watching a live-action show set in the world of Family Guy. This is (yet another) circle-of-friends sitcom in the vein of, well, Friends. It goes for a farcical, over-the-top tone, like the far superior Community, but I didn't feel like it committed enough to sell it. As a result, it came off as unrealistic people behaving unrealistically. I knew intellectually that was supposed to be funny, but I just didn't enjoy it

A Fairly Odd Christmas (2012)

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"A Fairly Odd Christmas" is the live-action made-for-TV sequel to the similarly live-action made-for-TV movie "A Fairly Odd Movie: Grow Up, Timmy Turner!" which is itself a sequel to the Nickelodeon series "The Fairly OddParents," which had a Christmas special of its own , though that featured an entirely different version of Santa Claus and therefore doesn't seem to be in continuity with this film. I should probably add that I've never seen the first live action movie or any of the animated series other than the aforementioned Christmas special. This apparently opens where the previous movie left off: the now grown-up Timmy, Tootie, and the CG fairy godparents are circling the world in a magic flying van granting wishes to anyone who's sad. They give one young girl a magic unicorn, another a monster truck, they turn a boy's small toy into a giant monster and set it loose on Tokyo, and they help a bunch of robbers empty out an electro

Podcast: Studio 360 on A Charlie Brown Christmas Soundtrack

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I don’t have much time these days for Studio 360. A radio show from WNYC about art, creativity and culture, I have loved some episodes and been bored by others. Even if I wanted to listen to it more often, it’s a weekly show that’s an hour long in full, and that’s a time commitment. I do sometimes check out the podcast feed to see what’s been on recently. I have always loved the shows they’ve done about great American art and artists. This year, the podcast replayed a fantastic interview from 2012 about the composition of the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas. Even a Grinch like me likes the music to A Charlie Brown Christmas. Even if you’ve never been curious about the composition of “Christmas Time is Here” and “Linus and Lucy,” the piece is only 7 minutes, and it’s definitely worth your time. Hear from Jean Schulz, Jerry Granelli (the drummer who played with Guaraldi), and Lee Mendelson, the producer who worked closely with Schulz on the Christmas special, on St