The End of 2021 and Plans for 2022

 Hey everyone! Today was a real kick in the you-know-what with Betty White's passing. But I'm here to talk about my plans for 2022. So let's get right into it.

So I've held off on doing the geeky haul posts that I promised you last week because I got a VHS coming tomorrow thanks to my sister and her partner. So I'm moving those to next week instead. I've also decided to split them up into 5 categories: Books, Comics and Magazines, DVDs and Blu-rays, Toys, and VHS. The VHS post is going to be the longest because once my sister drops off the VHS she has for me, I will have acquired 41 VHS tapes in the last month and a half. So look forward to that probably Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, depending on how much I'm able to get done on Monday. 

As for the rest of my plans for the blog in 2022, I'm going to be doing more retrospective style posts. For example, to start off the year I'm going to be doing a five part series on the Walt Disney Animation Canon on home video. So from the origins of Walt Disney Home Video in the late '70s and early '80s, to the movies released on 4K in the present day. Because the subject of Walt Disney Home Video is so vast, and I already did an indepth look at the Walt Disney Classics, Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection, Walt Disney Limited Issues, Walt Disney Gold Classics Collection, Walt Disney Platinum Editions, Walt Disney Diamond Editions, and Walt Disney Signature Collection on my old blog, The Review Basement (they're still up there if you want to take a look at them), I decided to just do a retrospective on the various home media releases for the 60 animated movies produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios.

I have similar posts in mind for Star Trek, Star Wars, Batman, Spider-Man, Power Rangers (maybe), the original four Winnie the Pooh cartoon featurettes, and Disney Sing-Along Songs as well. I've also got more personal retrospectives too. Like my history with Star Trek, my history with Power Rangers, and my history with Disney. I'll also talk about book covers, comic book covers, movies that my parents rented for me when I was a kid, and toys, particularly toys from my childhood. And my favourite franchises will be discussed in depth as well. This year will definitely be heavily focused on physical media and everything that I like, in addition to reviews that I REALLY want to do in the new year. So I hope you'll all join me in 2022 because I've got alot to talk about.

2021 is over, and it was a weird year for my blogs. I closed the book on The Review Basement a couple of months ago because I just couldn't focus on what I wanted it to be. I just wasn't sure exactly what I wanted it to be. But with this blog, I know exactly what I want it to be. I want it to be big, fun and geeky. And that's what it's going to be. So if you're into that kind of stuff, then please enjoy my posts. I can't, and won't, promise any kind of schedule. I'll post whenever I feel like posting. 

That my friends is going to be it for me for 2021. I'll you back here on Monday for the first post of 2022. So until then have a wonderful evening, Happy New Year, and I will talk to you all later. Take care and stay safe!

Knives Out (2019) Review

 Hey everyone! How was your Christmas? Mine was excellent! I'm still trying to figure out my haul post, which I'm probably going to split into several posts because I got alot since November and that will save you from any long posts. So look for that starting tomorrow. Right now though I'm here to talk about the 2019 Whodunit film, Knives Out, written and directed by Rian Johnson. So, let's get into it.

I've been wanting to see Knives Out since it came out two years ago. Unfortunately I didn't have the chance to go see it in theatres. 2019 was a big year for movies with Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, Glass, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, Happy Death Day 2U, Alita: Battle Angel, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Dumbo, Aladdin, The Lion King, Shazam!, Hellboy, Detective Pikachu, John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum, Brightburn, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Booksmart, Dark Phoenix, The Secret Life of Pets 2, Men in Black: International, Toy Story 4, Child's Play, Annabelle Comes Home, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Hobbs & Shaw, It: Chapter Two, Ad Astra, Rambo: Last Blood, Joker, The Addams Family, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Zombieland: Double Tap, Jojo Rabbit, Terminator: Dark Fate, Ford v Ferrari, Frozen II, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Jumanji: The Next Level, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and Little Women all coming out that year.

Of all of those movies that I mentioned, I saw seven of them in theatres, and I was interested in 13 of them. 14 if you include Knives Out. Unfortunately time didn't allow me to go see all fourteen movies that I wanted to see in 2019 in theatres. And many of them I still haven't seen. It's not like I can go to the video store and rent a few movies for the weekend. Nor can I afford half a dozen streaming services just so I can watch all of the movies that I wanted to see in a particular year. But thanks to it being cheap on iTunes, I was finally able to see Knives Out and I loved it.

I'm not a big fan of Whodunits because after awhile they become repetitive and oftentimes I find myself solving the mystery before the protagonist does. Not because I'm a genius or anything, but those are the times where the script is written to be obvious and easy for the audience to solve. Knives Out is not that kind of murder mystery film, even though it emulates many aspects of films like Clue (1985).

About halfway through the movie it seems like the mystery has been solved, not by Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), but shown to us, the audience. But, then we discover during the second half of the movie that all is not as it seems and certain characters are more heavily involved than you thought initially. That was a big twist, which I won't reveal in this review, because it's worth watching this movie for the ending.

The cast of this movie is spectacular! While the movie's poster and even the trailer makes it seem like it's an ensemble cast, it's not. The movie is very much focused on Ana de Armas's character, Marta and she's the character we follow through the entire film. Her co-lead is Daniel Craig's character, Benoit Blanc, a renowned private investigator, who was hired to solve the case by an unknown client, who we discover at the end of the movie. That doesn't mean that the rest of the cast has nothing to do. But they aren't the focus so we don't spend very much time with the rest of Harlan's family outside of Chris Evans's character, Ransom Drysdale. 

