Starter Villain (2023) Book Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well for a Monday. So today, I'm going to be reviewing a novel called Starter Villain by John Scalzi, who also wrote the 2012 novel, Redshirts. There might be some minor spoilers in this review, but I'm not sure on that yet. Let's get into it.

Despite having heard of Scalzi's work from people talking about Redshirts for years, I've never read it and I want to so badly, as a fan of Star Trek. However, my sister got me Starter Villain for Christmas last year and I read it as soon as I finished another book I was reading at the time. I loved it. I didn't review it at the time though because I was focusing a lot on nostalgic stuff, and with this book having come out in 2023, it doesn't exactly fit the bill for a piece of nostalgic media. 

So the book is about Charlie Fitzer, who lost his dad and is barely making ends meet as a substitute teacher. When his estranged uncle, Jake, dies, Charlie inherits millions of dollars and all of his uncle's businesses. However, he also inherits all of the dangers that come along with those businesses. He also gets a secret volcano island lair though, and finds out his cats talk and dolphins are planning on going on strike due to their working conditions. 

If you're confused about anything in that synopsis, you've never watched the James Bond series, or the Austin Powers Trilogy. Or any spy thriller or even superhero movies and shows. While having nothing to do with Science Fiction properties like Star Trek or Star Wars, Starter Villain is one of the geekiest books I've ever read. And I've read Ready Player One and Armada by Ernest Cline. Basically this book is James Bond meets The Godfather by way of Austin Powers. Like I said in the synopsis, Charlie has a secret island volcano lair like Dr. Evil does in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. 

The thing about Scalzi's writing is that it's satire. So, even though the stakes are real and the dangers the characters face are real, it's meant to be humourous and make fun of the James Bond movie tropes that people love so much. The same way that Seth MacFarlane or Mel Brooks make fun of the tropes in the genres they love in movies like A Million Ways to Die in the West, Spaceballs, Ted, and Blazing Saddles.

My favourite scenes in this book is whenever Charlie talks to the dolphins. There's just something about the dolphins that make me smile. Probably because they serve as a commentary, along with Mathilda Morrison, on things happening in the world currently. Especially when it comes to rich people and how frustratingly despicable the majority of them are. Mathilda, or Til, is Charlie's assistant and had been his uncle's assistant before that.

Something I found interesting about Starter Villain is that Charlie has no love interest in the book. He'd been married, but he and his wife had gotten divorced at some point prior to the beginning of the book, so he's single throughout the book. Yet, Scalzi chose not to give him a love interest. Til is a badass assistant, but there's nothing between her and Charlie, and the only other women in Charlie's life are his two cats, Hera and Persephone. So there really isn't anyone for Charlie to become romantically involved with.

Overall, this was a really good book. If you like Kevin Smith films, Seth MacFarlane films and TV shows, or Mel Brooks movies, you'll love this book. It has all the right kind of poking fun at movie genres that few other things end up being able to do.

That's it for me for today. I'll be back soon with more posts. Until then, have a great rest of your day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.  

Superman #149 (1961) Comic Book Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well for a Sunday morning. Today I decided to do a quick comic book review. For this review we're going back to 1961 to talk about a Superman comic. Let's get into it!

Superman #149 tells the tale of "The Death of Superman". No, not THAT "Death of Superman", a different one. These stories would be called "Elseworlds" these days, but in the '50s and '60s, DC would occasionally publish what they referred to as "imaginary stories" for Superman and Batman. I think they did it for their other characters too, but Superman and Batman are the two that I know of for sure. For Superman, they put him in all kinds of situations, from being married to Lois Lane to being split into Superman Red and Superman Blue, to being killed (this issue). Oddly enough they actually did all three of these things in the regular Superman stories in the '90s, with Superman Red/Superman Blue being the most notorious storyline that they did in the late '90s (apart from giving him the mullet when he came back from the dead in 1994).

This story, written by Superman's co-creator, Jerry Siegel, takes place on an Earth where Luthor discovers the cure for cancer as a ploy to trick Superman into believing that he'd turned over a new leaf and wanted to do good, instead of evil. Remember, this isn't businessman, Lex Luthor, this is the mad scientist/evil genius Luthor. So everything we know about him now was different back then. Obviously, he's still evil since he'd use the cure for cancer in a scheme to kill Superman. I mean, he didn't use the cure to kill Superman, he used lethal doses of Kryptonite for that, but the cure for cancer was developed with the intention of being put into a position where he could kill Superman. After Superman is killed, Supergirl takes over his job of protecting Metropolis and the world, having been kept as Superman's secret weapon up to this point. This is the original Kara Zor-El version of Supergirl, though her secret identity is Linda Lee rather than Kara Danvers or Linda Danvers or whatever she is called in different periods of her publication history.

