45 “Kids Will Never Know the Struggle”s

Kids today have it so easy! Here are 45 struggles from the old days that today’s kids will never understand






1.Old school cell/cordless phones

Five Things I liked in Santa Clause 3:The Escape Clause

And now for a challenge. As you guys know, I kike to take a bad movie and find good things about it. Since it’s Christmas, I knew the perfect choice for this. The problem? I really hate this one. But can I find five positives anyway? Let’s discuss:

 

I heard Tim Allen say that he was going to make this on The Tonight Show and my reaction was, what the heck is the plot going to be? Twelve years after the first movie, we got this unnecessary sequel, The second movie managed a premise that made sense. Enough sense anyway. This one was pushing things but to be honest, I was in on the premise. It sounded like a neat idea. Santa gets disgruntled and wonders if he should have ever become Santa at all. Ok, not original but it had promise.  It didn’t work out quite that way,

The Sets

With the stupid Canada joke we get a good look at the sets for the north pole here,and they are very well done. Of course the Hall of Snow Globes is amazing, and they did a real good job changing the set in the alternate tine lime so that it almost doesn’t even look like the same place.

Top 10 Home Improvement Christmas Episodes

I love Christmas episodes and some series really go above and beyond, like this one…







The reason I am focusing on this show is that it did something which was kind of unqiue. It managed a Christmas episode every single year. I was going to say this was the only show that did that, but there are a few others that did especially “The Middle” which I never watched. I thought it would be fun to go over these episodes and see which was better. Oh you may be wondering, if Home Improvement had 8 seasons how can this be a top 10? I’ll explain the two honorary episodes as we go.

 

#10.”No Place Like Home” (Season 6)

Ok ok, I have talked about this episode before and how awful it is. And not just as a Christmas episode either, it’s one of the worst episodes of the series. I honestly think they threw the Christmas elements in there because felt they needed a Christmas episode again. Even though Christmas is barely in it and it has none of the elements that make the other Christmas episodes so memorable. I think they meant the Thanksgiving episode that year to be the official Christmas episode in heart, since that episode mentioned the lighting contest and had a tribute to the old Rankin/Bass stop motion shows.

Christmas Movie Anniversaries in 2019

I spent a lot of time this year discussing some big anniversaries that happened to be this year. One area I missed was Christmas movies. And believe it or not, a few have notable anniversaries in 2019.


Let’s run them down:




Christmas with the Kranks-15th

Ok this isn’t the best Christmas movie ever made, by far!, but it’s still worth a mention. Where many films fade away (anyone remember Deck the Halls?) this one has managed to stay alive in people’s thoughts. Maybe because it starts Tim Allen? Flawed, but not as jaded as some other movies that have come out in the last 15 years that were really detestable.

Ten Memorable Coca-Cola Christmas Commercials

12 Movies About Santa’s Extended Family

Disney+, yes I have it too, has a new movie coming out with Anna Kensrick about Santa’s daughter. When Santa’s son disappears before he’s supposed to take over, she has to find him. Nice idea but…Wait a minute, when did he have children?? Yeah for about twenty years now creators have realized that they have done all the stories they could about our favorite man in red. Where to go next? His family of course!






One of the first was in the 90’s. CBS had a TV movie about Mrs. Santa Claus which was so boring it put me in a coma. And of course Santa Claus 3 had a plotline about Santa having a child, who we didn’t see until the very end. I can’t figure out exactly when it was but at some point people must have started to wonder, what if Santa had kids? Or even a brother or sister? And these days there quite a few movies out there abut that very thing. For some reason we just put aside how disturbing the idea of Santa having sex is, and accept the premise. I guess I gotta admire creators coming with something different, but like everything else Christmas related it’s been done to DEATH at this point. Are any of these good? Let’s check them out. And one rule here is that the Santa in the movie has to be the “real” Santa.







Fred Claus

This wasn’t the first, by any means, but I figured since it was one of the few that wasn’t made for TV I would mention it first. There are these two brothers, Fred is the troublemaker and Nicholas is the saint. And, well, hijinks. This isn’t considered a great movie, although Paul Giamatti does a fair job as Santa, and I’d be lying if I said I’d even seen it. From what I’ve heard I think I’ll keep it that way.

12 Favorite Product Placements in “Friends”

So I talked last time about how movies use product placements. Some worst than others. But with TV shows, this is not as common. Usually if you see a familiar product creators will block out a part of the product name so that they don’t have to pay royalties to anyone. One show that did not do this was…








Yeah Friends was awful with their product placements. Somethings are easy to ignore, like the characters drinking Poland Springs water. Others are more, obvious. I’d be here all day if I did a run down of all of them, so instead here are some of the more obnoxious one’s.






Operation (The One with the Candy Hearts)

An early but still worth a mention I think. They never even play the game.