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by Moviefan
Holidays at The Loud House: A Flipmas Carol
December 15, 2021 in Blogs
My favorite Christmas story is A Christmas Carol.  Yes, I know it has been adapted many times. There are many good adaptions but sometimes the worst adaptions come from TV shows that decide to do a Christmas Carol episode. Sometimes you get a dud like A Christmas Cruella or you get what I believe is the gold standard of Christmas Carol episodes.
So, where does this one fall? It’s not very good and part of the issue in my opinion comes from how truncated the story is. I get what a lot of these episodic adaptions do to fit the story into their allotted time.  Like a lot of episodic takes including A Hearth’s Warming Tail, there is no Jacob Marley stand-in. That’s a little annoying and I do think that could have worked with the character filling in the Scrooge role and it doesn’t even have to be a dead character considering the characters that were used for the ghost stand-ins. They even have a character setup that would have been a good Marley stand-in. With that out the way, let’s take a look at this episode and see what it’s all about.
by Moviefan
Holidays at The Loud House: Season’s Cheatings
December 14, 2021 in Blogs
Over the next couple of days, we are going to be having a holiday party at The Loud House leading up to a review of the live-action A Loud House ChristmasÂ
Starting with the first episode today, we are looking at is thankfully an original story and an enjoyable one.
by Moviefan
A Look at Disney’s LGTBQ Characters: Uncle Bruce & Uncle Gerry (Christmas…. Again?!)
December 13, 2021 in A Look at Disney, Blogs
There has been a recent uptick in queer Christmas movies. Hallmark has released a few and Kristin Stewart was in one last year for Hulu and just this year, Netflix released a new one called Single All The Way.Â
And just this month, Disney Channel released a new movie featuring a same-sex couple. In many ways, it’s not bad but at the same time, it feels like in most cases Disney being behind the curveball once again. Though I do believe that inherently comes from the setup of the movie as is a time loop/Groundhog Day movie where the lead character lives Christmas mover again until she learns to accept change and that it is okay to embrace new things and traditions aren’t what define the holiday.
by Moviefan
Trotting Through The Snow: Equestria Girls: Holidays Unwrapped
December 10, 2021 in Blogs
The Equestria Girls Holiday Special from IDW is perhaps one of the worst stories to come out of this franchise.  It decided to try and use the holiday setting to tackle cyberbullying. I am all for stories that want to show how bad that can be but considering that this story was set after the events of Rainbow Rocks,  I found it heartbreaking how quickly the Humane Six turned on Sunset Shimmer and blamed her as being the one that was leaking secrets of the friends online. Things became so bad for Sunset that at one point she broke down crying in the school hallway.
That’s truly how I want to spend the holidays, with a character I love being betrayed by her friends because they don’t believe her when she says she’s not the cyberbully. Not! Thankfully in 2019, Equestria Girls finally got a good Holiday Special. Now apparently, what we ended up with was not originally pitched. The original pitch was meant to be an hour-long winter special and would have even explored what happened to the Sunset Shimmer of the human world.
by Moviefan
A Look at Disney: Christmas Villains Profile: The Sugar Plum Fairy
December 9, 2021 in A Look at Disney, Blogs
When I started this look at Christmas Villains, I brought up how the arts are such an important part of shaping what this holiday is and how they have come to play an integral part in some of the traditions that we have set up. One of the biggest examples of that has to be the beloved ballet, The Nutcracker.  As we end our look at Christmas villains this year, we once again find ourselves once again revisiting the world of the theater.
Now yes, the beloved ballet itself was an adaption itself as it was adapted from  The Nutcracker and The Mouse King
However, the ballet is what people think of when they think of this story. The title also highlights another interesting facet as The Mouse King is a popular Christmas villain. Sue, he may not be on the same level as say The Grinch but considering how often the story has been adapted, people know him as the villain of The Nutcracker. And heck an old obscure Disney special, Mickey’s Nutcracker kept the idea of him as the villain but instead changed him to The Rat King.
See, you can still have this guy as the villain, though I don’t think I’ve seen many adaptions where he has multiple heads but that is something else he ballet changed as he only has the one head there.
I am spending so much time on The Mouse King because A. he’s an awesome villain and as you could tell from what the name is in this entry, he is not the villain in this Nutcracker movie. Ugh! We’ve discussed adaptional villainy before and I’ve always stated that one has to be able to buy into the character being turned into a villain and it also has to be a character that makes sense to be a villain. So, which character did this movie decide to turn into the villain?
The Sugar Plum Fairy, why? No seriously, why is The Sugar Plum Fairy a villain? That is such a baffling choice to me, the best I can figure is that Disney wanted this movie to kickstart an epic fantasy franchise much in the same way they hoped Oz: The Great and Powerful would do. It kind of seems like they’ve been chasing that white whale ever since letting go of Narnia. This is kinda funny after doing research and learning how many people consider the first Narnia movie to be a Christmas movie. A bit understandable as Father Christmas does appear and if I do look at more Christmas villains next year, The White Witch will be included, I just had no idea about that when coming up with this year’s line-up. (Also, I’d like to have time to read the book before watching the movie).
