Okay, so the last few days were the specials of my childhood. Things that really resonated with me and always bring back a bit of the past. But now it's time for something more fun. For you see, as I grew older, Christmas specials didn't stop. No. They just got better. Bolder. Sexier. We all know A Charlie Brown Christmas or Garfield Christmas. Everyone watches It's a Wonderful Life or Frosty the Snowman. But how many remember that magical time when Johnny Bravo teamed up with Donny Osmond to save Christmas? Yes, as a young man and still as a... less young man... I love Johnny Bravo. So when the Christmas special rolled around, I was hooked. It's funny. It's clever. It even throws back to an old Johnny Bravo episode where Johnny KO'd Santa by accident (and I believe that episode was narrated by Adam West, so... bonus!) Look. You can have sentimental specials. You can have silly stuff, too. But right there, in the creamy nougat center of the holiday is a special place that only Johnny Bravo can fill. So take a little taste from this clip and, if you're brave enough, follow the link below to see the whole thing. It's a worthy addition to your Christmas rotation. DFTBA A Johnny Bravo Christmas < ---- Click here for the full episode on Daily Motion.
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Okay, I knew this moment would come. If I'm honestly reviewing all my favorite holiday classics and sharing them with you, there's one I have to touch on and, apparently, it's become a hot button issue this year. This is the time we live in. I'm sure you've deduced that I'm talking about the Rankin/ Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Now, let it be known, I'm very aware as an adult that there's something wrong with the story, especially if you sum it up. It's the story of an outcast that everyone hated until he was useful. He's verbally abused by his peers, by his family, and it's been a while, but I'm pretty sure Santa wasn't innocent in the whole affair. At the very least, he had to be aware of it and was, therefore, complacent in the whole thing. But let's look past that. Lots of good stories deal with being an outcast. With people being jerks. I mean, that's kind of life. Is it messed up what happened to Rudolph? Yes. But it's messed up that the wicked neighbor lady was going to have Toto put down. Wait... that's an old one, too. I'm sensing a pattern here. Okay, point is, terrible stuff happens, but all in all, I don't think it sends a bad message. I think it's pretty realistic. People (or reindeer as the case may be) can be complete jerks. The world is unfair. And often times, yes, you're only valued when you have something to contribute. But all of that, all the stuff that happens to Rudolph is nothing. You want to know what the real tragedy of this beloved Christmas classic is? The elves straight up murder a toy. The video should start at 57 seconds in. What you're seeing is an elf taking out a doll, giving it an umbrella, then tossing it over. Then repeating this for the elephant. But the bird. If you don't remember the movie or haven't seen it, that's "the bird that doesn't fly." That's why he's a misfit toy. He swims! That elf straight up tosses him out and waves goodbye. Cold blooded. That is what we should be talking about.
DFTBA Growing up, we had three, maybe four VHS tapes that we pulled out just for Christmas. All year long they'd sit in the entertainment center, filed away behind old WWF Saturday Night Main Events and a few Saturday morning cartoon blocks (Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures was an amazing cartoon.) The one that everyone loved, though, the Christmas special that got my mom and my dad both chuckling was what they had decided to label Kermit and Fozzy Christmas. I was in my twenties when I learned it was actually called A Muppet Family Christmas. I was also in my twenties when I learned that the TV version had cut off the first ten minutes or so. Much like Garfield, it was eye opening. I love this special. The Muppets are incredible in any capacity (I loved the new Muppet show on ABC. Fight me!) but this... it was special. The original voice cast... the inclusion of not only all the main Muppets but the Sesame Street Muppets and even the freakin' Fraggles! This might have been where I first learned to love crossovers. This special has it all. Singing. Hilarity. Tension. Romance. And of course the Swedish Chef trying to cook Big Bird for Christmas dinner. It's the whole package! So please, like Garfield, if you can find it, watch A Muppet Family Christmas. I'm just going to leave this innocent, non-related YouTube video right here, though. DFTBA So the worn out VHS tape that had Will Vinton's Claymation Christmas Carol had one other thing on it. Well... maybe a couple others. There were a ton of commercials from the '80s that I'll never forget (It's a good time... for the great taste... of McDonald's!) but beyond that, it had Garfield. The Garfield Christmas special always held a special place in my heart. I was so downtrodden as an adult to learn that I had lost that tape, but fortunately, YouTube is a thing. Even better? YouTube apparently had scenes that were cut out of the TV version my parents taped. Imagine watching a special you knew like the back of your hand, something you watched every year for your entire childhood, just to bump into new stuff. Yeah. Blew my mind. But more than that, it, like the Claymation special, brought me back to my childhood. I'll never had another Christmas with my mom and dad again. I'll never hug my little puppy Lucky and stare at presents in my mom's living room again. But for twenty minutes, I can recapture an ember from that Christmas flame of my youth. Garfield. I loved the cartoon. I loved the special. I loved songs, the characters, the flawed logic... it was amazing. If you can find a legitimate copy, watch it. If not... I mean... YouTube is still a thing. So