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deadcactuswalking · 5 months

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REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 30/12/2023 (Christmas Garbage)

Content warning: Brief references to murder, racism and unlawful sex acts. Merry Christmas!

Yawn, it’s a Christmas episode. It’s not even Christmas anymore - the tracking week included Christmas Day. “Last Christmas” is #1, of course it is. Skip this one is my personal advice. Christmas Christmas Christmas. REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

Rundown

So, there are a few new arrivals today, but it’s also a week of mostly just festive music the week after festive music mattered so I’ll have a bit of a different approach, one I’m sure will be made up for with next week’s: Less than a fifth of this week’s chart are non-Christmas songs, I’m going to be mostly in chart nerd form rather than expressing much of my opinion, which is kind of how this series has been moving towards lately? Next episode will be the rush of new and old songs thanks to the end-of-year gains and Christmas collapse, so that will be more of a classic episode when it comes to dishing out intros and opinions on different genres and artists, the usual. For now, well, let’s just run down what we have here. Rounding out the top five are Brenda at #5, Ed and Elton at #4, Mariah at #3 and Sam bloody Ryder still hogging up #2.

Let’s continue with rounding up the Christmas songs. The songs entering the UK Top 75 for the first time this year in this week, but have already entered the top 75 previously, are “Cozy Little Christmas” by Katy Perry at #70, “Mistletoe and Wine” by Cliff Richard at #69, “Please Come Home for Christmas” by the Eagles at #68, “Santa’s Coming for Us” by Sia at #66, “Santa Baby” by Kylie Minogue at #64, “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses at #62 (one of my personal favourites) and “My Only Wish (This Year)” by Britney Spears at a new peak of #59, “Come on Home for Christmas” by George Ezra at #56, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas” by Perry Como at #54, “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town” by Bruce Springsteen at another new peak of #47, and “Christmas Tree Farm” by Taylor Swift at #46… and speaking of new peaks, “What Christmas Means to Me” by Stevie Wonder at #76, “Jingle Bells” by Meghan Trainor at #48, “Santa Baby” by Eartha Kitt at #44, “Little Saint Nick” by the Beach Boys at #43, “A Holly Jolly Christmas” by Burl Ives at #40, “The Christmas Song” by Nat King Cole at #34, “Winter Wonderland” by Laufey at #26, “Sleigh Ride” by the Ronettes at #20 and “DJ Play a Christmas Song” by Cher at #18, as well as Jorja Smith’s cover of “Stay Another Day” at #16 and “Let it Snow” (three times) by Dean Martin at #13 and finally, it took a while but “Santa Tell Me” by Ariana Grande reached the top 10 at #8.

I questioned the point in listing the notable dropouts - songs exiting the UK Top 75, which is what I cover, after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40 - since they’ll all be back next week but hey, if I can list a bunch of Christmas songs by dead people in succession, why not secular songs by those very much still with us? With that said, we bid adieu to that terrible cover of “I Wish it Could be Christmas Everyday” by “Creator Universe”, and then bid a probably temporary farewell to “Stop Giving Me Advice” by Lyrical Lemonade, Jack Harlow and Dave, “You’re Losing Me” (From the Vault) by Taylor Swift, “Surround Sound” by JID featuring 21 Savage and Baby Tate, “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims, “exes” by Tate McRae, “Northern Attitude” by Noah Kahan with Hozier on the duet version, “Runaway” by Ye featuring Pusha T, “Can’t Catch Me Now” and “vampire” by Olivia Rodrigo, “On My Love” by Zara Larsson and David Guetta, “Water” by Tyla, “Strangers” by Kenya Grace, “I Remember Everything” by Zach Bryan featuring Kacey Musgraves, “Cruel Summer” by Taylor Swift and finally, “Sprinter” by Dave and Central Cee. So, yeah, big bloodbath this week but one that involves a revival for the next.

So, time to “review”, isn’t it? We have some new arrivals, most of which are Christmas songs, let’s trodge through them.

NEW ARRIVALS

#74 - “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” - Dean Martin

Produced by Lee Gillette

So, firstly: I’m going to be getting the vast majority of my info from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, the Official Charts Company’s archive: it may sometimes be inaccurate or awkward in its formatting but I know charts well enough to notice when something doesn’t seem right - for the most part - or when it contradicts with Wikipedia or other sources. You can find the vast majority of this info elsewhere, I’m not doing intense research, but hey, it’s good to have a little backstory and that’s what most of this episode will be: stories. We start with a fictional one, that of Rudolph’s.

