I'm a shopper
I finally got my first summer school paycheck this week, and I did a little "just for fun" shopping this weekend.
I want to preface this by saying that I have been INSANELY good about not buying ANYTHING for myself beyond the essentials in the past three months, besides maybe $10 dollars a week in comic books or paperbacks. Other than that small luxury, money has gone to rent, food, and when I can fit it in, student loan payments.
DVDs
I picked Animaniacs, Vol 1 and Pinky and The Brain, Vol. 1. You know, it's nice when you revisit something and it's exactly as good as you remember it being. That doesn't happen often. When Filmation finally released He-Man to DVD, I dipped back into the well to find that the show, which was an absolute cornerstone of my childhood, sucked hard and long. I had some worries about these two DVDs, as I was an avowed fan of the characters on both shows and I didn't want to end up marring my memory of how funny the show was by being faced with the cold reality that the stuff you love as a kid normally does not age well.
I needn't have worried- both Animaniacs and Pinky and The Brain are just as good as I remember them, although Animaniacs a little moreso. I never quite warmed to the P&B spin-off series... but most likely that was because of timing. When Pinky and the Brain finally spun off from Animaniacs, I was well into puberty and not much interested. Immediately upon opening Animaniacs Vol. 1, I skipped right to my favorite short from the series: Meatballs or Consequences in which the Warner Brothers and Warner Sister meet the Grim Reaper.
I've seen this particular episode quite a few times, but they were all when I was in 8th grade. Watching it now with over a decade on 14 year old Chris, I was amazed at all the stuff sprinkled into this cartoon by the writers and animators. Death carries an hourglass on his belt, but he's also got a beeper. He reads from "Robert's Rules of Death", a detail that made me laugh out loud. They even do a vicious number on Bergman films- how many kids watching cartoons afterschool know a THING about Ingmar Bergman? Not many, I'd wager... I didn't.
I didn't give Pinky and The Brain as much of a viewing as I did the other discs... I only rewatched the Christmas special, and that's because I've always liked the P&B Christmas special. For awhile it seemed like The WB was committed to airing the episode every year around the holidays, which is probably the best and surest way to make something a classic. Air a holiday movie/TV show every damn year without making a huge deal out of it and eventually people get to the point where it becomes a tradition and they can't make it through Christmas without it. It's a slow process, but it yields HUGE results. Look at It's a Wonderful Life, a movie that was obstinently a flop on initial release... now revered as one of the greats of American cinema.
Anyway, my point is, both shows hold up brilliantly.
One cool note about both DVDs: I bought P&B from Target, but the store was completely out of Animaniacs. I asked one of the employees in the DVD section and he told me they were "sold out" and little else. Later that day I went to Best Buy and grabbed that stores' last copy of Animanicas... when I was being rung up by the cashier, she commented that she'd been working at Best Buy for a year and in that time she had never seen people go crazy for a DVD the way they had for this release. She said that the store sold out of the Animaniacs set TWICE, once on the Wednesday when they were released, and then again on Friday when they got a re-order. I think that's great news, especially considering the Internet scuttlebutt saying that Warner Brothers was avoiding releasing Animaniacs to DVD because it did not feel there was a sufficient audience for the show. This definitely gives me hope that WB will see this through and release all the episodes to DVD.
I also picked up Saturday Night Live: The Best of Christopher Walken. Walken's one of the classic SNL hosts... Lorne Michaels has even gone so far as to include Walken in the pantheon of "Hosts that Could Have Been Castmembers," a list which includes such luminaries as Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin, and John Goodman. Of all those actors on that list I think Walken is probably the weakest host... as you watch this DVD, you can see how much he relies on cue cards and fumbles when they're not in sight... but he's still amazingly funny. What's great about Walken is that even when he screws up, you can tell that he knows what people find funny about him. He gets that people like the weird line reads and overt staring that most folks work into their bad Chris Walken impressions, an he mines the hell out of that.