This movie was my first time seeing Ana de Armas in anything and I was impressed. She's an extremely good actress and I am actually excited to see her in future projects, maybe as a voice in a Disney movie, or a future Star Wars film or MCU project. Or even a romantic comedy even. I think she's versatile enough as a performer to be good in any movie she's in. Which is actually pretty rare. Like there are performers who are great in comedies, but don't work quite as well in dramas. Or are fantastic in horror, but don't work well in Science Fiction. That sort of thing. 

I'm not a big fan of Daniel Craig's run as James Bond, having not seen his Bond films since Quantum of Solace (2008). I also haven't seen him in very many movies that weren't Bond films, since Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2001. But I was blown away at how good he was in Knives Out.

The rest of the cast is a who's who of acting across multiple generations. Christopher Plummer, who I mostly know as General Chang in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, is a Canadian legend and Jamie Lee Curtis, who I know mostly from Freaky Friday (2003) and Veronica Mars (2014), is also a legend at this point. Chris Evans (MCU, Not Another Teen Movie, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World), Don Johnson (Nash Bridges), Michael Shannon (Man of Steel), Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense), Katherine Langford (Love, Simon, 13 Reasons Why), Jaeden Martell (It, It Chapter Two), Lakeith Stanfield (Get Out), Riki Lindhome (The Big Bang Theory, Gilmore Girls), and K Callan (Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman) round out the main supporting cast. Frank Oz makes a cameo appearance as Harlan Thrombey's attorney. That's a pretty powerful cast, even if I haven't seen Toni Collette and Lakeith Stanfield in anything before this movie. I'm familiar with everyone else in this supporting cast.

I say supporting cast because Ana de Armas and Daniel Craig are the lead actors in this movie. It's focused on them. Everyone else is just there to fill the roles they play. I don't mind ensemble casts, but they don't always work when the cast is large enough. You can't give that large a cast equal screentime or even storylines in movies like this. That was one of the problems that I had with Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which was also written and directed by Rian Johnson. The cast was too big and you couldn't focus on the new characters, like Rose Tico, properly without sacrificing time with the characters established in The Force Awakens or the returning characters, like Luke and Leia, from the Original Trilogy. So I'm glad that for Knives Out Johnson chose to focus on two characters and have the rest of the cast there for story purposes. It made things easier for me to follow while I watched it. 

I kinda like that people are starting to appreciate murder mysteries again. I mean, sure they've never really gone away, but like I was telling my friend, Aaron, earlier today, the classic Whodunnit shows were replaced by police procedurals and dramas such as Castle. Until Knives Out came out two years ago, murder mysteries like it just weren't getting made anymore. But I hope the sequel, because yes it's getting a sequel, generates even more interest in the genre, because I would love to see what other writers and directors can do with it.

Knives Out is an awesome movie! If you haven't seen it yet, I definitely recommend you watch it. I wish I hadn't had to wait so long to see it because it's one of the best movies that came out in 2019 and as I said at the beginning of this review, alot of really good movies came out in 2019. I'll definitely be watching it again in the future. 

That's going to be all for me for today, but I will be back tomorrow with the first part of my big haul post, starting with everything I got when I was out with Brad on November 14th. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Klaus: How Santa Claus Began (2015) Review

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing okay. There's only two days until Christmas and I decided to do this Christmas comic book review. So let's get right into it.

I'm not a fan of Grant Morrison. I find his work to be too complex, too disturbing and too weird for my tastes. But, I can't deny that he is an amazing writer and a really good storyteller. He's also very mischievious because he had me fooled by the first couple of chapters of this book, Klaus: How Santa Claus Began. When I started reading it, I thought, "oh this is way tamer than what I'm used to reading by Morrison". Yeah, no, it's not. It's as disturbing and weird as basically anything else I've read from him, with the exception of All-Star Superman.

I don't have to give a synopsis of this story, because it's basically the comic book version of Santa Claus's origin story. The twist is that it's set in a dark fantasy land full of demons, monsters and tyrants who are trying to destroy Christmas (Yuletime in this story). Which actually isn't that different from any other version of Santa's origin. Except that Burgermeister Meisterburger from Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town (1970) and Aksel Ellingboe and Tammy Krum from Klaus (2019) are about a thousand times tamer than Morrison's villains in this book. 

I didn't like this book. I'm not a fan of the dark, twisted, and brutal stories as many of you may know if you've been a follower of my blogs for any length of time. And this is another unnecessary perversion of a beloved mythical character. In this case, Santa Claus. The violence and brutality is senseless and completely unnecessary. And like most of Grant Morrison's characters, I have no reason to like any of the characters in this story. Oh sure, Klaus is noble and wants to help his former hometown, but Santa Claus at his core is a gentle person who simply brings toys for all the good children using a flying sleigh, pulled by eight magical Reindeer, and is helped by Elves. He's not some Robin Hood-esque figure fighting for justice in an unjust world. And he's definitely not a superhero either.

I also don't hate this book either. It's not a bad book. Like I said, Grant Morrison is an amazing storyteller, but his style is not appealing to me in general. The artwork in this book, by Dan Mora, is spectacular. But this is not my type of story. It's dark, brutal and creepy and not my cup of tea. If you enjoy this sort of thing, and you haven't read this before, I recommend it. But, if you're like me and don't like the dark side of the world, then I would definitely avoid this book. I wouldn't've chosen this for myself. Brad lent it to me because he told me about it either when we hung out back in November or when we hung out on my birthday three weeks ago, and it sounded interesting, as I knew nothing about it and didn't realize it was by Grant Morrison. When I saw who it was by, I had a feeling of dread because, like I said, I'm not a fan of Morrison's work.

