2 in 1 Showcase At the Movies returns! This week, Blake and Kenny take the time to give their thoughts on Men in Black III. Can this third installment and the addition of Josh Brolin inject some life into this franchise? Plus, Blake asks you to look into the Kickstarter campaign for David Berger‘s Task Force: Gaea. In the picks, Kenny goes with Red Lanterns #9 and Blake is into The Comic Book History of Comics Contact us with comments, suggestions, or anything else at Showcase@CXPulp.com!
It’s a day late thanks to the great CX Server Malfunction of (Early May) 2012, but it’s time for this week’s Everything But Imaginary. With The Avengersoutpacing everyone’s wildest expectations, it’s time to take a step back and think about what the film may mean for the future… the future of the Avengers franchise, of Marvel Studios, of superhero movies, and of Summer blockbusters in general.
Fair warning: although this is not a review of the film, there are spoiler herein. Read at your own risk.
With a little time to kill this afternoon, I decided to make one of those “Movie List Challenges” over on Facebook. Being the sort of nerd I am, I whipped up a list of 100 movies based on comic books, graphic novels, and newspaper comic strips. Some of these are kind of indirect — the comic strip was made into a broadway musical, the musical was made into a movie. Some of them will be movies you’ve seen but maybe didn’t know were comic books first. Some of them will be foreign and some of them, especially the movie serials of the 40s and 50s, will be characters you’ve heard of in movies you didn’t know existed. And although I tried to stay with theatrical films, it’s possible a made-for-TV movie or two snuck in while I wasn’t looking. But let’s see how many of ‘em you’ve seen. For the sake of fairness, I’ve put an asterisk next to each movie that I’ve personally viewed…
1. The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941) *
2. Batman (1943)
3. Congo Bill (1948)
4. Batman and Robin (1949)
5. Superman and the Mole Men (1951)
6. Blackhawk: Fearless Champion of Freedom (1952)
7. Lil’ Abner (1959)
8. Batman: The Movie (1966)*
9. A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969)*
10. Tales From the Crypt (1972)
11. The Vault of Horror (1973)
12. Superman (1978)*
13. Flash Gordon (1980)*
14. I Go Pogo (aka Pogo For President, 1980)*
15. Popeye (1980)*
16. Superman II (1980)*
17. Annie (1982)*
18. Swamp Thing (1982)
19. Superman III (1983)*
20. Supergirl (1984)*
21. Howard the Duck (1986)*
22. Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987)*
23. Akira (1988)*
24. Batman (1989)*
25. The Punisher (1989)*
26. Return of Swamp Thing (1989)
27. Dick Tracy (1990)*
28. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)*
29. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991)*
30. Batman Returns (1992)*
31. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)*
32. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time (1993)
33. The Crow (1994)*
34. The Mask (1994)*
35. Batman Forever (1995)*
36. Judge Dredd (1995)*
37. Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995)*
38. Barb Wire (1996)*
39. Tales From the Crypt: Bordello of Blood (1996)*
40. Batman and Robin (1997)*
41. Men in Black (1997)*
42. Spawn (1997)*
43. Steel (1997)
44. Blade (1998)*
45. X-Men (2000)*
46. Ghost World (2001)*
47. Blade II (2002)*
48. Road to Perdition (2002)*
49. Spider-Man (2002)*
50. American Splendor (2003)*
51. Daredevil (2003)*
52. Hulk (2003)*
53. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)*
54. X2: X-Men United (2003)*
55. Blade: Trinity (2004)*
56. Catwoman (2004)*
57. Garfield (2004)*
58. Hellboy (2004)*
59. The Punisher (2004)*
60. Spider-Man 2 (2004)*
61. Batman Begins (2005)*
62. Constantine (2005)*
63. Elektra (2005)*
64. Fantastic Four (2005)*
65. A History of Violence (2005)*
66. Man-Thing (2005)*
67. Sin City (2005)*
68. Son of the Mask (2005)*
69. V For Vendetta (2005)*
70. 300 (2006)*
71. Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006)
72. Over the Hedge (2006)*
73. Superman Returns (2006)*
74. X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)*
75. Ghost Rider (2007)*
76. Persepolis (2007)*
77. Spider-Man 3 (2007)*
78. TMNT (2007)*
79. The Dark Knight (2008)*
80. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)*
81. Iron Man (2008)*
82. Punisher: War Zone (2008)*
83. Surrogates (2009)*
84. Watchmen (2009)*
85. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)*
86. Iron Man 2 (2010)*
87. Jonah Hex (2010)*
88. Kick-Ass (2010)*
89. The Losers (2010)*
90. RED (2010)*
91. Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World (2010)*
92. The Adventures of Tintin (2011)*
93. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)*
94. Cowboys and Aliens (2011)*
95. Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (2011)*
96. Green Lantern (2011)*
97. The Smurfs (2011)
98. Thor (2011)*
99. X-Men: First Class (2011)*
100. The Avengers (2012)
With all due respect, to me, this is the biggest lost the musical world has suffered in years.
