For today's Fest, we have two more songs from the wonderful Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, with a score by Broadway composers Jule Styne and Bob Merrill.  I wrote about it yesterday, so you can see all the details here.

This first song is "Winter Was Warm," sung by Belle, Scrooge's former lover from the Ghost of Christmas Past.  When I was a little kid and first saw the show, I absolutely loved it but this particular song was the least interesting to me.  It was nice enough, but let's get on with the story.  I am no longer a little kid, and understand and admire the great deeply-wistful charm of it.

The second song is "We’re Despicable," which comes from the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come sequence.  It's sung by thieves who have robbed the home of the late Ebenezer Scrooge.  It really is the most unnecessary song in the show -- it doesn't advance the plot or develop character, it just reinforces the situation -- and arguably is the funniest and most fun.
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One of the best made-for-TV animated specials was Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol.  In fact, it was the very first animated Christmas special on American TV, which first ran on NBC in 1962.  The hour-long show aired annually until 1969, but because the animation was considered a bit primitive, it unfortunately (and in my biased opinion, foolishly, since the special is so terrific and not all that much more primitive than, say, ​Frosty the Snowman) went off the network air, though showed up over the years in syndicated local airings.  Back in 2012, however, NBC did run the show again for its 50th anniversary.

The shame that it hasn't been seen even more is that not only is it wonderfully done (and actually quite a good adaptation of the Dickens story), but it has arguably -- and I'm tempted to say, inarguably -- the best score of any animated TV special made.  The songs are by Broadway composers Jule Styne and Bob Merrill who at the time they were working on this show were also working on their upcoming musical, Funny Girl.  Their score is absolutely wonderful and at that level.  In fact a story is that one day the Magoo producer was walking past the office where Style and Merrill were working, overheard them playing a new song and told how great he thought it was.  They had to explain that the song wasn't for the TV special (though it would have fit), but rather it was for their Broadway show.  The song was "People."

I'll post a bunch of the songs during the Fest, and here for starters are three of them.

This first, "Ringle, Ringle" introduces Scrooge and also Bob Cratchit in the counting house, featuring the voices of Jim Backus and, as Cratchit, Jack Cassidy.

Second is the Cratchit family during the Ghost of Christmas Present section with big "showstopper" of sorts, "(We'll Have) The Lord's Bright Blessing."

​And third is the achingly touching, "I'm All Alone in the World," sung by Scrooge and his younger self from the Ghost of Christmas Past.

We'll end our Thanksgiving extravaganza with one final scene from The West Wing.  I particularly wanted to post it, not just for how funny it is about a Thanksgiving tradition, but also because it has one of my favorite lines in the series.  It comes around the :38-second mark, and is President Barlett's response to CJ telling him what will happen to a turkey.  And as a bonus, there is a hilarious, but very subtle, throwaway line by Donna near the end, so low-key that it's easy to miss.
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Trundling along with our Thanksgiving gala, The West Wing always seem to go out of its way to have wonderful episodes for Thanksgiving.  This is one of the funniest and most memorable scenes from them.  President Bartlett and the Butterball Hotline.

Okay, let's head back to The West Wing.  As long as I mentioned the one song that people sing on Thanksgiving, I thought I might as well include a scene where the show uses the song, as well.  It's also perhaps the quintessential scene that explains why Aaron Sorkin and the writers loved writing shows about the holiday.  The image is fuzzy at beginning, but it only lasts a few seconds and the words are crisp and lovely.
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Not long ago, Stephen Colbert finally followed up on his invitation from the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to visit the country.  Given his adoration of All Things Hobbits, where the two trilogies were filmed, it was only a matter of time before he went.  And last week, his show broadcast highlights each night from his trip.

One of those segments concerned his idea to interest writer-director Peter Jackson to make a spinoff series, based on a tiny cameo extra part that Colbert played in one of The Hobbit movies -- The Desolation of Smaug.

This is the result.

Three months ago, I wrote an article here about perhaps the worst series finale I've seen on television, the one for one of my favorite shows, Mad About You.  It was so horrible that it pretty much killed off reruns of the highly-popular show for the past 20 years since it went off the air.  The short version is that they took two characters who were deeply, crazy in mad love with one another -- mad about you -- and then got them divorced.  Yes, they brought them back together many years later, but still, c'mon, seriously guys.  It was awful.

