Fun and Fancy Free – ★★½

Fun and Fancy Free

The framing device with Candice Bergen’s weird ventriloquist father takes off half a star from this by ruining Mickey and The Beanstalk. He wasn’t even very good at keeping his mouth from moving and half the time he did the dummies’ lines from off camera.

And according to Candice it sounds like he loved that puppet more than he loved her. (Which considering the puppet was in his will and she wasn’t seems like it might be true.)

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The Three Caballeros – ★★★

The Three Caballeros poster

Occasionally horny, often trippy, usually probably racist, but boy is it amazing to look at. The parts overlaying animation over live action are particularly great.

The Three Caballeros song (and reprises) are the only bits that completely worked for me, and that’s likely at least partially due to my great affection for the ride in the World Showcase at EPCOT.

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The Print Shop and dot matrix banners

I spent so much time messing with The Print Shop and my family’s dot matrix printer as a kid. I still have long printouts of my baseball card database upstairs in the attic somewhere too.

@shtunner Replying to @altheval Printing a banner for my music academy’s front desk! Using a Portable Commodore SX-64, The Print Shop and MPS 803 dot matrix printer! #asmr #80s #tech #retrocomputer #floppydisk #pixelart #retrogaming ♬ Cathode Girls – Com Truise

(via Nilay at The Verge)

Lost in Time (by A.G. Riddle) – ★★

Book front cover for AG Riddle's Lost in Time

I’ve listened to a bunch of A.G. Riddle books and enjoyed and/or really liked them. This one I just don’t know. While being a page turner and generally entertaining, it had some real problems I just could not get over.

Spoiler filled book review continues...
Lost in Time misrepresents how death penalties, criminal deterrence, human nature, society, the justice system, and the Supreme Court work all at once. I’m not sure if this is trying to be propaganda for capital punishment or just a careless misstep in the pursuit of context for the story.

The book constantly states the prisoners the “worst of humanity” despite also being a story about the judgement of innocent man and never once mentions that others our heroes blink out of existence maybe just maybe might also have been unjustly accused.

(Also, time travel stories are hard. So many examples of “I can’t do anything different without destroying the universe” comments while constantly making a bunch of huge and small changes.)

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Beetlejuice – ★★★½

Kids and I love the Beetlejuice The Musical cast recording so much that I finally caught up with this I maybe for the first time so I could see if kids would be ok watching. 

I think I might have tried to watch this when I was younger but thought it was too creepy. I certainly recognize bits and pieces. I was surprised how little Beetlejuice is actually in Beetlejuice. 

Definitely still to creepy/gross/scary to show my kids.

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