Now he may be a tradition now but he’s more recent than you think, pitched in 1939 by a retailer in New York known as Robert L. May. He’s a newly-created Christmas character that is a bit of wholesome children’s content with a good message, insanely basic character design and therefore incredibly intuitive marketing strategy. The song came 10 years after the character, and whilst Gene Autry probably recorded the most well-known version, it’s never charted in the UK. In fact, Dean Martin’s version, which debuts this year at #74 - it’s its first week in the top 100 even - is the first version to chart, despite American success of versions by Autry, Bing Crosby and even the Chipmunks and the Temptations, both inspiring 60s vocal groups. This 1959 cover from A Winter Romance, the same album with “Let it Snow” on it, is a completely fine, very cliché Christmas-sounding tune with a weird German accent for Santa’s dialogue. Whilst it may be somewhat surprising the song’s not charted, I do understand. I sang “Rudolph” as a child in assemblies at school, sure, but I’m a much later generation than a lot of the people listening to Christmas music this time of year in this country, and it’s always felt like a specifically American export, especially that stop-motion TV special that may have re-popularised the tune. The only other “Rudolph” song to chart is Chuck Berry’s 1958 classic, “Run Rudolph Run”, which peaked at #36 in 1964 and is currently at #49. When it peaked, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by The Beatles, another rock-and-roll classic, was #1. Mr. Berry of course would later go on to film women peeing, so maybe someone should make a festive rock and roll remix to “Ignition”.

#72 - “Carol of the Bells” - John Williams

Produced by John Williams

Spotify actually credits more than OCC does here: John Williams is listed here as he’s the only performer listed on the chart itself but on streaming services, the lead artist is actually Mykola Dmytrovych Leontovych, the Ukrainian composer for the song, originally arranged as a very non-Christmas piece “Shchedryk”, which I guess is still about Winter as when translated, one can read lyrics about how a swallow flies into a home promising wealth for the upcoming spring. It’s connected to a folk holiday in Ukraine celebrated on New Year’s Eve known as “Malanka”, somewhat similar to Christmas in its festivities but with a depth of its own traditions unique to eastern Europe, and it wasn’t even the intended holiday of Leontovych’s original composition, first performed in Kyiv in 1916. An American composer, importantly one descending from the Rusyns of modern-day Ukraine, heard the composition, which made its way to New York in the 1920s, and wrote English lyrics relating to Christmas though, interestingly, Peter J. Wilhousky is nowhere to be seen in the artist credits for this version, being relegated to a writing credit on Spotify.

There are many versions of this song but by far the most popular is the rendition by John Williams, an icon in film scoring who arranged the song alongside a children’s choir performance for the 1990 film Home Alone, which has aged pretty well - mostly because it’s practically just slapstick of a kid torturing these two idiots - and has become a Christmas classic, particularly in eastern Europe, where its release lined up pretty nicely with more lenient restrictions on western films, so it became one of the first western family films seen by many children beyond the Iron Curtain just as it fell, which does make the use of Leontovych’s composition come full circle in a way. Personally, I’ve always found this song a tad eerie and intense, but Williams’ version of “Carol of the Bells” is the only one to have charted in the UK, and it first reached the top 100 in 2018. Additionally, the main theme from Home Alone, “Somewhere in My Memory”, spent one week at #69 in 2019. The #1 that week was “Sweet but Psycho” by Ava Max, and John Williams has charted a few times with singles and many, many other times on the albums chart, for his work in film scoring. Last year, the Home Alone soundtrack made its very first appearance there at #100, and this year, probably assisting with the new peak of this song, the actor who played the boy Kevin McCallister, Macaulay Culkin, received a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the film itself was inducted into the Library of US Congress’ National Film Registry.

#71 - “Entrapreneur” - Central Cee

Produced by Chris Rich and Caleb Bryant

Alright, let’s cut the Christmas crap for a second as we do have a new song from Cench charting, and whilst Jeezy has made that awkward pun before, this is still a completely fine, maybe even pretty good, drill track with a very energetic performance from Cench here and despite some very odd mixing that makes the percussion feel stiff and the bass less present than it should be, I still think it hits hard amidst the soaring strings and keys at the back of the mix that is surprisingly dynamic at times, it almost feels like it’s going for a cloud rap vibe but instead of fully submerging the listener, Cench submerges any need for the instrumental by bringing a lot of charisma, some funny lines and a whole lot of triumphant flexing that given the motivation in his voice here and some genuinely likeable lyrics, actually feels pretty deserved. Sure, he sticks to the same flow, but it’s one that works and seems to serve his best interests lyrically as he can fit all of his wordy bars into it, so I’d say this is ultimately a success.

