Top of the Order … Bottom of the Barrel

So I was watching X Games Aspen the other day and it struck me how impertinent it is to have a made-for-TV competition featuring largely made-up sports so close to the Winter Olympics. It’s like running a “Mythbusters: David Blaine” episode right before Blaine vanishes Wichita. After four score and seven years' worth of coverage of obviously made-up X Games events, people might think there’s no purpose to biathlon and team handball and yachting and short-track speed-skating and rhythmic gymnastics and all the other, older made-up events that comprise an Olympics. I realize there was a time when shot-putting got soldiers ready for war, but those were the days when warfare consisted of lobbing pots of boiling oil onto hordes of Gauls trying to scale the walls of a dung-daubed castle. Now, of course, drones do it.

It also marginalizes snowmobile-flipping. Call me revisionist, but I maintain that cranking a Ski-Doo up to 90 miles an hour, propelling it off a ramp and spinning it three complete revolutions before landing is every bit as much of an athletic feat as sliding on your belly down a glorified toboggan run. The only difference is the motor and the three complete revolutions, and those are way cooler than anything the luge track has to offer unless A) you really like the sound the word “luge” makes in the back of your throat or B) you like plastic-coated Austrians.

(I sent this to Jim McLauchlin because I was kinda proud of what I had written, and as always he had a retort. It goes like this: “My favorite sport is always biathlon, which should be retitled, ‘What The Finns Have To Do Every 40 Years When The Russians Invade.’ In fact, I'd be willing to bet that EVERY biathlon medal ever has been won by a Finn, with the exception of like, maybe one by a Russian who was a particularly good shot and was kinda hungry. Here's an idea: Loose three Ivans and three Finns in the woods with rifles and skis. The three who make it out get medals.” So naturally I went back and checked. A Finn has never won gold in the biathlon, but a lot of Russians have – and the Russians have dominated the pursuit competition. McLauchlin might want to double-check the over-under on the Ivans.)

I don’t know where exactly I’m going with this, other than back to sport. The Olympics and the X Games remind us what the Super Bowl doesn’t: all sports are made-up. No sport serves a purpose other than to institutionalize play. Nothing wrong with play, by the way; I’m a huge play fan. My life has been spent making everything seem like play and so far, so good.

Taken from that standpoint, though, sports cards are sort of ridiculous. Why would you take a picture and put it on a piece of cardboard to heroify someone playing a game? My kids built an igloo over the weekend, and I didn’t feel like I had to put them on a card for that, even though igloo-building shares its chassis and other important bits with playing in the Super Bowl.

(I’m allowed to say “Super Bowl,” right? Super Bowl Super Bowl Super Bowl Super Bowl. I guess I can.)

I never knew a single person in the trading-card industry who wrestled with this ethical dilemma any more than they wrestled with Hacksaw Jim Duggan. They would have let Larry Zybysko put them in a figure-four deadfall in return for a baseball license, but alas, Zybysko was all tied up with Gorilla Monsoon, and the licenses were all tied up with Upper Deck.

However, a few enlightened trading-card folks did realize that as the price and sophistication of sports cards increased their play value decreased. They also saw their lunch being eaten by Starmies and Hitmonchans and all the variegated witches and wizards of Magic: The Gathering. These were cards you could play with; they were cards you had to play with, because taken at face value they were as engaging as a subway pass.

And they sold. God they sold, and they cost next to nothing to make. Some cardmakers got mad at their success; others tried to get even. If they can sell the excrement out of made-up-cards of made-up things used to play a made-up game, they reasoned, we should be able to sell quadruple the excrement out of made-up cards of real players used to play a made-up game. And so it came to pass that Topps, Donruss, Fleer, and Upper Deck, in addition to longtime baseball-game maker APBA, came out with sports cards that were gamified to one degree or another.

Of course, these days everything from your colonoscopy to your taxes are gamified, and we expect it. Figurative millions are buried casketless each year because online casket sites don’t give out extra lives. Well, 20 years ago sports cards were being gamified, and no one found it novel. Or compelling or entertaining, either, but we’re getting to that.

Upper Deck affixed sort of a game border to the Special Edition chase in its 1995 baseball. The game was of the one-action-per-card variety, meaning it would take a whopping pile of cards to play and the desire to crease and dog-ear to death what ostensibly were added-value cards. It was a half-hearted nod in the direction of games, and it couldn’t have been less of an empty gesture if it had been endorsed by Joe Montana and Martha Stewart.

