2023 comes to a close, and already we had to say goodbye to some people since the last time I posted here.
Marty Krofft
Tom Smothers
Shane MacGowan
Norman Lear
And just today, Shecky Greene.
But the saddest of all, among many others, we lost Andre Braugher.
Captain Holt died! It's not fair, man. The above quote sums it up perfectly. Brooklyn Nine-Nine was such a great show, but Andre Braugher really was the glue that held it together. He was one of the best to ever do it.
On top of that, I got this for an early Christmas gift:
Covid! It felt like a cold, and thankfully got over it within a week. And it got me out of work the week before Christmas. And it was the week the Pokemon Scarlet/Violet DLC dropped. Oh noooo, I have so much time to play it, whatever will I do?
But with that, let's get to Christmas!
I saw Santa!!
And here's my tree:
So cozy, right? And let's see what I got this year!
I actually got Simpsons stuff this year!
And Bobs Burgers and Super Mario Wonder!
My favorite bbq sauce!
And my advent calendar full of scratchers. I won $33 and two free Take 5 tickets.
And here's some things I bought for myself because you do that when you're in your thirties with no other immediate family besides your parents.
I never realized that the Not Pizza Planet Truck transformer hailed from Stranger Things, and I managed to snag it when Target had a 30% off sale before their toy section was blown out. Same with the Zelda amiibo, I managed to find the last one Target had, since it was the only TOTK one I missed out on.
And I can't wait to finally play the Super Mario RPG remake since the Pokemon DLC took up most of my free time.
And I picked up the Peanuts and Rankin-Bass collections at Wal-Mart since they had them there. No more pirating for me! At least for these.
I found the Kerwin Frost McNuggets! Dig that box art.
Well, it's not the one that looks like Svengoolie, but I'll take it. Apparently this chill one was a sought after one?
And lastly, here was my favorite pickup from Wintercon at the beginning of the month. A Carvel comic! "Where are Fudgie and Cookie Puss?!" You ask. Well, the comic hails from 1973, so it predates those two by quite a few years, or else they would've had starring roles on the cover instead of the Flying Saucers.
But in any case, summer is on its way, and it's time for a new post.
But honestly, not really feeling it this time around. I'll just post some random videos and pics I liked this month.
This Steamed Hams/Gorillaz mashup's been around for a few years, but I finally stumbled upon it a few days ago and can't stop listening to it. Everything is so synced up incredibly well.
Speaking of memes, a cel of He-Man in THAT pose went for over $2000. That video is over a decade old and has yet to get old.
Baby ducks are here!
And baby geese!
And a rabbit! They've been getting braver lately.
Tears of The Kingdom finally came out!
...But I haven't bought it. Because I want to do stuff with my life right now. I'm not much a of a Zelda guy, but I'll admit I got interested in watching streams of it. Maybe I'll get it for Christmas.
It was Flea Market time once again! Only of the first treasures I found was a stack of uncut Garbage Pail Kids cards. But they've seen better days, so I left them be.
A pay phone has been one of the odder things I've found at one of these.
This was cool, but where would I put it?
Mood.
Something in the "shoulda bought" pile was this box of old Playbills, dating back to the sixties. They had at least three versions of Hello, Dolly. You have the original Carol Channing one above, and I also saw the version with Pearl Bailey. You can smell the Old Broadway in these. Or maybe it was the mustiness of being in a box for sixty years.
Plus the original Odd Couple. Yes, before Thomas Lennon and Matthew Perry, er, I mean Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, there was Art Carney and Walter Matthau as Felix and Oscar.
And finally, what I picked up there. These four pins only set me back ten bucks. There was a table that had a bunch of pins from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and these were the ones that stood out to me. That, and I'm not made of money. Around here I mostly see stuff from the 1964 NY World's Fair, so merch from any other big event in the country is pretty rare and I had to grab something from it.
I figured that other Atlanta icons made the cut for merch, like the Cabbage Patch Kids and Coca Cola, but there were quite a few pins of characters from Izzy's Quest For Olympic Gold. (I go into more detail about it in this entry). I left the Alice Ghostly voiced character pin for someone else.
We lost a lot of good people this year. I lost my grandmother back in September. She was 90 and she'd been in poor health for the past few years, so this didn't come as a surprise. But it still hurt.
