Two Awesome New Holiday DVDs

I love holiday episodes of TV series which makes me particularly excited for two upcoming DVD releases from the fine folks at Mill Creek Entertainment. First off, let me say how much I adore Mill Creek Entertainment. Besides Disney, they have got to be my favorite company putting out home video material today. They constantly have imaginative and unique titles on their slate, always at a very low beyond-reasonable price.

Holiday episode collections have become quite popular in the last couple of years, mostly with Christmas episodes but Mill Creek is getting ahead of the game with a fantastic looking collection of Halloween themed episodes of 13 different sit-coms. TV's Spookiest Halloween Episodes collects trick-or-treat fun filled episodes of a wide variety of sit-coms and offers them up in one neat package. What I'm really digging about this collection is the wide range of years this collection represents from early 60's (Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie) to late 90's (Mad About You, NewsRadio.) What's also impressive is the range of popularity of the series represented. Some obscure goodies like Square Pegs and Ned and Stacey are tucked in there along with The Cosby Show and Roseanne. To me, this collection is just about perfect. I'm not sure I ever need to watch an episode of That 70's Show, but all the others I can't wait to dig into, especially The Jeffersons, Square Pegs and The Facts of Life. This is just a solid collection I can't wait to add to my library.

Then we've got Mill Creek's Christmas edition of Holiday themed episodes with TV's Merriest Episodes. I already have an enormous collection of Christmas TV episodes on tape and DVD and I'm really looking forward to making this disc part of the yearly viewing traditions.  Again, there is a great variety as far as ages of the shows although this one is a little more heavy on the mid 80's to mid 90's. The collections two vintage episodes: Bewitched and The Flying Nun are the same episodes that appeared in Shout Factory's (also excellent) 1989 collection Merry Sitcom! But it does feature The Ellen Show, which was a great one season CBS sitcom that aired between Ellen's popular ABC sitcom and her huge hit talk show.

TV's Spookiest Halloween Episodes is released Sept. 16, 2014 and TV's Merriest Episodes is available October 14, 2004. Both have an MSRP of $9.98.

If Holiday episodes are you thing, there are also two new collections of The Dick Van Dyke Show out from Image Entertainment. Halloween Episodes Collection is available now and contains 4 episodes while Classic Christmas comes out October 7 with two episodes.

Finally, A Post About Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments

Folks, in case you didn't know... I loves me some Christmas tree decorations! Every year there are a few Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments that catch my eye, and I always intend to share them here and always forget. So this year I'm doing it, even if it's a little early for Christmas posts.

My favorite ornament this year is easily this really cool Caddyshack one. Mr. Gopher taking control of a subtley Christmas colored golf cart would make a fine addition to the South Family Christmas tree. This one is called "Pro Gopher" and it pretty darn cool. I don't think they've done a Caddyshack ornament before so that just makes this one all the neater. As every guy, I love that movie. When I was little, I used to keep my eyes peeled for it to come on regular TV so I could watch it because it was R rated and I just wanted to see that Gopher puppet so darn bad!



Last year, Hallmark did a National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation ornament of the Griswold's Home decorated with thousands of twinkling lights. When you push the button on it, the house lights up and it plays the Hallelujah Chorus. I was thrilled to score one as a gift last season and it's a fine centerpiece of our tree. This year, Hallmark captures the opening scene in the movie when Clark and family trek out into the wood and take home the biggest tree they can find. This keepsake also plays the theme song from the Christmas movie. In the end, you just can't go wrong with the Family Truckster immortalized in ornament form!

This is the other new ornament this year that I really like. I love when stuff is based off specific old Mickey Mouse cartoons. "Clock Cleaners" captures the iconic scene from the 1937 cartoon of the same name. This is one of the best vintage Mickey toons and this ornament is a real doozy. When you turn the little crank in the front, Mickey and Donald sway back and forth working on the clock while they whistle the same song used in the film. Goofy is on the back side, also animated. Really cool piece, but at $34.99 I don't see it being added to our tree this year.