(Conceptually the Upper Deck game was identical to the winner-and-still-champeen of baseball-game trading cards, the 1968 Topps Baseball game set, albeit at 400 times the per-pack price. The ’68 game cards were awesome. The art was spectacular, the player roster couldn’t be beat, and the game played like butter. I played the World Series over and over with those cards for years afterwards, almost always pitting the Phillies against the Brewers. The Brewers usually won, in spite of the heroic efforts of Phillies pitcher Ron Diorio. I had a Ron Diorio thing going on for years, and I have no idea why a Alaskan kid transplanted to Wisconsin would get so far behind a Philadelphia pitcher with a whopping 25 major-league games and no decisions.)

Donruss’ contribution to playtime was a full-blown game called Top of the Order. It was one of two sports games the cardmaker produced in 1994, the other being Red Zone football. The game cards shared the same basic layout and structure – 80-card base set, booster packs, similar-looking quasi-design -- but game play between the two games was like the difference between reading this column and my master’s thesis. One is light and fast-paced; the other is formulaic, plodding, and sort of pedantic. (Yeah, my master’s thesis was that good.)

I guess you could say Top of the Order was realistic in that regard, but I’m not looking for realism when I sit down to play a baseball card (or board) game. I’m looking to have fun playing a game. Any resemblance it bears to real baseball is a bonus.

That may be why the ’68 Topps baseball game is so much fun. It follows the basic rules of baseball – three outs, nine innings, team with the most runs wins – but doesn’t go much deeper than that and doesn’t care to. It’s made for nine-year-olds. You just flip cards and let wang chung. Sometimes it chungs your way and sometimes it doesn’t, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I don’t mind that lack of control; it makes me feel like I’m nine years old again, and any sort of caloric intake I can dream up is A-OK.

Back to Top of the Order. The cards were color-coded with actions that came into play when you spun a play wheel. Dice were involved, too, and I believe a specially licensed magic 8-ball. In the end, taking a turn involved implementing an action, spinning a wheel, drawing a card, implementing another action, consulting the magic 8-ball, doing a couple of battements, and pinching yourself hard to wake up.

Realistic, right? The only thing missing that would make this just like real baseball is the hot dogs. And the baseball.

Top of the Order plays only slightly less ponderously than Pursue the Pennant, the sports-simulation game most popular with tree sloths and woolly mammoths, though PtP rewards the extremely patient and clinically dead with some highly realistic outcomes.

We’re going to be spending some time with these sports-cough-simulation games over the next several weeks, and we’ll come back to this point many times, but just to get this out there, the reason why something like Pokémon got the popularity and sports-simulation card games didn’t is because there are no preconceived notions in Pokémon and baseball is nothing if not preconceived. There was no way Kevin Stocker could be the big hero in Top of the Order because we already knew Kevin Stocker the human being from his performance in Major League Baseball: Human Being Edition, and he was no hero. And if he perchance was exposed to a special Top of the Order chemical cocktail (including gummies) that transformed him into the TOTO version of Elastic Man and he took Eric Gagne deep downtown and became the hero of heroes, we’d say the game’s wacked. On the other hand, your Venusaur can play Vine Whip for 25 straight turns and no one thinks it’s a flaw. It’s what Venusaur does – and even though it’s just freaking Vine Whip, it’s still more compelling in the artificial realm of the game table than a 100-mile-an-hour Randy Johnson fastball.

That’s the long, master’s-thesis way of saying that baseball simulation games that try to simulate too much are a bad idea, though so are baseball games that don’t simulate enough. We’ll look at another failure to learn that lesson next time.

All Talking! All Singing! All Cockroaches!

If we’re going to discuss the modern cinema with any degree of intelligence we need to distinguish between stoner movies and stoned movies.

Stoner movies are movies made by people who aren’t on drugs for people who are. You can trace them from the Salvador Dali sequence in Spellbound through Lost Weekend and The Fly to The Trip to Up In Smoke and (N)Ice Dreams to the various Harold and Kumar flicks to Jack-in-the-Box ads.

Stoned movies are made by people who are on drugs for who the hell knows, because they’re made by people who are on drugs. Flying-day-glo-unicorn drugs.