#67 - “Deck the Halls” - Nat King Cole

Produced by Lee Gillette

Another Lee Gillette production in the same week, huh, I guess the guy was the go-to for soulful Christmas tracks. I’m never going to complain about hearing Nat King Cole’s rich voice… except for this song, misspelled as “Deck the Hall” on Spotify, where it feels like everything’s a bit too fast for the guy, I almost feel bad. It’s a very spritzy and string-heavy song that just ends up too chintzy to give Nat King Cole any time. Hell, I’ll be honest - this one sucks, it’s way too busy and barely anyone could pull off this dead-on-arrival fa-la-la-la song anyway unless you’re a cartoon character but I haven’t seen the Animaniacs chart in my lifetime so this is a carol I’ve never preferred. As for this song’s chart history, this is its second week on the chart, and only this version has ever charted to my knowledge, debuting at #84 last year. That’s not to say people haven’t recorded and performed this song that aren’t named Nat King Cole because by God, they have, though not nearly as much as a song we’ll be talking about in a few paragraphs’ time. As for the original composition, it dates back to the traditional Welsh carol “Nos Galan”, which is actually about New Year’s Eve and both its tune and lyrics were written around the 1700s, but English lyrics by Scotsman Thomas Oliphant in 1862 brought us the carol we know today, so this one is a bit more historied than Rudolph, especially with popularising the now universal phrase of “’tis the season”. I don’t even like the slower, original Welsh version of this, it’s just a pestering little song to me. Never done well to my knowledge. Next.

#63 - “This Christmas” - Donny Hathaway

Produced by Ric Powell and Donny Hathaway

This is a pretty weird one because yes, this version of the song has never charted in the UK’s top 100 before. That much is true… but I have reviewed it, and in 2020 in fact, so dig up that old episode, right? Well, maybe not, because the only reason I reviewed it is because a Jess Glynne version charted that year, and it was an Amazon original version, that I ended up comparing to the original, one of my favourite ever Christmas songs, in complete despair and almost disgust. Hathaway has a buttery but unabashedly joyful voice, he came up with that iconic gleeful horn line and that clever, sleek title-drop in the verses, and like I said in 2020, lest we forget the bongos. It’s a detailed, beautiful song that was first released in 1970, with the B-side “Be There”, which is probably why OCC questionably lists this song as “This Christmas Be There”. Said B-side is the other holiday single tacked onto his self-titled album and whilst not as catchy or canonical, it is more of a melodramatic tune with just as many intricacies, it’s really an underrated gem to be honest. It took a while for “This Christmas” to latch on, only really resurging in 1991 when included on a reissued Christmas compilation record. It didn’t chart on the US Billboard Hot 100 until 2020 and has finally made it to the UK’s singles chart in its original form. The malformed Jess Glynne butchering made it to #3 in 2021, and “Last Christmas” was #1 that week too. It briefly returned in 2021 but only peaked at #52 that year and has not appeared again so I’m assuming the UK has come to their senses and made the correct decision about which one to enjoy from this year onward.

#60 - “Jingle Bells” - Frank Sinatra

Produced by Voyle Gilmore

It is a disgrace that Meghan Trainor’s version outcharts Frankie, but there is some solace in knowing Trainor’s version may be like Jess Glynne’s “This Christmas” and end up as a one-year-only success. It’s not like it matters though, “Jingle Bells” may be the most-recorded song in human history, and is definitely at least one of them, even though it was never explicitly about Christmas… though the song was originally titled “This One Horse Open Sleigh” so part of me thinks that James Lord Pierpoint, the song’s writer and Confederate soldier - yikes - had at least Father Christmas in mind when composing the jingle. Pierpoint even wrote music for the losing side in the Civil War and ended up on the opposing side of his father in the Union Army - Jesus, the less we know about the guy who wrote the song, the better, what a loser. Anyway, like 70,000 Goddamn people have dashed through the snow to get to the studio and record this track, so it’s safe to say the song has reached beyond its obscure writer at this point. It’s been broadcast from space, for God’s sake.

Sinatra, or more accurately Gilmore, extends the song with an unnecessary spelling section from a choir, but otherwise the 1948 recording is a lot of fun with a classic, swingin’ performance from Frankie as one would expect, especially when he has some fun with the cadence of the track, even if he doesn’t do it all too much. The song is such a staple that it’s been implemented into other Christmas standards for years, and not just “Jingle Bell Rock”, which I consider so separate to be its own song so I’ll wait for another cover of that next year before I get into that chart history, but also it’s a motif heard in Bing Crosby’s “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas”, the guitar… solo(?) in Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” and even Joni Mitchell’s “River”. As for the original, I mean, it’s been covered by everybody from Herb Alpert to the Beatles to the Barenaked Ladies to Barney the Dinosaur to Eric Clapton to Gladys Knight to Pearl Jam to the Wiggles to CBeebies’ Goddamn Alphablocks but the versions that charted are as follows.