Robert Sherman, along with his brother Richard, is responsible for pretty much every classic Disney song you’ve sung before The Little Mermaid came out. The music from Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, The Parent Trap, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and the original Many Adventures of Winnie-The-Pooh all came from the Sherman brothers. Away from Disney, they gave us the music to the likes of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Charlotte’s Web and the Peanuts movie Snoopy Come Home. They also composed a lot of the early music for Disneyland and Walt Disney World attractions.
Basically, thank this guy for the soundtrack to your childhood. It is due to them that we know it’s a small world after all, that a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down and that the wonderful thing about Tiggers is Tiggers are wonderful things. Without them, Portabello Road would be just another street in London, the Bear Necessities would be far more bare, and the Ugly Bugs would have no ball to attend. And to say the least, there would be no great, big, beautiful tomorrow awaiting us.
The last place you heard his work was probably in Iron Man 2. For the Howard Stark sequences, the creators of the film were trying to evoke a Walt Disney-esque flavor to the presentation (this even before Disney bought Marvel comics), so who did they turn to for the music? The Sherman Boys, of course.
Just like yesterday’s post about books, I also keep a running list of the movies I watch each year. You know you do it to. Okay, some of you. Three of you? Harvey?
Anyway, for those who are interested, here’s the tally thus far. As with the books, if I happen to write a review of any of these films, I’ll throw up a link. And, should I happen to watch a movie as it’s being riffed by the likes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Rifftrax, or Incognito Cinema Warriors XP, I’ll provide a separate “grade” for the riff.
1. Tucker and Dale Versus Evil(2011), A
2. Little Shop of Horrors (1960), D; RiffTrax, B+
3. Eurotrip (2004), B-
4. Barely Legal (2011), D
5. TransFormers: Dark of the Moon (2011), B
6. Lady Frankenstein (1971), D; ICWXP, B+
7. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011), B+
8. Serenity (2005), A
9. Bloody Pit of Horror (1965), F; ICWXP, B
10. Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory (1961), F; ICWXP, B+
11. Cedar Rapids (2011), B
12. Pontypool (2009), B+
13. Atlas Shrugged Part I (2011), B
14. Ghosthouse (1988), F; RiffTrax, B+
15. The Slime People (1963), D; MST3K, C+
16. The Crucible (1996), B+
17. Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop (2011), B+
18. Chronicle (2012), A-
19. Justice League: Doom (2012), A-
20. Timer (2009), B+
21. Tree of Life (2011), D
22. Another Earth (2011), B+
A day or two ago, during a Twitter conversation, a buddy of mine expressed surprise that the TV show How I Met Your Mother is already in its seventh season. Specifically, he said when he watched the first episode, his reaction was along the lines of, “A laugh track? Right, this is going to last.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard him express a sentiment like this, and he’s be no means the only person I know who has felt this way. And I have an odd sort of reaction to it every time. While I’m not necessarily a fan of laugh tracks, I’m not instinctively opposed to them either, and in no way do I think the presence or absence of a laugh track is indicative of the quality of a show. Some of the greatest comedies of all time have featured either a laugh track or, even better, the laughter of a live audience — Cheers, The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, All in the Family, Sanford and Son… due to the sheer number of shows that have included the sound of laughter, it’s easy to argue that it has been present in most of the great English-language comedy shows of all time.
Let’s examine the perceived problem with the laugh track. The opposition, I believe, stems from the feeling that the producers of the show are being insulting or patronizing by cuing the audience to laugh, or that it speaks to an inherent lack of confidence in the material that requires the canned laughter so the viewer knows it’s supposed to be funny. In some cases, this is probably true — it’s a little less painful to watch a terrible attempt at comedy if we hear somebody laughing. But for most of us, that’s not nearly enough to disguise bad material. In fact, when used on a bad show, it can even serve to accentuate what’s wrong with it. For example, think of the critics’ current go-to example of terrible programming, the NBC sitcom Whitney. Among the show’s many crimes against the viewers, Whitney Cummings starts every episode by announcing, “Whitney is taped before a live studio audience. You heard me.”
