It's Gonna Be June

 Man, this month was both long as hell and whizzed by so fast.

Just today I saw The Mandalorian and Grogu movie. I have to confess, this was the first new Star Wars thing I've seen since Rise of Skywalker. My verdict? Way better than Rise of Skywalker.

I actually went out of this not sad, or disappointed, or angry at any of the choices made in this movie. The main complaint I've seen for this was that it was a standalone story that would've disappointed fans of the show because there was nothing new plot-wise or any character development. Well, it was more aimed for people like me, and if this movie existed solely to get me interested in watching the rest of the series? Well, mission accomplished. 

I wasn't exactly blind going into this, either. I knew Rotta the Hutt from the Clone Wars pilot movie was back (Jeremy Allen White giving a performance that would make Hayden Christensen proud), Zeb from SW Rebels making that rare jump from tv character to someone in the official canon, and Sigourney Weaver standing around and wondering what life choices she made that led her to be in this movie. And also Martin Scorcese was in this for some reason. You'll know him when you see him, he voices the Italian-sounding alien with big bushy eyebrows.

It was a solid Hawk and Chick-esque adventure with tiny puppet aliens that sounded too much like the Minions. I liked seeing more Babu Frick aliens, but their voices were almost too distracting. But if that was the main complaint I have about a Star Wars movie, it's definitely worth watching.

But the name Grogu still rubs me the wrong way because American Dad introduced a similar looking tiny alien thing named Rogu and he showed up first.

See? Way more worthy of the name. I wish the people running Star Wars came up with literally any other name for Baby Yoda. (Who was of course, adorable and an actual animatronic puppet!)

Other stuff I did? Conventions!

First up, the big Long Island TCG show! Man, this scene really pissed me off this past year or so. Streamers and resellers have ruined this hobby and I've barely bought any cards since more or less the last big show they had here last year.

Seriously. Crazy prices.

And this set of Gem Mint Van Gogh cards were going for $65K. Just insane.

And that's on top of seeing a Black Lotus in the flesh. But it wasn't from the sets people really care about, it wouldn't have been just in a penny sleeve in a big case with the rest of the rare stuff.

I was mostly there to see voice actors.

Was finally able to scratch a few names off my wanted list, like Eric Vale (Sanji from One Piece), Justin Cook (Kirishima from MHA), and Eric Stuart.

He joins Matthew Sussman, the original English voice of Meowth on this print. It's really sad that Rachel Lillis, the original dub voice of Jessie passed away, so I can't complete the set. I just need to wait for Michelle Knotz to come around again to get a Jessie on this.

Oh, and I met Professor Oak.

Yes, the real one. Stuart Zagnit actually cosplays as Professor Oak and he was as delightful as everyone else. It sucks that most voice actors charge extra to add quotes these days, or else I would've gotten him to add "now's not the time for that!" on this pic:

And then later in the month came Cradle Con!

The main event was a few cast and crew of the original GI Joe cartoon were there, and had a panel.

I don't have a lot of nostalgic attachment to that cartoon (I've always been a Transformers guy), but the highlight was hearing Bill Ratner, the voice of Duke, talk about the Barbie Liberation Organization, the people that switched the voice boxes of talking Barbie and Duke dolls. It happened one Christmas in New York City but it was enough to inspire a Simpsons gag:

It was a trip to hear Duke's voice talk like Barbie, and him imitating Barbie yelling "YO JOE!" If it weren't for my social anxiety (and I didn't want to pay the fifty bucks), I would've asked him about that Simpsons gag.

I still managed to pick up these Canari cards. They're from the then-recent Ascended Heroes set and pretty much the only card I wanted out of it. I got the Japanese one at the TCG show, and found the English one at Cradle Con. Thankfully they didn't break the bank too much because everyone wants the fancier (and rarer) SIR cards, but I like this art much better.

My other pickups at that con. Action Comics #454 has a notoriously silly cover:

I bought the original a few years back, but recently DC has been rereleasing various old classic issues, and for some reason they reissued this one, and with a blank cover variant to boot. I'm gonna have some fun with this one.

And while I didn't pick up any new pins at Cradle Con (gasp), I snagged a few at the TCG booth. The Mewtwo one from the official store, and a few from Wild Bill's. Had no idea they sold pins, and two for six bucks was a deal I couldn't pass up.

