I've seen every Pixar movie in their theatrical runs. Yes, even the "Disney Plus" exclusives: Soul, Luca, and Turning Red. With the fifth entry of the story of toys, I can happily say that the streak remains intact.
Well, with two exceptions: The Incredibles (never got around to it) and Onward (lockdown happened just as I was gonna go see it).
But anyway, my verdict: way better than Toy Story 4. Nothing will ever top the first two, or most of Toy Story 3, but overall I enjoyed it.
(WARNING: Spoilers ahead)
Did this movie need to be made? No.
Did Woody need to be in this movie? No.
Was it good anyway? Yes.
They tackle the "tech vs toys" plot pretty well here. It's not "oh no, tech is here and making kids dumb!" like a lesser movie would do. If anything, the tension between the toys and Lilypad is a parallel to Woody and Buzz in the first movie: a new, advanced toy shows up, upstages the older toys, they eventually learn to coexist, complete with the requisite chase scene at the climax.
It also shares a lot of plot beats from Inside Out 2 in a way: Lily is like Anxiety, the new toy/emotion that thinks it knows what's best for Bonnie as she tries to make friends, casts out the old guard, finds out the hard way that their way alone doesn't help (Bonnie getting cyberbullied hits HARD, not gonna lie.), the old toys and the new ones learn to balance their involvement in Bonnie's life. Everyone wins.
Oh, and Jessie is the lead in this movie, and it delves into her backstory that'd been on the backburner since her introduction in Toy Story 2. Did you ever cry at THAT scene? Well, they revisit it. And prepare to get emotional over it.
If I had to say a negative about this movie it's that the cast is too damn big. Every movie introduces a new "gang", which leads to less screentime to the older "gangs" over the series, with this one being no exception. Most of the old guard gets a line or a bit to let their voice actors retain their SAG benefits, and they spend most of the movie in a box in the garage. Rex and Hamm still deliver the goods, and Mr. Potato Head finally got recast, so he has actual lines again. As for Bonnie's toys, my favorite of the new group is Forky. He's so blunt about everything, it sets him apart from the sardonic and sarcastic Andy toys.
Hell, I was surprised to see some of the Toy Story 4 gang, too. Duke Kaboom (the one played by Keanu Reeves) was the only one that talked. That's how stuffed this movie was.
But the MVP of the new "Gang" was Smarty Pants, voiced by Conan O'Brien.
Yes, he's an early 2000s potty training device, with all the bathroom jokes that go with it. He can only count to 2, he has two buttons, he'll make any pun about gas, it makes a toilet flush sound every time you pull his handle, and he looks like a damn roll of toilet paper. You get the idea.
It's incredible character design. There's one sequence that gives him Conan's hair, and the resemblance is uncanny. And his first scene has him acting like a belligerent drunk. You just gotta think Conan was having a field day in that recording booth.
Oh, and he can text and interface with a camera and a GPS somehow. Don't think about that too hard.
But the best part is that, yes, there is a real toy of Smarty Pants and does everything he does in the movie, even the drunk talk. There's a video of Conan seeing it for the first time and he is HORRIFIED.
"I'm being interrupted by myself!"
"Join the club!" says everyone else lol
But the biggest surprise was the voice of Snappy the digital camera.
It was Shelby Rabara! The voice of Peridot from Steven Universe!
Snappy even acts like Peridot, too! Well, more like post-character development, but she's still anxious, and tiny, and uses a digital interface, but she's more positive.
All in all, a definite recommend.
And now June, Pride Month, comes to an end. And now we enter July: Wrath Month.
Especially if the five day forecast is any indication.
Nothing much, really. Well, STUFF did happen. Easter happened, people died, some people went crazy.
I saw the Mario Galaxy movie, at least. My verdict? I liked it more than the first one. The first one had a better story, this one had more action. And way fewer random needle drops! But this was relentless. I read a review that called it "made for the Youtube Shorts generation" and I couldn't get it out of my head. A thing happens, they go to the next thing, repeat until the credits pop up. Nothing gets to breathe and lots of characters are just...there. Bowser in particular has an inconsistent arc.
But it's a treat for folks like me that love the deep cuts of Mario lore. So many times I was like Leo DiCaprio pointing at the screen to see this thing or that thing remembered, let alone on a big screen in HD. I wish we weren't spoiled on Star Fox or the SMB 2 villains, but they looked gorgeous. There were a few other cool cameos and Easter Eggs I won't spoil, but it's been out for almost a month, you probably know what they are by now.
No Wario, Waluigi, or the Koopalings, though. They're like the only major Mario characters that haven't shown up yet. They must be saving them for the next movie.
Boompane and Spanakopedia, respectively, have been godsends for the meme community. But while Frinkiac worked with static images, you could make actual clips with these sites. With audio. And (just about) every episode of those shows are on there, even the Hulu reboot season for King of The Hill. That...kinda technically makes them pirate sites. Even if the clips can't be longer than a minute. So enjoy them while you can, folks.
