Music:
This weekend it's been mostly Pandora's 70's Christmas and Celtic Holidays Radio.
TV and Movies:
Mantovani and his Orchestra - Mantovani’s Music of Christmas
Easy orchestral Christmas tunes with some ballet and a cute little puppet show. Charming if outdated.
Prince of Peoria - A Christmas Moose Miracle (2019)
It’s a Miracle anyone watches this stuff. Even by tween show standards, this was lame. Aggressively unfunny, and yes I’m grading on a curve since it’s a kid’s sitcom. The guy hitting the laugh track button really liked it though.
Christmas Break-in (2018)
Unwatchable Home Alone rip off.
Christmas with a View (2018)
Same holiday romance crap, different day.
Pixi Saves Christmas (2018)
Unites the world‘s holiday gift givers as members of a forum of genies. Apparently a disgraced genie turned evil (sigh) businessman has a nefarious plan to do nefarious things nefariously. Luckily there’s a snarky elf to save the day. I assume she saves the day, I gave up about a third of the way in.
The script is a mess. I don’t know if it’s a translation thing or just poor craftsmanship, but it becomes hard to watch. Most kids, no matter where they live, will have no context for the multiple magical characters that immediately show up, competing to leave presents, without explanation. Eventually this odd universe is, poorly, expositioned and it’s pretty bad.
My kid’s would have hated this and I wouldn’t have blamed them.
Happy Days - Christmas Time (1978)
What could have been a sweet, funny episode focusing on Richie and his girlfriends’ arguing over how much to spend on gifts and the Cunningham ladies rebelling against Howard’s bringing home an aluminum tree, gets dragged down with a Fonzie abandonment issues subplot. Winkler’s coasting with his over the top performance and the clumsy tone shifts, spoil what could have been a classic show. Watching the episode it feels as if they wedged the Fonz plot into an existing script focusing on the other two story lines, stripping most of the set up for them and leaving the punchlines.
My kvetching aside, it's still a nice episode, if a little bit sloppy, and I rewatch it every couple of years.