And finally, various other pics I got at Cradle-Con:

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It Snode

Forgive me if I'm not too into the National Gorilla Suit Day spirit this year. We just lost Catherine O'Hara.

She was one of those rare people I've never heard a bad word about. Like she was just as lovely offscreen as she was during any of her performances. 

All these tributes will talk about Beetlejuice or Home Alone or SCTV or Nightmare Before Christmas or Schitt's Creek or A Mighty Wind. But I will stand up on a hill and say that acting opposite Fred Willard in Waiting For Guffman was one of her finest works. I embedded the Midnight At The Oasis audition scene and every second is absolute gold. Not just her acting skills. It takes a LOT of work to act and sing crummy AND be hilarious at the same time, and she made it all look easy. Notice how she's mouthing along to all of Fred's lines, too. And something she's always had a knack for? How her outfits tell a story all on their own. The matching track suits, and the bangs! It's really something only she could pull off, and you don't really think about these things.

TCM showed that and Best in Show last month (right before Rob Reiner and his wife were killed), so those performances were still fresh in my mind.

And she, like Eugene Levy with her, are and were incredible singers.

And I dare you to not have a dry eye after watching the A Kiss At The End of The Rainbow scene from A Mighty Wind.

How that lost the Best Original Song Oscar that year baffles me.

To give you a hint to how far and wide she reached people, when I came home from work yesterday, my mom said "did you see the news? Moira died!"

As in, Moira Rose from Schitt's Creek. That's how my mom knew her. And why wouldn't she? That role is just a master class all on its own. The way she says "Alexis" is seared into my brain. Like Fred Willard, she had this uncanny ability to make boring words sound so gut-bustingly funny.

Just a "Hi!" and you're on the floor. Only her.

Every single tribute shared a different scene and they're all iconic and nobody has a wrong answer. It's gonna be tough without her. And she was on The Studio and I heard it JUST started filming season 2. Can't imagine how they're gonna write around this.

And to get to the main topic: It did indeed snow.

We got at least a foot, which is, uh, not normal in recent years.

I actually had to shovel multiple times that day since it snowed for most of it. It became a real pain in the ass when I had to dig out my car.

And since it hasn't gone above freezing since last Sunday, about 90% of it is still around. And it's MOSTLY off the roads. I can't imagine what it's like living in a place that gets like this all the time. Or, like what's happening now in North Carolina, a place that has barely any infrastructure to handle it.

And one last thing to round out the month:

Walter Simonson?! At a small comic show near me?! For some reason, this was on a Tuesday, so I booked it out of work as soon as I could to take advantage of this really rare chance. The last time he was even around here was NYCC back in 2023, and I had no idea he was there until after the con ended. When he announced that he caught covid from it.

When he's usually at cons, he always had a super long line. Because he liked to chat, and, yeah, how rarely he shows up. And this was really no exception. There were about, maybe fifteen people in front of me? And I still waited about an hour. Mostly because two people in front of me wanted sketches and they waited a long time for him to do it. (As luck would have it, he had just gotten back from a dinner break when I got on line).

He was, of course, real nice and funny and it was really cool to see him sketch right in front of you.

He's most known for his work on the Thor comics, and being a co-creator of Beta Ray Bill. So naturally, I got him to sign my copy of The Mighty Thor #337, his first appearance.

It's the biggest original key issue I own. I own a few classics in reprint form, but this one's the real McCoy. I bought this off eBay in I wanna say 2018 because if the MCU was gonna add him to it, I'd better buy it before the price on it skyrockets, lest what happened to the first appearances of the Guardians of The Galaxy. No name characters that appeared in no name comics that now command big name prices because Zoe Saldana and Bradley Cooper play them in movies. 

Well, he hasn't shown up yet, but it's still a key and it still commands a big price. But not as much as I thought it'd be. For a while, it was the most I paid for a comic.

But I also got Mr. Simonson to sign Beta Ray Bill's next two appearances, in Thor 338 and 339.

Pay no attention to the price tags, I got them for much cheaper at NYCC the year I bought them.

Thor 339, not only was it part of Assistant Editor's Month, but it's notable for being the first appearance of Beta Ray Bill's weapon Storm Breaker, and that WAS famously added to the MCU in Infinity War.

And just for fun I got a couple of the Frog Thor issues signed, too.

When are THOSE stories getting adapted, Feige?! And how can Kermit star in them?!

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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 him 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.

I'll see you all in December to close out 2025.

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