And we were watching a Super Champion on Jeopardy!
Jamie Ding was on a 31 game streak, and was finally knocked out this past Monday. He came close to losing a few times, like in a really good one last week with Patrick. But his buzzer game was one of the strongest I'd ever seen, and a lot of his episodes looked like this Far Side comic.
Greg, the guy who beat him was a chess champion who was faster than Jamie was. Although to do so he needed a "buzz first, think later" approach. It was successful at beating Jamie at his own game, but the rest of the games he played this week, to buzz in and have a brain fart almost every single time while keeping the rest of us in suspense was...not at all frustrating to watch. It happens to the best of us, but every time? He was knocked out today by someone who was able to grab the Daily Doubles from him.
Weird Al sums it up better than I do:
And then I did have one great pickup this month:
A new cel! I've been wanting a Scooby-Doo cel forever, but they're usually pricey as hell. Old series, iconic series, iconic characters? Good luck paying for less than triple digits.
But this one I got an actual good deal on. It's from 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo. Most cheap cels from this show that pop up on eBay either have half of a character, or they're really tiny, or it's some no name extra, or it's Flim Flam. I found one that has most of Scooby (he's missing his tail), and all of Flim Flam. Well, it's no Vincent van Ghoul, but I couldn't pass this opportunity up.
The background is a reproduction, and it's not even from the original scene. It originally looked like this:
I don't blame the seller for including a background that made the characters pop better. This particular cel is from episode 3, "Scoobra Cadabra," where for some reason they disguise themselves as used car salesmen in this scene.
The frame pops up at around 1:37 in the video.
Oh! And one of my Seattle cousins sent me this care package out of the blue
And one of my other cousins that lives in Arizona took her family to Disneyland a few weeks ago and sent me this guidemap in the mail that I wasn't expecting at all.
You have no idea how happy I am that Disneyland still makes these. And it checks off a lot of my boxes: Disney theme parks. Guidemaps. Anniversary promotion (still in the middle of the 70th anniversary!). And Bluey!
Don't know what I did to deserve these gifts, but I welcome them.
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?!
Well, there are months where nothing happens, and then there's months where A LOT happens.
August was the latter.
I started the month seeing the new Fantastic 4 movie! Ben Grimm didn't say "Thing Ring, do your thing" ONCE! 8/10.
But in all seriousness, it was pretty good. It was nice to see a Fantastic 4 project that actually LIKED these characters and knew what to do with them. Johnny wasn't a womanizing idiot! They remembered Ben was a nice Jewish boy that grew up on Yancy Street. Sue was the politician and the people person of the group. (And Reed was, as always, NOT.) There's a great irony that MCU Tony Stark was introduced boasting about wanting to privatize world peace, and this movie showed a world where the Fantastic 4 actually pulled off World Peace. Worldwide optimism and cooperation seems like science fiction these days, but I'll take what I can get.
I absolutely loved the world of 828. There was a color pallette! And it was shiny! But that was probably because nobody smoked in Alternate 1960s.
Seriously, if there was one movie that deserved to show Reed Richards smoking his pipe, or Ben Grimm chomping on a stogie, it was this one. Ted Gilbert should've been holding a cigarette every time we saw him! But that's a nitpick.
The next day I went back to the Flea Market!
And what I ultimately went home with:
A vintage G1 Drag Strip figure for two bucks. One of the Stunticons! Just needed some TLC and it was good as new. Tinier than I imagined it to be.
And then came the big Seattle trip!
These are but a few of the highlights. We were only there for three days, so my family crunched in as much touristy stuff as possible.
Like the Museum of Pop Culture.
Again, highlights. They had Darth Vader's costume from Empire Strikes Back! The model of the Death Star II! A Dalek! A Cyberman! And various stuff belonging to Kurt Kobain and Jimi Hendrix. And lots of guitars.
Then the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum. A real cool glass art gallery.
I had zero expectations going into this one, the pictures don't really do it justice. It was all real cool to see in person.
And then because it was there, we went to the top of the Space Needle.
It was a lot more beige than I expected it to be. You see all the pictures and think it's white. It's not!
By pure luck, the sun showed up the moment we got to the top. You see, Seattle is famous for being muggy, and the first two days we were there it was cloudy and kinda rainy in the morning.
It was real cool to see Seattle from so high up. Then I went down one floor to the rotating restaurant they had. I took one step on the floor and wanted off. Going down was a bit more harrowing than going up.
Ahh, that's much better. But then I came across this beauty:
A working Mold-A-Matic machine?! In 2025?!
Yup, Seattle was the site of the 1962 World's Fair, with the Space Needle as its centerpiece, much like how the Unisphere was the symbol of the 1964-65 World's Fair in New York (to put a very long story short, the Seattle fair was an official World's Fair, while New York's was not). These Mold-A-Matic machines dotted the NY fair, mostly making the Sinclair dinosaurs out of pure molten plastic for a small fee (five bucks in today's money). Or they were in Disneyland and made Disney figures, and the working models you see today still make those. They're quite rare these days. I know at least two are in the Pinball Hall of Fame in Vegas.