Huh?
The “live studio audience” bit is standard, of course, it’s been used by sitcoms for decades to let the viewer know that, yes, real people were there when they taped the show and, yes, they really laughed. But Cummings takes it a step too far: “You heard me.” Suddenly she’s become abrasive and confrontational, as if she’s anticipating some critic using the laugh track to condemn the show and wants to cut him off by saying, “See? THESE people like it!” It’s supposed to set the tone with a joke, but it doesn’t work. Then again, “abrasive,” “confrontational,” and “it doesn’t work” are all terms I would use to define the show in general, so perhaps it’s more successful at setting the tone than is readily apparent.
Regardless, Whitney doesn’t suck because it has a laugh track, it sucks because it’s poorly written and performed by soulless automatons that couldn’t hold on to their jobs frightening children in theme park dark rides. The laugh track itself is just a convention of muti-camera sitcoms, and we’re so used to it that such a show would feel strange without one.
There are, basically, two kinds of comedies on television, single-camera and multi-camera, and each has different demands based on the way the television show is filmed. “Single-camera” shows are filmed like movies, with one camera in use at any given time, and no audience. Shows like this — such as Scrubs, The Office, or Community to name a few — allow for location shooting, outdoor filming, and give the director the opportunity to record a take as many times as he wants until he gets it right. The “multi-camera” technique was popularized by Desi Arnaz when he was making I Love Lucy. Like their predecessors in radio, early TV sitcoms were often performed in front of a live audience. The problem here is that you can’t do as many takes are you want with an audience.
People will only sit so long to be entertained, and even worse, the jokes lose their impact upon repeat viewings. Even the funniest scene ever written (and here I am specifically thinking of the bit in The Dick Van Dyke Show when Rob and Mary are afraid their child was switched at birth, only to find out the other family is black) will fail to elicit a laugh if you’ve seen it ten times in the past hour while the director tries to get different angles. Using several cameras to shoot different angles at the same time drastically reduces the number of takes necessary. The vast majority of TV comedies over the past several decades have been multi-camera, and it wasn’t until the early 2000s, when shows like Scrubs became successful, that single-camera began to regain popularity. (Virtually all TV dramas, by the way, are filmed single-camera, and thus aren’t particularly germane to this discussion.)
The result is two very different experiences for the viewer. Single-camera shows are packaged like movies, with more incidental music and greater opportunities for action or special effects. They come to the viewer in a very complete fashion. But multi-camera shows aren’t made like movies. They are performed and packaged like a stage play, and it is for this reason that laughter isn’t only expected, but almost required.
A stage play is far more immediate than a movie. There’s a greater energy and urgency, not only for the actor, but for the audience as well. Live actors can feel when an audience is enjoying a show and feed off that energy, and conversely, when an audience isn’t into it, the show suffers. There is nothing you, as an audience member, can do that will change your experience watching a movie, but simple audience consensus in a live play actually does make it better or worse.
Obviously, this isn’t true of a TV show, once you’re watching it at home. But the point I’m making here is that these shows — probably unintentionally — are designed in such a way as to imitate the shared community experience of watching a live play, which is different even from the shared community experience of watching a movie in a packed theater. And it is because of this that hearing laughter during a multi-camera show “feels” right, and why a laugh track added to a single-camera show “feels” wrong. In 2010 NBC rolled out yet another of their many doomed sitcoms, this one called 100 Questions. This single-camera show was weak to being with, but the producers did it no favors by adding in a laugh track. This sitcom convention, which is almost unnoticable when used well on a multi-camera show, is unbearably conspicuous in a single-camera setting.
By contrast, look at a multi-camera show with no laugh track. There are plenty of efforts on YouTube to strip the track from assorted shows, and most of them suffer from rather poor and obvious editing, but it’s enough for you to get the idea:
Even the funniest show, when stripped of its laugh track, feels like sitting in a play where nobody is laughing, and that’s a miserable feeling for actor and audience alike. The tone is similar to the webcomic Arbuckle, which repackages Garfield comic strips without Garfield’s thought balloons, thus giving Jon Arbuckle the appearance of being a sad (well… sadder), lonely man who talks to his perfectly conventional pets as if they could respond. (This is not to be confused with the more popular Garfield Minus Garfield, which strips all characters and dialogue save for Jon Arbuckle himself, giving him the appearance of being a lunatic suffering from advanced schizophrenia. Although one wonders if The Big Bang Theory would feel this way if you edited out Johnny Galecki’s Leonard and left Jim Parson’s Sheldon by himself.)
