Archive for November, 2023

Yet More Disney + Stuff

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2023

Uhm, wow, well, this’ll be a short one, but man, my uh, apparently continuing relationship with Mandy Moore sure has taken some… weird turns over the years.

Like- we went from that romantic relationship we had started back in my college years up to the Tangled stuff, and now I’m seeing her serenade me with her rendition of “Chugga-chugga, choo choo the Chugga-chugga choo choo train” on Sheriff Callie’s Wild West.

Wow.

Well, maybe some context would be useful here. Right now I’m sorting through some of the stuff in my drawers and I just needed something, you know, on the TV, so I picked Sheriff Callie’s Wild West, a Disney Jr. show about a precocious animated police cat who works as a sheriff in the wild west and what do you know- it stars Mandy Moore, of all people. So now I’m watching her dance around as a cat with a pink cowboy hat singing about “Choo-Choo trains” while I root through my old stuff.

Well… I mean, it’s not a bad show for the target demographic. I could see how kidlets might really like it. But the whole experience is kinda surreal.

I don’t think I’ll be going into the real origins of this character, at least for now, on account of me wanting to minimize the oddness of this. Besides, I have stuff to look through.

Maybe later, tho.

Yeah.

Halloween 2023

Saturday, November 11th, 2023

Well, I had a good Halloween this year, with a few caveats.

Felt I should blog about this since I just paid for another 3 years of hosting, lol.

Soooo, yeah, Halloween was fun / enlightening. I learned a lot, watched a ton of movies, and felt quite satisfied with the whole holiday.

The good parts, of which were many:

1) The movies. I watched a lot of them, mostly old-ish movies from the 80’s and 90’s, and in doing so I took many lengthy walks down memory lane. Some of them in fact I had missed the first time around so in those I learned new things about myself and my distant history, and, bizarrely, of my very recent history as well, which I guess shows how planned and organized this has all been, unbeknownst to me.

Example: In two of the movies I watched, I saw my recent (5 years or so) health problems referenced in regards to me, specifically. And these movies were 20 to 25 years old! I was… baffled. Confused. And disoriented.

I saw Urban Legend, a late 90’s slasher movie that used my freshman year in college as a reference point. Near the end, a pointed remark was made about injuries to my kidneys and my liver, both of which I was hospitalized for in recent years. Verrry specific, that one. Kind of… incredible, and frightening.

Reallllly creepy, which I guess goes along with the holiday, but still.

There was a lot of very personal stuff in the movies I saw. I Know What You Did Last Summer and it’s sequel were interesting explorations of my past relationship with Jen Hewitt. Wow, they were kinda mindblowing, lol.

Man, too much to talk about, there. But the movies themselves are critically underrated. Not by a lot, but they certainly were. The sequel was the better of the two. It was quite good, much better than I had been led to believe by the critics. I missed it the first time around because of the reviews. I wish I hadn’t.

Let’s see… I saw Aimee’s Beneath the Darkness, all 3 Urban Legend movies, Scream, The Craft, The Faculty, the two “Boogedy” movies on Disney+, the Disney vampire flick, Don’t Look Under the Bed, When a Stranger Calls, Piper Curda’s School Spirit, Casper, the 90’s The Adams Family, and some other flicks, which I’m kinda drawing a blank on now lol. And a bit earlier I saw Kelli Berglund’s Ghost in the Graveyard.

Oh yeah- and I also saw the third Crow movie- the one with Kirsten Dunst. I missed it the first time around, since it was a direct to DVD release. TBH I hadn’t even heard about it until a few years ago. It was good. The low budget didn’t give them much to work with but they did what they could with it. It was a fun watch.

Actually- now that I think about it, I think that the lower budgeted movies were the ones I liked the most out of the group. An interesting thought. Perhaps budgetary constraints forced creativity on the part of the filmmakers, or something. Or perhaps a smaller budget just means more creative control for the director, since the studio would likely be more concerned with higher profile projects. I don’t know. But it seemed to me that the direct to video or television releases that I saw were more personal and a bit more… impactful, I guess, then the glossier theatrical movies.

Oh, wait. I also saw the last two out of the four Halloweentown flicks. And Nightmare Before Christmas, again. And Frankenweenie the original.

I saw a lot of stuff, lol. Well, an in depth discussion of all this would take hours, so I think I’ll move on at this point.

2) Trick or Treating. This is always fun. I handled candy duties this year and it was interesting. I like to people watch in general I guess, but I did the usual analysis of things while doing so. My recent understandings of things made this kinda different. In particular it was odd seeing Trick or Treaters dressed up like Harry Potter. Imagine that- a kid dressed up like Harry Potter on Halloween, and the man who hands him candy is the actual Harry!

3) Music. As usual, I used Halloween as an excuse to goth out. I ran through a few playlists of goth this and that- some death rock, synthpop stuff, gothic rock, and darkwave. I even played some graver and gothabilly stuff. Gawd damn goff stuff can be just delicious. You can just kinda sink into it and get lost; it’s amazing.

I used to just adore this stuff before… ah… IDK, I guess before Selena Gomez and Co. expanded my palette. But it’s still there, always in the background.

Oh yeah, I saw that Olivia Holt and Kiki Shipka movie Totally Killer. So I guess this paragraph belongs up in section 1) somewhere, so please put it there, mentally.

Where was I? Oh yeah, ummmmm music.