Finally, this Smurfette ornament isn't necessarily all that exciting, but it's pretty cool that the Smurfs have been included in the line-up this year, and it's a real smurf not a 3D movie Smurf. Smurfette will only set you back $9.95 so she's a little easier to hang on your tree than the clock tower. Hopefully somebody else will put out a more gender neutral Smurf ornament. We ain't got a Smurf on our tree!

Happy Easter!

H-B Holiday Parade Sightings

I found a very cool Flickr photostream yesterday from a fella named Kerrytoonz, chock full of cartoon goodness. Here's a couple of images he found from some recent holiday parades...

First up is an awesome Jellystone Park float headlined by that smarter than the average bear and his little sidekick, Boo Boo. This image is from a parade in Toronto, Canada. Those Canadians have all the fun, eh?
Here's the mighty Fred Flintstone towering over a puny Captain America at a pre-Thanksgiving parade in Stamford, Connecticut earlier this year. I would have wet my pants if I had seen that down the parade route.

This one's not an officially licenced appearance, but you gotta love when people try. This photo was snapped by a friend of mine at the nearby Gettysburg Holiday Parade. I've never been to that parade before, but this picture is all the invitation I need to hit it up next year!

Vintage Christmas on DVD

I've been enjoying the holy heck out of this 4 disc DVD collection, Holiday TV Classics. The fine folks at Mill Creek Entertainment have gathered up 49 episodes of vintage Christmas television programing from the 1950's & 60's, slapped it on 4 DVDs and put it out for only $9.99 MSRP. If you pick it up at WalMart it's actually only $5.00!

I love old television, especially stuff produced for the holiday season. I wasn't around in the 1950's, but it seems that Christmas meant just a little bit more back then. I guess the country had been through some rough times and the holiday season was a really special time to slow down and appreciate everyone and everything around you. Anywho, this collection of old TV shows is great for someone like me who just loves the history of television. The footage on most of these shows is top notch and the audio is also fantastic for material that hasn't been remastered or probably preserved very well.

Now, I haven't watched all 49 episodes...yet. But so far what I've watched has been very enjoyable. Most of the original sponsor cards and announcements are still in place, and some of the shows still have their original commercial breaks still intact. The Bell Telephone Company sponsors Telephone Time, which I was expecting to be a game show but was actually a dramatic anthology series which ran on CBS for two seasons. The episode on this disc is called "A Picture of the Magi," a creative reworking of O'Henry's classic tale.

I, of course, also enjoyed a holiday themed episode of Date With The Angels one of Betty White's earliest network roles. The episode take place mostly in a department store and for my money there isn't a thing much more Christmasy than a 1950's department store at Christmas! From the looks of old movies and shows that I've seen, Toy Trains were the ONLY toys available to boys in the 50's.

There are plenty of shows that you have heard of before sprinkled among the set's 4 discs. There's several episodes of The Beverly Hillbilllies, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Dragnet and The Jack Benny Program. Holiday TV Classics is a real treat for the shows that you can't readily find on DVD...or VHS for that matter: Screen Writers Playhouse, The Paul Winchell Show, Dear Phoebe, and Racket Squad - just to name a few.

I watched the Lux Video Theatre episode, which I later discovered was a redramatization of the movie Holiday Affair. I also enjoyed discovering The Bob Cummings Show, which was racy for it's time but is now as tame as a Disney Channel Show (just more entertaining.)

This is a great collection of material that will provide nights of entertainment throughout the season. Look for Holiday TV Classics at WalMart in the $5.00 DVD section. At almost 21 hours of vintage Christmas television, that's around twenty three cents per hour for your entertainment dollar. Beat that!

Let The Halloween Cartoons Begin

Halloween is just a few weeks away and the kids and I have been in the mood to kick off the holiday special viewing season. So, this past weekend we decided to relax after a day of pumpkin picking and hay rides with the annual ritual of "Pulling Out The Halloween Videos."

We started things off with a screening of Bugs Bunny's Howl-oween Special, a good ol' fashioned CBS primetime offering from 1978. As with the majority of the Looney Tunes specials, this show mixes a handful of classic animated shorts with some newer low-grade animation to form one continuous half hour cartoon. Even as a young kid, the newer bits of the cartoon stuck out like a sore thumb in the middle of the original masterpieces. Sometimes the new animation was just used to link together three or four complete cartoons, other times (such as the case with Howl-oween) the newer bits are sprinkled in and out the old cartoons to try and make it seem like one whole story. When the latter approach was used, the shows feel disconnected and choppy. Animation style, character design and voices change every couple of minutes and it makes viewing a bit difficult. It's a wonder why they didn't just collect a handful of Halloween themed shorts and air them in their entirty.

