Classic and new Christmas specials and longer videos. See what I add all year and see if one of your favorites is on the list.
Well, maybe not Christmas exactly. Certain fantasy and sci-fi worlds have lore where even if Jesus existed in their dimension it wouldn’t be on their planet. Still, these nine games are paying tribute to the season for the gamers who are celebrating Christmas and that’s still nice. Are they the best? I don’t know. I haven’t played them. I just needed something Christmasy for an article link.
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We’re near the end of the production notes before finally seeing the second sales pitch to bring the Transformers to CBS.
Last time we saw Hasbro’s notes, and for obvious reasons (which I also stated flat out) they didn’t like the complete reimagine of the very concept of the line. For CBS it’s a different story. Between parent groups and the Federal Communication Commission (usually bossed around by the parent groups), there were less things you could get away with on Saturday morning than you could in syndication. Granted, the only reason a Transformers cartoon was made was due to deregulation, as then-President Ronald Reagan was a hawk about reducing the scope and power of the Federal government. This led to a change in the rules that forbid TV shows based on toys. This rule hurt Hot Wheels when they tried to make a Saturday morning cartoon, ironically about a car club given that was a potential idea for this show.
I don’t care if the show was created by a toy company or if the toy company is pushing for new toys of an existing show. You’d be surprised how many shows were NOT based on a toyline but had a toyline as a bonus source of income. This would be really important for first-run syndication, but with a Saturday morning show the network would be doing some of the funding, making it more profitable for Sunbow, Marvel Productions, and even Hasbro. Transformers were a hot property, as robots that turned into vehicles and other machines were something new. That was before we got dinosaurs and all of the later gimmicks like combination and triple changers.
Meanwhile the show has to be good in order to push the toys. This was already true for toys based on existing shows. Megatron’s Japanese counterpart was inspired by role-play toys for The Man From UNCLE, an American show that was surprisingly popular in Japan. I had toys based on Star Trek, Adam-12, Emergency–well, a play fireman’s hat with branding, Star Wars, and a talking fake CB radio based on a show called Moving On. You can blame my parents for the stuff not based on a sci-fi franchise. I didn’t watch the first two until I was older and Moving On came on when I had moved to bed. The show has to be good, whether selling toys is the main goal or not, so writing off a “30 minute toy commercial” is lame because if it wasn’t a good show that we would fondly remember years later if only for nostalgia, those toys aren’t moving.
So we already saw what Hasbro wanted. What were CBS’s suggestions for making this new idea work?
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Catch more from The Nerve With Maureen Callahan on YouTube
Oh, not this crap again.
It seems like every year someone has to post a video or an article or even shove lyrics into the Christmas classic Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer insisting our hero must tell the bullies what to do with themselves. Specifically, Callahan is focused on the classic Rankin-Bass version of the story, a Christmas special I have done my own review of here at BW Media Spotlight back when I still had time to make videos. It’s still one of my favorite Christmas specials. It’s not perfect. I even noted in my review that Santa’s grumpiness was out of character and young Rudolph seems to suffer from it among other things. Maybe this sets up The Year Without A Santa Claus or something?
I haven’t seen the Billy Joel documentary she talks about, but I was a bully victim myself, and psychological warfare was their tool at the time. For the record I actually get along with some of them now as they matured and became better people. Even Flash Thompson became Peter Parker’s friend eventually in the Spider-Man comics. Stephen King should have been so lucky given the bullies in his stories. I know in real life what Rudolph went through in fiction. I just hate the idea that Rudolph should have told them to fly off because he “suddenly became useful”. It’s a bad interpretation and once again I have to speak on it.
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Catch more from How It Should Have Ended on YouTube
For the record I don’t hate the song. Maybe I miss the monotony everyone else hears because I don’t get out much these days and have my own music playlist, which I think does include that song. Fair warning.
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I’m not going to tell you that Supergirl is one of my top superheroes, but I do really like her when done right. Kara Zor-El, last survivor of a chunk of Krypton that flew off into space and gave science the finger until science pushed back by turning the place into Kryptonite clearly has a tragic history. In a couple of other versions, Argo City or something similar survives in a pocket dimension or something, and Kara has to get home. There’s also the “Matrix” Supergirl, a protoplasmic being created in a pocket dimension post-Crisis On Infinite Earths, when DC decided messing with their “no multiverse” change was less objectionable than not messing with their “no Kryptonians except Kal-El” rule, which might have been the wrong choice, but she certainly has her fans and I like what little I saw of her…until her story went into this weird twist involving angels, demons, a suicidal girl who was part of a two-person cult, and someone who may or may not be God because they really don’t care about Biblical accuracy in the Big Two anymore. There’s a reason I dropped that title pretty early.
One of the defenses I see for the James Gunn version of Kara, and make no mistake that Gunn is seriously influencing this despite not being the screenwriter or director but is promoting the hell out of…himself again mostly, and using Tom King’s Woman Of Tomorrow comic is that this version of Kara, born of the DC plague that is the New 52, is finally addressing watching her people die. The pain has clearly gotten to her and the only direction you can take her is a broken, self-destructive, angry girl who needs to learn to be better. To quote Colonel Potter from M*A*S*H, horse hockey.
The Kara Zor-El I knew pre-Crisis and the original Matrix version of Supergirl both suffered loss. They were also good, caring people who attached themselves to something familiar like family or the alternate universe version of her creator. As I wrote recently, Supergirl and Captain “Shazam” Marvel were seriously altered in the New 52 and that’s the version Tom King turned into someone who shunned her family in favor of going off to get drunk on an alien planet with a lower drinking age in his Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow miniseries. King is notorious for “breaking the toys”, making Mister Miracle suicidal, anti-drug hero The Protector into an addict to deal with the stress of his mission in a story where a freaked out Wally West kills a bunch of people at a superhero therapy retreat accidentally then has to die to rectify the situation and create an alternate timeline counterpart, and having Bane trick Catwoman into leaving Batman at the altar because he “needs his pain”, which is clearly just Bane ruining Bruce’s life again. (Bane is the TRUE master of “prep time”.) That’s not even all of it, but this isn’t about King, it’s about his Supergirl story and why I reject the idea that adding trauma to Supergirl’s backstory means making her a self-destructive, rage-filled party bitch.
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First, let me show you the trailer.
And this is being distributed by Angel Studios, who I thought would know better given their previous original productions. If you don’t understand the problem, the Critical Drinker (who as you’ll recall swears) explains everything.
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