A Fuzzy Memory

Back when I was really young, I was - and still am - a huge fan of the series "Home Movies" that aired on, originally UPN, but later Adult Swim for the remainder of its run. The animation style, the barely scripted dialogue, the concept itself and the tone overall just really sunk its teeth into me, and when Home Movies was over, I needed something else to fill that void. Thankfully, that something was O'Grady. Not thankfully, O'Grady didn't last nearly long enough. O'Grady, which aired on Nickelodeons sister station Noggin, later renamed simply The N to bring in a more diverse teenage crowd, was primarily aimed at said targeted crowd. It featured four kids - Kevin, Abby, Beth and Harold - who live in a town called O'Grady and go to O'Grady High. Fairly typical premise for a tv show based on that age group, right? Except O'Grady had one hidden trick up its sleeve. The town itself was a magnet, sometimes literally, for something called The Weirdness...

What It's Like Being Alone was a stop motion comedy series that aired briefly in 2006. In hindsight, it's rather crude and often crass and sometimes even cringy with its humor, but hey, that's the mid 2000s for you, I suppose. Even still, the somewhat immature and outdated humor aside, the show was something that caught my eye for various reasons. Part of it, truth be told, was simply the visual aesthetic. I've always been a sucker for stop motion. As a little girl, my favorite movie was Nightmare Before Christmas (well before Hot Topic got its grubby little paws all over it) and I've always been an enormous fan of Wallace & Gromit, even rushing to the theater opening day for their long awaited feature film. I liked Gumby, I liked the stop motion in Pee Wee's Playhouse, and I loved the Prometheus & Bob segment from Nickelodeon's KABLAM which I'm sure I'll cover at some point. But the second part is, frankly, the concept itself, and how oddly ...

I generally don't like to focus on one company back to back, like I'm doing with Disney these past two weeks, but since it's October now, I'm going to forgo my own rules and discuss one of the first things that came to mind when I created this blog, and that is Disneys Halloween Treat.  The special is a 1982 Halloween themed episode of the television anthology series "Walt Disney" which originally aired on October 30th. It's a fairly simple thing, chock full of Disney's "spookiest" bits from old cartoons and movies, including Night on Bald Mountain from Fantasia and Ichabod Crane & the Headless Horseman, which, if you can find to watch, I highly suggest you do. It's a wonderful lost piece of classic animation.  There was also, in 1981, another special titled A Disney Halloween, a 90 minute Halloween special which originally aired as part of the Wonderful World of Disney on October 24th. For the sake of nostalgia, I'll be covering ...

Despite being a beloved corporate overlord of the entertainment industry, every now and then there's just a Disney project that just sort of becomes...lost to time. Perhaps it's due to timing, perhaps it's due to lack of availability, but whatever the reason, some things Disney makes are just lost in the shuffle, never to be seen or heard from again. Until I come along and remind you all they exist, via this blog. This weeks post is one of those times. When I was a little girl, I caught a movie on TV. To be fair, I didn't even know it was a Disney movie for the longest time, and also, I was never really an enormous Disney fan to begin with, so. Either way, I caught a movie on TV, and that movie was called Susie Q. What makes Susie Q extremely interesting to me is not actually how lost it is, though that's interesting too, but more so that it's a Disney movie. Well, to be fair, it wasn't actually a Disney movie proper, they were simply the distributors of it ...

When I was a child, there was only one journalist I trusted, and that was Stick Stickly. We return now to the domain of the weird ass early years of Nickelodeon, back when the network was apparently in film school and obsessed with student art flicks, willing to try anything, no matter how bizarre it might seem in hindsight. Stick was the host of Nick In The Afternoon, a programming block on the network that ran summers 94-98 every weekday afternoon. While likely the most uncreative fictional character ever made, he holds a special place in my heart, and apparently many others as well. Some claim him to be boring and uninspired in design, but I think he's brilliant. I mean, who else besides children used popsicle sticks for entertainment? This is why he succeeded, because he was a visual medium they understood. I don't really remember much about Stick Stickly, I just remember Stick Stickly himself. I remember that he existed, and that he really made me happy. Much like Face, he...

    Nostalgia can make you love even the most baffling things. Nostalgia is the best liar that we have, quite honestly. Something truly terrible you might adore, simply because it came to you in a part of your life when you needed it, or when you enjoyed it for what it was, instead of seeing it for what it truly is. This is why people still like certain shows they grew up with, despite a good handful of them being just trash. When I was growing up, I really only had a select few things to watch, because for a good while when I was little, we didn't have cable. Because of this, I wound up renting movies a lot, and a lot of those are, admittedly, still movies I love today. Some of which have since then become all time classics. Stuff like Nightmare Before Christmas, Hocus Pocus, or Beetlejuice. But some of them, even I'll admit despite my fondness remaining, are pretty terrible, honestly. And none is a better example than what the spotlight will be shone on today; The New Advent...

In the 90s, puppets essentially became the overlords of educational television. Sure, Jim Henson really solidified this back with the creation of Sesame Street, but it wasn't, in my opinion, until the 90s that it really took hold. Suddenly, there was an influx of edutainment that was bursting at the brim with puppets. Whether it was something like Mr. Rogers, where the puppets were more of side characters, or something like Lambchop, who was the star, puppets teaching kids became as normal as 80 year old women with bad hairdos teaching kids. But none stick out in my mind as such a fever dream as Timmy The Tooth. I can't remember who it was who originally gave me the Timmy The Tooth VHS I had, it may have been my mother, it may have been my grandmother, that knowledge is forever lost to me, but I can say that whoever was responsible for it shouldn't have been involved in childcare, because Timmy The Tooth is simultaneously completely fine and absolutely horrific. Looking bac...