Overlooked Specials 2nd Day of Christmas

2^nd Day of Christmas:

101 Dalmatians: “A Christmas Cruella”

I’m probably breaking my rule about TV episodes here but I don’t care! I’m going to be the first person on the internet to talk about this special! It’s weird that my first exposure to the Christmas Carol story, now my all-time favourite book, was on a video tape of this episode from the 101 Dalmatians TV series. You remember that series that aired on One Saturday Morning in the late 90’s? This special isn’t timeless but my brother and I grew up on it and still laugh at a number of jokes. Cruella voiced hilariously by April Winchell gets the Scrooged arc with the regular puppies and Spot the chicken acting as the spirits. Sure it’s over-the-top and it may be mostly nostalgia, but it’s funny with an Animaniacs sensibility in a few more grown-up jokes, enough so that I really recommend it.

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The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...

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A Stylish and Charmingly Reinvented David Copperfield

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