To give one more example, this of a fantastic show where virtually everything was done wrong, look at Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night. It was a multi-camera sitcom that, strangely, felt very wrong with a laugh track added in. When the producers dropped the laugh track, it made for a better show, but it also made it clear what the problem was: the show wasn’t really written as a comedy, but a drama. At most, it was a “dramedy,” and should have been shot single-camera, where it may have at least stood a chance. But Sorkin learned his lesson on his next show, a little thing called The West Wing.
While I can accept that a person can prefer the single-camera format to the multi-camera or vice versa, I soundly reject the notion that either format is inherently superior to the other. And I think the sound of laughter (I do prefer live audience to canned laughter, but that’s another discussion) is hardwired into the genre the way comic books use panels. Is it possible to do without? Sure — but it feels… off.
If, perhaps, we were to eradicate the laugh track entirely, we could learn to live without it. Twenty or thirty years from now, it could be considered quaint, and the next generation would find it unusual if someone tried to bring it back. But it’s part of an experience that has been conditioned into our brains, and that’s really hard to change.
So I kicked off my month of filling in the 2011 movies I missed with a film I heard a lot of good things about, Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil. There are few things as purely enjoyable as a solid horror/comedy (see my love of Ghostbusters and Shaun of the Dead) and few things as disappointing as those movies that don’t do it well (pick whichever Scary Movie you want as your example). But this movie starred Alan Tudyk (Firefly) and Tyler Labine (Reaper), two wonderfully entertaining performers who can do both comedy and action really well, so surely this little film would be worth it, right?
Oh, so, so right.
Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Eli Craig, is a brilliant send-up of horror movies that uses the conventions of the genre the way the greatest horror movies always do, with a dash of social commentary. In the film a group of college students on a mountain camping trip run into a pair of hillbillies, Tucker (Tudyk) and Dale (Labine). Although Tucker and Dale are kind-hearted, harmless good ol’ boys, the college kids are creeped out by them and retreat to the woods, where Chad (Jesse Moss) regales them with the tale of a massacre that happened in those woods 20 years ago. Tucker and Dale head out fishing and startle the swimming college kids, accidentally causing Allison (Katrina Bowden) to slip and knock herself out. The boys save her, but her friends flee in terror, thinking they’re kidnappers. The college crew plans a rescue attempt, but one misunderstanding after another causes the blood to flow.
This movie is just fantastic. It works as a comedy, to begin with, with loveable protagonists, clever dialogue and whip-smart situational comedy. There’s a lot of physical comedy as well, although that trends more towards the gory, for those of you who are sensitive about that sort of thing. But it’s perfectly legitimate in the context of the film. (There’s a reason that horror movie aficionados use the term “gag” to refer the a clever death set piece, after all.) The performances are really good as well — Tudyk and Labine are both proven actors, and their skills take characters that could have been dull and lifeless in lesser hands and make them into protagonists you root for with every fiber of your being. Katrina Bowden’s Allison goes on an interesting journey in the course of the film as well. Her fear about the guys goes away quickly, but we get to watch as she grows to understand and like them as well. The transformation is really believable in her hands, and helps give an additional level of heart to movie that could have been purely slapstick. Mild spoilers follow, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, you may want to stop here.
As I said, though, there’s a degree of social commentary present here that makes it different from soulless horror/humor mashups. At first, you think you’re going to see a parody of the “cabin in the woods” brand of horror. Instead, though, you get a complete reversal of that trope, with Tucker and Dale becoming the heroes against an onslaught of (admittedly inept) psycho killers who are trying to destroy them for no reason. The college kids attack time and again, getting into situations way over their heads and paying dearly as a result.
The result is what gives us the two layers of comedy here. The teenagers react the way you expect teenagers in horror movies to react: blind terror, followed by the resolve to “get those bastards” for what they’ve done to them. In horror movies, there are usually a couple of survivors after such an onslaught, but in real like that’s a good way to get yourself killed.
The second layer is all about perception and preconceived notions. Tucker and Dale try to get Allison back to her friends the moment they pull her out of the water, but they instead run away. After that, each mishap, each event that leads to one of their deaths, could easily be avoided if any one of them stopped and realized that the only danger is in their own minds. Tucker and Dale are gentle, harmless men (until the awesome climax, but even then, neither of them even approaches the level of violence displayed by the kids who fear them). Our heroes prove themselves better than their tormentors time and again, wanting only to protect Allison and reunite her with her friends, while her friends allow their own prejudices to turn them into the least-effective group of killers in movie history.
