IBJoel

Gobear you are the winner of the Documentary pack! Please PM me your address.

IBJoel

I believe we have two more packs up for grabs. Recent Releases and a True Wildcard.

T-bone22

Opting in!

shadokitty

I wasn't able to count it, due to a power outage last night, but I caught part of a special on Fox News where they lit the tree in the studio plaza.

Trevor

Thanks IB and Joel! Got it last night and was pleasantly surprised at how many movies you sent and thankfully tamer than I feared it might be. I mean, it did contain A Serbian Film which I know will be rough, but all the rest looked very do-able and they will go into my April box for the Cult/B-Movie Challenge here. Got a DVD set of six old Django films, a bunch of MVD and Kino blu-rays, and even a 4K disc!

Gobear

Wow, thank you! PM sent.

Cardsfan111

Received the MVD pack earlier in the week. Thanks again, Joel! Very generous and every title included is something I haven't seen before. Anxious to check them out.

Mr Awesome

Started the Christmas viewing with old school TV specials off yore with Bob Hope, Perry Como and Dean Martin. Gonna do some Jack Benny and maybe next week dive into more of the "big guns" like rudolph and Christmas Vacation.

LJG765

I've been watching old TV shows xmas/holiday episodes. I've watched 2 Jack Benny ones. The first one was alright (Jack Benny being cheap in a department store buying Christmas presents), the second one (New Year's Eve, his date was canceled and he spent the night wandering) was better.

We also watched 3 Ozzie and Harriet shows tonight. Very clean cut and sweet, but a little too much. I've enjoyed them though. I have one more of those and a Liberace special left on the disc and then on to some older holiday movies from a disc I borrowed from the library.

Gobear

YouTube has a wealth of vintage Christmas shows, sometimes with commercials intact. I'm watching a Perry Como Christmas special and it's like a time machine back to 1985.

The Monkees

I'm very sad that Michael Nesmith, my favorite Monkee, has died. I highly suggest watching the Monkees Christmas Show as it shows Papa Nez doing a little bit of dramatic acting.

LJG765

I saw this earlier. Davy Jones was my favorite Monkee but I enjoyed them all. I can't believe that the band is down to one living member. I have the series, I'll have to watch this episode. I didn't remember that there was a Christmas episode.

Finished off the classic disc I was watching. The Liberace as a lot tamer than I thought it'd be. Music was great though!

The Monkees

I had the honor of meeting 3 of them (Mickey, Davy & Peter), I knew I would never meet Nez, I could have when I went to their concert in 2018 but the VIP ticket was like $380 or something and I just couldn't afford that (although I did end up spending $200 on the blu-ray set at the concert ). But, I got to see Nez 3 times live, twice with Mickey & Peter and then once with just Mickey. I also got to see them when it was Mickey, Davy and Peter and I saw Mickey Dolenz solo once and Davy solo once as well.

Needless to say, my username was no mistake, I am a MAJOR Monkees fan!

P.S. I was born on leap day (February 29th) and Davy Jones died on my birthday in 2012. That was great news to wake up to on my birthday.

LJG765

When I see your user name, I always smile because it makes me think of them! I never had the opportunity to see them in concert much less meet them. Hopefully they didn't disappoint!

I'm almost done with the episode and they still make me laugh! Also, I'm not sure how I totally missed it, but the kid, Butch Patrick, was not only Eddie in the Munsters, but Milo in The Phantom Tollbooth. I've like his major childhood acting credits without realizing that it was the same kid!

shadokitty

I too was saddened to hear of his passing. A family friend who is also a musician posted on Facebook yesterday that he planned to do a tribute when he did his show last night. He was not the only one who passed either. Jane Seymour said her friend Larry Sellers, who played Cloud Dancing also passed.

I've been recording a lot of the PBS Christmas specials this past week that have been airing on their pledge drives. And yesterday I watched a classic, A Charlie Brown Christmas ​​​​​​, on Apple TV +. I do miss the Dolly Madison commercials that would air on them as a kid though.