What's interesting is that when Doomsday killed Superman in Superman #75 in 1993, people thought that Supergirl was going to replace him. It was the Matrix Supergirl at that point, but I'm wondering if readers who'd been around 32 years earlier, when this issue came out, got that idea from this issue, because there are a few things that Dan Jurgens and the other Superman writers took from this issue for the "Funeral for a Friend" story arc. Namely the size of Superman's funeral. Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash, and Green Arrow are present as are Lois Lane, Perry White, Jimmy Olsen, Lana Lang, and Superman's Mermaid ex-girlfriend, Lori Lemaris. Lori is a character that hasn't been used much since the '60s, so modern readers might not know who she is. I definitely didn't until about twelve years ago. More on that later.

The only thing that confuses me is how Luthor managed to kidnap Lois, Perry, and Jimmy without Superman noticing that they're missing. Mostly because he works at The Daily Planet with them as Clark Kent, but there's no panel showing Clark seeing that his three friends aren't at work or him flying around, looking around for them as Superman. He just sees Luthor's distress signal as other criminals had been gunning for Luthor thinking he'd turned his back on crime, not realizing it was a ruse to kill Superman. 

There's one other panel that I'd like to discuss. During Superman's funeral, Lana thinks about how she'd been Superman's childhood friend in Smallville. I know all about the Superboy comics and how Clark had been Superboy before he became Superman in the comics of the '40s to the '80s, but Lana's thought dialogue doesn't specify if she's talking about Superboy or Clark Kent. In the regular stories during this time, neither Lana nor Lois know that Superman is really mild mannered reporter, Clark Kent, and Lana never discovered that Clark and Superboy were one and the same. But this story takes place on another Earth within the pre-Crisis Multiverse, so could the Lana of this story know that Clark/Superboy/Superman were the same person? There's no way to tell, because Clark Kent isn't even mentioned by the other characters after Superman dies.

The art in this issue was done by Curt Swan, who was the definitive Superman artist from 1948 until 1986. Other artists worked on the book naturally, but Swan was THE Superman artist of the '60s and '70s. I really like his art style, and when I think of Superman in the '60s, that's the version I think of, because even his cartoon version from the 1966 Filmation series, The New Adventures of Superman, looks like the Curt Swan version.

Obviously this issue is really hard to find nowadays, even in back issue long boxes at cons. It was collected in a few collected editions, the most recent being in Superman: A Celebration of 75 Years, which is a hardcover collection that DC published in 2013. I don't think it's still in print being that it's been 12 years since it was published, but that's how I read this issue, as I got that book back in either 2013 or early 2014 with Chapters gift cards that I got for my birthday and Christmas in 2013. It's still a fun read though and an interesting one given what we got in the '90s with The Death of Superman.

That's it for me for today. I'll be back soon with more fun posts throughout the week. Until then have a great rest of the day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Star Trek Novels, Comics, and Video Games that are most likely inspirations for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (2025)

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. It's Wednesday, which means it's time for this week's non review blog post. Today I wanna talk about three pieces of Star Trek media that aren't a movie or TV show that could be inspirations for the upcoming TV series, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Let's get into it.

While there has never been a movie or TV series that has been set at Starfleet Academy, the institution has been part of Star Trek lore pretty much since the very beginning of the franchise. There have also been several novels and comics that have Starfleet Academy. The ones I'm talking about today are ones where the majority of the stories's cast are completely original characters with established characters from the TV shows and movies appearing as background characters or supporting characters only. So, I won't be talking about the junior novels that have main characters from TOS, TNG, and Voyager as young adults at Starfleet Academy.

Published by Marvel comics from 1996 to 1998, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy was a 19 issue comic book series that focused on a group of cadets, with the only pre-established character as a main character in the story is Nog from DS9. Both Benjamin and Jake Sisko appear in issue #17, Pike appears in issues 9 and 10, and Charlie Evans appears in issue 8. Otherwise it's all original characters, including an Andorian, a Vulcan inhabited by a Romulan (don't look at me, I'm just looking this up on Memory Alpha), a Betazoid, and a Trill. While the time period of this series is set during the fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons of DS9 (seasons 2, 3, and 4 of Voyager), I'd say this series is probably the most likely out of all of these that Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau, the showrunners of the new TV show, took inspiration from for the show.