Movies that purport to take on racism, sexism, or other -isms are common, and often heavy-handed. Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil is a rare knock against elitism, and an even rarer film that gets the point across without preaching or making you constantly aware of the message, instead just telling you a hell of a story and letting the point occur to you in its own time. It’s a great movie, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if, once all is said and done, it’s earned a spot on my “favorites of the year” list.
Exactly one year ago today, I sat down in an effort to compile my personal list of the best movies of 2010, only to discover, to my horror, that I hadn’t seen nearly enough 2010 releases to come up with any kind of comprehensive list. Undaunted, I decided to spent the next month gorging myself on on 2010 movies via Netflix and borrowing DVDs from people. Ultimately, I managed to create such a list, although it wasn’t posted until February 1 of this year.
I’ve come to realize that, while there’s a natural urge to categorize things at the end of the year, I don’t get out to the movies nearly often enough. I used to — back in the day my pal Jason and I could knock out two or three movies in a weekend, but that was before I had a blog. These days, not so much. I’ve seen a total of 36 films with a 2011 release date, 10 of which would typically be disqualified from a list like this because they were either made for television or direct-to-DVD (although I would put things like All Star Superman and Phineas and Ferb: Across the Second Dimension right up there with the most entertaining films of the year, head-to-head with any movie that got to theaters).
If I had the sort of life that allowed me to take in most movies as they were released, it would be more logical of me to try to compile a list like this, but sadly, I’m not a professional reviewer, although I’ve often wished I was. In this day and age I see movies in the theater, typically, when it’s something I have a burning desire to see that won’t wait for DVD or on those rare occasions when I’m hanging out with friends and we need something to do, something that has happened less and less often thanks to the work and family obligations that seem to hold us all back these days.
So, like last year, I’m going to frontload my NetFlix queue with 2011 releases (now that so many of them are available), then come back in a month or so to let you know what I decided were my favorites of the year. In the meantime, here are the movies I’ve already seen, ranked by how much I enjoyed them. The first few shouldn’t surprise anybody…
The Muppets
Super 8
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Captain America: The First Avenger
All-Star Superman (Direct-to-DVD)
Phineas and Ferb: Across the 2nd Dimension (TV Movie)
X-Men: First Class
Attack the Block
Thor
Batman: Year One (Direct-to-DVD)
Source Code
The Captains
Green Lantern
Cars 2
Scream 4
Still Screaming (Direct-to-DVD Documentary)
Good Luck Charlie: It’s Christmas (TV Movie)
The Hangover Part II
Limitless
Green Lantern: Emerald Knights (Direct-to-DVD)
Scream: The Inside Story (Direct-to-DVD Documentary)
Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown(Direct-to-DVD)
Contagion
Battle: Los Angeles
Tower Heist
Paul
Cowboys and Aliens
Miller’s Tale (TV Documentary)
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Ties
Quarantine 2: Terminal
Sucker Punch
Unknown
A Fairly Odd Movie: Grow Up, Timmy Turner (TV Movie)
As much as I love the regular episodes of Community, the Christmas episodes are really something special. Season one was a nice parody of overreaction to the holidays by both the extreme secularists and the extremely ecumenical. Season two was a stop-motion extravaganza that, at its heart, was about the loneliness of the holidays. And this year, we got Regional Holiday Music, a full-blown Christmas musical episode, a joyful romp diminished only by the knowledge that this is the last episode of the show for the foreseeable future.
In “Regional Holiday Music,” Jeff gets his hated nemesis — the Glee Club — busted for singing copyrighted music in preparation for its Christmas pageant. The Glee director asks Jeff’s study group to step in and take over, as they did once before (it’s very much not what you think). Although the rest of the group blows it off, Abed sees an opportunity to keep his surrogate family together over the holidays and begins a quest to win them over one at a time. In doing so, though, he begins to change his friends into something they’re not… mindless Christmas zombies.
Again, the inherent genius of this show shines through. How many other television shows would make their Christmas show half a parody of Glee, half a parody of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, while still making room to write, record and choreograph musical numbers for almost the entire cast, geared specifically to each character? It was a magnificent episode and a great Christmas special, and it was just what this show needed as it goes “into hiatus.”