It’s hard to tell the difference between a stoned movie and a really bad one, but it seems pretty obvious to me that Joe’s Apartment is the No. 1 stoned movie of the ‘90s.

I don’t know what was being ingested by the creative-so-to-speak forces behind Joe’s Apartment, but Jay-Z has to take out a title loan to afford an ounce of it.

Right now I’m sure of two things: you’ve never seen Joe’s Apartment because you’re a person of taste and refinement, and you’re dying to know the plot. I use hand sanitizer every time I call this burrito filled with random events a plot, but here goes: A country boy named Joe moves into a big-city apartment and finds it inhabited with cockroaches.

So far so good. It’s not really a plot, but it’s plot-like. It has some plotness and a little bit of plotitude, and its plotivity displays a tenuous connection to reality.

Let’s not get carried away, though, because shortly after Joe rents the apartment and finds it infested with cockroaches he discovers that A) he hates cockroaches and B) the cockroaches can talk. ( I realize it would make more sense if B) came before A), but not in this movie. Never in this movie.) And not only can they talk, they sing and dance and display the highest level of human intelligence: They do standup comedy. With matches for microphones. Because they can’t do Kafka.

You can pretty much guess where the movie goes from here. Joe starts a comedy club under his sink for other insects and becomes filthy rich, only he can’t spend any of it because insects pay for tickets using small bits of rotted flesh, dandelion pollen, and the carcasses of other insects, even when they use PayPal.

Actually, that would be a better plot than the plot-burrito that is plopped on this movie’s dirty plate. You can figure it out, if you promise to use no imagination whatsoever: Joe meets prospective girlfriend. Prospective girlfriend is grossed out at first but then comes to respect  the talking cockroaches.

(Because the way for people to respect gross, disgusting insects is to give the insects the power of speech. I suppose. It worked for Chris Christie.)

Throw in a couple of bumbling crooks that are conquered by Roach Power and everybody lives happily ever after, including the bugs, because you, like, can’t kill cockroaches.

Like it? If you don’t you need to cozy up to your friendly neighborhood pharmaceutical representative right this minute, because that’s all the ploticity this puppy can deliver.

It also doesn’t star anyone, with a Subway-style capital “ANY.” The lead is Jerry O’Connell, the love interest is Megan Ward, and the crooks are led by Robert Vaughn (long way from The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Bobby). This cinematic turd-de-force is on its knees begging for Daniel Stern, George Wendt, Abe Vigoda, Al Lewis, Harvey Fierstein, Classy Freddie Blassie or anyone with a dram of charisma to camp it up, but no one shows. They were all at a David Hasselhoff celebrity roast.

Even with all its negative castification Joe’s Apartment might have been able to pull itself out of the sump by its bootstraps, but then you listen to the lyrics the cockroaches sing and you’re right back in the septic soup again.

Here’s a sample: “Garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage/Garbage in the moonlight gives off a lovely smell (lovely smell)/Sipping sewage with my baby in our little roach motel (please don't tell)/zum zum zuma zum zum zum/doot de doot doot doot de doo doot de doot doot doot de doo doot de doot doot doot de doo doot de doot doot doodly doo/Take an ocean trip on our garbage ship with the cockroach I adore/We'll take a taste of the medical waste that washes up on shore.”

“Positively 4^th Street” it ain’t. Or “Mairzy Doats and Doazy Doats,” either.

There’s only one more thing to be said about this celluloid angel-dust aftereffect: Donruss had the trading-card license.

Of course Donruss had the trading-card license. How the heck else could it follow up Kazaam?

You ought to be getting the message that Donruss’ ear for trading-card licenses was crafted of the finest tin, but it’s not all Donruss’ fault. In the pop-culture licensed-product market at that particular time Joe’s Apartment  had multiple positive attributes: It had a soundtrack, the card license was available, and it was made by MTV.

The history of MTV and trading cards as I remember it goes something like this: First the Yo! MTV Raps! Cards from Pro Set (memorably profiled here), then Beavis and Butt-Head sets from Fleer (including – unless I’m hallucinating again – a Flair/Ultra-ish version, since the one thing B&B-H fans want to do is pay more for trading cards), an MTV Toons set that showed all the shows that weren't music videos and weren't as good as Beavis and Butt-Head, and the MTV Films/Joe's Apartment set, and then everyone said, "Uh, I think we’re good."