The Best of DVD is a mixed bag- it must be hard to cobble a lot of different stuff out of Walken's six appearances on the show. Most of those other comedians listed above have hosted a minimum of 8 times, and that doesn't even include special appearances that Goodman and Baldwin do every so often. As such, Best of Chris Walken is very heavy on The Continental, Walken's skeevy ladies' man character, which is incredibly funny once, but by the third time the character appears on the episode, you're sort of over it. Also, if you own the Best of Will Ferrell disc, you have two of the sketches already included on here- the Lovers sketch (or Love-AHs if you prefer) with Walken and the immortal Blue Oyster Cult/Cowbell sketch, in which Walken is merely window dressing for Ferrell's insanity.
There is one gem on this disc though, one sketch that made me glad I plopped down my $8 bucks... the Centaur Job Interview sketch. I think this sketch could be a litmus test for a certain type of humor... either you really really REALLY think this sketch is hilarious... or you're the type of person who likes Tim Allen movies.
CDs
I'm going to see that Revenge of the Book Eaters in a few weeks and I wanted to pick up at least one Sufjan Stevens album since he's going to be performing an acoustic set at the show. I'm about as far out of touch with the musical world as a guy can get, but I know that a lot of folks whose opinion I really expect were very into Illinoise when it came out, so I grabbed that.
I also grabbed the soundtrack to Little Miss Sunshine, which was sitting near Illionoise by virtue of the two songs that Stevens has in the flick. I had just read a great review of the album, and although I haven't seen the movie yet, I figured now was the time to give it a shot. I'm very much enjoying it.
I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I'm a fan of movie scores of all kinds. I don't usually write or draw to music with lyrics, as i find they stop me from what I'm doing. I can't even write with the television turned on, I'm so easy to distract. It started out as a small hobby and it's ballooned into an obsession- last year I paid $30 dollars for the out of print LP for the soundtrack to the Barry Levinson flick Young Sherlock Holmes.
At any rate, the Little Miss Sunshine album is one of the best movie scores that I've encountered since Michael Andrews' work on Me and You and Everyone We Know. Eminently listenable.
My impulse CD purchase was Highway Companion, the new album from Tom Petty. I've been listening to a lot of older Tom Petty stuff lately, so I figured I'd give his new stuff a shot.
Toys
Ok. Ok, I did it. I pre-ordered Series 1 and 2 of DC Direct's Minimates. I skipped Series 3 for now since technically none of these toys have even been released yet, and by December (Series 3's release month) I'll probably be able to decide whether or not I want to continue throwing my money away on this admittedly neat but somewhat embarrassing hobby.
And no, before you asl (because I'm sure you were going to) I'm not interested in much of the Marvel Minimates that make up Series 12 and 13. Series 12 is a run of X-Men done in the style of the Joss Whedon/John Cassiday Astonishing X-Men and Series 13 is a Bendis themed New Avengers run. I own most of those figures in one incarnation or another and I don't feel like shelling out the money for a new version of Captain America. I may by the Kitty Pride/Beast set as well as the Modern Luke Cage/Sentry set... but I haven't decided yet.
Grown-Up Stuff
..and just so you don't think I'm a total 5 year old, I finally broke down and bought a couple of nice wine glasses for the apartment. I haven't had anybody over drinking wine since Kate and I were hanging out but whenever it does happen, it's embarrassing. Wine has to be sipped from pint glasses, and I'd feel like a real loser about the whole situation. That being said, I was broker than hell and not about to go spend any money to rectify a problem that wasn't exactly pressing.
I also bought a bunch of stuff for around the house. Again, these were all things that I needed but could live without, so I simply didn't worry over until I had a bit of money. New shampoo and conditioner, a new toilet brush, garbage bags, that kind of stuff. I've been doing my household supply shopping from the dollar store when needs arose, so it was nice to be able to go and buy the garbage bags with draw strings instead of those 99 cent monster bags that fall apart when you look at 'em.