The next item on the list is the 1997 PC game, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Once again, while Kirk, Sulu, and Chekov appear in the game, as this game is set between Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the cadets are all original characters who don't appear in any other piece of Star Trek media outside of the novelization of the game. You play as Cadet David Forrester, a human, and your job is to assemble a crew that also seems to include a Vulcan and an Andorian. This game is unique in that it has full video cutscenes rather than animatic sequences or static images with text over it like the various console video games Star Trek had in the '80s and '90s. 

As mentioned, there was a novelization for the game. It was published by Pocket Books in 1997, a few months before the game was released. Having never read the novel, I have no idea how much of the game's story is left out of the book being that the mediums are very different from one another. Memory Alpha only list Kirk, Sulu, Chekov and Forester (his name is spelled with two Rs in the game apparently) as characters in the novel, Memory Beta, the Wiki for Star Trek novels, comics, video games, and other tie in media, lists all of the characters from the game for the novelization. Being that I don't have a computer that can play the game, and even if I did, finding a copy of the game would be extremely difficult, the novelization might be something I can get my hands on at some point.

The final piece of media on this list is the 1998 Star Trek: The Next Generation novel, The Best and the Brightest by Susan Wright. Once again, all the cadets are original to this novel, but characters from TNG, DS9, and Voyager are either seen or mentioned throughout the book. The novel also spans from the end of the fifth season of TNG to the fourth season of DS9, and heavily features the destruction of the Enterprise-D in Star Trek Generations. Like with the comic and the game, this novel's cast includes other races besides humans. However, while a Vulcan cadet appears in the first chapter, he isn't part of the main cast, and doesn't appear after the first two or three chapters. However, there is a newly-joined Trill, a Bajoran, two humans, a Rex, which is a felinoid race, and an Oppalassan, which is a humanoid race who goes through puberty in their 20s rather than their early teens.

Any of these three stories would be easy to pull inspiration from for the upcoming TV show. While Star Wars's Expanded Universe of novels, comics, and video games is more well known, as is its impact on the Star Wars movies and TV shows, Star Trek's Expanded Universe has had just as much impact on the TV shows and movies. For example Kirk's middle name was Tiberius in the novels for about ten years, or longer before it was spoken on screen for the first time in Star Trek VI, as was Uhura and Sulu's first names, Nyota and Hikaru. Not to mention Star Trek: Early Voyages featured the adventures of Pike, Spock and Number One aboard the Enterprise both before and after "The Cage" similar to what Strange New Worlds is doing on television today. 

The world of Star Trek novels and comics isn't as well known as the Star Wars Expanded Universe is. Likely because Star Trek is a TV franchise first and a movie franchise second, so while the novels and comics were especially important in the '70s and again between 2005 and 2017, because we haven't had a whole lot of periods where there hasn't been a Star Trek show airing or a Star Trek movie being released, the novels, comics, and video games have felt more like tie in material rather than carrying the bulk of the franchise due to the uncertainty of more movies being made the way the Star Wars Expanded Universe felt.

Nonetheless, the Star Trek novels and comics have evidently served as inspiration for a lot of things in the Star Trek movies and TV shows, with SNW being inspired by the novels and comics set during Pike's tenure as commanding officer of the Enterprise.

Alright my friends, that's it for me for today. I'll be back soon for more reviews in the near future. Until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (1991) Movie Review

 Hey everyone, I don't usually do this, but I just finished watching the 1991 comedy movie, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, starring Christina Applegate, and I didn't want to wait until the morning to write about it. So here we are. Let's get into it!

Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead is insane. Released on June 7th, 1991 the movie earned $25.1 million at the box office, but didn't do so well critically. However, it found its audience on home video and on cable. I actually watched bonus features on the Blu-rays for Mallrats (1995) and The Iron Giant (1999) and both said that certain movies are made for a particular audience and sometimes that audience doesn't find those movies at the cinema. Sometimes it finds them at the video store or on TV. And on streaming these days, but still, the sentiment is the same.