The first version of the original “Jingle Bells” to chart in the modern chart was… a reggae version by Judge Dread, who if you know anything about him, is not exactly a wholesome Christmas artist, and of course, it’s actually a vulgar, laddish version using the melody to talk about having sex on Christmas with some girl. I’ve talked about Judge Dread on this blog before in my special episode from 2021 about songs banned by the BBC, in which I included a lot more of his story. To be completely honest, his version is a lot of fun, especially with how carelessly he delivers it all, and it peaked at #64 for two weeks in 1978, during which “Mary’s Boy Child / Oh My Lord” by Boney M. was #1. It’s currently at #51. In 1981, a novelty version by the Hysterics that lasts for only less than a minute and a half, peaked at #44 for three weeks. Subtitled “(Laughing All the Way)”, it is simply a guy laughing obnoxiously to the tune of the song as a cartoon-sounding pop-rock version plays under him. It is profoundly stupid. “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League was #1 during these three very cursed weeks in British history. In 2005, whoever the Hell was behind the Crazy Frog mashed up the song with “U Can’t Touch This”, which apparently warrants it a separate Wikipedia page, and it peaked at #5 whilst Nizlopi’s “JCB”, a personal nostalgic song for me, was #1. Another EDM version by Basshunter peaked at #35 in 2008, when Alexandra Burke’s cover of “Hallelujah” was #1. It’s safe to say that both 2000s Eurodance versions of “Jingle Bells” are cheap and ridiculous. Last year, Sam Ryder’s Amazon-exclusive version from an Amazon-exclusive Christmas film charted at #41 - “Last Christmas” was of course at #1 that week - and this week, we see both versions by Meghan Trainor and Frank Sinatra charting. He originally recorded it in 1948 but it only started charting two weeks ago. Oh, and of course, Batman smells and Robin laid an egg.

#58 - “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” - Mariah Carey

Produced by Walter Afanasieff and Mariah Carey

Mr. President, a second - okay, more accurately, third - Mariah Carey Christmas song has hit the canon… and I have no idea why you’d listen to this slightly-oversung, dull 1994 rendition over the Darlene Love original, which has a slightly similar story to “This Christmas” though arguably more organic. It wasn’t a single when added to Phil Spector’s Christmas compilation album - he would later murder a woman, of course - but the track, released in 1963 and featuring Cher on backing vocals, who would later cover the song as a duet with the surprisingly-still-alive (especially if she knew Spector, sheesh) Ms. Love, 60 years later - yes, that’s this year - on her own Christmas album. Sadly, that one didn’t chart but Carey’s instead. Love’s version gained popularity simply because in the late 80s, talk-show host David Letterman just liked the song and continued to invite her year upon year to perform it on his show, which is adorable.

In the UK, the original version didn’t chart until after Bublé’s - sigh - which didn’t last, peaking at #47 for two weeks in 2011 and briefly coming back in the bottom-feeder region in 2015. When it peaked, the #1 was “Cannonball” by Little Mix, and then “Wherever You Are” by the Military Wives and Gareth Malone, that year’s Christmas #1. Love’s version first charted here in 2017, though her other Christmas song, “All Alone on Christmas”, featured on the Home Alone 2 soundtrack - starring a man who I’m pretty sure James Lord Pierpoint would have voted for - peaked at #31 in 1992, during which the #1 was predictably Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”. “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” would eventually peak at #22 in 2018 and is currently charting at #31, whilst Carey’s version reaches a new peak this year after first charting in 2021, and with that, we are done with 2023’s Christmas episodes of REVIEWING THE CHARTS. Also, did you know U2 had a version of this? …Why?

Conclusion

This wasn’t really a conventional episode, was it? I can’t really fairly give Best of the Week out, or the worst for that matter, because these are songs I hold very few notable opinions on and spent most of the time just talking about their origins and their chart success. With that said, screw “Deck the Halls”, thank you for reading and I’ll see you next… year!

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #christmas music #frank sinatra #mariah carey #dean martin #central cee #nat king cole #donny hathaway

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tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons · 2 months

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Appendix D: Some Pig/One More Final

The first three posts in this series are here.

Undertale was a slightly postmodern children's fantasy movie produced by Jim Henson's Creature Shop in the '80s. Noah Hathaway played the protagonist, Frisk, who went on a long quest to escape from a magical prison inside Mt. Ebott; Frisk's father had thrown them into the mountain, known to be full of monsters, in an attempt to kill them. However, it's suggested that as a human, Frisk is inherently more of a protagonist than a monster can be, and has a vague sort of magical power over them. Toriel's death, which Frisk accidentally causes early in the movie, is commonly listed as a Peak Sad Childhood Moment.

George Orwell wrote The Writing In The Web, a political fable about a cult started by a well-meaning spider. E. B. White wrote Snowball's Farm, a whimsical children's tale about a farm whose animals decide to take over.

Infamously, Emmanuel Goldstein's monologue fills dozens of pages, takes at least three hours to read aloud, and brings the plot of Ayn Rand's 1984 to a screeching halt.

Short story collections and anthologies often keep the same title, author, and spirit, it's just the stories that are swapped out. For example, classic episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone include A Wonderful Life, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, Miracle On 34th Street, and The Sixth Sense. 1983's The Twilight Zone Movie includes segments based on classic episodes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (directed by John Landis and given anti-war themes), Cocoon, The Poltergeist, and In Search of the Twelve Monkeys (the original starred a young William Shatner). Candle Cove is an episode of Black Mirror.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a 1999 Ben Stiller comedy about a team of low-rent superheroes who theme themselves after public domain characters because they cannot afford licensing fees. The film was well-reviewed, but a box office bomb. It was actually the first film to use Smash Mouth's One Week - the One Week music video is actually cross promotion with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - and it would remain the film most associated with the song until Dreamworks' Happily N'Ever After hit theaters two years later.