please, visit my childhood with me. Be Excellent to Each Other Second day of keeping holiday spirits bright. If you didn't see yesterday's post, here's the Reader's Digest: Christmas has been depressing for years and now I want to smile again. Caught up? Good. So today I wanted to share another piece of my childhood Christmas. Something that I looked forward to every year, something that my family would dig out every December. I think my mom more or less tolerated it, but my dad... he loved it. He was visibly excited when it was time to look through all the VHS tapes and find the old holiday special tape. There were two things on the tape. I'll share the second one later (maybe), but the main, most unique one, was Will Vinton's Claymation Christmas Carol. Or as we always just called it, Claymation Christmas. It was a beautifully funny stop-motion special that explored a handful of Christmas carols, with my favorite as a child being the California Raisins performing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. As I've grown older, I've grown to appreciate the other songs more and more, and most especially the banter between the two hosts, Red and Herb (a red T-Rex and a blue Triceratops.) I've decided to include a small taste of the special, one of my favorite songs, but if you have the chance and can find it, make sure you watch the whole thing. The banter between the hosts makes the special all that more... er... special! So, please enjoy with me this little taste of my childhood Christmases. DFTBA Okay, it's Christmas and normally this is where I might get a little melancholy and relate all the reasons the season doesn't feel as magical as it once did. A huge chunk of that is the loss of my parents over this past decade, but, you know, as I sit thinking about that, I remember how much they both loved Christmas. I remember how fun the times with them were. And you know what else? They wouldn't want me to be so somber and depressed. So I'm going to focus this next week on feeling the spirit of the holidays. All the great Christmas movies, putting up a stocking, singing songs... the works. It's not the same, and I know it never will be again. But it's okay for me to enjoy it. So you know what? I'm going to share some things of the next week or so. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not (I'm not actually religious, but I absolutely love Christmas!) I hope I can share a few things that might put a smile on your face. Does it have anything to do with writing? Not really. But we all need to recharge and reinvigorate ourselves from time to time, else that writing spirit is going to suffer. So I'll start off this little celebration with a new song I can't stop laughing about. Everyone knows the controversy with Baby, It's Cold Outside, right? Some people are claiming the song promotes predatory behavior. I'm not weighing in one way or the other, but I will say that this song I'm about to share is the perfect response to this whole thing. Take this as a non-Paladin Paladin Playlist. Please enjoy Baby, Just Go Outside. DFTBA I recently listened to an episode of Writing Excuses (if you're a writer and you don't listen to them, get on it!) and they had a strangely titled show; The Unsexy Side of Space. The gist of it is they interviewed two people who work at NASA but aren't astronauts. One was an accountant and the other worked with some kind of logistics that was completely behind the scenes. The point was to demonstrate that there are levels upon levels of people that work to bring things together.
Listening to them talk, it was fun to hear stories about hiding funds from managers so there would be money left in case something broke or renting out space in the pool where they do neutral gravity tests to an outside company to help pay for rent on the building. There are so many facets to running a huge organization like NASA that you don't think about and all of them are important for the end goal to be had. One of them pointed out how important it was to keep things on budget when the project leaders threw money at everything that was brought their way. They mentioned that sometimes the windows for missions were minuscule, days sometimes, and if that window was missed because a part broke and there were no funds to repair it, they might not get another chance for fifteen years. Fifteen. Years. Just because someone wasn't wise about their spending. It got me thinking. I've got a government agency within The Paladin that operates on a not too dissimilar model. There are the paladins who go out and hunt monsters, but they're supported by a crew of dozens, even hundreds of masons, regular people who know about the monster world but aren't cut out to hunt demons. These people contribute in more mundane ways, from simply offering a coffee shop after hours for a paladin to meet in to coordinating paladin parishes across the state. They're in the community, as police and EMTs, and back at base as librarians and custodians. I wonder then - since I'm looking for something to write about at the moment - would there be any interest in a story exploring the lives of these masons? I know the mason that gets the most attention in the book, Katie, seems to be popular among my betas. Still, would seeing people living in a world of werewolves and vampires but never directly interacting with them be interesting? I'd love to hear your thoughts, so please, feel free to leave a comment below or hit me up on social media. In the mean time, enjoy a picture of my favorite mason from my favorite artist. Ciao! DFTBA With all the words I apparently need to cut from The Paladin, I'm wondering if rewriting from scratch with the current manuscript as a guide is more advisable than a line by line edit. So much has to go to meet that word count cut off that I'm going to be losing a lot of little details, details that will kill proper continuity if they aren't managed correctly.