I had no idea Seattle had one! Making mini Space Needles, to boot!
And me, like an idiot, didn't get one.
"Where would I put it?" I said. Like a dumbass.
I think it's because we went to eat a late lunch then head to the Seattle Aquarium before it closed.
And then the next day was spent catching up with family I haven't seen in thirty-some odd years on Bainbridge Island.
There's me, my parents, my uncle Tim, his ex-wife Gloria, my cousin Shiloh, her husband Endo, my other cousin Candace, her daughter Mabel, and my half-cousin Amanda (who works here). Turns out it was a goddamn miracle they all got together for this. Just for us!
Then we visited Poulsbo, Seattle's Little Norway.
Very charming.
And then the last day was crammed with more touristy stuff.
The famous Fremont Troll! A giant sculpture of a troll that's under the big bridge in the city. That's a car it's holding, and its eye is a headlight.
And then my cousin took us out to brunch.
"Oh, do you guys watch Twin Peaks?" I wish I did, because I would've gotten more out of this. It's where they filmed the Great Northern Hotel.
A biscuit covered in their Honey From Heaven. My god was that good. And I do NOT have a sweet tooth but I knew I'd regret not trying it when presented with the opportunity.
And hey look, tossed salad and scrambled eggs!
I didn't have a bad meal the entire trip, but these au gratin potatoes were probably the best thing I had, and that whole brunch was fantastic. It was enough for four people, but I ate more than my share because they were that good. It was "every future version of this I have will be compared on this" good.
Then we were off to Pike Place Market!
It's the most touristy area in all of Seattle, and hoo boy, did we pick the big time to be there.
You see, unlike in New York, Seattle tends to close early. Nightlife is essentially anything that's open after 7pm. And Pike Place Market, being an actual market, starts closing around 5pm, and becomes a ghost town around 6pm. We only had four chances to make it while we were there, and we managed to hit it while it was open on the last day. This was around 2:30pm on Friday on a gorgeous summer day, it was packed to the gills.
"Come when there's nobody around!" My uncle said.
"We WERE here when nobody was around!" I told him. And even then we didn't get to see everything, because it was so crowded.
Yes, this is the famous place where they toss the fish. It's hard to tell, but there's a fish flying in that picture.
A real awesome comic shop. I had a ten minute limit before I got dragged out.
And of course the first Starbucks was there.
But the line to get in was enormous, so I just took pics of the signs.
And behold:
The famous Gum Wall of Pike Place Market!
Yes, it's a big wall that's covered in wads of gum.
The whole thing reeked of chewing gum. It was cool, one of the grossest things I've ever seen, but cool.
Then guess who was able to sweet talk their cousin into driving them to the Funko HQ store in Everett?
I mean, it was just a big photogenic Funko store, but since there's only two of them (there, and in LA), it was worth the pilgrimage.
And just as soon as we got there and started adjusting to the time change, it was time to head home.
Didn't get to ride the monorail (it only went back and forth a few blocks anyway), but I did ride the neat light rail to and from the airport.
I loved all the little salmon on the floor of the terminal.
Ha, these are little planes.
And this one's got a little suitcase!
I'm just glad to be back in my own time zone. Seattle was loads of fun, but getting back from that airport was no joke. It made me really appreciate JFK. If you think THAT one's bad, all of SeaTac could fit inside JFK's Delta terminal. And it's servicing the same volume of people.
Could be why I only fly on planes once a decade these days.
Something else they don't tell you about Seattle: it's very hilly. We stayed a block away from Pike Place Market and there's a giant slope you go down before you can get to it.
And to get to the waterfront where the aquarium and the ferries and that neat ferris wheel is, you gotta go down ANOTHER steep slope.
And I've got bad ankles and my parents are retired and we were all on jet lag. We were NOT walking any more than we had to.
This was all I could find of Frasier merch the entire time I was there! Turns out Grey's Anatomy is the big Seattle show these days, most of the souvenir shops had at least a wall dedicated to it. I had no idea it was even set in Seattle! Even Sleepless in Seattle got one rack of shirts in a shop I went to. Frasier just had this in a tiny chotchke shop in Pike Place.
And speaking of swag:
Magnets and pins, because I am predictable. And a few stickers because I started collecting those, too.
Shirts!
The Krusty Doll and Bigfoot Funko pops I bought at the big store. Space Ghost I bought at the comic shop, thinking I'd never find it again. Turns out the Funko store had it, too.
Most of what's in this pic I bought for other people, aside from the Poulsbo magnet.
Apparently this variant was limited to 1000 copies and that sold me instantly.
And I couldn't leave Seattle without trying the local flavor at least once. Salmon tacos at a place in Poulsbo. No, that's not a euphemism.
And this was just the first half of August! I went to LI Tropic Con, and Anime NYC!
But this post is getting long as it is and you'll have to (gasp) wait until next time for the rest!
