Mainlining Christmas

After watching a handful of episodes of Boy Meets World, I'm a little confused how the series lasted as long as it did (seven seasons) and why anyone remembers it at all. It's more unremarkable than awful. The series mainly seemed to revolve around five characters. The title references Corey, played by Ben Savage (Fred's little brother), who feels like a poor man's Shia LaBeouf. His best friend, Shawn, fills in as the requisite "bad boy with a heart of gold", and Topanga serves as Corey's childhood friend/eventual love interest (hell, they get married in the last season). Corey's brother, Eric, is mostly interesting because he's played by Will Friedle, who voiced Terry McGinnis on Batman Beyond (we got far more laughs spotting accidentally ambiguous Batman lines from him than anything intentionally scripted). Finally, there's Mr. Feeny, their mentor who inexplicably winds up teaching at every school and/or college they attend. The show'

It's time for some new installments in my periodic series on Novelty Character Albums ! (Oh gosh, I last did these back in year two?) You can cleanly break this album into two halves, and, in fact, the first half was initially released alone. Part one is mostly versions of traditional Christmas music, and part two is music from the 2016 holiday episode . There's one track that straddles the divide, but we'll get there. Let's remember one thing up front: ponies do not celebrate Christmas. They celebrate Hearth's Warming. (In fact, the composer clarified this point on his Facebook page .) So it's a little odd to listen to pony voice actresses singing about Christmas. However, these are some of the sweetest, most fun Christmas songs I've heard in a while, so I'll easily let that go. Many of them are unique or special rewrites of classic Christmas tunes. They aren't written to be Hearth's Warming songs, but they are otherwise completely tweak

If Christmas were a whale, I think Wembley would be a lamprey, or perhaps some sort of mutant leach. To be fair, they're hardly alone - there are thousands of parasitic companies feeding off our culturally mandated need for material gifts. Wembley isn't even the worse of the bunch. They just happened to make and market this product. We came across this in a Fred Meyer, incidentally. At least I think it was a Fred Meyer - every year I swear I'm going to do a better job keeping records on where we find clearanced holiday garbage, then every year I fail. That stops now: I hereby resolve to quit vowing to do a better job. Problem solved. Well, one of the problems. I'm still left with this thing to review. I think "thing" is the best classification I can give it. This isn't really a toy, and its supposed intent is dubious. It's really another in a long line of low-end joke gifts. As a cottage industry, gag gifts are of questionable value at

As far as sub-genres go, "dysfunctional family at Christmas" may have one of the lowest hit rates out there. Most of the ones that work do so by incorporating alternative genre elements to make the concept fresh: The Lion in Winter , Arthur Christmas , and Fred Claus all spring to mind. Those are technically great Christmas movies about a dysfunctional family over the holidays, but the dysfunctional family isn't the part of the synopsis most people would focus on. Almost Christmas, on the other hand, embodies the more traditional trappings of the sub-genre through and through. If you were to sit down and make a list of tropes you'd expect to find, you'd wind up checking most of them off. There are the siblings who despise each other, the family member with a drug problem, food getting destroyed, a decoration mishap, a wedged in love story... you get the idea. The substance of this movie certainly isn't original. However, there is one fairly original ele

Murder, She Wrote: Manhattans and Murder (1994) and Murder, She Wrote: A Little Yuletide Murder (1998) By Donald Bain The Christmas episode of the show was fairly lackluster , so I suppose it's fair that the novels match. These two brief books are part of a long-running spin-off series that apparently someone will continue to write until society crumbles. (Seriously, Book 47 is available for preorder.) The two books have a few things in common. The author can write passable lines of dialogue and narration, but there's no build from scene to scene and the story as a whole is utterly forgettable. Both books seem determined to raise but refuse to sensitively address social issues (drug addiction and teenage pregnancy, respectively). Most bizarrely, both books feature a minor subplot about someone asking Jessica to write a true-crime novel about the events going on. Unless this was a running gag in all the books, it seems strange not to reference the first event, given

First of all, let's get this out of the way: I'm not exactly this movie's #1 fan . That being said, it's become one of the most iconic Christmas comedies of all time, so as both a Christmas geek and a toy collector, I became interested when NECA announced this as a follow-up to their Home Alone figures from last year. Still, I had no interest in spending $30 on something I only kind of wanted for the occasional display or holiday toy picture. But while $30 was pushing it, I was willing to drop $15 when FYE unloaded these after the holidays. To recap from the Home Alone toys, these are in an 8-inch scale and feature removable fabric clothing. Stylistically, they're meant to be reminiscent of Mego action figures from the 70's with realistic modern sculpts. Or at least the Home Alone figures were. Clark features a more cartoonish looking head, which I found a bit disappointing compared to the earlier figures I picked up from this company. To be fair,

The past seven years have seen a renaissance in TV animation, largely thanks to the success of Adventure Time and its peers. Nostalgia for 60s, 70s, and 80s science-fiction and fantasy lies at the core of most of this wave. We Bare Bears differs in that respect. It's far closer to Yogi Bear, Winnie the Pooh, and perhaps even the Berenstain Bears. Sometimes, it even reminds me of old edutainment shows; as though the characters are about to teach us about geography or math. They don't, incidentally. When the show does communicate a point, it's usually about subtle cases of systemic racism, the difficulty of interacting with a society that views you as an outsider, or - in at least one case - the toxic nature of male entitlement in perceived romantic situations. If all of that sounds a little heavy, rest assured the show mixes in three or four parts comedy to one part moral. Throw in some surprisingly affecting drama, and you wind up with something that feels like a kid&