I do want to say that, even though I dislike this book, there are things I do like about it. For example, Klaus himself is a reasonably likeable character. Which is fairly unusual for a Grant Morrison character, be it original or not. He had no idea that his former home had so many problems when he returned to town. Most people would've walked away at that point, especially after the harassment he got for sneaking toys to the children of the town (kinda reminds you of the classic Rankin/Bass Christmas special Santa Claus is Comin' to Town doesn't it?). But, like Robin Hood, like Batman, like Green Arrow, Klaus decides to fight the bad guys, led by Lord Magnus, head on.

I also like the relationship between Klaus and Lady Dagmar. Well, former relationship, since she's with Lord Magnus now and has a son with him. It's your typical tragic love story, but in this kind of story, it would be weird if it wasn't tragic. Luckily it gets resolved and Lady Dagmar becomes Mrs. Claus, similar to Jessica in Santa Claus is Comin' to Town. 

I can't stop thinking about how Lord Magnus is similar to Professor Snape from Harry Potter in terms of appearance as well as elements of his backstory. For example, his marriage to Lady Dagmar is like if Snape had started going out with Lily Evans, instead of Lily falling in love with James Potter in the pre-backstory of the Harry Potter books. 

Krampus is not the most original big bad villain out there, and I really don't understand the fascination that people have with him, aside from the fact that he looks creepy. But, when you're doing a dark, scary, intense, Christmas story, who else are you going to use as the main villain? Magnus? Yeah, no, he's like every other petty medieval dictatorial lord we've ever seen in fiction. 

The series was collected in hardcover in 2016. Brad lent me the 2nd edition, which includes the subtitle, "How Santa Claus Began", whereas the original hardcover doesn't include the subtitle. There isn't much bonus content in this book, just the covers for the original issues. No interview with Grant Morrison or sketches or anything like that. It's Boom! Studios afterall.

The collection came out in trade paperback in 2019. I've never seen the trade paperback in person, so I don't know if it has any extra material included or not. 

I think that's going to be it for me for this week. Like I said in my Hawkeye review yesterday, I'm going to aim to have a Christmas/birthday/general geek haul post sometime in the next week or so. I'm aiming for Monday at the latest, but it could be Saturday afternoon or sometime on Sunday at the earliest, depending on when my friends show up for our annual gift/Christmas card exchange. So until then have a wonderful weekend, Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it, and I will talk to you all later. Take care

Hawkeye (2021) TV Series Review

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. There's only three days until Christmas, two days until Christmas Eve, and I've got three more posts to go up for 2021. The first one is this review, where we're going to be talking about Hawkeye as a whole as well as the finale, episode 6, "So This Is Christmas?". I'll leave the last two as a surprise. The next one will be coming tomorrow, so keep your eye out for that. Right now though, let's get into it and talk about Hawkeye. Oh and there will be some spoilers for the finale because alot of what happened in this episode are things that many people on YouTube and on Twitter predicted would happen, especially regarding Eleanor and Kingpin. So just be aware of that if you haven't seen the finale yet. 

The thing about any of these Marvel Disney+ is that, unlike many of you, I wait to watch them, if I watch them, until the next morning rather than staying up until 2 in the morning to watch the new episode as soon as they drop. Which means I run the risk of spoilers because I turn on my computer and go on Twitter and YouTube before I have breakfast. For Hawkeye though nobody in my feed tweets spoilers and I actively avoid the reviews on YouTube until I've watched the episode so that my opinion isn't influenced by others. Especially when a show does something stupid and it's something stupid that I might like. While some people haven't enjoyed this show, I've enjoyed it all the way through. I do have issues with it, but I think they're reasonable issues with it  and I did an entire blog post on them last week after episode 5 dropped, so go check that out if you want to know more.

The first thing I want to talk about is Kingpin. I've never watched Daredevil. I've never been interested in any of the Marvel Netflix shows. However, despite this Kingpin being the same character from Daredevil, and played by the same actor, Vincent D'Onofrio, you don't need to have watched his previous series to know what Kingpin is about in this series. And despite him being a full character in this episode, he has been a presence looming over this entire series. I don't know if this happened at the end of Daredevil season 3, but I was surprised to see him in the classic comic book Kingpin white suit. Anytime I've seen pictures of D'Onofrio as Kingpin he's been in black suits only. Same when I saw the Michael Clarke Duncan version in the 2003 Daredevil movie. But here he's in the suit that I remember from seeing the character in Spider-Man: The Animated Series (1994-1998) when I was a kid. Which I thought was pretty cool.

Honestly, I was afraid that, despite his looming presence over the entire series, Kingpin was going to be shoehorned in as part of Maya's storyline and that's it. But he was pretty well integrated into Kate's storyline. I was a little bit disappointed that he and Clint didn't share a scene together given the last couple of episodes showed that Clint has some history with Wilson Fisk from Clint's time as Ronin (most likely).

