I was pretty lit up by these shorts they were first on YouTube. There was a great shot at the start where a memory of the past is intruded upon by a present day bulldozer that made my heart leap in hope but the script was too punishing. The therapy scenes are dialogue to fill time and are nonsensical. All this perhaps fits with the AI autofill themes that the backrooms spaces evoke, they're a wrong version of our world…
Looking with friends for something "weird and older" that might keep a 7 year old's attention. He fought admirably through the first quarter to stay engaged before begging to be put to bed. They really hold all the big numbers until the end!
My Ned Sparks admiration is undimmed.
My dad taped this when it originally aired stateside on PBS. When Mickey's Christmas Carol aired one of these tapes was used to record it for my sister and I who were both single-digit young.
Not much later my sister and I were both allowed to stay home sick from school alone. We put on MIckey's Christmas Carol which, with its grave opening into flaming Hell, was already at the limits of what induced fear in us.
The Christmas special…
Some good puppets and a generous amount of the clever afterlife gags where everyone's method of death is apparent at a glance. Keaton is solid reprising the character but the jokes aren't so hot. O'Hara inexplicably middling. Ryder, Ortega, Theroux all very bad. MacArthur Park lip-sync climax undercooked to the point of amateurishness.
The original film is a weird miracle of wrongheaded inspiration: a sleazy cartoon ghoul is annoying to some people until a worm from Saturn eats him. That…