I was never really a huge fan of these chop shop Warner Bros. specials, but I watched them every time they were on because that's how we rolled back in the old days before VCRs and 24 hour cartoon channels. In more recent years, I kinda had a nostalgic yearning for some of these specials and have sought some out on video and DVD. Bugs Bunny's Howl-oween Special makes it's debut on DVD this year, having not been released since a 1994 VHS cassette. The special itself features clips and scenes from nine vintage shorts including Broom-Stick Bunny (1956), Hyde and Hare (1955) and Transylvania6-5000 (1954). One of my all-time favorite Looney Tunes shorts, Scaredy Cat from 1948, is also used luckily without too much interruption.

All in all, even though the show alters the original state of the cartoons the special is entertaining and promotes enough Halloween spirit to get everyone in the mood. The new DVD also features the complete short Hair-Raising Hare from 1946. This is the one where Bugs Bunny meets the giant orange-haired monster and does his nails. Good stuff and actually worth the price of admission alone!

In the mood for more classic animated shorts, we then popped in Tom & Jerry: Hijinks and Shrieks. I picked up this DVD at a yard sale a couple of years ago (they had it priced at $3 but I talked `em down to $2...suckers!) but we had never gotten around to watching it. This isn't an old TV special, but rather a collection of 7 top-shelf Tom & Jerry shorts from 1952 to 1965. The bad news is that only two of these shorts have anything at all to do with Halloween, the good news is that they are all pretty good cartoons. The amazing thing is that after 60+ years, these cartoons are still laugh out-loud funny to kids and grown ups alike! And quite frankly, there is no greater sound than hearing your kids crackup to pieces laughing at silly things like animals running into walls and cats getting their tail chopped off!

The two Halloween themed shorts, 1956's The Flying Sorceress & The Haunted Mouse from 1965 are both filled with sufficient levels of spooky fun to carry the other 5 titles into making this a fun collection for the Halloween season. A couple of the shorts were produced in CinemaScope and of course are presented here in pan and scan. I think a DVD of just a handful of cartoons presented in their widescreen glory for new television sets would not only be an awesome addition to the WWoB DVD library, I think it would be a big seller as well!

Both Bugs Bunny's Howl-oween Special and Tom & Jerry: Hiijinks & Shrieks are available at Wal-Mart, Amazon and for rental from Netflix. Good stuff for your pre-Trick or Treat viewing!

Happy Memorial Day!

Classic Commercial Sunday - Easter Edition

Happy Easter! Today for Classic Commercial Sunday we present two of the most fondly remembered Easter commercials of all time...

Friday is Independence Day

Insert Your Own "Pink" Pun Here

Here's another great animation DVD that goes beyond the call of duty. It would have been easy for MGM to release the cozy 1978 television special A PINK CHRISTMAS on a DVD of it's own, much as they had done with the VHS release. But instead not only are we treated to the Pink One's Christmas outing, we also get 1981's PINK AT FIRST SIGHT (a romance themed half hour that aired near Valentine's Day) and the very obscure PINK-LYMPICS, which was produced in conjunction with the 1980 Winter Olympics. This last film is a real treat as it only aired once and never received home video treatment. It's so obscure that I myself only learned about it's existence last year.

But of course the centerpiece of this collection is A PINK CHRISTMAS, which besides for a choir of children singing, is a completely wordless half hour story adapted from O'Henry's "The Cop and the Anthem". (I was in a high school play of "The Cop and the Anthem" so I feel a little more connected to The Pink Panther. Isn't that lame!?) In this longer than usual adventure for the Pink Panther, Pink has trouble finding a meal on Christmas eve, so he decides to get himself arrested so that he can spend the night in jail with a hot meal. The film is a great little holiday special packed with heart and warm songs of the season.