When their mom goes on vacation, Sue Ellen, Kenny, Walter, Melissa, and Zach are left with an old lady named Mrs. Sturek, who is a hardass tyrant of a babysitter. However, after she sees Kenny's room and the various posters, the mess on the floor, and the smell of weed and stale food, Mrs. Sturek keels over and dies. Sue Ellen, or Swell as she's called by friends and siblings, discovers the body and with her siblings's help, she drops it off at the mortuary. However, Mrs. Sturek had all of the money Mrs. Crandall (the kids's mom) had left for them. Swell ends up getting a job at a fashion company as a executive assistant to the senior vice president of operations, Rose after working one night at a fast food joint called Clown Dog, where she meets Bryan. The hijinks continues from there and all of the kids grow from the experience.

I didn't wanna give away too much of the plot, because nothing I say could ever possibly do it justice. You have to see it for yourself to believe it. I love this movie. 

The cast is insane. I'm not all that familiar with the cast. I vaguely remember Christina Applegate from when my parents would watch Married...with Children when I was a little kid, but the only other cast members that I'm mildly familiar with are Jayne Brook, who plays snobby receptionist, Carolyn, and David Duchovny, who plays Bruce, the company's head inventory clerk, who gets chewed out by Swell because he's harassing her while she's on the phone. Jayne Brook played Admiral Katrina Cornwell in the first two seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, and of course David Duchovny is well known as Fox Mulder on The X-Files. According to Wikipedia Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead was one of Duchovny's first roles prior to being cast on The X-Files. So that's cool.

One of my favourite scenes in this movie is a quiet one between Swell and Bryan during their date on the beach. They're talking about what they want to do in the future, and how it's unfair that you're expected to be one thing your entire life once you decide what to do. The typical teenager stuff that I remember thinking about a million years ago when I was in my last two years of high school. Yes, my friends, I'm ancient. I'm joking, but you get my point. Life is difficult at that age and you don't always know what you want to do even though you're expected to know.

I also love how Walter was able buy an entire home theater system and have it delivered to the house with no questions asked. I love it because it's so ridiculous. And the TV had the little panel that you flip down to reveal more buttons like the contrast, and probably the volume selectors or the channel selection buttons. I think one of the TVs that my family had when I was growing up had that panel, but, I mostly remember TVs like that from school and from the hospital. So that was a very nostalgic moment.

This was actually my first time watching this movie. My friends over on the VHS Club Podcast reviewed this movie last spring and naturally they recommended it as it's one of their favourite movies. So, when I was out with Brad last week on the Canadian Civic Holiday, we happened to be at Sunrise Records in one of the malls, and I happened to come across this movie on DVD, along with Mallrats and The Iron Giant on Blu-ray. So, I picked up all three as a fun selection of '90s movies, only one of which I'd seen before (The Iron Giant obviously). I loved it. I messaged Katie from the VHS Club Podcast when I finished the movie and told her that this was a fun Friday night flick. I also told her that if I'd known about this movie when I was a teenager in the early to mid 2000s, it absolutely would've been a Friday night rental for me. Especially after 2002 when I first got the TV/VCR combo set for my 16th birthday from my uncle. 

It's absolutely true. At that point in my life, I wasn't going out all that much, so weekends were spent watching movies, episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on VHS, and playing video games with my brother and sister. Mostly it was movies that I already owned on VHS, and, once I got my portable DVD player from my parents, on DVD, but every once in a while my parents would rent a movie for us to rent as a family, or just for my siblings and I to watch. So, if I'd known this movie existed, I would've asked my parents to rent it for me, or I'd look for it to air on TV and then tape it to watch later like I did with Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), Batman & Robin (1997), and Sailor Moon R: The Movie - Promise of the Rose (1993/2000).

I had such a fun time watching this movie. Like I said, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead is a fun Friday night movie that made me feel good by the end of it. I laughed, I rolled my eyes, and just had a good time. So, if you've never seen it before, I recommend giving it a watch. It's available on VHS, DVD, and on Amazon in the U.S., but it's not streaming anywhere in Canada.

Alright my friends, that's it for me for this week. I know, I said that earlier when I did my blog update this afternoon, but I actually mean it this time. So, have a good weekend and I will see you all back here in the Geek Cave next week. Take care.