...I also bought a new tee shirt.
I want to preface this by saying that I have been INSANELY good about not buying ANYTHING for myself beyond the essentials in the past three months, besides maybe $10 dollars a week in comic books or paperbacks. Other than that small luxury, money has gone to rent, food, and when I can fit it in, student loan payments.
DVDs
I picked Animaniacs, Vol 1 and Pinky and The Brain, Vol. 1. You know, it's nice when you revisit something and it's exactly as good as you remember it being. That doesn't happen often. When Filmation finally released He-Man to DVD, I dipped back into the well to find that the show, which was an absolute cornerstone of my childhood, sucked hard and long. I had some worries about these two DVDs, as I was an avowed fan of the characters on both shows and I didn't want to end up marring my memory of how funny the show was by being faced with the cold reality that the stuff you love as a kid normally does not age well.
I needn't have worried- both Animaniacs and Pinky and The Brain are just as good as I remember them, although Animaniacs a little moreso. I never quite warmed to the P&B spin-off series... but most likely that was because of timing. When Pinky and the Brain finally spun off from Animaniacs, I was well into puberty and not much interested. Immediately upon opening Animaniacs Vol. 1, I skipped right to my favorite short from the series: Meatballs or Consequences in which the Warner Brothers and Warner Sister meet the Grim Reaper.
I've seen this particular episode quite a few times, but they were all when I was in 8th grade. Watching it now with over a decade on 14 year old Chris, I was amazed at all the stuff sprinkled into this cartoon by the writers and animators. Death carries an hourglass on his belt, but he's also got a beeper. He reads from "Robert's Rules of Death", a detail that made me laugh out loud. They even do a vicious number on Bergman films- how many kids watching cartoons afterschool know a THING about Ingmar Bergman? Not many, I'd wager... I didn't.
I didn't give Pinky and The Brain as much of a viewing as I did the other discs... I only rewatched the Christmas special, and that's because I've always liked the P&B Christmas special. For awhile it seemed like The WB was committed to airing the episode every year around the holidays, which is probably the best and surest way to make something a classic. Air a holiday movie/TV show every damn year without making a huge deal out of it and eventually people get to the point where it becomes a tradition and they can't make it through Christmas without it. It's a slow process, but it yields HUGE results. Look at It's a Wonderful Life, a movie that was obstinently a flop on initial release... now revered as one of the greats of American cinema.
Anyway, my point is, both shows hold up brilliantly.
One cool note about both DVDs: I bought P&B from Target, but the store was completely out of Animaniacs. I asked one of the employees in the DVD section and he told me they were "sold out" and little else. Later that day I went to Best Buy and grabbed that stores' last copy of Animanicas... when I was being rung up by the cashier, she commented that she'd been working at Best Buy for a year and in that time she had never seen people go crazy for a DVD the way they had for this release. She said that the store sold out of the Animaniacs set TWICE, once on the Wednesday when they were released, and then again on Friday when they got a re-order. I think that's great news, especially considering the Internet scuttlebutt saying that Warner Brothers was avoiding releasing Animaniacs to DVD because it did not feel there was a sufficient audience for the show. This definitely gives me hope that WB will see this through and release all the episodes to DVD.
I also picked up Saturday Night Live: The Best of Christopher Walken. Walken's one of the classic SNL hosts... Lorne Michaels has even gone so far as to include Walken in the pantheon of "Hosts that Could Have Been Castmembers," a list which includes such luminaries as Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin, and John Goodman. Of all those actors on that list I think Walken is probably the weakest host... as you watch this DVD, you can see how much he relies on cue cards and fumbles when they're not in sight... but he's still amazingly funny. What's great about Walken is that even when he screws up, you can tell that he knows what people find funny about him. He gets that people like the weird line reads and overt staring that most folks work into their bad Chris Walken impressions, an he mines the hell out of that.