So the big problem for Donruss wasn’t that it had a bad eye for licenses; it picked a good(ish) license, only at a really bad time.

(Okay, so it picked a really bad license. As former Cards Illustrated editor Don Butler remarked when he heard I was writing about this set, “Yeah, unbelievably a card set about an agoraphobe and talking cockroaches did not become the next Mars Attacks.” He also dismissed its wretched sales by saying, “It came out about the same time as the Flipper set.” Because a card set for a dog movie featuring a semi-talking dolphin takes down a card set for a dog movie featuring talking cockroaches any day.)

The set didn’t do buyers or collectors any favors, though it has about as much fun with the material as your average Project Runway All-Star, with nary a Heidi Klum or Alyssa Milano in sight, sorry to say. The set is pitched in terms of “Etymological Order & Phyla,” making it the only trading-card set ever to be categorized the same way as dung beetles or, yes, cockroaches. (Can’t say these guys didn’t know their subject matter.) Chases include seven Roach cards, because 10 would be too many, and every pack has a free tattoo – yet another reason why tattoo removal is the growth industry of the twenty-teens.

In case you’re curious, the cards were advertised with the line, “The TRADING CARDS crawl from behind the fridge into stores everywhere.” It’s no “He's A Rappin' Genie With An Attitude ... And He's Ready For Slam-Dunk Fun!”, but it’ll suffice. At least it didn’t kill any sales that weren’t dead already.

At one point in the classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby Katharine Hepburn is trying to explain to her aunt why Cary Grant is standing in front of them in a peignoir. Her aunt says, quite sensibly, “Why, that doesn’t make any sense,” to which Cary Grant replies, “And take my word for it, madam: It never will.”

The Joe’s Apartment set is like that. The difference is that in Bringing Up Baby you get Cary Grant in a peignoir, and in the Joe’s Apartment set you get talking cockroaches. It doesn’t make any sense, and it never will.

Wham! Bam! Damn, Kazaam!

George Santayana never worked in the movie business, and that’s a good thing for all concerned. Instead of “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” we would have had, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to remake it.”

We’re plagued with remakes as it is. New movie versions of Annie, Robocop, Godzilla, and Gilligan's Island are coming in 2014, along with TV-series versions of everything from Fargo to The Road To Bountiful.

Fortunately, the search for new stars for these new/old shows has shifted from athletes to rap artists to internet sensations and reality-TV stars. While this hasn’t brought us to the point where Phil Robertson stars as Miss Hannigan (“Scrub them floors, girls; you’re a-gonna be married in a couple months!”), it has upped the thespian quotient somewhat. I don’t know what kind of acting chops you need to star in Something Borrowed, Something New or get thrown by a Sit ‘n’ Spin through a plate-glass window, but it has to be more than what it takes to drain stepback three-pointers. And more importantly, it’s quelled the clamor to remake Kazaam.

You’ve probably forgotten Kazaam; I had until I stumbled upon this promo card this morning, and I’d really liked my life up to that point. But Kazaam brings back memories I’m not sure I want to remember.

For those of you who are not completely up to speed on pooch-screwing, shark-jumping, egg-sucking movies of the late ‘80s and ‘90s, Kazaam was a thinly veiled (no pun intended) remake of Aladdin, with Shaquille O’Neal in the Robin Williams role.

Shaquille O’Neal as a seven-foot-one, three-hundred pound genii that grins a lot, wears size-18 curly-toed velvet slippers, sports a Superman tattoo, talks like a cement mixer full of stove bolts, raps with the rhythmic sensibilities of Flo, and can’t shoot free throws: Why didn’t I think of that? And better yet, why didn’t I think of throwing myself on top of that puppy of a license like a Sgt. Rock hero flinging himself onto a live grenade to save the rest of his platoon?

I couldn’t do that last thing, because Donruss beat me to it.

When I think of non-sports cards, I don’t immediately think “Donruss.” And when I think “Donruss non-sport cards,” my mind trips back pleasantly to Odd Rods and images of Bill Spaceman Lee lookalikes stuffed into GTOs with engines the size of the Sears Tower protruding from the hood. I had actually forgotten that Donruss, just like every other cardmaker flush with sport-card loot, had gamboled barefoot through the poison ivy of the non-sport market in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

A smorgasbord of licenses and properties were laid out before these rich, innocent cardmakers. Some of the properties were jewels, some were paste, and some were the toneless, plotless brainchildren of committees of bean-counting corporate yes-men doing their best Wolf of Wall Street impersonations, movies that made Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate look like Seven Samurai and The Seventh Seal.