The reason for writing the article was because it had just been announced that a new, 12-episode limited series of Mad About You would be brought to television in November.  This coming Wednesday, if fact, on Spectrum.

In that article I wrote about not having the slightest idea how they will deal with the finale in relation to the new series. 

Will they ignore the earlier finale, like Will and Grace did and just say, "Forget it, folks, It didn't really happen, it was just a misguided TV episode that didn't work right.  Here's the real way it all went on."  Or will that still be part of the show's story?  Because it can be.  The divorce in the finale took place 22 years later.  This new series picks up 20 years after the first series ended.  So, are they going to show us the final two years of a marriage as it breaks down??  That sounds fun!  Or will they show these two years of an "empty nester" marriage (which is how the press releases describe it) as happy, fun and charming -- and ignore that right after this limited series ends the couple that's Mad About You will be getting divorced.  Which would be artistically dishonest.

I wrote that I hoped it would be the former, that they'd just say, "Hey, we screwed up, forget it, that didn't happen, we were just riffing and filmed the first draft by mistake."  Though I doubted they'd do that.

It turns out -- they're doing that!

In an interview with variety, showrunner and executive producer Peter Tolan says, "The things that you saw in that [the original finale] might happen in the future, but some of it won't, so we're not strictly being held to that finale. I'm pretending it didn't happen."  He also quipped that he hoped "that not many people remember the finale," 

The way Tolan explains it is that, somewhat like Will & Grace which totally ignored its own finale that was deeply unsatisfying to fans and wouldn't have even allowed for its "reboot, he thought that most of the shows fan wouldn't care if he changes the world of the finale -- let alone simply ignores all of those events that took place in the finale's future.  The way he put it is that all those events could simply be explained away as Paul and Jamie imagining what could lay ahead for their daughter. And that perhaps some of the details -- like Mabel making a movie at film school -- could still happen, just on a different timeline.

As for that daughter, by the way, the new series begins with Mabel going off to college.  But that doesn't fit the timeline with when she was born -- in 1997.  And Tolan explains that inconsistency away, too.  As he puts it, "We're futzing with time a little bit."

So, instead of that original "imagined" version of what the couple were thinking maybe could possibly happen, the revival is what really, truly, honestly happened.  Tolan says they actually did think of keeping the finale intact, but that idea didn't last long.  Instead, he said -- wisely -- that "most of the viewers are just waiting to see those people again and there's some comfort level that has to be there."

And thus they are being really smart and simply ignoring the idiotic, dismal finale as It Didn't Happen.  For years, when a rare rerun of the show would pop up on TV, I'd either watch for a few minutes and then turn off or just not watch at all, since the finale had taken the heart and soul out of believing anything that had gone on.  Knowing now that the show is ignoring the finale in full, I've watched a bunch of episodes of the series which Spectrum has On Demand in its entirety -- and they're joyously wonderful.

So, I now look forward to the upcoming revival.  And big points to the show's producers for being so wise in doing what should have been done.  But it just points up to how incredibly nuts that they did that original finale in the first place.  What on earth were they thinking???  Other than trying to be artsy without reason.  But today, 22 years later, even they don't want to try to defend it.

So, I'm not Mad About Them at this point.  Annoyed at what they initially did and the lost time?  Sure.  It's deserved.  But I always admire people who can step back and acknowledge a mistake.  Good for them.

And here's the trailer.

I mentioned the other day that there were two TV ads running that I loved, and two that bugged me.  I've mentioned the former, so now for the latter.

This first is one that I think a lot of people like.  It's for AT&T from their "When 'Just okay,' isn't good enough" series.  (Actually I didn't even remember that it's for AT&T -- I had to look it up.  And that's never a good sign for an ad.  It's okay for an ad to be annoying if the point is to get product attention which leads to sales.  Note that "product attention" does not always lead to sales.)  This particular ad in question is the one that takes place at a business meeting, and a guy says, "That's okay, I speak Dutch," and then proceeds to screw up the translation which the Dutch businessman, not knowing a word of English, think is on the level.  It's pretty funny on the surface -- but inches under the surface is idiotic, which is why it bugs me so much.