Ah, “hiatus.” How TV fans hate that word, because far too many times in the past that’s been Network Code for “Cancelled.” Community, at least, still has a full-season order from NBC, which means we should still get the rest of this season even if the episodes are burned off at odd times during the summer. (Which, by the way, would be a disaster, as one of the show’s many gimmicks is the “realtime” nature — each episode takes place in the week that it originally airs.)
The reason, of course, for the hiatus is that the show isn’t pulling in the ratings it deserves. It’s never been a blockbuster, and now in its third season it has reached the point of a TV show’s natural lifespan where the stories and jokes can be more character-specific, trusting that the audience (and writers) know the characters well enough to make the sort of self-referential jokes the fans love, but that the casual viewer may not understand. The Orphan Gospel Choir that was used to seduce Shirley into the Glee club, for example is something that would largely have been lost if you don’t know what kind of woman Shirley is. And the way Britta kinda sorta saves the day at the end is funny regardless, but a hell of a lot funnier if you know what it means to “Britta” something.
So if you’ve never watched Community -- and I know there are a lot of you, else the show wouldn’t be in trouble — you owe it to yourself to give it a try from the beginning. You’ve got time now, so do it however you can. NetFlix (discs only — this really should be streaming). Hulu (the entire series is there, and in HD via Hulu+.) Hell, come to my house and I’ll loan you the DVDs for the first two seasons.
And if you’re already watching, good. Keep it up. And tell your friends. Be vocal (but polite) to NBC. And do whatever it takes to get more students to Greendale Community College.
Six seasons and a movie, peeps. Six seasons and a movie.
I love the Warner Bros Archive Collection. I’ve you aren’t familiar with this vendor, it’s where Warner Bros sells DVDs of movies and TV shows they know have an audience, but probably not a big enough audience to mass-produce and sell in stores. With DVD-on-demand technology being what it is today, they can burn and package DVDs to order at a much smaller financial risk and sell them exclusively online, on theor own site and on Amazon. I’ve found some old favorites on this site — things like the Rankin and Bass Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, the Chuck Jones version of The Phantom Tollbooth, and the so-bad-you-must-watch-it Legend of the Superheroes special which featured Adam West and Burt Ward reprising their roles from Batman alongside a host of DC superheroes.
But today, I want to talk about The Flintstone Christmas Collection. Now don’t mistake this for The Flintstones Christmas Carol – also a fine cartoon, but it’s been readily available on DVD for years. (By the way, Warner Brothers, can we please agree on pluralization? Why is it sometimes “Flintstone” and sometimes “Flintstones?” Let’s pick one.) This Archive DVD contains two other Flintstones Christmas specials, beginning with 1977′s A Flintstone Christmas. In this special, Fred is summoned to play Santa Claus both by Wilma and by his boss, Mr. Slate. He runs into trouble, however, when the real Santa Claus takes a tumble, gets hurt, and Fred and Barney have to step up and take his place. I really like this cartoon, but I’m almost positive it’s a 60-minute remake of an old episode of the original TV series. I got the complete series on DVD last Christmas (thanks, Mom and Dad), so I suppose I could check, but I’ve got a week of school left before the semester ends and these kids are starting to whine about wanting to “know what they made on the last three tests” or something.
The second special, A Flintstone Family Christmas, is from 1993, and is perhaps the last thing made in the chronology of the original series. This actually follows up two made-for-TV movies from the early 90s in which an adult Pebbles and Bamm Bamm got married and had twins. In the new special, their family (who lives in Hollyrock) is coming home for the holidays, and new grandpas Fred and Barney couldn’t be happier. But things go awry when Wilma convinces them to take in a street kid named Stony who seems to be a bit of a troublemaker. If only he had a father figure in his life to set him straight.
If you know where this is going, it’s because you saw the same thing playing out in the now-infamous Leonardo DiCaprio arc on Growing Pains. And like The Cosby Show‘s Raven-Simone before him and the Simpsons‘ Poochie after him, Stony seems to be a rather blatant attempt to inject a new character in the franchise. Which is odd, as there was no Flintstones TV show on the air at that point. I dunno, maybe they hoped that this special would jump start things and get them back on the air. It didn’t, though, and to the best of my knowledge they stopped going forward in the Flintstones’ personal timeline after this and returned to Pebbles and Bamm Bamm’s years in diapers the very next Christmas, for 1994′s Flintstones Christmas Carol.
The second special is kind of trite, but it’s okay. The first one is classic. And if you’re looking for old Christmas cartoons and movies, hunt around the Archive collection. There’s a lot there to choose from, including a lot of things you’ve probably forgotten.
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