Speaking of Maya, while I've had my problems with her storyline this entire show, it's been a good storyline. However, I feel like they wrapped it up a little too neatly considering she's getting her own series in the future. I mean it actually felt like there was no more room for more stories to be told with Echo. Which works since the show is still in very early development and Marvel Studios hasn't revealed a release date for the series yet. So we probably won't see anything of it until 2023 or 2024, after Phase Four is over or at the very tail end of Phase Four, depending on how long Marvel is planning Phase Four to be. Either way, it's going to be quite a while before we see Maya again.

Kate and Clint were the best part of this entire series. So was Yelena, which was another character that I was afraid would be shoehorned into the finale, which she wasn't. But Kate and Clint were great. Their fighting style was so in sync and perfect together. Especially with their trick arrows. I think I said this when I reviewed the first two episodes of the show almost a month ago, but Hawkeye is what Arrow should've been when it started back in 2012. Not in terms of the number of episodes that show has compared to this one, but in terms of how Oliver Queen/Green Arrow was portrayed in the show versus how Clint and Kate were portrayed here. Particularly since the character of Hawkeye had to have been influenced by Green Arrow since Green Arrow was the only other archer character in comics up to that point (there are plenty of others now of course). I suspect the next time I do a watch through of Arrow I'm going to be spending the entire time pointing out everything that Hawkeye did better as a series compared to Arrow.

So I do have some complaints about this show. The big one is how pointless Jack Duqesne was in this series. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the character, but he's supposed to be a criminal mastermind, with ties to Clint, since in the comics, he was Clint's mentor. Here he's just an arrogant rich person who happens to have some skills with a sword. He was literally just there to be the fall guy for everything Eleanor was doing for Kingpin. 

Speaking of which, Eleanor was a predictable character. Once we found out at the end of last week's episode that Eleanor was working for Fisk, that just became the most predictable ending for that character. She wasn't a bad character, just predictable.

My final weird nitpick about this show's finale is that it intentionally left both Kate and Clint's story open ended but wrapped up Maya's a little too nicely. Which begs the question, where will Kate and Clint show up again? They haven't announced any further involvement of Jeremy Renner in the MCU, and who knows when Hailee Steinfeld will show up again, because I want to see Kate Bishop again. Maybe in a spin-off of her own with Florence Pugh as Yelena. Because I would've loved to have seen more of them together on screen, besides their epic fight in the finale. 

Overall Hawkeye was a great show to end off 2021 with. Especially with Spider-Man: No Way Home coming out last week ending off Marvel's movie slate for the year. Despite my complaints about the show, I loved it. Besides The Falcon and the Winter Soldier earlier this year, Hawkeye was the only Marvel Disney+ show I was actually excited about. However, it's also my last foray into the MCU. At least for a while. I don't have any interest in Moon Knight, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, Secret Invasion, Ironheart, Armor Wars or whatever that Wakanda set series is supposed to be. I might come back for Echo whenever that drops, and I'm definitely interested in Spider-Man: Freshman Year but I have no interest in the MCU going forward. For TV shows anyway. I'm interested in seeing what the MCU is going to do with the X-Men and the Fantastic Four in the future. But otherwise I just don't care anymore. Come the New Year I'm going to write about why I don't have interest in the MCU going forward beyond Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four. 

That's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back tomorrow with a Christmasy comic book review, though you'll have to come back tomorrow to find out what comic I'll be reviewing. Then my final post for 2021 will be a big Christmas/birthday/general geeky haul post to show off all the cool movies and books and comics that I've gotten since November. I'll probably do that on Monday just because I don't know what day two of my friends are dropping off my Christmas presents from them yet. Otherwise I'd be doing it on Boxing Day or even Christmas Day after all of the very subdued craziness of my family's Christmas traditions is over and done with. So until then have a great afternoon and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Do Disney+ Original Series Need Longer Seasons?

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm getting by. The idea for this post came to me on Wednesday morning, after I watched the latest episode of Hawkeye. After watching the episode I decided to ask the question, do Disney+ Original Series need longer seasons? Because honestly the Disney+ shows, particularly the Star Wars and MCU shows have a really hard time with cramming too much material into a season of television when those seasons are between six and eight episodes only. What If...? and Star Wars: The Bad Batch aren't that big of an issue since What If...? is an anthology series and The Bad Batch had 16 episodes in it's first season but the live action shows all seem to have this problem. Especially compared to live action shows on other streaming platforms like Hulu and Netflix which typically have between ten and fifteen episodes per season. I'm only going to focus on the three shows that I've seen, or will be seeing, all the way through. Oh and there will be spoilers for season 2 of The Mandalorian, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and episode 5 of Hawkeye, so if you haven't seen any of these three shows then go do that before reading this post. Let's get into it.

The impetus for this entire post came from watching episode 5 of Hawkeye, entitled, "Ronin". In the episode I found that the storyline for Maya Lopez/Echo was pretty weak in favour of introducing Yelena Belova played by Florence Pugh. Maya's storyline was always a little bit on the weak side because they're setting her up for her own spin-off, but it wasn't all that noticeable because up to this point it was pretty evenly balanced with Clint and Kate's storylines. But, the finale, which airs next week, not only has to wrap up everyone's storylines in a satisfying way, but it's also introducing Vincent D'Onofrio's version of Wilson Fisk/the Kingpin from Daredevil, probably so he'll appear in the Echo spin-off. 

The thing is that Hawkeye is a six episode limited series, with no plans for a second season or any projects down the line for Clint Barton or even Kate Bishop at this point. So it has to wrap all of this up, except for Echo's stuff, because there won't be a chance to pick up any loose threads in the next season. Let's take a look at the other two examples that I want to talk about.