Having said all this, does making The Sugar Plum Fairy a villain work?
by Moviefan
by Moviefan
A Look at Disney: Christmas Villains Profile: Jack Frost
December 7, 2021 in A Look at Disney, Blogs
Oh, this is going to hurt so much. The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause was the last entry in the series and perhaps the worst of the three movies. Everything about this movie is just unpleasant as this movie just makes you wish you were spending time with anyone else.  This movie also makes the decision to introduce another legendary figure as its villain, Jack Frost.  Now I know this is not the first time that Jack Frost has been seen as a villain as that is also the case in Frosty’s Winter Wonderland
I am not a fan of when Jack Frost is seen as a villain. The line of Jack Frost nipping at your nose has always made me think of him more as a playful figure kinda like a wintery Peter Pan.  The best take that I’ve seen on Jack Frost in my opinion came from the underrated Rise of The Guardians. Â
In that movie, Jack Frost is a bit more playful and mischievous showing off the fun of winter and why kids love playing in the snow during this time of year whereas this take on Jack Frost plays more on the cold and cynical side of winter and how it can turn people off.
by Moviefan
A Look at Disney: Christmas Villains Profile: Toy Santa
December 6, 2021 in A Look at Disney, Blogs
One of my favorite childhood Christmas movies is The Santa Clause.  Yeah, Tim Allen kinda sucks nowadays but I can still hold onto my love for the original movie. I do find it so odd that a sequel was released so many years after the fact and well, I do overall enjoy this sequel (much more so than the godawful third movie) but if there is one thing that bugs me about the two Santa Clause sequels is that they try to do too much. This one alone has a second clause where Santa has to get married, deal with his son, Charlie getting in trouble at school, and acting out because his dad isn’t around. And then you have Toy Santa being in charge of the North Pole and taking things to a bit of an extreme. The Toy Santa stuff is the C plot of this movie and while it’s fun, it’s not needed. That does seem to be a common problem with Christmas movies sometimes, they overstuff the movie thinking as though they are prepping the Christmas turkey for dinner.
by Moviefan
A Look at Disney: Christmas Villains Profile: Maestro Forte
December 3, 2021 in A Look at Disney, Blogs
I love Disney Princesses and I love Christmas, so much so that a cherished Christmas memory I have is reading Ariel’s Christmas Under The Sea during the holidays as a kid.
FYI, I was so happy when I found an upload of this on YouTube after I got rid of my book years ago.  That book brought me so much joy. So Princess love plus Christmas love should equal me loving this movie right.
by Moviefan
A Look at Disney: Christmas Villains Profile: Oogie Boogie
December 2, 2021 in A Look at Disney, Blogs
I’ll admit that I have an interesting history with this particular movie, for the longest time I did not like this movie and thought it was quite boring and overhyped. I watched it again in preparation for this event and well, I genuinely enjoyed it. Perhaps, it came spending time with my big sister this past October, and seeing how much she loved it opened me up to giving it another chance. This is always a nice feeling but having said all this, there is one thing that bugs me about this movie. Oogie Boogie. I get that he’s popular and people love him, heck he has his own Halloween event named after him at DCA.
I get that he’s popular as are so many of the characters in this movie and that in part comes from how much Disney has marketed the film. But here’s my issue, for as much as I enjoyed this movie, Oogie Boogie is rather pointless to the story being told. This is not to say he’s a bad character far from it but rather Jack’s obsession with Christmas and the conflict of him trying to give kids the perfect Christmas without understanding what Christmas is about is interesting enough on its own. This is something I’ll touch upon when I discuss Lock, Shock, and Barrel but Jack seems almost neurodivergent and as though Christmas is his latest hyper fixation.
Taking this further, I do not believe Oogie Boogie was in the original poem that Burton wrote that was the basis for this movie. That does make sense and it reminds me of when Dr. Seuss’s stories are stretched out and given a villain that wasn’t in the original story such as the Mayor in Ron Howard’s Grinch.
by Moviefan
A Look at Disney: Christmas Villains Profile: Barnaby
December 1, 2021 in A Look at Disney, Blogs
So many Christmas traditions and stories we love can be traced back to the arts and how prominent they are. This is important to me as the arts are so important. Take, for example, theater. I imagine that when you think of Christmas and the theater, so many of you think of The Nutcracker. Â
That is indeed an important piece of Christmas theater and we will be touching upon an adaption of that later in the month where The Rat King is not the villain. However, there is another piece of Christmas theater art that sometimes gets overlooked: Babes in Toyland.  This classic operetta has been adapted many times first came to prominence in 1903 with the same team that would give The Wizard of Oz life on stage.
Much like The Nutcracker, this piece of theater has seen many adaptions. Though from what I understand, the Disney version is perhaps an “In name only” adaption. Still, this movie is an interesting case of being something where modern audiences are perhaps more familiar with the iconography from the movie than they are the movie itself. This comes from the fact that the Toy Soldiers that show up in Disney Christmas parades come from this movie.
by Moviefan
A Look at Disney’s LGTBQ Characters: Jess & Ally (Amphibia)
November 2, 2021 in A Look at Disney, Blogs
This past weekend saw something exciting as two Disney Channel shows introduced us to three new LGTBQ+ characters. Something that I liked about all three of them is how casually they were treated. Let’s start with our couple from Amphibia. Â
I give you Jess and Ally, they appeared in the first segment of this week’s episode Fixing Frobo when Polly uses the show’s version of YouTube to lookup information on robotics and comes across their internet show, “Just two Girlfriends who REALLY Love Robots!” It’s a fun and funny moment with perhaps one of the best gags of the episode being this panda robot that is constantly on fire.