And yet, the prospect of rewriting the entire manuscript, word by word, chapter by chapter is daunting. It feels like so much time was or will be wasted. I know I can more or less copy and paste whole sections, but... I don't know. It's just discouraging to think of how many years I've been working on this, how many edits I've made, how many versions beta readers have gone through (and liked!) all to just start over with a blank page. I know it's not like I'm losing the manuscript either way. All that work isn't gone and nothing is lost. But there's a psychological wall, a barrier that's hard to surmount in the form of a blank page. If this was a new story, I'd be jazzed at the blank page. But for the seventh time rewriting The Paladin, I just don't know. Really, this is all just a vent. One way or the other, I'm going to need to do some heavy word cutting and probably a decent amount of editing. That'll necessitate a whole new round of beta readers to make sure the version actually stands up. Which means if I decide on this route, it could be months or even a year before I send out my next query letter again. But that's what I have to do, I suppose. I want to see this published and if agents won't look at it as is, I need to be ready to modify it. Does that mean I'm compromising something as an artist? I don't know. Edits are part of the process. They're good. No one worth their salt every put out a first draft. But I wonder if the Tolkien we read today was his seventh draft... DFTBA Another day, another set of queries sent out. I'm beginning to think I just wasn't cut out to market myself. Did you know I can't even properly sum up my own novel to people without thinking long and hard about it?
This isn't a matter of a poor story (I hope not!) but more that I, personally, seem to have trouble keeping track of things. I'd had to talk to my betas and there's definitely a theme. Thankfully the PitchMad competition helped me figure out what the core message of my novel was so now I feel like my query is slightly more accurate. Still, the more I stare at my own synopsis and query, the more I doubt my work. This isn't unique to me by any means. It's just a writer thing. It's hard to know if we're good or bad because all writers go through a stage of hating their work. Well... most. Some stumble bass-ackwards into three movie contracts after writing their story on a Blackberry. But I digress. The point is, I know that worse books than mine have been published and been a success. I just need to find an agent that shares my vision and can champion my novel. Heh... I'm starting to use their lingo. The rejection letters have accumulated enough that I'm starting to see the pattern in their word choices, the careful way of saying that they aren't interested without insulting your novel. Again, though, I need to keep in mind that this is natural. I'm supposed to wade through a sea of agents before finding the right one. Apparently JK Rowling couldn't get a second glance from her queries until one agent's daughter got a hold of her stuff and, more or less, yelled at her father to represent it. But I can't could on luck like that. Everything's digital now, anyhow, so the chances of accidentally falling into a child's hands is terribly unlikely. I just need to gain more confidence in my work. I need to be my own champion and push forward, letting agents know that they'll love this book as much as I do. Which, as someone who grew up with low self-esteem, is a very awkward and uncomfortable thing to do. But I said I'd do anything to become a published author. That means stepping out of my comfort zone to do something for the better. I did it when I went to the Netherlands to study. I did it when I built a pro wrestling organization from the ground up. I can do it with my book. I will do it with my book. Be Excellent to Each Other. Ah, here's an old one for you. I'm sure everyone's heard Duran Duran sing Hungry Like the Wolf, but have you heard the cover from Reel Big Fish? I'll admit that's the version I heard first and, frankly, I like it better. Sure there's some bias in there and yes, this was in the early days of the internet and I might have heard it paired alongside a Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro music video, but that doesn't take away the fact that I absolutely love this song. In fact, it helps me a bit with one of my characters... and possibly a specific scene in an upcoming story with them. This version is far more upbeat. There's a presence to it that just isn't in the original. The Duran Duran version felt too slow, to languid, but this... this feels like a chase. It feels active like a wolf on the hunt. So, please enjoy the Reel Big Fish cover of Hungry Like the Wolf. DFTBA |
Matias TautimezKeep your eyes open for my debut novel, The Paladin. Archives
January 2023
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