Catch more from James Foody on YouTube
As I try to get Captain Yuletide done by the end of the year (my late start may lead to a late posting–sorry, but Christmas WILL be saved), I’m going to fill time with a bunch of Christmas specials to help pad out my Christmas special playlist on YouTube.
So, what do the Peanuts characters, Garfield the cat, and the Simpsons have in common? Before they had their own series they had a Christmas special that convinced the network to make more with the characters outside of the Holidays. Add to that list The Raccoons, a Canadian TV series that started off with a series of specials, starting with The Christmas Raccoons. While Christmas doesn’t play a huge part in the resolution and they did that bit where you can’t tell if they dreamt it all, it’s still a fun special as the three titular animals and their dog friend first tangle with aardvark Cyril Sneer. He wants to cut down the forest to sell the wood, but when that includes our heroes’ home, it will take some quick thinking (and frankly better business sense than Sneer has) to save the Evergreen Forest.
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I’ve seen a few YouTube channels prepping a live feed from NORAD’s Santa tracker but you can find it on their official website, along with games and other special stuff. I usually remember to post this earlier but this year’s been a mess.
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Have you guessed who they are yet?
Yes, folks. That was Leon’s parents, doing a bit of time travel from their point of death to see what kind of man their son will become. Turns out he’s a good man with good friends. We still don’t know what happened to them, but at least they know he’s okay. The epilogue next time.
As for what’s coming this week, Captain Yuletide is still behind schedule. If I have any chance of getting out before New Years if not Christmas, no regular posts this week. Just more Christmas specials and videos until the 25th or longer if I need to. It should hopefully be done by the weekend at least so I can post the epilogue to the Jake & Leon story and take my time off before resuming normal operations. Have a great week, everyone, and if you don’t come back, Merry Christmas!
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Here’s a two-fer for the last Christmas Showcase of the year, though I will have a few more Christmas specials during the week so I can focus on Captain Yuletide, which is going to probably be late again. Though at least it will be up before the New Year.
Superbook was 1980 cartoon that aired on the Christian Broadcasting Network back when it was just a television station ministry. The show, produced with famed Japanese animation studio Tatsunoko, followed Chris Peeper and his friend Joy as a magic book transported them to Biblical events. It also brought Chris’ wind-up robot toy, Gizmo, to life to help them in their travels. The show would have a sequel in which Superbook get transferred to a computer. Uri, Chris’ cousin (his brother in the Japanese version) is forced to travel through the same stories with Gizmo, chasing Chris’ dog throughout time. Unlike the others, he never got to go home until finally catching up with Ruffles the dog.
In 2011, the series got a futuristic CG re-imagining, now made by Korean studios if memory serves. Now it’s Chris Quantum and Joy Pepper (this one got a last name), and the regular robot Gizmo are brought to events via a virtual version of Superbook. Like the previous show, the idea is that Chris or Joy is having some kind of problem or needs to learn a moral lesson, and Superbook takes them to those events that not only teaches about God and the Bible but helps the kids through whatever their personal issue is. I don’t know if they’re actually time-travelling, like the other CBN/Tatsunoko co-production The Flying House, or if they’re some kind of magical holodeck recreation (depending on the magical or technological version) but it doesn’t really matter.
Tonight I get to bring you both versions. You can watch your preference or compare the two. A Merry Christmas to you all, and enjoy.
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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?