And then, underneath those, was Kazaam. 

It's no My Giant, that's for sure. And acting-wise, Shaq is no Georghe Muresan.

Since I had to read the copy on the promo card, you need to share my pain. “This summer, Shaquille O’Neal materializes into theaters in Kazaam, a major motion picture featuring Shaq in his first movie role as a wise-crackin’ Genie for the ‘90s,” the card reads. “And you can collect all of Shaq’s magic in Kazaam Trading Cards exclusively from Donruss this summer!”

And then, underneath this deathless prose, lest you get any ideas to the contrary, the card sports another big “Exclusively from Donruss.”

No problem, dude. You got this one all to yourself, free and clear.

You can see what Donruss was thinking. It couldn’t be any more transparent if their corporate skull was made out of cellophane. Shaq sells. Shaq sells. Anything Shaq sells. A Shaq movie’s gonna sell. And a Shaq card set of a Shaq movie has to sell. Right? RIGHT?

Amazingly, Shaq is not the worst thing about Kazaam. (He’s not the best thing either, but only because there is no sense in using the word “best” around Kazaam.) The worst thing is the slogan: “He's A Rappin' Genie With An Attitude ... And He's Ready For Slam-Dunk Fun!” The second-worst thing is the plot, which was fished out of a dumpster behind Nickelodeon’s world headquarters. The third-worst thing is the kid lead, Francis Capra, who is so one-dimensional that he makes the Sprouse twins in The Suite Life on Deck look like they’re going to jump out of the screen and plop in your lap. The fourth-worst thing is Shaq’s outfit. His Laker warmups would have been a far better choice than the neo-Babylonian tunic with cardboard bracelets. (The slippers are cool, though. They are without question the best part of the movie. In fact, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Kazaam are the only two movies where the best thing about them is the shoes.) The fifth-worst thing is Shaq.

Given the essential dreckiness of the movie, could there be any hope for the cards? Of course not. Kazaam the card set is even more formulaic than Kazaam the movie. There actually was trading-card potential here; a bad movie does not automatically translate into a lazy, indifferent set. Donruss could have cut up the slippers and made SlipperCards, or donated Shaq’s pants to a family needing emergency shelter. But Donruss was too far removed from its Odd Rod days to have any ideas on how to fun up a set of cards where the major characters are a basketball-star-turned-cheesy-genie, a nondescript kid, and a boombox. Donruss was just meatballin', trotting out the tired old formula in the service of a movie whose most effective marketing tactic was distracting people's attention from the movie. Uncle Allen Caplan would have known what to do with Kazaam, that’s for sure.

Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that trading cards are a disposable medium. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Fortunately, a Kazaam comes along every now and then to remind us.

Hard as it may be to believe, Kazaam did not represent the nadir of Donruss’ dalliance with the movies. We’ll go there next time.

In the meantime, if you’re an 11-year-old orphan girl, you’d best stay out of North Louisiana and away from strange old guys with beards. Not even Shaq’s gonna help you there. 

Happy Caplan Christmas

Let us pause a moment at this time of year to remember some of the good folks that have passed through the card business, and laugh a little at their cards.

I first encountered Allan Caplan when we started doing consulting work for SkyBox in the mid-‘90s, though my partner Dean had known Allan before, from Dean’s days as the advertising manager for the highly late and constantly lamented Baseball Cards magazine.

Dean warned me about Allan. “He’s something else,” Dean said. “Wait ‘til you meet him.”

I didn’t meet him first; I heard him.

There’s something about the way Allan Caplan greets you over the telephone that’s unique in the way that red-bean-sandwich-flavored Kit Kats are unique. You have to be ready for it, and even if you’re ready for it you may not like it.

“Hi, Kit,” Allan said when he called the first time, drawing out the “I” in “hi” like homemade caramel, and talking in a sort of Mean Streets patois but higher-pitched, so I understood right away why some people called him “Uncle Al, the kiddies’ pal.”