Ziggy's Shinning Moment

We've talked about Ziggy here at WWoB before. What's the deal with him!? Is he supposed to be funny? Is it supposed to be religious!? He doesn't talk, or have a job, or really do anything at all. He does have more pets than that old lady down the street though! Anyhow, Ziggy has been appearing in newspaper comic strips since 1971 and has also appeared in various Halmark-esque endeavors like greeting cards and good ol' coffee mugs. In 1982 they took Ziggy to the small screen in what is probably the best effort brought about by the Ziggy people. ZIGGY'S GIFT is a delightful half-hour animated Christmas special that is filled with good holiday cheer. In addition to being cute and charming, ZIGGY'S GIFT also boasts some beautiful animation. Whereas most television cartoons are done in "limited animation", this Ziggy Christmas Special is fully animated. It was directed by acclaimed animator Richard Williams who also did the animation for WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT and the ol' 70's Raggedy Ann and Andy movie.

It was kind of hard to find on video but they released it to DVD a couple of Christmas ago, so you shouldn't have too much trouble finding a copy if you wanted to add this great little holiday flick to your collection. It won't answer any questions about what the heck Ziggy's deal is, but it will certainly put you in a holiday mood. And, unlike the newspaper, Ziggy wears pants on TV.

Good Ol' Charlie Brown Specials

Here's two old school TV Guide ads for "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving." The special first aired in 1973 and was a yearly tradition until the 90's. The special disappeared for a long time only to resurface not too long ago when ABC took over the Peanuts collection from CBS. Before 2001 the Peanuts specials had aired on CBS for 35 years! This classic program will be rebroadcast yet again tomorrow night at 8:00pm on ABC. (That's Channel 2 in Baltimore and Channel 27 for Southern PA.) Following "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" will be a repeat of "He's a Bully, Charlie Brown" at 8:30pm. We mentioned this show last year on WWoB when it made it's debut.

It turned out to be a really good show and in my opinion the best Peanuts TV outing since 1986's "Happy New Year, Charlie Brown." Although Charles Schulz did not get to write the script for "Bully" he was working on the idea for the show before he passed away in 2000. The script is based on comic strips published in April of 1995.

So pop yourself some of that microwave popcorn and grab a diet Vault and settle back for a solid hour of entertainment!

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Trick-or-Treat 2007

Well, Halloween 2007 is over! We survived two nights of trick-or-treating, a 2 1/2 hour parade, a three different Halloween parties! I'm beat! Tanner has discovered the wonders of Candy Corn, while Elias has officially become of Gum chewer.

Tanner developed his own style of trick-or-treating. Instead of greeting people with "trick-or-treat", he would use his own "I want some candy, please!" He also replaced "thank you" with "I want more!" Since he's two years old, and looks adorable in his pumpkin costume he got away with it and he really did have significantly more candy than Elias at the end of the night.

Last night we went trick-or-treating in the neighborhood that I grew up in. When I was little, there were seriously hundreds of kids out going from door to door. Last night, we saw a few lone trick-or-treaters pass us by. My mom only had seven knocks on her door! Kind of sad, ain't it! Where's the spirit!

Now we get a two week break before I bust out the Christmas CD's and videos and begin Christmas 2007! Ho Ho Ho!

Also: Happy Birthday to my lone star brother! Happy Birthday Charlie!

Ya Gotta See It To Believe It

Last week I told you about my latest acquisition to my holiday television special collection, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special. In case you didn't believe me about the sheer greatness of this program, today WWoB gives the internet screen captures of this 1976 Halloween/Disco extravaganza!

You know it's a Halloween Special because there are jack o'lanterns in the background!

Witchiepoo, The Wicked Witch of the West, Betty White, and Paul Lynde - that's star power my friends!

Here's Lynde as The Rhinestone Trucker. This picture is also in the dictionary next to the word homosexual.

Here's a trucking/CB radio themed musical number. It has nothing to do with Halloween, but doesn't mean it ain't entertaining as all get out!

Witness Paul Lynde playing Monopoly with The Wicked Witch and Witchiepoo!

Mrs. Brady belts out a disco tune. And to think, she used to sing in the church choir with Cindy!

Seriously, you're not even allowed to wear a jacket like that on television anymore before 10:00.