Blog Update

 Hey everyone, happy Friday! I hope you all had a good week. Mine was pretty good. I had so much fun talking about A Goofy Movie on The VHS Club Podcast last night. Katie and Nat did a wonderful job getting an entire panel of fans of the movie together to talk about the show, so it was a pretty great evening. Today I just wanted to give an update on the blog and let you know my plans for the rest of 2025. Let's get into it.

As you may have noticed, I haven't posted anything on The Star Wars Journal lately. One of the things that I've found having blogs with particular themes you run out of things to talk about pretty quickly. In the case of both Star Trek and Star Wars, because I'm not a lore person, there isn't a whole lot about either franchise I can do without sticking solely to movie, episode/season/show, comic, and book reviews or doing unboxings and showing off my collections for each franchise. Tons of people do that already, and I honestly feel like I'm not contributing anything to the conversations on either franchise that other people aren't already contributing.

The same is also true of The Star Trek Journal. I'm finding it more difficult to review every episode of Strange New Worlds this season than it has been the last couple of seasons. Like, for example, I enjoyed this week's episode, "The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail", but I don't have a whole lot to say about it just on my own. I'll be fine talking about it with Aaron later, but I don't have much to say about it in a review.

I started having this problem when I did my season 2 episode reviews. There were an episode or two where I just didn't have very much to say about them, so I did my best with those reviews, but it was a struggle. With season 3 up to this point I've really found it difficult to talk about each episode despite Strange New Worlds being a more episodic series. 

So, Josh's Geek Cave is going to be my focus from now on, and I will be focusing on movie reviews, the occasional book review, some comic book reviews, and the occasional TV show review if it's a show I REALLY want to talk about. Don't worry the focus will still be mainly nostalgia, but I've got lots of movies that I'd like to talk about on here from all decades between the 1930s and the 2010s.

That's going to be it for me for this week though folks. I'll be back next weeks with lots of cool posts. Until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you all on Monday. Take care.

A Goofy Movie (1995) Movie Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well for a Wednesday. So today I'm reviewing the 1995 Disney animated movie, A Goofy Movie, which stars Bill Farmer as Goofy, Jim Cummings as Pete, Jason Marsden as Max, and Rob Paulsen as PJ. Let's get into it!

It's hard to believe that this movie came out 30 years ago. The movie was directed by Kevin Lima, who would go on to direct Tarzan for Disney, which was released in 1999. He's also married to Brenda Chapman, the first female director of an animated movie produced by a major studio. She directed The Prince of Egypt, which was released in 1998, and she also worked on various animated Disney movies in the '90s. 

A Goofy Movie was based on the Disney Afternoon animated series, Goof Troop with Bill Farmer, Jim Cummings, and Rob Paulsen reprising their roles from the show. However, Dana Hill voiced the younger Max Goof in the show, and with Max being 14 years old in this movie, Jason Marsden (Step by Step) was hired to voice the older version of the character. Kellie Martin, who has been in a ton of movies and TV shows, including Matinee (1993), voices Max's crush, Roxanne.

After Max gets into trouble for hijacking the end of the year assembly to perform "Stand Out" by the in-universe popular rockstar, Powerline (singing voice by Tevin Campbell), in order to get Roxanne to notice him, Goofy takes Max on a road trip to Lake Destiny, Idaho, where Goofy's dad had taken him when he was a boy. Of course, because Max had to break his date with Roxanne due to the sudden trip, he did what any 14 year old boy would do to make his crush not be upset over it, and lies to her by telling her that Goofy knows Powerline and that they'll be onstage with the singer for his final number of the concert that Max was taking Roxanne to a party to watch on TV. Now, he has to somehow get Goofy to change course and go to L.A. so that he doesn't look like a loser to Roxanne.

Y'know, the whole plot of this movie, like most plots that involve teenage characters, hinges on the adults being dumb enough not to figure it out. Which is why Goofy didn't know that Max had changed the route on the map until Pete mentions it to him while him, Goofy, Max, and PJ stay at a motel together at the end of the second act of the movie. And Pete only found out because he overheard Max and PJ talking about it. And, because Pete is naturally suspicious of kids, particularly teenagers, he knew to listen closely to what Max and PJ were saying, without them realizing he was there. 