We also lost, among others: Alex Trebek, Sean Connery, Squiggy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Lewis, the guy who voiced Peppy in Star Fox 64 (Robert May aka "Do A Barrell Roll!" himself!), Kobe Bryant, Jeremy Bulloch, David Prowse, Whitey Ford, Chadwick Boseman, Diana Rigg, Kamala The Ugandan Giant, Regis Philbin, Eddie Van Halen, Carl Reiner, Fred Willard, Jerry Stiller, Little Richard, Gene Deitch, James Lipton, Kenny Rogers, Olivia de Havilland, Bill Withers, Jim Lehrer, Terry Jones, Kirk Douglas...
And just in the past few days: MF DOOM (back on Halloween, no less), Jon Huber (aka Brodie Lee), and Dawn Wells.
Yes, we lost Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island thanks to Covid. The show was a childhood favorite, and I know I'm not alone in that. It was a Nick @ Nite staple back in the day. I always liked her more than Ginger. And speaking of which, that leaves Tina Louise as the last surviving castaway.
Luckily Dawn Wells was a fixture at autograph shows like Chiller Theater, so finding a signature on ebay is both easy and relatively cheap, so that's where I went the moment I heard the news. I wish I could've met her in person, by all accounts she seemed like a lovely person.
And when 2020 comes to a close, so will Flash. What would early 2000s internet be without it?
Kids today will never know the pain of having to wait so long for Mario Twins (a four minute video!) to load that you could play a separate minigame while you waited.
This was the pinnacle of comedy in the early 2000s. Poorly drawn cartoons about video games with lots of poop jokes.
There was also this classic from Lemon Demon:
This was probably the first BIG viral cartoon, but I'm more familiar with this video by him:
Colin Mochrie was the Chuck Norris of Animutation. I have fond memories of that one.
And then there's the grandaddy of them all: Homestar Runner.
I jumped in during my later years of High School, which places it around 2003 or 2004. Right before the 100th Strong Bad Email, and I've been a loyal follower ever since. Most of their catalogue migrated to youtube, but not all of it. The flash version of Halloween Potion-ma-jig was a terribly hard loss, since it integrated a Choose Your Own Adventure-style algorithm that had three different endings, and that video only has one of them. (the youtube version is embedded above)
Thankfully some kind soul uploaded the other two endings.
I think HSR picked the funniest options, which was for the best. I still don't know what "Powdered Thanksgiving" is.
It just sucks since they were one of the last hangers on for Flash, and while they have a plan to migrate to a post-flash world, it's no longer gonna be the same. Seriously, it's the only internet cartoon that I'm aware of that had easter eggs in them, and now most of them aren't accessible.
With that out of the way, time to share what I got for Christmas!
Not much this year, but when you're 33, you don't really want much to begin with. I got another bottle of my favorite barbeque sauce, the new Hyrule Warriors game (it's pretty sweet), the Steven Universe box set, and of course gift cards. And it wouldn't be Christmas in 2020 if I didn't get new masks. Not pictured were new work clothes, stocking stuffers like deodorant, and toothpaste. Everyone in my house got more toothpaste for Christmas.
I also got new pajama pants:
Christmas Vacation themed! They're comfy.
Oh, and I have to highlight an early Christmas gift:
Izzy's Quest For Olympic Gold has finally been found and uploaded to Youtube!! I've mentioned before that finding it had been my White Whale, and the week before Christmas a kind soul had been going around Twitter and showing it to anyone who ever tweeted about it, especially me. And not only is the special here fully intact, it has all the commercials, too! What's notable is that those very commercials pinpoint to when this special aired, which was in August of 1996. I'm more than certain that THIS was the very broadcast I saw back in the day. A few of the commercials brought back some strong memories, especially the one for Rice Krispies Treats Cereal.
So what did I think after not seeing it in almost twenty-five years? Well..it's okay. It wasn't the godawful trainwreck I'd been expecting, but it's not good, either. I knew I didn't watch until the end, but I got farther into the special than I thought. I remember tuning out after the gymnastics portion, but there were only five minutes left after that.
The Olympics are usually super strict about promoting its brand when any other kind of media tries to talk about it, so it's kind of off putting to watch this special and it does not stop reminding you that this is about the Olympics. Sports, ambition, brotherhood, good sportsmanship, bribery and corruption, and basketball. That's what it's all about.
