The Christmas TV Companion: A Guide to Cult Classics, Strange Specials, and Outrageous Oddities by Joanna Wilson*I couldn't find another pic other than that Amazon one bleh!*
Rating: 4/5
Age R: 12+
Release Date: November 10, 2009
Read an excerpt here.
Synopsis:
From the back cover: Christmas on TV is wilder, weirder, and more wondrous than you think! The Christmas TV Companion is a funny, engaging look beyond the same Christmas specials that air every year to the cult TV rarities, over-the-top made-for-TV holiday specials, and bizarre, spacey shows that truly expand the notion of Christmas spirit. Loaded with pop culture references, this book is sure to please pop aficionados and TV junkies of all stripes. Its remarkable breadth of content covers the far-out gems of yesterday, as well as the irreverent and cutting edge Christmas material of today, from Arthur C. Clarke to South Park, and from Ed Sullivan to Squidbillies. This guide also contains practical examples for enhancing your own Christmas TV viewing.
Thoughts:
This book is really cool. It's a guide to tons of Christmas specials. Some very old, some fairly new. A lot of them you can look up on youtube and some you'll just have to hope they play on T.V or are available to buy or rent somewhere. I LOVE Christmas specials because they're so nifty! Plenty are just plain odd but you can't help but be curious about them. Unfortunately I've seen so very few of them :( This makes me so sad because they all sound awesome! Even the crazy ones.
I have seen a few though. I take pride in being able to say that I've seen and loved the Christmas special from Supernatural where this happens:
The Winchester brothers investigate a string of disappearances, speculating that they are looking for the Anti-Claus: an evil monster who comes down the chimney and steals people from their homes. Instead, their search takes them to two ancient pagan gods which require human sacrifices at holiday time, ironically disguised as normal Midwestern residents.
I remember that episode so well!! It made me crack up too much where that lady says "fudge" and then Dean says "If you fudgin’ touch me again I’ll fudging kill you!"
The author also awesomely mentions the Christmas special in Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Angel is being haunted by "nightmares from his past." Is it bad that I only vaguely remember that? Not a proud moment for me. ;)
She also mentions the Family Guy Christmas special where Stewie is baby Jesus remember? The house burns down Louis goes crazy, someone gets shot in the butt, and tons of crazy stuff happens.
Way more TV show Christmas specials and movie specials are mentioned. It's really great, I recommend this book to those who adore Christmas specials and are looking for a guide telling them exactly what's been done just ready to be watched or re-watched.
Hopefully you guys can find this book somewhere where it's not $22 (Amazon). That's such an insane prize for a book especially a 146 pg book. It's really cool but whoa 22 bucks is too much for me, but maybe I just feel that way because I'm a semi-broke college student ;)
Enjoy these Christmas special clips I found that where mentioned in the book:
*warning* there is blood and violence. duh it's Supernatural
watch the whole 3rd Rock from the Sun Christmas special "Jolly Old St. Dick" I love this show!! hehe and I love Joseph Gordon-Levitt he's so adowable!
pt. 1 (below), pt. 2, and pt. 3
man it's so weird having seen the dad as a serial killer on Dexter. I just can't get over that hehe
Tons more of my favorites are mentioned like Monk, My S0-Called Life, Roseanne (I saw that ep at Nick at Night the other day hehe), SNL, Superman, THAT 70'S SHOW!!!, X-Files, Xena and so many more.
Enjoy!
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