The Amazing Digital Circus was a virtual pet game and toy line that struck when the iron was hot on that niche, before being bought out by Hasbro and rebooted a few times in different forms and mediums. Lauren Faust created a long-running television cartoon of it that was a huge smash hit with fandom culture despite the show's clearly very young target audience. The property's canon is all very light kiddie fare; the scariest thing about The Amazing Digital Circus is that for a brief and touchy stretch of time in the early 2000s, it was owned by the Peoples Temple, which was seriously considering turning it into a recruiting platform.

Your cringe unpublished works that you gave up on were almost certainly swapped around with other people's cringe unpublished works that they gave up on. There's lots of upwards and downwards mobility to the scramble, but not usually that much. Exceptions are very rare - like a beggar suddenly being made king, or a god being reincarnated into an ant - but they do occasionally happen. For example, what you know as the land of Oz exists only in the head of a young Milwaukee stoner, who suddenly came up with the idea for an epic graphic novel one day in the 2010s while sitting on the bus, and spent a couple of years absolutely convinced she would eventually make it. (She cannot draw.) Conversely, L. Frank Baum's children's fantasy series, Enormia, which has been adapted and reimagined many times, most notably as audiences' introduction to color film, exists in your world only as a different Milwaukee stoner's overly elaborate backstory for his jerkoff sessions. This kind of thing is much more the exception than the rule, and even such exceptions are almost always much smaller in scope - an obscure stillborn project getting swapped around with an obscure out-of-print novel, or an obscure direct-to-video z-movie.

The True Detectives forum and its many schismatic spinoffs, all of which are devoted to discussing mystery fiction, host literally thousands of Wind fanfics. Many of the writers - perhaps most of them - have never actually read Wind, just other fanfiction of it; next to none of the fics are worth reading. Most Wind fics reuse the original protagonist, Rorschach, but treat him as a generically relatable blank slate. The most common fic format by far is the "altdunnit", a form of what-if scenario in which the mystery that sets off Wind's plot is different in some way.

Rorschach is held by a substantial portion of the fandom to be an egg (a trans woman who has not realized it yet). Wildbow has never endorsed this interpretation, and it doesn't seem to be much on his radar. In recent years, the trans Rorschach portion of the fandom has grown; they don't tend to look especially kindly on Warn, much of which Wildbow wrote as a response to fans (like those on the True Detectives forum) he felt had been too inclined to take Rorschach's side in Wind. Flame wars over Warn's content were constant throughout its serial publication, and made it easily the rockiest experience of Wildbow's writing career.

Some noteworthy and relevant podcasts include Jonathan Sims' The Dresden Files, the Ranged Touch Network's Scott Pilgrim Made The World, Doof Media's Winding Down (later Warning Down), and the McElroy family's The Adventure Zone (an actual play podcast which has currently had three major campaigns, two anthology series, and various one-shots). Film Reroll is still an actual play podcast that runs the basic setups of movies (and occasionally other media) as short tabletop campaigns; occasionally, their version of a movie will be much closer to ours than it is to the version of the movie in their own universe.

Xenobuddy was an early childhood public access show, originally created for the BBC in the late 1990s but later aired internationally. The title character is a small alien puppet who lives on a futuristic spaceship staffed by children (who speak a vague conlang akin to a dollar store Esperanto). At the end of every episode, it gets lost and is found, usually by (harmlessly) bursting out of one of the children. It was very popular with its target audience and much loathed by parents. Edgy ironic fanart depicting the titular Xenobuddy as some kind of dangerous parasite abounds.

Static is a supernatural slasher franchise created by Wes Craven, with the first film, also simply titled Static, released in 1984. The movies concern a group of gibbering neotenous ogre-fae who wake up in the modern day after a long sleep, incorporate televisions into their bodies, and start eating people by sucking them into hellish pocket dimensions. The Screen-Guts collectively are probably in the top five antagonists most people think of when they think of slasher horror.

Toby Fox's ROSEQUARTZ is especially known for its meta take on video game morality systems. The game has a mission-based structure; throughout it, the player is encouraged to take on a pacifist playstyle, championed by the player character's late mother, the title character. However, the Crystal Gems give the player enough autonomy that you are entirely able to take a much more violent tack; doing so has a rippling effect on the game's writing in countless immersively-integrated ways. If the player goes out of their way to be as murderous as possible - the so-called "genocide route" - the differences from the main route grow much more extreme, and rather than gaining allies, you start to lose them, as the Crystal Gems realize what you're doing and one by one turn against you. If you manage to shatter Garnet - it's the hardest and most iconic fight in the game, Megalovania is playing, her Future Vision gets used for all it's worth - then you use your knife to slash at the cosmos, erasing Earth, Homeworld, and everything else. This, Toby Fox is saying, is apparently all you want out of a video game - another toy to break.