Even Tim Conway can't believe what he's gotten himself into, and he was in a movie called The Billion Dollar Hobo.

You're The World's Most Popular Fruit. What Are You? Humble!

Here's a new one that I've just added to my collection: a 1976 ABC primetime variety special imaginatively called THE PAUL LYNDE HALLOWEEN SPECIAL. First of all, if you don't know who Paul Lynde was he was a very popular actor in the 60's and 70's. Among many other roles he played Uncle Arthur on BEWITCHED, he was the voice of Templeton the rat in the old animated CHARLOETTE'S WEB movie, and he was the center square on the old HOLLYWOOD SQUARES. (Not the one hosted by John Davidson...ya gotta go back further than that!) If you still don't know who he was, let's just say he was gayer than all the styling mousse in France and no one ever made a mention of it! He used to do primetime specials and this particular Halloween special has become legendary for it's line up of celebrity guest stars. It was thought that copies of the entire show no long existed, but the show's original producers were recently able to find the master tapes and now the show can been seen for the first time in 31 years! It just came out on DVD a few weeks ago and it is pure television magic, my friends!

The show kicks off with a rousing musical number where Paul sings the song "KIDS" a song he sang in the Broadway hit BYE BYE BIRDIE! That song has nothing to do with Halloween, but when Donnie and Marie Osmond drop in on the fun...who could care! Right? So then, Paul and his housekeeper Margaret go for a drive in the country to visit Margaret's sister. When they arrive at her house it turns out that Margaret's sister is actually Witchiepoo from H.R. PUFNSTUF and Margaret is actually Margaret Hamilton the Wicked Witch from THE WIZARD OF OZ. Mr. Lynde is creeped out and wants to leave, but the witches offer him three wishes to get him to stay! He agrees, and his first wish is to be a truck driver with a rhinestone covered jacket! (No, seriously!) So then there's a skit with Paul Lynde as a Super-gay Truck Driver and Tim Conway and another truck driver fighting for the love of Pinky Tuscadero. (I had no idea who Pinky Tuscadero was until I looked her up on Wikipedia and found out she actually a character from HAPPY DAYS!?) Anyhow...this truck stop romance turns into a big musical number!

O.K...so then KISS make their their primetime television debut playing "Detroit Rock City", there's another dream sequence where Paul plays a Shiek trying to woo Florence Henderson, and then Paul gives his third wish to the witches. They wish to go to a Discoteque...sure, who wouldn't??! So they all go to a Discoteque where Florence Henderson sings a disco version of "Strangers in the Night". KISS sings two more songs, oh...and I forgot Billy Barty is the witches butler and Betty White pops up somewhere in the middle!

As you can see, it's pure entertainment gold! As someone wrote in IMDB.com, "it's one of the best things ever committed to videotape." With the exception of THE HANNA-BARBERA ALL-STAR COMEDY ICE REVIEW hosted by Roy Clark and Bonnie Franklin, I just might have to agree!

Here's a clip...

Lame A. Tempt

We've got one video store left in town that actually rents video cassettes. All the other rental stores sold off all their VHS in the last year or two, but luckily I've still got one place to hunt down old crap on VHS. Seeing as how Halloween specials are just about completely extinct from airing on television, I wanted to dig up some of the classics to show my kids. The only thing of note that I came across was THE GREAT BEAR SCARE staring Ted. E Bear. Now, ya know things are off on a wrong foot when your main character is named Ted E. Bear. How original is that!? Oh...and get this, the monsters in the show live on Monster Mountain! See, it's a mountain...where monsters live...!?! And don't forget Ted's girlfriend Patti who is a reporter for Bearwitness News...instead of EYEwitness News, ya understand!? (I don't even get that pun!?) One more...the bears live in Bearbank...there's a city in California called Burbank, but these bears live in Bearbank. OK, that was is actually kind of funny. And this 1984 animated tale isn't half bad, while the story is kind of lame the script itself is pretty clever. But to enjoy this special you first have to get over the animation style employed here. It's not even really animation. The poses the characters move between are transitioned with very stylized fades. It kind of looks like animation, but it looks more like a cheap preschool storytime video.

