The Space Ghost Christmas Collection, Chapter Two

Episode the Second is entitled "Waiting For Edward," and it stars Denis Leary.

Moltar is about to destroy the Ghost Planet, and to celebrate, he's having a sale. He has a punching fight with Space Ghost, who quits fighting to host the show.

Denis gets off a few good jokes: about Celine Dion, Madonna, and his greatest fear: "Having to have my own show on prime cable." (Nope, just checked. No irony here.)

Space Ghost doesn't much care about the guest, as usual. So he wanders around, playing Zorak's synthesizer and trying on a mustache. Brak wants Melba toast. Tad boasts that he once beat up Charlton Heston "over the holidays." Then, maybe as part of the same story, he tells some kids at camp the story of how he saved Christmas. That's all.

As an episode of SGC2C, I rate this one 5/10. It's not bad, but it never quite reaches the dizzying heights the show usually hit.
As a Christmas show, I rate this one 1.5/10. This one's on me, again. I saw "Christmas" in the episode description and I just wanted to write about Space Ghost some more.

Legacy of Frankenstein #6: Gods and Monsters (1998)

I know very well that I'm kind of cheating here, counting this in my Frank theme. There are dozens and dozens of Frankenstein movies out there, and this isn't really one of them. But I'd never seen it before, and I was interested in James Whale (though I expected this film to spend more time on the making of his films).

James Whale directed the first two Universal Frankenstein movies, along with The Invisible Man and several other classic films, and this film imagines his final days, befriending a gardener and looking back over his life and memories.

Whale did indeed have a fascinating life, though the main story told in this movie is completely fictional. The film is sweet and sentimental (though not cloying). And, honestly, I feel like it deals with Shelley's original friendship themes better than any of the official Frank movies I've seen. 

Sidebar: While watching Whale's memories of World War One trenches, I couldn't help but think about Walt Disney, driving an ambulance in Paris at the same time. The two men both lived through horrors I can only imagine and survived to create warm, humane films which entertained the world. 

Ian McKellen is, of course, remarkable as Whale, and it's amazing to think how unknown he was to mainstream movie audiences at the time (Roger Ebert even felt he had to identify McKellen as a well-regarded stage actor for his readers). And Brendan Fraser, who'd follow up on a Universal horror franchise of his own the next year, was best known as a lowbrow goofball. I can't imagine a more unlikely pair of actors to make Oscarbait in 1998. But that's kind of the point, and they click together and create something real. It's touching to watch the two simply interact, and warm to each other. 

This movie, as I said, wasn't exactly what I expected, and I don't think I'll feel the need to see it every time I watch Whale's work (as I do with Ed Wood). But it's a sweet, sad piece of work, and it's great to know more about James Whale as a person. 

A Spoopy Month: Happy Halloween from Mysterious Mose!

Here it is -- my ultimate Halloween post for 2015!

If you've ever spent more than ten minutes with me in person during the month of October, I've probably made you watch this. If so, I implore you to watch it again. This is a 1998 film based around a 1930 novelty record, and I'd love this song even if the accompanying visuals weren't so great.

Sidebar: Why didn't the Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah) band ever record this song? I love their Monster Mash, and even considering the low budget, their visual presentation of the song is ambitious and fun. I would love at least one more spooky, atmospheric song from them, and a cover of this would fit the bill and meet their early-years need for generations-old novelty songs.

I've always loved this film, since it uses puppetry and stop-motion animation and even some shadow animation to tell a weird, spooky, wacky story. There's a graveyard jamboree (you could almost call it a swingin' wake) and Mose has to round up (or dig up) all the musicians for the show.

Okay, so maybe it's light on plot, but each frame of this does something interesting, and it's obvious that each character and set was built by hand in the real world. In 1998, computer animation wasn't as advanced as it is now, but the love and hard work invested in this production clearly shine through as the textural opposite of that year's metallic, shiny CGI-fests Godzilla and Armageddon. In just a few years, CGI would've been an affordable method to remove all the visible rods from the puppets and special effects, but the directors don't care -- the handmade nature of this is an important part of the fun.

Appropriately, there are a few mysteries I don't get about this video: first off, do I know this guy from somewhere else? This weird green bird only has a few seconds of screen time, but he rang distant bells in my head I can't place. (Sure, he looks a LEEETLE like Jose Carioca, but not much.)

Secondly, the credits thank Don Sahlin. Everyone else in the thank you section (that a quick googly search will find, anyway) seems to have had something to do with the actual production, but Sahlin died twenty years before this film was made. He was, of course, enormously influential in the worlds of both stop-motion and puppetry, working with George Pal and Burr Tillstrom and designing/building most of your favorite Muppets in their first incarnations. At least one of the other credits appears to be a joke ("Costumes by Cesar Romero"), but this sticks with me.

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Looking back from the end of this month, I've certainly missed posting a few days, but I wrote more things than I did in December last year, and I consider that a win. I'm hoping to post more regularly (if less frequently) in the future, so watch this space! Thanks, all, for your kind attention. Have a great Halloween night!

25 Days of Christmas #2: Due South: "Good for the Soul"

My second Christmas special this year is Due South #408: Good for the Soul. As you might guess, then, this episode is about confession. Yesterday, we talked about Paul Haggis's Catholic upbringing, which necessarily included an emphasis on confessing one's sins. His later devotion to the CoS also emphasized confession of one's shortcomings, but Mr. Haggis didn't write this episode. It was written by Peter Mohan, about whose personal life I know nothing. Of course, this episode comes so late in the series that Mr. Mohan's own beliefs are unlikely to enter into the story anyway...

As always, this review will contain spoilers.

The episode begins in a mall, as Kowalski has just gotten the must-have present for... well, he got it. Fraser stops to purchase a lovely piece of wood.

Suddenly, our heroes overhear a kerfuffle of some kind. Turns out a young waiter has enraged some guy, who slaps him. The angry guy turns out, as this is Chicago, to be a big evil mob boss, who's walked on murder charges before. Surely, Fraser's moral quest to get justice for the waiter will be defeated by the mob boss's high-priced lawyers and decades of legal inertia. Nonetheless, we can trust that Fraser will always, always, do the thing that is right, rather than the thing that is easy. So he stakes out the mob boss's club, earning a beating which is pretty upsetting to watch. As Fraser comes to realize the legal system may not see that justice is done, he expends a lot of energy trying to get Warfield, the mob boss, to confess to his crime.

This episode comes very late in the series' run, and there are a lot of established characters who must appear in this episode: Deif, Fraser's wolf, is in love with a poodle (do you call those puppies woofoodles?). Inspector Thatcher lectures Fraser about sheltering the waiter in the consulate, while Constable Turnbull is getting into the Christmas spirit with his Clint Black Christmas album. (That album, incidentally, does NOT include a song called "Santa Drives a Pickup Truck.")

If Constable Turnbull looks a bit familiar to you, perhaps you know him better as a "reality" star; he's (as of this writing) married to Tori Spelling.

There's nothing really wrong with this episode as a whole, but there's nothing particularly great about it either. It shows Fraser taking a noble ethical stand, with consequences harsher than he usually faces, but the series consistently shows us that Fraser is practically always a good person, and a better cop. This is a perfectly-good, acceptable late episode of the series, with a few really good jokes and, for some reason, an Edward Scissorhands reference.

As an episode of Due South, I rate this 5/10 -- sounds harsh, but NAME a bad Due South -- they're all at least good..
As a Christmas show, I rate this about 6/10 - plenty of music and decorations, talk of gifts and a Christmas toast at the end.

  Due South: The Ultimate Collection - Three Complete Seasons