The Best of DVD is a mixed bag- it must be hard to cobble a lot of different stuff out of Walken's six appearances on the show. Most of those other comedians listed above have hosted a minimum of 8 times, and that doesn't even include special appearances that Goodman and Baldwin do every so often. As such, Best of Chris Walken is very heavy on The Continental, Walken's skeevy ladies' man character, which is incredibly funny once, but by the third time the character appears on the episode, you're sort of over it. Also, if you own the Best of Will Ferrell disc, you have two of the sketches already included on here- the Lovers sketch (or Love-AHs if you prefer) with Walken and the immortal Blue Oyster Cult/Cowbell sketch, in which Walken is merely window dressing for Ferrell's insanity.
There is one gem on this disc though, one sketch that made me glad I plopped down my $8 bucks... the Centaur Job Interview sketch. I think this sketch could be a litmus test for a certain type of humor... either you really really REALLY think this sketch is hilarious... or you're the type of person who likes Tim Allen movies.
CDs
I'm going to see that Revenge of the Book Eaters in a few weeks and I wanted to pick up at least one Sufjan Stevens album since he's going to be performing an acoustic set at the show. I'm about as far out of touch with the musical world as a guy can get, but I know that a lot of folks whose opinion I really expect were very into Illinoise when it came out, so I grabbed that.
I also grabbed the soundtrack to Little Miss Sunshine, which was sitting near Illionoise by virtue of the two songs that Stevens has in the flick. I had just read a great review of the album, and although I haven't seen the movie yet, I figured now was the time to give it a shot. I'm very much enjoying it.
I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I'm a fan of movie scores of all kinds. I don't usually write or draw to music with lyrics, as i find they stop me from what I'm doing. I can't even write with the television turned on, I'm so easy to distract. It started out as a small hobby and it's ballooned into an obsession- last year I paid $30 dollars for the out of print LP for the soundtrack to the Barry Levinson flick Young Sherlock Holmes.
At any rate, the Little Miss Sunshine album is one of the best movie scores that I've encountered since Michael Andrews' work on Me and You and Everyone We Know. Eminently listenable.
My impulse CD purchase was Highway Companion, the new album from Tom Petty. I've been listening to a lot of older Tom Petty stuff lately, so I figured I'd give his new stuff a shot.
Toys
Ok. Ok, I did it. I pre-ordered Series 1 and 2 of DC Direct's Minimates. I skipped Series 3 for now since technically none of these toys have even been released yet, and by December (Series 3's release month) I'll probably be able to decide whether or not I want to continue throwing my money away on this admittedly neat but somewhat embarrassing hobby.
And no, before you asl (because I'm sure you were going to) I'm not interested in much of the Marvel Minimates that make up Series 12 and 13. Series 12 is a run of X-Men done in the style of the Joss Whedon/John Cassiday Astonishing X-Men and Series 13 is a Bendis themed New Avengers run. I own most of those figures in one incarnation or another and I don't feel like shelling out the money for a new version of Captain America. I may by the Kitty Pride/Beast set as well as the Modern Luke Cage/Sentry set... but I haven't decided yet.
Grown-Up Stuff
..and just so you don't think I'm a total 5 year old, I finally broke down and bought a couple of nice wine glasses for the apartment. I haven't had anybody over drinking wine since Kate and I were hanging out but whenever it does happen, it's embarrassing. Wine has to be sipped from pint glasses, and I'd feel like a real loser about the whole situation. That being said, I was broker than hell and not about to go spend any money to rectify a problem that wasn't exactly pressing.
I also bought a bunch of stuff for around the house. Again, these were all things that I needed but could live without, so I simply didn't worry over until I had a bit of money. New shampoo and conditioner, a new toilet brush, garbage bags, that kind of stuff. I've been doing my household supply shopping from the dollar store when needs arose, so it was nice to be able to go and buy the garbage bags with draw strings instead of those 99 cent monster bags that fall apart when you look at 'em.
...I also bought a new tee shirt.