Well, aside from the gawth stuff, this year I included in my rotation some more mainstream-ish songs, like some from the Rocky Horror soundtrack. And, believe it or not, even some from people like Elvira, whose music I was introduced to on the Sounds of the Seasons channel. Not really heard her stuff before but I was pleasantly surprised. I mean, it’s pop, but it’s listenable. Pretty good.

4) Life stuff. I like to use Halloween as a life barometer of sorts. So every year I take stock of how things are going, and I think they’re going pretty well in general this time ‘round.

I’d explain more but this post is getting a bit lengthy, and any further detail here would take things too far off-topic.

Now, on to the not so good if not downright bad stuff.

1) The candy. It… wasn’t good. I’m not sure how to account for this, but seriously. It sucked.

This year my dad went to Costco and purchased the same big bag of candy he always purchases, but this year, it was… different. The mixture in the bag, I mean. He was really disappointed. In the past, there’s been an even assortment of different kinds of candies, like M&M’s, Snickers bars, Twix bars, etc. in this bag. This year, there wasn’t. For some reason, three quarters of the bag was divided up between Yorks and Twixs, with the remaining 25% being a small mixture of everything else. There were two small bags of peanut M&M’s in the whole thing, and I think like 5-6 plain M&M’s, and like 5 Snickers bars. And aside them, a gigantic pile of Yorks. The weird inequality of the whole thing was glaring when it was all sorted out by product.

Not sure what was going on, but it looked like the manufacturer was stuffing the bags now with the least popular candies and not letting the consumer know of the change. Typical of a modern company.

The candy itself was… strange, too. My mom remarked that the candy bars seemed smaller than they used to be, like when I was a kid. IDK, but I don’t think it impossible. Some of the plain M&M’s bags were so empty I was shocked. One I opened myself had 5 M&M’s in it, total. Seriously- just 5. At first I thought maybe it was just a manufacturing one-off but there was another bag with only 6 in it. Wut? Even a 9 year old would feel ripped off by these things!

And the candy tasted… weird, too. IDK. After the holiday was over I ate some of the remaining candy myself and it didn’t taste right, like at all. It didn’t taste good. It was too artificial. And I know that I’m talking about Halloween candy here but still, this stuff tasted really artificial, and not in a good way. It didn’t taste how I remember it tasting back when I was a kid, that’s for sure. It wasn’t satisfying. It didn’t taste like a unique treat, it just kinda tasted odd.

Back in the 90’s candy tasted artificial too, but I remember it being… a measured kind of artificial. It tasted like something created to maximize enjoyment of taste. Like it was artificial, but it tasted good; on some level it was indeed satisfying. This stuff wasn’t. It tasted like candy-product. The M&M’s didn’t taste like M&M’s, they tasted like imitation Chinese knockoff M&M’s.

I though it might just be me but man, after eating the candy I got sick for a solid week! Hence the lateness of the post. That never happened back in the day.

IDK. I don’t follow these things, but I suspect that the ingredients for these products have been futzed with a LOT in the last 30 years. Things swapped out with cheaper things that are only close-ish to the original product. And perhaps my crack about the Chinese knockoff type product wasn’t off the mark, either. Maybe these things are manufactured differently, now, in different places. Yuck.

At any rate, they taste bad. It kinda sucks.

Ohhhh that’s right. Speaking of candy, I saw Fun Size too. And also Idle Hands. So this paragraph belongs up there with the other 1). So please put it there mentally, thanks.

2) The costumes. Not a huge gripe, but still, are costumes these days kinda bland to anyone else? It’s just… where’s the gruesome? Where’s the disgusting?

Looking at the kids this year I was struck by how, IDK, samey they all were. There were a lot of Spider-Mans. A lot of Marvel, I guess purchased as whole units by parents who didn’t know what else to do, probably at those Halloween shops that pop up annually every October.

Back in the day there were a lot more DIY costumes. I know that this is kind of an old-man-yells-at-cloud complaint but seriously tho, lol. Back in the 80’s and 90’s a lot of kids and parents made their own costumes and they came up with some very cool stuff.

One year I went as a diseased hunchback and I got some weird reactions I remember to this day, lol. I had this swollen irregular hump on my back and huge, bloody, oozing pus filled welts all over my hands and face.

My mom and I took great pains to make the welts and sores as realistic looking as possible. At the time she worked in an emergency room so she knew what real blood and skin infection looked like. So we made it seem “real”.

The reactions I got made all the work totally worth it. More than once I caught moms doing double takes, lol. I swear that on at least one occasion there was actual concern. The other kids loved it. The dads were in awe. “God damn kid, who beat the shit out of you?!?” LOL. Good times.

One year I went as “Spider-Man”. No, not that Spider-Man. I had a different one in mind. I went as a normal kid being overrun and eaten alive by a horde of bloodthirsty man eating spiders. I painted some fake blood on, glued a few dozen spiders of different kinds to my clothes and covered myself in webs. It was a ton of fun.

The thing is is that unfortunately I don’t see any stuff like that anymore. Literally, it’s all just… franchises. Corporate stuff. If I’m being honest, boring stuff. No imagination. Honestly I can’t think of one costume that didn’t seem like it didn’t just come off the rack at the mall.

So many good memories there, of past Halloweens. It really can be a great holiday.

Well… I guess that’s it for this year’s Halloween installment. It was fun writing this; I hope you had fun reading it.