I have not yet finished a single holiday film this month. I've started like a dozen, but usually it's with my kids, and that means I get called out of the room constantly to make food, do dishes, mediate fights, etc. Hoping I'll finally see something all the way through once vacation begins!

I watched the live action Lady and the Tramp last night with the wife on Disney+, and as it starts and ends on Christmas I think it counts. I was never huge on the original, and my wife never even saw it but I thought the remake was pretty solid and I thought the song they used instead of "We are Siamese" was actually pretty funny. I think my favorite part was the making of the movie documentary at the end, they used real dogs for most of the scenes and only animated the faces, and whats more all the dogs were shelter dogs and they all found homes after filming wrapped...mostly with the cast and crew!

While wrapping presents today I gave myself a very Muppets Christmas!

I started with 1977's Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas, which is a great take on the Gift of the Magi with your typically heart warming Muppet songs. What makes it more interesting however is that this was Henson's first experiment with fully platformed sets which allowed them to film the Muppets in more angles than ever before, giving the special a much more naturalistic and cinematic look with out which we wouldn't have gotten the 1979 Muppet Movie or films like the Labrynth or the Dark Crystal.

This next one I had to watch, ahem, illegally as the original recording my parents made of it is unavailable to me and after all these years it still hasn't had a proper DVD release with all the music:

This 1987 special isn't anything fantastic plot-wise, involving the Muppets traveling to Fozzy's mom's house for Christmas only to find she's skipped town to Malibu and rented out her house to some strange characters(Doctor Teeth and company, plus some of the seseme street cast) but it is cool in that it brings all the various Muppet Productions under one roof, even including the Fraggles and the Muppet Babies.

And I ended my day with 1992's The Muppet Christmas Carol which I saw with my Dad and little Brother in the theater on Christmas eve. It's a pretty great adaptation of that perennial Dickens Classic, giving us perhaps the best version of the Ghost of Christmas Present and I love the songs.

Catching up.

Have watched Magoo's Christmas Carol; Alastair Sims' version; Patrick Stewart's version; Reginald Owens' version; the Muppet version and Seymour Hicks' 1935 version.

Watching any Dickens movie, but especially Carol is like watching and comparing Shakespeare productions. What did they cut? What did they add? When does Scrooge start to change.. early on (Owens)? A bit later (Sim)? Not until the last possible moment (Scott?)

Magoo goes with Christmas Present first, I think b/c they wanted an upbeat musical number to end the first act.

I love the way "Barbara Allen" weaves its way through the Sim version.

Ignorance and Want are particularly fearsome in the Scott version. I love how Present ages in that one, too.

Richard Grant is a superb Bob Cratchitt in the Patrick Stewart version.

The opening of Hicks' and, for that matter, Sim's versions almost qualify as films noir. London never looked darker, damper, or more choked with factory smoke.

Meet John Doe, Christmas in Connecticut and Wonderful Life are on the docket. Doe is not really a Christmas movie, but it is. And it gets scarier and scarier every time I see it nowadays.

With leaving work early Tuesday and Christmas day spent at home alone, it was plenty of eats, drinks (hot tea, cocoa, hot apple cider) and movie watching. Tuesday was Muppets Christmas Carol, Mickey's Christmas Carol, Rudolph and Year Without a Santa Claus (love me some Mizer bro's) for my annual Rankin Bass holiday fix. Christmas day slept in a bit (hey, every minute counts when you can roll over and doze for another 5-10 minutes) and cinnamon rolls bathing in butter with hot blueberry tea to watching The Man who Invented Christmas with a sublime Christopher Plummer Scrooge. After that it was on to The Nutcracker and the Four Realms as I cooked up Christmas lunch/dinner. 

Had a short nap before sitting up late for watching Albert Finney's musical Scrooge on the MoviesTV HD channel. And that winds up my Seasonal viewing for awhile. Back to enjoying whatever happens to pop up on my free TV HD channels and whatever I should to pluck from the DVD shelves in the living room. Plenty of 1950's westerns to yet view as over the summer had bought up the Warner Bro's archive collection's of Tim Holt (4 volumes) and the RKO Monogram Cowboy collections (9 volumes) along with 2 DVD sets of George O'Brien westerns. Add in he Walmart $5 bin finds that always occur and 2020 shall have lots of movie pleasure.

Didn't brutalis win with 21?

I was robbed I say, robbed son! Are you listening to me boy?