Beaming For Bunnies: November 2025

Sunday, November 30, 2025

Give Thanks, 2025

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. I did the same thing I usually did, watch the parade.

In a "striking while the iron is hot" way, the main event was K-Pop Demon Hunters. Wigs, balloons, fireworks, Ken Jeong as Bobby, all capped off with the singing voices of Huntr/x singing "Golden" in a prime spot in the parade, just before the Bluey balloon.

And again striking while the iron was hot, there was a Pop Mart float filled with, what else, Labubu.

Meanwhile it took 45 and 40 years, respectively for Pac-Man and Mario to get balloons. The latter is at least promoting the Super Mario Galaxy movie. I don't know how Bandai Namco got the scratch for Pac-Man, but there was a whole display for him in the Herald Square Macy's.

And Goldfish had the talk of the parade with this tiny float, life-sized for the little crackers.

And the Luffy balloon finally got a nice day to fly, since his last two appearances were ruined by high winds and rain.

And what was not on the bingo card but welcomed was a marching band tribute to Christmas Vacation.

All in all a pretty decent parade. Other highlights include Shaggy singing "It wasn't me" (appropriate for 11am on Thanksgiving morning), Busta Rhymes on the TMNT Float, Lil Jon on the Toys R Us Float, and Al Roker giving a golden ticket to se the Rockettes to a little girl...who already saw them the day before.

And just like last year, someone watching the parade recorded the whole thing.

Oh yeah, the week before I was in the city for Big Apple Con again and went to THAT Macy's all prepped for the parade.

Of course Santa doesn't arrive at that Macy's until after he shows up in the parade. Clever.

This year was the 99th parade, even though the parade's been going since 1924. They took two years off for World War II, otherwise there's been a parade every year, even 2020. Next year is number 100 and I bet there will be some great merch for it.

I mostly went to Big Apple Con this time for the very short window to finally meet Larry Lieber, Stan Lee's kid brother.

He's 94 and doesn't do many conventions. And the ones he does go to, he only goes for one day and for a few hours. He WAS at NYCC, but I missed him and I jumped at meeting hm this time.

He's a creator in his own right, co-creating Iron Man, Thor, and Ant-Man, and responsible for the Rawhide Kid comics, and the Spider-Man comic strip. He was there promoting his novel Chirps, about a parakeet that got superpowers.

It's not often these days to hear him speak at a panel, and he had some good stories to tell. Seeing Pinocchio at Radio City at a young age gave him his spark for creating.

I did find one of my ISOs for a good price, Spidey Super Stories #39. It's the first appearance of the Cosmic Cube (normies who only follow the MCU know it as the Tesseract or the Space Stone), but it's also the first appearance of something even better:

The Thanoscopter!

Now why does Thanos need his own helicopter, especially one with his own name on it? Who cares, really. It was all an excuse for him to lose the Cosmic Cube so it gets into the hands of a little boy.

Honestly, we wouldn't have even needed Endgame if Thanos was able to lose one of the damn macguffins this easily.

And here's one of the wilder books I found that day, but I didn't take it home because it was in poor shape and I didn't feel like paying twenty bucks for it.

Had the classic Charles Atlas ad on the back and everything, too.

I did some digging at what exactly SIR! magazine was, and...hoo boy. I stumbled upon the UK's version of Playboy. More for the risqué and bawdy articles, no one's really naked in these things. Unfortunately.

And the stores in this, especially that Tahiti one...well, let's just say they haven't aged well. I found an even wilder book behind it about war stories and that's even way more un-PC, even for this blog.

Before I digress even further, let's talk about the National Dog Show.

I'm starting to get good at picking the winners, this was like the third year in a row I guessed it right. I called that Soleil the Belgian Sheepdog was gonna win the moment in won for the herding group.

When you see the competition, it was fairly obvious. Baby Joe the Miniature Schnauzer was the only one I thought was gonna be close.

I mean, look at him. Now that's a dog right there.

And now here's the other highlights:

To quote Fred Willard from Best in Show: "and to think that in some countries these dogs are eaten."

And of course with Turkey Day comes the MST3K Turkey Day marathon. This year they added the Netflix episodes to the rotation, alternating a newer one with a classic.

You know, with Twitch running a 24/7 MST3K channel, with the marathon running through the whole weekend now, it made this feel, I dunno, less special? But in any case, I was multitasking by watching it while watching TCM at the same time. In that pic was the classic Dr. Doolittle, but earlier in the day they showed something even more baffling:

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. It's the only movie Dr. Seuss made in his lifetime, and it goes without saying that it's super weird.

This movie is about a boy named Bart dreaming that his sadistic piano teacher Dr. Terwilliker (heh) will torture him and 499 little boys to play his giant piano to live out his weird musical fantasy.

The titular 5,000 fingers would play this monstrosity.

"Wouldn't it just sound crummy?" Well, this is a dream and the whole set was designed by Dr. Seuss, it's not meant to make any sense.

And of course it gets destroyed at the end. People had to physically build all of this, it was a miracle this movie got made in the first place.

It's probably best known for the roller skating twins that are conjoined by the beard.

Like I said, blame Dr. Seuss for all this.

You could say that I'm thankful for programmers for niche channels. Good to know that they're still out there.

But of course, I'm thankful for food.

Still just me and the parents, but it was a good meal.

And what else am I thankful for this year? The usual: my family, my health, the fact that I still have a job and a roof over my head. My friends, and of course, all of you, my readers. And hopefully I can keep doing this.