I love the music in this movie. Powerline is basically Michael Jackson and Prince rolled into one. Because of this, the music reflects that. It has a very pop sound to it, though there's one ballad in "Nobody Else But You" sung by Goofy (voiced by Bill Farmer) and Max (singing voice by Aaron Lohr, who played Dean Portman in the second and third Mighty Ducks movies). My favourite songs in this movie are "After Today", sung by Max at the beginning of the movie, and "On the Open Road", which was sung by Goofy and Max as they drive down the freeway at the start of their trip. 

There are a couple of Disney references. The first being when Max says, "Oh, uh, Donald Duck?" when Goofy tells him that he's going on vacation with his best buddy. Mickey and Donald actually show up during the "On the Open Road" musical number. The weirdest one though is when Goofy mentions Walt Disney. Does that mean that there's a version of Walt Disney that exists, or existed, in this universe? If so, what did he create since Mickey, Donald, and Goofy all exist in this universe as real people? Oh and Goofy had a Disney keychain.

A Goofy Movie was a VHS watch for me when I was a kid. We didn't rent it though. I actually got the 1995 VHS release of the movie as stocking stuffer for Christmas that year. Because I was strictly tube fed in 1995, putting apples and oranges and tons of chocolate in my stocking didn't make any sense. So Santa, put books, comics, toys, or VHS tapes in my stocking instead. I don't remember if this was Nana and Grandpa Santa, Grandma and Grandpa Santa, or Mom and Dad Santa. I just know this was a stocking stuffer.

One thing I find interesting about the 1995 VHS release is that on the U.S. version of the tape, after the Disney Interactive Storybooks preview and the home video trailer for Gargoyles: The Movie - The Heroes Awaken, there's a music video for a song by singing group, Parachute Express, which had albums released by Walt Disney Records. However, that music video doesn't appear at all on the Canadian version of the North American VHS release. So that's interesting.

I loved this movie when I was a kid, but I think I appreciated it so much more as a teenager. Particularly at 14 years old, when I was the same age as Max is in the movie. I could identify with Max because I wanted my own life, separate from my parents. Especially when it came to dating and having friends. In my case, it was actually my mom and I who had the big arguments about me wanting to do things with my friends, and about the friends I had in general. I even remember my mom telling me to get new friends after her first encounter with one of the friends I'd made at school when I was in grade 9, at the age of 14 no less. 

Also, I identified with Max because of the girl situation. I had a few awkward moments with girls I wanted to date at that age. Especially when I actually asked them out. Not just at 14, but all through my teenage years. In fact, I don't think that's actually gone away. Anyway, regardless, when I was a teenager I didn't want anything to do with my parents, though I also wasn't embarrassed to the point of being mortified by either of my parents. It's just, I'd spent so much time with them when I was younger due to my life's circumstances, since they're the ones who spent hours at the hospital with me, that I was ready to break away from them a bit sooner than most kids at that age.

A Goofy Movie has continued to live on through the years. It got a direct-to-video/direct-to-DVD sequel in 2000, called An Extremely Goofy Movie, with Farmer, Marsden, Cummings, Paulsen, and Pauly Shore (who played Bobby in this movie) reprising their roles from the film. Roxanne wasn't in the sequel, but she does appear in an episode of Disney's House of Mouse in 2002, called, "Max's Embarrassing Date". This time, she was voiced by Grey DeLisle. She also appears in a picture of her and Max that is in Goofy's wallet, which he shows to Donald Duck in an episode of the 2017 reboot of DuckTales. And of course, there's a documentary that came out earlier this year on Disney+ called Not Just a Goof, though it hasn't dropped here in Canada yet for some reason, even though it came out on the movie's 30th anniversary back in April.

Overall, I still love this movie. It has its ups and downs of course, but I still love it, even thirty years later. I watched it on both VHS and DVD last night and it was so much fun. Despite having headphones on for both viewings, I kept mouthing the words to all of the songs both times I watched the movie. The Bigfoot scene was hilarious and I loved Wallace Shawn as Principal Mazur, who is probably based on the principal from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, except that Mazur is completely out of touch with the pop culture of the '90s...and probably even pop culture in general and doesn't even make an effort to make himself liked by most students. I love how everybody was cheering for student president, Stacey, but there's nothing but crickets when Mazur comes on the stage just before Max hijacks the assembly.

That's it for me for today. However, I'll be appearing on the VHS Club Podcast on YouTube tomorrow night at 9 pm Eastern to talk about the movie further with Katie and Nat. And I'll be over at The Star Trek Journal to review this week's episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on Friday. So, until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.