The Monkees

What kind of specials do they air? I mean, what are they about, are they documentaries?

mrcellophane

I got together with some friends to make Christmas cookies, play a game where we battled Krampus, and watch White Christmas. My friends lit a fire and opened a nice red wine while we watched the movie so it was a cozy evening.

shadokitty

Concerts mostly, but there are some other things, like Rick Steves, and there was a Christmas episode of Nature on last week called Santa's Wild Home.

Gobear

British historian Lucy Worsley's docs are all great, and her 12 Days of Tudor Christmas is airing this week on my local PBS station, WETA (DC). Here's the promo:

Gobear

Also, if you get MeTV in your area, tonight at 8 pm they are airing a 2-hour Christmas cartoon special.

IBJoel

MysterioMan007 you're the winner of our recent releases pack!

And jholmes you're our true wildcard winner!

Please PM me your respective addresses.

shadokitty

Thanks for the heads up. I have the cartoon classics set to record.

On another note, I got a DVD Mystery Box in the mail from Loved Again Media in the mail today, and got two eligible DVDs. Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer ​​​​​​, with a Destiny's Child CD single included as a bonus. Plus I got The Muppet Christmas Carol. Though I had always heard about that, I've never seen it.

Travis McClain

I hope you've gotten over your cold in the week it's taken for me to realize you drew me!

Travis McClain

Gotta be honest, I haven't really been feeling it as much as I thought I was gonna. I usually wait until Christmas Eve to get into adaptations of A Christmas Carol, but I've now been talked into syncing up with two different friends; one for the '09 (Jim Carrey) and the other for the '99 (Patrick Stewart). There are things I dig about every version, and there's a lot that I dig about both of those. Aside from the incongruous 3D horse carriage chase sequence, the '09 was refreshingly faithful. One of my favorite little touches is that in the main titles sequence, we see a blind man's dog pull his master away from Scrooge--something Dickens provides as an offhand example of how estranged Scrooge is from humanity, but rarely depicted. What makes this so delightful for me is that the other rare instances I can think of, it was shown prominently, if fleetingly. Here, it's just one element of many in an aerial tracking shot of the entire street. It's more of an Easter egg than anything else. The Ghost of Christmas Past doesn't match the constantly morphing non-corporeal entity Dickens described, but evokes the sense of that Spirit in a way I haven't seen elsewhere, even in animation. (I hate Carrey's exaggerated whisper voice for that Spirit, though.)

The '99 is my favorite screen version. My all-time favorite version in any medium is the audiobook that Stewart recorded, recreating his one-man stage show. I make a point each year to at some point sit down in the dark and listen to that. I tend to think of the '99 TV movie as much as a dramatization of that as it is of the original novel. I realized for the first time while watching it the other night that Scrooge never encounters the charity collectors on Christmas Day! It's such an ubiquitous plot point that I think my mind inserted it anyway, because I could hear Stewart deliver Scrooge's lines. It didn't register that I couldn't hear the collectors' lines spoken by either Saul Rubinek or Carroll Spinney!

Late last night I remembered that the original Ocean's 11 heist happens on New Year's right after the crowds in the casinos sing "Auld Lang Syne". It'd been quite some time since I last watched it, and it was every bit as fun as I remembered. Dean Martin really was cool as the other side of the pillow. It's impossible to overlook it as a document of the segregation of 1960 Las Vegas. I've poked around for a bit today trying to find some essays about that aspect in this exact film but I keep running into the same generalized pieces about Sammy Davis, Jr.'s overall experiences with such things rather than anything we might glean specifically from Ocean's 11. I don't recall Soderbergh's trilogy being set at the same time of year but I may as well revisit those films while I'm thinking about it, and I still haven't gotten around to Ocean's 8 so I guess that's what I'll be doing the next few nights.

LJG765

The Muppet Christmas Carol is one of my favorite adaptations of Dicken's story. It's a tad on the long side, but Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat are great narrators and I really like Michael Caine's Scrooge. Depending on the version you received, there is a deleted scene (a song) from the movie you might want to check out. Not my favorite, but it was in the theatrical film and then they removed it when turning it into DVDs/BRs.