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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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, em...

The Wizard of Oz: Birth of Imagination

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So I Guess Comics Kingdom Sucks Now...

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