So he said, “Hi, Kit,” and then he said, “this is Allan Caplan.” He always said, “this is Allan Caplan,” stretching the syllables until you could read a newspaper through them, no matter how many times we talked, as if there could be another who talked with that peculiar mix of elasticity, gentleness and Brooklyn.

I don’t remember the question he asked me, but I’m guessing it was unanswerable, because that’s the way Allan’s mind works. He’s a marketing genius; he knows more angles than a geometry textbook, and if he called someone for help in those days it was either because he needed one of us to look up some arcane fact (good business in those pre-Google days) or the question couldn’t be answered.

Plus, I think he liked talking to a couple of Midwestern hicks who laughed pretty easy.

Allan was somewhere in that gray area between trusted-and-valued consultant and employee, and he was in charge of most of the SkyBox’s non-Star Trek non-sports cards. He had a key role in developing the original Marvel Universe cards, and he played a crucial role in the development of movie cards for Disney and others.

That means he takes at least a little culpability for Pagemaster[1] cards (though I don’t know what role he had in picking that lhasa apso of a license), and a whole lot of credit for the non-sport-card business as it shaped up through the ‘90s and into the 2000s.

Allan used SkyBox and all those non-sport sets to figure out The Formula, the exact mix of chase, autographs and other elements that would deliver collectibility and value to the buyer and profits to the seller, and once he had The Formula perfected, Allan took a couple of key people, left SkyBox and started Inkworks.

Inkworks did good work. I have a mess of its sets on a bookshelf behind my guitars, and they’re arguably the best base-level non-sports sets of their times. Inkworks did the best James Bond set, the best Elvis set, the best Simpsons set. They're perfect examples of The Formula in action.

Here’s what I mean. I just pulled my SimpsonsMania set off the shelf. It’s housed in a deluxe binder (extra, from your local Inkworks dealer or direct, via an on-pack offer). The base set consists of white-bordered cards that parody conventional trading cards; for instance, the set’s first card, Comic-Book Guy, has a word balloon with “Worst trading card ever” coming out of his mouth and his favorite aroma (“The smell of Mylar in the morning”) inset in the right-hand corner. There are puzzle cards, Wacky Packages ripoffs (my favorite: “Barnacle Bill’s Home Pregnancy test – just add urine”), a chase featuring comic artists’ reinterpretations of Simpsons characters, a mod day-glo chase, and fold-in inserts, all for less than $2 a pack – with a full set in a box guaranteed.

Given everything else that was on the market then and now, that’s value. Hey, it’s still pictures on cardboard, but it’s pictures on cardboard done right. It’s the difference between Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and generic. You can see and smell and taste the difference.

The other thing I love about Allan Caplan is that when he ran Inkworks he kept Christmas well.

A couple of years ago I cleaned out the Christmas-card bin and blogged about it here. In that piece I showed two Inkworks Christmas cards and talked about how Allan talks, but in the meantime I've found a couple more Inkworks Christmas cards to share.

Everyone signed this holiday card from 2003, including Godzilla. That’s his John Hancock in the lower-left corner. The thing I like about this card is that it doesn’t promote anything – except perhaps Inkworks in a snow-soft sort of way. It’s merely a Christmas trading card from a trading-card company. It’s like a bakery sending a Christmas card made out of bread, or an advertising agency sending a holiday greeting made out of weird.

Even though this card works the commercial side of Christmas Street I like it anyway. After all, few things say Christmas better than a come-back-from-the-dead gumshoe appearing (so to speak) in a wretched movie starring Gabriel Macht.[2]

This card also points up Inkworks’ greatest flaw and its eventual undoing. The company lacked the wherewithal to go after the slam-dunk licenses with the built-in fan base, so it had to bet on the come on licenses that either were dormant and underappreciated (e.g., Bond) or properties that could go big and develop critical mass (like the Buffy The Vampire Slayer spinoff Angel). The Formula also got a little tired after 10 years of constant use.

Let’s not dwell on that now. Let’s join hands with this cardboard card of a cardboard character and gaze up at the holofoil Christmas tree and sing.

Have a grand ol’ Landfill Christmas, everyone.

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[1] Talk about a movie that vanished from the planet. They don’t show The Pagemaster anywhere. You can’t even buy it for $5 at Walmart. I can understand why, but they still show Land Before Time XI: Invasion of the Tinysauruses without an ounce of compunction.

[2] A movie so bad that Roger Ebert remarked memorably, “There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material.”