Skip to main content

12 Days of Christmas Runners-Up

Christmas is less than two weeks away!
You know for all the Christmas classics, there are way too many holiday specials that don’t get the attention they deserve. So this year for the twelve days leading up to Christmas, I’m going to highlight an overlooked Christmas special each day. The only thing is I’m omitting mere Christmas episodes of TV shows unless they were made apart from the main series, because there are too many of them. As for today, here are my honourable mentions:

“A Garfield Christmas” -The musical numbers aren’t very good but it’s got a decent humble story, a fun cast including Pat Carroll as the most awesome grandma, and everyone’s favourite sarcastic cat.

Bah Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas Carol -Yeah in a lot of places it’s stupid but it captures the Looney Tunes’ personalities right and in a fun take on a classic story.

Mickey’s Christmas Carol -A really wonderful, beautiful telling of the Dickens’ classic that’s a great introduction to the famous story. Alan Young is of course superb as Scrooge McDuck and the song “Oh What a Merry Christmas Day” is perfectly joyous.

“A Chipmunk Christmas” -Like “Mickey’s Christmas Carol”, this one may be a bit too popular to belong on my list proper. Suffice to say a corny morality story is made better by stunning animation and a really endearing heart.

“The Star Wars Holiday Special” -See it! Just see it! It’s batshit insane! Bea Arthur, Art Carney, and a surprisingly unfunny Harvey Korman join Luke, Han, Leia, and way too many Wookies in celebrating “Life Day”. it’s so ridiculous even George Lucas pretends it never happened!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Disney's Mulan, Cultural Appropriation, and Exploitation

I’m late on this one I know. I wasn’t willing to spend thirty bucks back in September for a movie experience I knew was going to be far poorer than if I had paid half that at a theatre. So I waited for it to hit streaming for free to give it a shot. In the meantime I heard that it wasn’t very good, but I remained determined not to skip it entirely, partly out of sympathy for director Niki Caro and partly out of morbid curiosity. Disney’s live-action Mulan  I was actually mildly looking forward to early in the year in spite of my well-documented distaste for this series of creative dead zones by the most powerful media conglomerate on earth. Mulan  was never one of Disney’s classics, a movie extremely of its time in its “girl power” gender politics and with a decidedly American take on ancient Chinese mythology. It got by on a couple good songs and a strong lead, but it was a movie that could be improved upon, and this new version looked like it had the potential to do that, emphasizing

The Hays Code was Bad, Sex in Movies is Good

Don't Look Now (1973) Will Hays, Who Knows About Sex In 1930, former Republican politician and chair of the Motion Picture Association of America Will Hayes introduced a series of self-censorship guidelines for the movie industry in response to a mixture of celebrity scandals and lobbying from the Catholic Church against various ‘immoralities’ creating a perception of Hollywood as corrupt and indecent. The Hays Code, or the Motion Picture Production Code, was formally adopted in 1930, though not stringently enforced until 1934 under the auspices of Joseph Breen. It laid out a careful list of what was and wasn’t acceptable for a film expecting major distribution. It stipulated rules against profanity, the depiction of miscegenation, and offensive portrayals of the clergy, but a lot of it was based around sexual content: “sexual perversion” of any kind was disallowed, as were any opaquely textual or visual allusions to reproduction, and right near the top “No licentious or suggestiv

Pixar Sundays: The Incredibles (2004)

          Brad Bird was already a master by the time he came to Pixar. Not only did he hone his craft as an early director on The Simpsons , but he directed a little animated film for Warner Bros. in 1999, that though not a box office success was loved by critics and quickly grew a cult following. The Iron Giant is now among many people’s favourite animated movies. Likewise, Bird’s feature debut at Pixar, The Incredibles , his own variation of a superhero movie, is often considered one of the studio’s best. And for very good reason, as the most talented director at Pixar shows.            Superheroes were once the world’s greatest crime-fighting force until several lawsuits for collateral damage (and in the case of Mr. Incredible, a hilarious suicide prevention), outlawed their vigilantism. Fifteen years later Mr. Incredible, now living as Bob Parr, has a family with his wife Helen, the former Elastigirl. But Bob, in a combination of mid-life crisis and nostalgia for the old day