And like yesterday's Grinch special we mentioned, this Halloween special is a follow up to a Ted E. Bear Christmas cartoon produced some ten years earlier....oh wait, forget that...I just thought of another one! Instead of Madison Square Garden, the monsters all meet at Madison SCARE Garden...because they are monsters and they like to scare people! Ya see how that works!?

Anywho..don't look for THE GREAT BEAR SCARE on TV anytime soon. Instead you can look forward to multiple airings of Dora's Halloween Fiesta` or some other junk like that!

Disney Easter Egg Kits

One of my favorite parts of any holiday is working my favorite cartoon characters into the picture somehow. There's always lots of cartoon candy and cartoon Easter Eggs to go around. One of the nice things about being so obsessed with Disney and in particular Mickey Mouse, is that people give me Disney stuff all the time. My mother-in-law found this old Mickey Mouse Easter Egg Color Kit at an antique mall and picked it up for me a few years back. This item was produced by SunHill Industries of Stamford, CT. There's no date on it, but I'm guessing it's from the early 80's based on the artwork and the Walt Disney Productions copyright on the back. (They changed their name to The Walt Disney Company in the later 80's.)
All the box contains is four standard dye tablets and the traditional "egg dipper". The Disney fun comes on the back of the box where you can cut out two pairs of nifty little Mickey Mouse Club hats for your eggs, and the two Egg Holders. At the most, you would have had two Mickey eared eggs and two more eggs sitting on the little cardboard rings. Still, a fun item and a reminder of more innocent times.

SunHill also produced these Little Mermaid Instant Egg Art beauties. Sadly, my ownership of this item does not come from a flea market or antique store. My mom recently found this tucked away somewhere from when I had bought it sometime in the early 90's. And yes, I made a batch of Little Mermaid eggs back then too. But these suckers were cool. This kit comes with 12 egg wrappers which are basically little plastic sleeves that you put the eggs into and then you dunk the eggs into boiling water for 3 seconds and the wrapper shrinks around the egg making very clear and pretty eggs with different characters from the movie. The package doesn't lie..."Prettiest Eggs in Only 3 Seconds!" Then when you cracked the egg the picture just came apart with the shell as if you had hand painted it on the egg! Very cool item! I remember taking some over to my friend Chris' house for dinner Easter night. I'm sure his parents and their other guests thought I was out of my mind!

Here's this years entry into the Disney Easter Egg Decorating Kit cannon. Cars and Winnie the Pooh were the only two Disney themed egg kits I saw anywhere this year! I found them at Dollar Tree of all places! These bad boys come to us from The Paper Magic Company of Scranton, PA. (Rivals of Dunder Mifflin, no doubt!) Here we get FIVE dyes and the bent coat hanger...I mean, egg dipper, plus we get 48 stickers featuring all the four wheeled friends from the CARS movie. The package also promises "9 Fun Tops" and a "Punch Out Drying Tray". The tray, is the box itself with little perforated circles that you can punch out on the back to lay your wet eggs in. The "Fun Tops" are the little cardboard circles that you punched out to make the tray. The box instructs you to "Punch out the circles from the back of the box and push a toothpick into the center, then spin like a top!" Wow...how lame is that? I'm sure our CARS eggs will impress the Easter Bunny though!

Happy Easter!

Happy New Year 2007

A new year, a new look for the Wonderful World of Blog! Hope you had a great New Year's Eve, ringing in the New Year with lots of food and beverages and tons of your friends close by. As for me, I sat on the couch and watched THE FOX AND THE HOUND 2 with my son. Good times!

However, it's not all happy times this New Year's Day. My current streak of making it to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida every year has officially come to an end after a seven year run! We had plans to go in December but when we called to book our trip, the entire resort was booked solid the week we had chosen. (It turns out they were filming the Christmas parade special that week.) We decided to stay away all together since it was obviously packed.

I was actually less than two hours away from WDW in May when we went to a wedding in Tampa. Believe me, the thought crossed my mind to take a quick ride over to Orlando and get a little Downtown Disney under my belt, but I didn't! I did make it to the World of Disney store in New York in June - which is owned by Disney Parks so that should count for something!

Anywho, hope you had a great holiday season and as always thanks for visiting!