Warner Bros still did Space Jam with Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes, it's just that the Looney Tunes in question were Mickey Mouse and friends. They also still did a second one with LeBron James, which was, by God, somehow worse. They put Ms. Frizzle in it.

Walt Disney made his squeaky clean reputation on the back of adaptations of things like Rudyard Kipling's adventure novel The Call of Cthulhu, P. L. Travers' Thomas the Tank Engine, and Erich Kästner's feel-good coming-of-age kidnapping tale about the power of perseverance, Lolita, originally done with Hayley Mills and later remade with Lindsay Lohan.

Nabokov's extremely controversial literary classic that has defined the idea of the unreliable narrator is Father's Trap, from the perspective of a man who plots to obtain custody of both of his daughters for nefarious purposes. Most publishers ignored Nabokov's instructions not to depict the twins, Lisa and Lottie, on the cover. Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne have directed mediocre film adaptations, and songwriting team Lerner and Loewe did a musical that was a legendary flop.

The Japanese fashion movement is Gothic Pollyanna, after an otherwise-forgotten series of penny dreadfuls about a cute, cheery, rules-minded young girl who is, despite appearances, an insane criminal. Minor character Bonesaw in Alan Moore's Worm Turns also clearly hearkens back to the Pollyanna stock character.

The DEA was a prime-time soap opera about the ongoing "war on drugs"; it ran for eleven seasons from 1982 to 1993. Its plot focused on federal agents working at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and especially partners Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez and their families. It is mostly remembered today for its downer ending (in which the treachery of late-show villain Walter White, or "Heisenberg", gets the leads killed, and he escapes from justice), and for its far-more-acclaimed spinoff series Better Call Saul, which also ran for eleven seasons from 1993 to 2004, functioning as a prequel, midquel, and sequel to The DEA.

Between The DEA and Better Call Saul, Kelsey Grammer played crooked lawyer Saul Goodman for twenty consecutive years of primetime TV, first as featured comic relief and later as a leading man. (He also guest-starred on the mostly-forgotten Mall Cop, establishing that it, too, was set in the world of The DEA and Better Call Saul.) Better Call Saul won more than a dozen Primetime Emmys. Peri Gilpin received several of these for her performance as Kim Wexler.

St. Elsewhere was a film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan in the late 1990s; it was highly acclaimed and successful, and established Shyamalan in the public eye as a skilled auteur with an affinity for twist endings. The film's final scene reveals that its main setting, St. Eligius Hospital, exists entirely within the imagination of an autistic boy, Tommy Westphall, as he gazes into a snowglobe. The so-called "Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis", which posits that this same twist applies to most of fiction due to a network of crossovers, was invented by a Saturday Night Live sketch shortly postdating the film's release, in which an amnesiac Charles McGill (from Better Call Saul) wakes up in St. Eligius, attended to by a cast of characters who are more concerned with their own nonexistence.

After rising to prominence as a writer, storyboarder, and composer for Pendleton Ward's Science Time (where she established the Summer/Jessica relationship that would come to define later seasons), Rebecca Sugar got to make her own cartoon, Henry Ichor. Set in a recently post-apocalyptic but strangely cheerful world, Henry Ichor concerns a young teenage boy who is conscripted as a mech pilot due to his rare and innate ability to link to the powerful Evangelion mecha. (His preferred Evangelion is eventually revealed to be a form of his late mother, the reason he can do this in the first place.) Henry turns out to be a vital asset in protecting humanity from the monstrous "Angels" that frequently threaten it, and is surprisingly emotionally mature for his age. However, the adults around him (especially his father, Gennady) frequently push him too far, especially considering his generally noncombative and pacifistic nature. There is much interpersonal drama and much singing about it, with a very vocally trained cast. After several seasons of slow buildup, the show was forced to suddenly rush to its ending in only a few (infamous) episodes after an arc where Henry had a romance with an Angel in male human form. Henry Ichor The Movie and an ensuing miniseries, End Of Henry Ichor, helped bring the show to a more thematically satisfying conclusion.

Although he has played a creative or consultant role in many animated projects, Alex Hirsch is best known for the one he was actually the showrunner for, Disney Channel's smash hit Sunnydale. Focusing on a small California town constantly plagued by supernatural threats, Sunnydale generally followed a simple monster-of-the-week format, but kept audiences on the hook with teases at a deeper underlying mystery. The show almost didn't get a season two, as Hirsch found working with Disney very tiring, but he was eventually persuaded; season two ran through the rest of Hirsch's ideas at a faster pace, and concluded the show with the leads graduating from Sunnydale High.