While season 2 of The Mandalorian was a continuation of the storyline introduced in the first season, season 2 also introduced things that either went nowhere or were left as loose ends for future shows like Ahsoka and The Book of Boba Fett to pick up later on down the line. Like Cobb Vanth for example. He appeared in the first episode of the season, but then didn't show up again. Same with Bo-Katan and the other Mandalorians, and Ahsoka. Mainly because, in my mind anyway, if you're going to introduce a character, or a group of characters, in a show you should be able to service them properly so that viewers will want to follow them. Especially if they're going to be starring in their own show later on down the line. Most of the first half of the second season was meandering and traveling from one place to another and nothing from season 1, like Moff Gideon and why he wanted Grogu so badly, even came back into play until like the fifth episode and even then Gideon didn't show up in person until episode 6, more than halfway through the season. So it took me out of the story a bit because the first five episodes were used to set characters up for spin-offs, which don't really interest me very much because I don't care about those characters. 

A good example of this is season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery. The season introduced us to three new characters, Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Commander Una Reilly/Number One (Rebecca Romijn), and Spock (Ethan Peck). Technically these were re-introductions since Pike had previously been played by Jeffrey Hunter in the original TOS pilot, "The Cage", and by Bruce Greenwood in Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Spock is one of the most iconic characters in fiction ever, while Number One was originally played by Majel Barrett in "The Cage". But Pike and Spock were used extremely well in this series without taking away from the central characters of Michael Burnham and Saru (everyone else is basically supporting or recurring cast on that show at this point). It was only after Mount's work as Pike was well received by fans did CBS/Paramount decide to create the Captain Pike spin-off, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Even if they had had a spin-off in mind for Pike when they decided to include him in season 2 of Discovery, they still produced a satisfying wrap-up for those characters in case Strange New Worlds hadn't gotten greenlit, while giving us a satisfying wrap-up for the crew of the Discovery as well.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is more along the lines of Hawkeye because it's also a limited series, though the fourth Captain America movie is continuing Sam and Bucky's adventures using the threads left dangling at the end of the show. It also has six episodes with elements not wrapped up or rushed through because they tried to get through too much material in only six forty minute episodes. The question remains though. Do Disney+ Original Series, particularly the Marvel and Star Wars ones, need longer seasons?

I think the answer is yes. Both Marvel and Star Wars have a huge slate of shows and movies coming out in the next several years and the problem with the shows being interconnected the way they are, particularly the Marvel shows being connected to the movies, is that they spend so much time in the limited series introducing elements that are going to be in later movies and/or shows, which takes time away from story and character elements that should be focused on for the six episode shows. 

Now the only non-Marvel and non-Star Wars Disney+ Original Series I've seen is Monsters at Work, which is an animated series. But using this as an example, High School Musical: The Musical: The Series had ten episodes in it's first season and twelve episodes in it's second. So why don't Marvel and Star Wars shows have longer seasons, especially for shows like Loki that are getting multiple seasons? They start out strong, I mean the opening four episodes of Hawkeye were amazing, but introducing Yelena with two episodes left, with all the baggage of her storyline was kind of pointless. This is partly why I'm not interested in most of the shows and movies coming out post-Hawkeye. They aren't characters I know or care about, they get pretty convoluted at times (see my opinions on the various DC Comics based shows) and then you add in Marvel trying to make them cinematic by cramming in so much material into the show and it's get even more convoluted and confusing and becomes not fun anymore.

Now, Star Wars isn't as bad, but we've only had one live action Disney+ Original Series Star Wars show so far and the pacing was weird for the second season of that show, for the reasons I mentioned earlier in this post. And I fear it's only going to get worse with Kenobi, Ahsoka, and The Book of Boba Fett.

Strangely enough the Hulu Original Series that are on Disney+ here in Canada like Love, Victor and Only Murders in the Building have ten episodes per season for each show, and none of them have the same pacing issues of the Marvel and Star Wars shows. So in the end I think the Marvel shows, and the Star Wars shows to a lesser extent, either need to not try to cram so much into one season or have more shows with multiple seasons, or better yet make the seasons and limited series longer in terms of the number of episodes just to give the stories a bit more time to breathe.

I think that's all I wanted to say about this. I just found it interesting because this is a trend that I've been seeing with the Marvel and Star Wars live action Disney+ Original Series, and I don't know if they can change it at this point. Just because so many shows have to come out per year and at certain times of the year, they come out right after the other, so it's hard to schedule that block for more than ten weeks if you don't want to have shows overlapping, because that can be an issue too if there's too much from one franchise on at once.

That's it for me for today, but I will be back next week with some Christmas posts. I hoped to do them this week, but things conspired to keep me from feeling like working on blog stuff. So until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966) DVD and CD Review

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. So, today I'm doing something a little bit different. I have a vast physical media collection including CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, comic books, novels, and VHS tapes and they're what I watch the most even though I have access to Disney+ and movies and TV shows on iTunes. So that's going to be the geeky focus of this blog: My physical media collection, past, present, future, rented, borrowed, and owned. And since it's Christmastime, I thought I would begin with the 2006 DVD and 1995 CD releases of the 1966 classic Christmas special, Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas. So let's get into it.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is a staple of Christmas. Especially for me. My family never owned it on VHS when I was growing up, but it didn't matter because it was on TV twice every year. We tended to watch it on Christmas Eve. I finally got a copy on DVD last year, before the pandemic hit. This copy was my grandfather's and when he passed away in February 2020 I inherited his DVD collection and a number of VHS tapes.One of them was the 2006 DVD release of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the TV special and the 50th anniversary of the original book by Dr. Seuss. The cover even says 50th Birthday Deluxe Edition, with no mention of it being 40 years since the TV special had first aired.