Other than that, the plot is very basic. Izzy wants to go to the human world to compete in the Olympics, but he has to earn the five Olympic rings first to do so, which are mainly symbolic. He has only twenty two minutes to do it, so it's rather rushed. Spoiler alert: He earns all five rings before his Torchworld is torn apart by his friends and family bickering at each other about whether Izzy was worthy in the first place, Izzy gets to compete, everyone lives happily ever after. Izzy has a good heart, but he's kinda annoying. I think he's supposed to be a young teen at best? They don't specify his age, but he's probably around that magic age of 6 to 11. It worked for OK KO.
Would I recommend watching it? Yes, if only for the novelty of it. If the special wasn't known for being lost in the first place, it's not really surprising that it was forgotten. There's way better sports cartoons you could be watching instead, but none of them actually involve the Olympics.
And it was pretty easy to find where my cel is in the special!
It appears at roughly seven minutes and forty seconds in. This was the best screengrab I could get, but it's more or less the exact frame.
And so comes to what I do every year and plan out a resolution. Usually I don't have one since I never follow through on them in the first place, but I actually have one this year:
Make it to 2022.
Simple, yes, but getting here to 2021 was a challenge in and of itself. But we're not out of the woods just yet! If nothing goes wrong, I'll see all of you for January's entry.
Man, it felt like January went on forever, considering how quickly the past few years have passed by us. If you read the end of last month's entry, I've been feeling pretty down after the loss of my friend.
But the past few days have been looking up.
Here's a cute picture of my cat watching Jeopardy. She's still mad Ken Jennings won the GOAT tournament.
I watched a speedrun of Link's Awakening at Awesome Games Done Quick and I felt to urge to play it for myself, so I went out and bought it the first chance I got. I don't usually play Zelda games, this being the third one after Hyrule Warriors and Ocarina of Time. It's a pretty charming game, the graphics are pretty, and it's challenging but not too hard. Some people want Dark Souls, I just want an excuse to compulsively cut down all the grass with my sword, and this game delivers in spades. Sixty dollars well spent.
They're adding this emoji and I'm honestly excited for it. I'm an old guy and don't use them, but I might start now. With only this one. In place of words. That's how much I love this.
Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses got added to Smash Bros! Being the fifth DLC fighter of the (first) challenger pack, lots and lots of people were disappointed that Master Chief or whatshisface from Minecraft got snubbed in place of the only DLC character out of the six we got so far (Piranha Plant, Joker, Dragon Quest Hero, Banjo & Kazooie, and Terry Bogard) that I honestly saw coming. Fire Emblem is pretty big in Japan and I knew that a Three Houses rep was coming as soon as the game was announced, just like Corrin was added at the tail end of the last Smash game to promote that new FE game.
How do they play? Well, Byleth commits the sin of being one of two Fire Emblem characters without a Counter move (the other being Robin), but otherwise they're a strong one. Their main weakness is that most of their attacks are so slow, the windup on all the specials leave you wide open to an attack, and most of the attacks stop dead in their tracks the moment you're hit. But if you can land a hit? Especially on the neutral special? Everyone's as good as dead at pretty low percentages.
Oh, and a Cuphead Mii Fighter skin was added, so you can have him fight the Sans costume.
What a time to be alive.
The Good Place ended and I was not ready for it. It was pretty emotional, but also an incredibly satisfying sendoff.
A special Animal Crossing: New Horizons Switch was announced! I was not prepared for how this news would break twitter, it's been hyped for so long.
And then everyone got mad when it turned out it doesn't even come with the game already installed like every other special edition Switch bundle out there.
Crisis on Infinite Earths finally concluded and I have to say they stuck the landing. It's honestly much harder to list what DIDN'T get a shout out here. All we know is that Arrow is dead for good, we got to see a Giant Beebo again, Movie Flash met TV Flash, we got a preview for a live-action Superfriends, and the Arrowverse shows all take place on the same Earth now. Which gets kinda confusing when you realize that includes Black Lightning, and that show is heavy as hell. Aside from some exposition in the first Post-Crisis episode, seems like nothing much changed there.
And finally, that Dolly Parton meme was going around and I had to make one for the ultimate sex symbol: Hans Moleman.
And here's one I made for Moe:
Somehow that one got more traction than the Moleman one.
That'll do it for this month, folks! Hard to believe this blog turns 12 next month!