If there are any people in the non-English-speaking world who speak English the absolute best -- and maybe even better than many Americans -- it's perhaps the Dutch.  Maybe the Danes are neck-and-neck with them, but I think the Dutch might be ahead.  That's because I think the Dutch (other than just speaking English impeccably) also know American society, culture and politics incredibly well.  When I've been on those tech junkets to the IFA trade show in Berlin, I was always blown away by how insightful the Dutch were about the United States.  I even remember one conversation about politics where I referenced a particular video from a few months earlier that was part of a political story, and as I began to explain it, the fellow stopped me and said, yes, he knew about it.  In fact, when I wrote about the Consumer Electronics Show last year, I singled out a fascinating couple of products that did near-instant translations -- and the company making them was from Holland.  The Dutch really know language.  And care about language.

So, if there is ANY people in the world who do NOT need a translator in an international business meeting meeting, of all people -- it's the Dutch.  The ad agency could have picked any country in the world to be the one needing a translator...and the one they picked was the one more than probably any in the entire world who didn't need translating.  They probably did it because "Dutch" is a funny word.  But there are lots of languages who names are funny and could have fit in. Azerbaijani, Portuguese, Bahasa, Urdu, whatever.  But no, they picked "Dutch."  Ack.
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The other ad is for Celebrity Cruises.  Actually, this doesn't so much bug me as I'm utterly bewildered by it.  They have a woman running through a Celebrity Cruise ship in an ethereal sort of montage, along with images of her eating and playing and having fun, and this wonderful soaring song is playing with a woman's voice singing, "Feed your head!  Feed your head!"

Now, most people who lived through the late 1960s knows immediately what that song is.  It's one of the most infamous of the era since it actually got banned on a number of stations.  That's Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane singing "White Rabbit."  And the line "Feed your head" is taken from Alice in Wonderland and very blatantly in the song (and probably in the book too, but much, much, much more subtly) is a reference to to taking psychodelic drugs.

One pill makes you larger,
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you,
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall

Which leads to --

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's off with her head
Remember what the Dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head

Now, if Celebrity Cruise Line wants to promote an immersive psychodelic-like cruise with a hallucinogenic experience that overwhelms you sensory overload, fine.  But the problem is that they're promoting this particular cruise for families! In fact, at the very end of the ad it says, "Kids sail free."  That's what's bizarre.

I'm sure that their thinking is that there so much to do on their cruise, and there's huge amounts of delicious food to over-indulge in and it's all an overwhelming bounty for your senses.  But -- but that's Grace Slick.  And that's "White Rabbit."  And she's singing about stuffing your head with psychodelic drugs.  "Feed your head, feed your head."  And...hey, folks, "Kids sail free."  Totally, utterly weird.

And yes, they know what it is.  This is the full one-minute version of the ad.  They absolutely 100% know what the ad is.  Zero chance of it slipping under the wire or misinterpreting it.  This version doesn't have the "Kids sail free" sales pitch at the end -- apparently that's reserved for showing it on TV -- but it does start with a little kid by the pool with his dad, being hugged, almost the first thing you see.

Again, I don't dislike the ad.  It's really well made.  I just am utterly bewildered by who on earth they're trying to sell to.

There are a handful of TV ads that have caught my eye recently -- a couple of them very good, and a couple that bothers that I think are...well, less so.  I figure that I'll start today with the good ones.

Of these good ones, you probably know the first since it's been playing a lot.  The other though could have slipped through the cracks.

I think the first for two reasons -- one is that I've always liked the song by the Vogues, though that's not a substantive reason for liking the ad.  That's because I think it makes an absolutely great social point, and does so in a very subtle and very funny -- and impactful -- way.

The other is an ad for YouTube.  (I'm not quite sure why YouTube is advertising, but it's hardly a bad idea for any company.)  I don't think it's been seen all that much -- the only place it's touched down for me is during the baseball post-season playoffs. And given the subject matter of the ad, that might be the only place that they've bought air-time for it.  So, if you've missed it, I think you might appreciate how charming and evocative and whimsical it is.

If you can avoid reading the description of the ad on the embedded video below, do try to avert your eyes before clicking on the thing.  It's not a big deal if you do happen to read it, but it gives away someone that makes the ad a bit more fun to discover as it plays out.  But you learn that very early on, so it's fine if your eyes wandered...

So, here then is the second ad currently running that I love.  I'll post the two others that bug me upcoming soon.