What's unique about the TV special is that, aside from shots of the Who children playing with their noisy toys, it's a straight translation of the original Dr. Seuss book. The difference is that the animation was done by Chuck Jones and his team. Chuck Jones is, of course, the man behind the Looney Tunes for most of the '40s, '50s, and early '60s. And you can tell because the special has that Looney Tunes look and flavour to it. Especially with the visual gags the special has near the end with Max and the Grinch that the original book doesn't. 

Unlike the audio CD, which has Boris Karloff as the voice of the narrator, the Grinch, and Cindy Lou Who, the TV special has June Foray as the voice of Cindy Lou Who, though nobody but Karloff is credited on the title cards at the beginning of the special. Also Thurl Ravenscroft, who many people know as the voice of Tony the Tiger for Kellog's Frosted Flakes cereal, as well as the voice from several Disney movies, shorts, and theme park attractions. Including "Grim Grinnin' Ghosts" from Disney Sing-Along Songs: Disneyland Fun.

This CD came out in 1995, though I think it's a re-release of an older LP release from around the time the special first aired on TV in the late '60s. There's no indication of that anywhere on the cover except on the back it gives credit to the person who did the remaster work. The CD has five tracks. The first track is the story itself, narrated by Boris Karloff. The remaining four tracks are the songs featured in the special. Track 2 is "Welcome Christmas", track 3 is "Trim Up the Tree", track 4 is "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch", and the final track is a longer, reprise version of "Welcome Christmas". 

The story is very simple, because it's adapting a very simple story, being that it's a children's picture book. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. When the Jim Carrey version was made in 2000 I felt they added alot of unnecessary backstory for the Grinch. I get that they needed to have the movie be a certain length, but the backstory in that movie doesn't add anything to the Grinch as a character. It doesn't make him any more sympathetic, nor does it make him likeable. It's just another pointless backstory that makes no sense. Of course I've heard that the 2018 animated movie also added an unnecessary backstory for the Grinch, but that's what you get from modern Hollywood. That's neither here nor there though. My point is that this is the perfect adaptation of the book and I appreciate how simple it is. And that's why this TV special is a classic.

The DVD is actually fairly light for a deluxe edition release. It's a single disc release though there's plenty of bonus features on it. I didn't watch all of them last night, but I did watch the featurette, Dr. Seuss and the Grinch - From Whoville to Hollywood, which chronicles the early career of Ted Geisel a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, how he came up for the idea of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and what the process was to adapt it into the TV special. They did it in 15 minutes, which is shorter than it took most Disney movie Making Of featurettes on the Platinum Edition DVD releases around the same time this release came out.

I say it's light on bonus features for a supposed "deluxe" edition because this release came out in 2006, when most deluxe editions were 2 to 3-disc releases with tons and tons of bonus features on them. So I find it most curious that they called this a deluxe edition when, compared to some other releases from this time, it actually isn't a deluxe edition. It's a pretty good release though. Much better than even most Blu-ray releases are today in terms of bonus features. 

I think that's going to be it for this review. I'll be back tomorrow for another Christmas related post. Maybe even a VHS review since I had plenty of Christmas movies and specials on VHS when I was a kid as well as several on DVD now. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you later. Take care.

Enterprise: 20 Years Later...Retrospective

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing quite well. So today is going to be a little bit different. Instead of a review or talking about something I've watched recently, today I'm going to be talking about a show that I haven't seen in 16 years outside of random episodes here and there. With this year being the 20th Anniversary of several TV shows, there are three in particular that I'd like to talk about. The first being the fifth live action Star Trek series, Star Trek: Enterprise, which was also the last Star Trek series until Discovery started airing in 2017. So let's talk about it.

When Enterprise was airing I was in high school. In fact the first season aired during my first year of high school. Back then I didn't have alot of friends who were Trekkies. In fact I really only had two. One of them was still in middle school and the other lived forty minutes away from me, so I only saw him at school. And we didn't really talk about the show that much, even though I enjoyed it, because this was my high school in 2001 where being a geek and being into Star Trek was frowned upon. We still talked about Star Trek in general, but we very rarely talked about the episodes at school the day after they aired. 

Like I said, my high school was very geek unfriendly, so I was super embarrassed to like things like Star Trek and comic books, even though I absolutely loved them. Plus this was the era of awesome sitcoms like Friends, The King of Queens, and Everybody Loves Raymond so my interest in TV shows widened to include them as well as Star Trek and Smallville. Luckily Enterprise aired twice a week here in Canada. Once on CityTV, a Toronto network, and an encore airing on Space Channel, which is currently known as CTV Sci-Fi Channel and will be renamed SyFy Canada come the New Year. 

To be honest I quite liked Enterprise when it was originally on, though apart from certain episodes I only saw each episode once and don't really remember most of them. However my liking of it waned over the last twenty years. Mainly because I haven't seen the majority of the series for so long and also because people just don't talk about it online that much.