For a brief historical moment, Daron Nefcy's show, Ender vs. the Space Bug Army, looked like it would become the successor to Sunnydale, keeping Disney Television Animation prestigious after Sunnydale ended. However, though Ender drew in a big crowd, and lasted almost twice as long as Sunnydale, it was not ultimately as well-received. EvtSBA is a children's space opera, wearing its Starship Troopers (Joss Whedon) inspiration on its sleeve, but also clearly copying some (superficial) notes from Philip Pullman. Set in a future where mankind has come into violent conflict with bug-like aliens, the show follows unbearably smug boy supergenius Ender as he is sent to military school to prepare for interstellar warfare. The show has an extremely cutesy and hyperactive tone; typical filler episodes include the one (generally taken as meta about fandom drama) in which Ender's siblings' futuristic internet arguments prove instrumental to the survival of the human race. Later seasons get a bit more serious, but focus heavily on shipping. The show is infamous for its ending, in which Ender, for his final exam, destroys the Formics' home planet and releases a psychic signal that eradicates the Formic race. Although the show explicitly notes that this includes many individual Formics who we have previously known as sympathetic characters, it is nonetheless played as a happy ending in which a hostile colonial power is defeated. Ender has ended the war; he has beaten the Space Bug Army.

"Meugh-Neigh. 'Meugh' like the cat, 'neigh' like the horse." "Does it mean something?" "No answer; none at all."

Orson Scott Card is an extremely prolific author of speculative fiction. Although it isn't as close to his heart as the Steel Gear series, in which he got to flex his military sci-fi muscles and allegorically retell stories from his faith, he is undoubtedly best known for Ishtar's Curse. Initially a short story and later expanded into a full novel, the plot concerns young Princess Ishtar, or Star, heir to the heathen fairy kingdom of Meugh-Neigh. (In later novels, she changes her name to Bethlehem Diaz, or Beth.) Spoiled and destructive but magically talented, Star is sent to twentieth century Earth so she can develop the wits and the strength of character to be a viable wartime leader for her people - or at least so she can be kept out of the way. After several years of personal growth and magical misadventures with companions she met on Earth, a more grounded Star devises a spell to erase the magic that makes up the bodies of most of her throne's enemies. This plan works, and merges Meugh-Neigh into the Earth as a small and ordinary European country. However, though her subjects are eager to celebrate her for this, Star is devastated when she realizes that she has killed trillions of innocent spirits, and, seeking to atone, she takes on the title of Speaker for the Dead (also the title of the book's first sequel). Although it's frequently ranked highly in lists of fantasy novels of the twentieth century, Ishtar's Curse has received some harsh criticism, with the standard line being that Star is an idealized fantasy of a repentant Hitler figure, and that the text presents excessive justifications for her actions. The story has also been called a reactionary response to Wilde's The Little Mermaid. After more than twenty years, a film adaptation of Ishtar's Curse was released in 2009, starring Dakota Fanning, to mixed reviews. The box office took a further hit due to a boycott campaign, after Card's views on homosexuality (and, relatedly, his membership in the LDS Church) became widely known. In the end, it lost the studio a lot of money.

Hideaki Anno is best known for the classic smash hit anime he made for Studio Gainax, Einstein Goliath Nestorian, a psychologically intense deconstruction of martial arts shonen like Yoshiyuki Tomino's Dragon Ball. Einstein Goliath Nestorian concerns a mystery man known only as Saitama, who finds that he has become dissatisfied with life and alienated from the world after only three years of training have enabled him to easily surpass any physical challenge. The original series is known for its sudden, surreal, and clearly budget-driven ending, although this was quickly alleviated with a similarly surreal but more definitive finale movie. Although many Western anime fans often think of Einstein Goliath Nestorian as pretentious and ultra niche, it was actually a huge mainstream hit in Japan, with a colossal franchise of adaptations, merch, and spinoffs (notably including a series of Retrain films, which began as extremely close shot-for-shot remakes of the original series but wound up spiraling into a very different updated timeline).

Previously most noteworthy for his 2003 visual novel Oreimo, Gen Urobuchi was tapped by Shaft for their extremely successful and acclaimed anime Ohayou Hana!, hailed as a deceptively dark deconstruction of the teen idol genre. The plot concerns a girl, Saionji Mayuri, who leads a double life, being of little note at school, out of costume, but spending much of her time as #1 idol Hana. Her mental stability begins to deteriorate as she realizes that the adults in her life - especially her father, himself a former idol - have groomed her to serve as a drugged and hypnotized propaganda mouthpiece for a shadowy conspiracy. She winds up in the worst of both worlds as her ensuing breakdown, and her handlers' response to it, destroys both of her lives and brings ruin to those she cares about. In addition to the popularity of the actual anime, many of its songs became decontextualized J-Pop hits. The idol anime genre would then receive a glut of edgy lesser imitators, like Love Live: School Idol Project, Cheetah Girls, and magical girl fusion Symphogear. Although the original Ohayou Hana! was a self-contained twelve-episode story, it received a sequel movie shortly thereafter, Ohayou Hana! Rebel!, which ended on a cliffhanger that has still not been resolved over a decade later. The upcoming Ohayou Hana! MK Ultra! is expected to get things back on track. An abridged series originating on 4chan, focusing on cropped screencaps from Ohayou Hana!, called the title character "Miss Ohio", producing the memetic tagline "being Ohio is suffering".