I never cared that Enterprise was a prequel. Unlike the first two seasons of Discovery and the upcoming Strange New Worlds, Enterprise took place far enough back and featured original characters that the writers could do anything they wanted and really wouldn't impact the continuity of TOS all that much. There was an episode in early season 1 where the Ferengi appeared, and I actually didn't care, because of the way the Ferengi did everything they could to minimize exposure by the Humans. Also, they never actually revealed their species name, so it wouldn't feed back on "The Last Outpost", the introduction of the Ferengi on TNG where Picard stated they'd never seen the Ferengi before and knew nothing about them apart from rumours, hearsay, and second hand reports, most of them which did conflict with each other. 

I've been watching clips of episodes on YouTube and as I was doing that, I came to realization, Enterprise was different from the three Star Trek shows that began in the late '80s and the '90s for a reason. That reason has to do with television in the 2000s in general.

As I mentioned above alot of sitcoms were on in the early 2000s, around the time that Enterprise was on. However the 2000s also saw a resurgence in quality Science Fiction programming like Stargate Atlantis, the remaining seasons of Stargate SG-1, Andromeda, the revival of Doctor Who and weirder ones like Lexx and Farscape, as well as police procedurals like CSI, Law & Order, and NCIS, and teen dramas like Degrassi: The Next Generation, One Tree Hill, The O.C., the remaining seasons of Dawson's Creek, and Everwood. 2006 would see the birth of The CW after UPN, which Enterprise aired on, and The WB merged into one network. Because audience's attention had been drawn away from Star Trek, because, let's face it, Star Trek had been doing the same thing for 14 years by the time Enterprise began airing and quite frankly the way they were telling stories was becoming outdated. Particularly since, aside from DS9, Star Trek maintained it's episodic format rather than going completely serialized, and it remained fairly safe in terms of the content they showed onscreen, again, aside from a few episodes of DS9 and Voyager. Which meant it couldn't necessarily compete with shows like Alias and Smallville. 

The thing I liked about Enterprise is that the characters were allowed to show their flaws and struggle with them. DS9 was the same way, but the characters on DS9 were built from the same cloth as the characters of TNG, so there was always that safety to them that the Enterprise characters just didn't have. I liked the fact that Archer was allowed to be prejudiced against Vulcans and didn't just get over it overnight just because T'Pol became his friend and first officer. I liked that Malcolm Reeds's ties to Section 31 caused tension between him and Archer. I liked that Phlox wasn't just a sarcastic do-gooding doctor. He had morals, but he also failed sometimes and carried those failures with him. I loved that by the end of the show you knew these characters and they became a true family in a way that they didn't even really do on Voyager.

In fact many of the things that I love about Discovery, particularly in the last two seasons, started with Enterprise 20 years ago. Yes, the writing wasn't always great and the CGI looked really bad at times, but there was a charm to it that no other Star Trek show posesses. I remember episodes where I actually laughed because Archer said something funny or he and Trip teased each other, showing us that they are best friends and Archer becoming captain didn't change that. We actually saw them hanging out together off-duty, something we never saw with Kirk and McCoy (until the Kelvin Timeline movies), Picard and Beverly (they ate meals together but it felt so stuffy that I never classified it as "hanging out"), or Tom and Harry (the Captain Proton program being an exception I suppose). I didn't mention Chief O'Brien and Doctor Bashir, or any of the DS9 characters, because that show is also very different from the other Star Trek shows, though again, they were still cut from the TNG cloth, so they weren't THAT different from the TNG characters. 

There were also big emotional moments too, like Trip's sorrow over the loss of his sister when the Xindi attacked Earth in the season 2 finale "The Expanse", Archer's feeling sorry for himself because Enterprise may have caused the destruction of an entire civilization, forcing Starfleet to cancel their mission in the season 1 finale, "Shockwave Part 1". The joy the crew felt when Archer announced that their mission to Kronos had been a success and that Starfleet announced they could begin their mission of exploration in the pilot "Broken Bow". Their relief that they saved Earth from destruction in the first two episodes of season 4. 

Despite Star Trek having been around for 35 years by the time it started, Enterprise felt fresh, new and exciting. Like nothing that had ever come before on Star Trek. It had it's problems. Like the whole Temporal Cold War thing fizzled out because Berman wouldn't let the writers commit to it. Everyone blamed UPN for the problems the show had, but Berman was in charge of the franchise at the time, he knew everything that was going on, and he didn't stop any of it. And like I said, the writing was really bad at times, but no more than writing can be on any TV show. 

People also blame UPN for cancelling the show, but in all honesty, even if UPN hadn't cancelled it when they did, The CW would've. 2005 is when the merger between UPN and The WB happened, forming The CW, and back then The CW wasn't interested in doing Science Fiction shows. They cared more about the teen dramas and the more supernatural shows like Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries than they did about Sci-Fi. So if UPN hadn't cancelled Enterprise when they did, I think we would've found it on the chopping block at The CW within a few months of the merger happening. Which is why very few UPN shows ended up on The CW and most of the shows that were on The WB ended up on The CW after the merger to begin with.

I'm not trying to change people's minds about Enterprise but it felt like an evolution that Star Trek desperately needed after 14 years of straight production and broadcast. Because, as much as I love Voyager, it's unwillingness to do nothing but play it safe very nearly killed the franchise permanently as we saw with Voyager's ratings by the end of the series. Plus I just think people, a.k.a. non-Trekkies, got tired of Star Trek. The franchise spent the entirety of the '90s with two TV shows in production and on the air, and one movie in production at all times, which is alot of Star Trek during a time where Space Opera Sci-Fi wasn't very popular. Especially on TV. 