Zack Snyder first came up with the idea for Madoka around 2000, a long time before he'd actually get to make it; he put the project on hold in 2006 to make his adaptation of Worm Turns. He developed the idea with his wife Deborah and a cowriter, Steve Shibuya. Inspired by the Disney Princess phenomenon, as well as Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Cure (one of the few anime that had already become a hit in the States), Snyder wanted to tell a coherent story about fights between magical girls who could make anything happen, who could make any fantastical world or visual appear. In Snyder's film, we follow Madoka Kaname, a teenager attending a Catholic school in Los Angeles. Madoka and her friends are approached by a strange young woman who goes only by "Mommy", and her animal companion (a CGI-ed up squirrel-cat thing), QB. They offer to make the teens into "magical girls", granting them one wish each in exchange for a life devoted to spiritual warfare. (Another mysterious new girl, Lilly, urges them not to take the deal in the strongest possible terms.) This turns out to be a scam; QB is pitting the magical girls against one another for his own reasons, and in the end, every magical girl and her wish gets corrupted. Despite much of the film's plot being a horrific bloodbath - the MPAA demanded a lot of cuts to get it down to a PG-13 rating - there is a happy ending; Madoka finally makes her own wish and uses it to topple QB's whole system. Madoka isn't often discussed nowadays but it was a major discourse bomb when it came out in 2010, alternately being called misogynistic Orientalist trash and a subversive feminist masterpiece. Snyder, for his part, often notes that QB is intended as an allegory for exploitative forces within the entertainment industry that treat young women as disposable resources with an expiration date; this is already clear to anyone who's watched the film, which is not exactly subtle in its symbolism. He also explains that the film sexualizes the girls in an effort to shame the audience, to get people to understand that they are objectifying the characters in the same way that QB does. The soundtrack's got a really cool ethereal cover of Nine Inch Nails' King Nothing on it, which is probably the most remembered part of the film today.

Selena Gomez became a star by playing Violet Parr on Disney Channel's superhero sitcom The Incredibles. While the show was initially a very throwaway villain-of-the-week affair whose leads had to keep their powers hidden from the public and their caped escapades secret from the government for self-explanatory comes-with-the-genre reasons, it would eventually unfold that the show was set in something of an X-Men-style dystopia where superheroism had been outlawed and supers oppressed by the government as a potential societal fifth column.

Brad Bird directed one of Pixar's most celebrated films, Wizards of Waverly Place; it was Pixar's first film with a predominantly human cast. Disney was hungry for a fantasy property after losing a bidding war for the Luz Noceda rights. It had strong populist anti-eugenic themes, with an elaborate wizarding hierarchy of antagonists who seek to remove the Russo family's magic as part of an effort to curb wizard overpopulation. The sequel came more than a decade later, and wasn't nearly as good.

In addition to Worm Turns, Alan Moore is notable for the heavily metafictional comic Pagemaster, about a boy, Richard, who finds a magical library that contains all stories that have ever been or could ever be told; he becomes lost and imperiled in assorted pieces of historically noteworthy literature (initially ones in the public domain, though later volumes would start using legally safe serial-numbers-filed-off versions of modern stories). The 2003 film, in which Sean Connery played the librarian in one of his last film roles, is widely regarded as a terrible, deeply-toned-down adaptation that didn't grasp the tone or themes of the original story at all; it only covered the first half of the first volume, in which Richard meets "genre spirits" who wish to sort all stories into rigid categories. In a later volume, Pagemaster Millennium, an aged Richard Tyler, who has since taken on the mantle of librarian himself, meets a teenage girl, heavily implied to be Luz Noceda, who has also become lost in the library. She has become corrupted by an eldritch book, or "Necronomicon", written by "the Wrong Author", heavily implied to be the devil (and/or Hugo Astley, an Aleister Crowley caricature from W. Somerset Maugham's The Winged Bull). Flushed with demonic power and enraged by what she's become, a monstrous Luz tears through the library in a blaze of hellfire, seeking to destroy all of literature and the world. It is only through the intervention of the Fat Controller - heavily implied to be God - that Luz is defeated; he mercifully erases her by hitting her with a train, and laments what she became.

#queued post #the scrambled timeline #I tinkered around with the ordering of these entries so much that I guess this is a scrambled post for the scrambled timeline #credit to hieronymous-botch for the Alex Hirsch's Sunnydale idea #credit to Lorelei for the Orson Scott Card's Steel Gear idea

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