At some point I'm going to watch the entire show from start to finish and do a full review to see how it holds up today compared to how I felt about it when I was watching as a high schooler in the early to mid 2000s. For now though I just wanted to talk about Star Trek: Enterprise since it had it's 20th anniversary this year. I'll be back tomorrow for my discussion on Smallville and the impact it had on the comic book based shows and the superhero shows that are out now. So until then have a wonderful evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.  

Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore (1983) Review

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. So I sat down to watch Super 8 on Blu-ray last night, but I turned it off 30 minutes in because I wasn't enjoying it. So I watched Disney Sing-Along Songs: Disneyland Fun on VHS because I actually got the 1994 VHS release in a collection of tapes that someone I know gave to me two weeks ago along with two other volumes of Disney Sing-Along Songs. But then afterward since I wasn't quite ready to go up to bed yet, I decided to watch Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore on DVD (it's a bonus feature on the DVD for The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh) since it's about Eeyore's birthday and my birthday is in two days. So instead of a review of Super 8 directed by JJ Abrams and produced by Spielberg, I'm gonna be talking about the fourth Winnie the Pooh featurette from 1983, Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore. So let's get into it.

It might surprise you to know that despite owning the first three Winnie the Pooh featurettes on VHS, I didn't own Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore. At least not on a Walt Disney Home Video retail VHS release. My grandmother had taped it off the TV along with the 1948 Goofy cartoon, The Big Wash, and a few Chip 'n' Dale cartoons. Though I think one of them was Pluto's Christmas Tree but I don't remember because I haven't watched that tape in about 20 years. So I always watched Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore on that tape. 

One of the things that I liked about this featurette is that the focus is on another character besides Pooh and Tigger. I mean Rabbit played a huge role in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966) and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too (1974) and Piglet played a fairly major role in Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968) but all three of those were focused on Pooh or Tigger. Whereas Eeyore only has a few lines in the first two featurettes while he's completely absent from Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too. Same with Owl for that matter. 

It's also a departure from the previous three featurettes because aside from Hal Smith, Ralph Wright, Paul Winchell, and John Fiedler the voice cast was changed around for this one. The late Will Ryan replaced Junius Matthews as Rabbit, Hal Smith, who continues to voice Owl, replaced Sterling Holloway as Pooh, and Julie McWhirter Dees replaced Barbara Luddy as Kanga, while both Christopher Robin and Roo have always had different voice actors for each featurette. Oh and the narrator has changed too. Sebastian Cabot was the narrator in the first three featurettes, but he was replaced here by Laurie Main, who narrated Winnie the Pooh Discovers the Seasons in 1981, narrated Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore in 1983, narrated Welcome to Pooh Corner also in 1983 and then returned in 2003 to reprise his role as the narrator for the video game tie-in to Piglet's Big Movie (2003), Piglet's Big Game, which came out for the GameCube, the Game Boy Advance and the PlayStation 2. And because I watched Welcome to Pooh Corner whenever I was in the hospital, the Laurie Main version of the Narrator was as much a part of my childhood as the Sebastian Cabot version was.

One thing that I find weird about this featurette is that it ignores Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, where Piglet lives with Pooh. At the end of The Blustery Day, Owl takes over Piglet's house and Piglet moves in with Pooh. Owl isn't in Tigger Too but at the beginning, just before Tigger bounces Piglet, you can see that a Piglet sized door was installed in Pooh's house. But in A Day for Eeyore Owl is back in his original treehouse which was blown down and destroyed by the windstorm in The Blustery Day and the Piglet sized door is no longer in evidence in Pooh's house either. And I mean Winnie the Pooh doesn't have any real continuity, beyond, Tigger and Piglet first appear in Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day and that's it. Even the full length films have no real continuity between them. So it really doesn't matter, it's just Owl's house being destroyed and him moving into Piglet's place, while Piglet moves into Pooh's is a pretty big plot point in Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day. 

Even though Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore is different from the other three featurettes, including the music, and I didn't watch as often as the other three, because I didn't have it at home, I still love it. Because all four featurettes were a big part of my childhood, and I don't have an absolute favourite out of all four of them. Because they're all so good. Winnie the Pooh is comfort food when it comes to movies, be it the full length feature films, the TV shows or the featurettes so I can't choose a favourite.

Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore was released on March 25th, 1983 alongside the 1983 theatrical re-release of Disney's 1963 animated feature, The Sword in the Stone. It's also the first Winnie the Pooh featurette to not have any songs as part of the story. Tigger Too had a reprise of "The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers", but this one has no songs in it at all, though a remix of the Winnie the Pooh theme song is played during the opening credits.

It's not on Disney+ but Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore is included as a bonus feature on the 2002 VHS and DVD releases, the 2007 DVD release, and the 2013 Blu-ray release for The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and there are several standalone VHS releases for it as well. But the easiest way to check it out is on the DVD and Blu-ray releases for The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh that I mentioned. 

And that my friends is probably going to be it for me for this week. I might do a comic book review tomorrow, but we'll see. And I'm not doing anything over the weekend since it's my birthday on Saturday and I have family coming over and friends will be texting and messaging me all day as well. So if I don't do a comic book review tomorrow have a great weekend and I will see you all next week back here in the Geek Cave. Take care.