Astounding! Now, and a few weeks, I suppose, for the fourth time in eight years, the Disney company has invented new artificial significance to justify claims of "anniversary" which mean people should pay to visit their theme parks. I do not know if this is the one I was annoyed at seven months ago still continuing or a new one seperate from that (making this the fifth time, then), but neither are any more excusable than diapers with pictures of cartoon characters on them. I'm quite sure now that they intentionally set this stuff up years and years ago so that by the time every possible thing had had a "major" anniversary, ten years had passed and the first thing could have another. And yes, there is something wrong with that, if they attach some kind of only-chance-before-you-die lie to it. What makes the whole even worse is that the person announcing it is Frasier. I hated Frasier anyway, but now more! If it is not Frasier, it is someone who sounds like he does, and Frasier could choose to not sound that way. I'm not saying he has a distinctive voice, just that he is the only person sufficiently unlikable by me, rich and "safe" to be chosen for this role, by Disney, who sounds like that. Hmmm. Now free of his NBC contract to eventually become a wholly owned subsidiary of that swell little corporation, does that mean Kelsey Grammer has to retire into the Disney Vault when he stops making money? Tell him to say hello to Boatniks and Rescuers Down Under for me. I will not. Oh, so self-congratulatory. My absence of plan was to not say anything about that fowl diminutive movie, and just hope it went away, but then they started with the "we're number 1, we're so great" and I could almost not contain my rage. And now they've had to go and do something which reminded me of this other thing they did, and now oh, me so mad all over again. There were approximately 237 number 1 movies last year; that hardly gave the hideous birdoid an excuse to dope-dance in front of a giant 1 numeral. Nothing ever would. That was just rude. I think the 1 on the outline of the 48 united states was outright obnoxious. What do you want, a cookie? Disney movies just end up being 1 anyway by default, because of their Microsoft-like hold on people who refuse to acknowledge alternatives. However, it's worse than Microsoft, because I'm not going to buy a Minesweeper telephone, wait while a Regedit tattoo is applied to my forehead or "create" my own line of Little Hourglass fanart characters which I insist are copyright to me as a result of the mental atrophy I suffered from using Windows for ten years. I'm going to do that on my own. Aw. Congratulations, you took a story someone else wrote long enough ago that you don't have to pay royalties, and then added 80 minutes of irrelevant filler. I think what Disney really wanted me to notice was its dumping Pixarrrgh in favor of another indistinguishable company that did not insist on having its name in the title (or worse, I suppose, just buying the whole thing out), and still making just as much money. How do you figure those things were chickens? They're proportioned like humans, wear clothing, appear to have hair and definitely have teeth. Is "little" to denote the level of resemblance? I suppose the sequel will have the same characters and be called "Hamster Even Less." Here, at last (I was waiting for it), are the reasons I hate the Disney Channel condensed into one sentence. Disney has an seventy year film library featuring some of the best paid animators and musicians in that business to show the output of, without breaks during individual features, but instead chooses to exhibit made-for-TV junk with whatever color-by-number Mr. Potato Head "stars" it is currently trying to push, broken up constantly by non sponsor necessitated ads for other new Disney junk. Back when I was dumb kid (unlike the dumb whatever I am now I am now), old-timey Disney short cartoons always had a mystifying appeal to me because they were never on television. Now I realize the reason they were never on television is because Disney would rather charge you $30 each for video cassettes with four or five which you could only ever see in that context. You could say something like Time-Warner have more channels and better distribution, but that's garbage, for Disney's owned ABC since 1996 and probably was a major shareholder for years before that. I know for a while during that decade there was the "Disney Afternoon" for free, five days a week, but those cartoons were involving either, again, new characters, or old ones acting differently and speaking better English. Even in a time when I did not yet hate every thing associated with dead old Walter (pre-Lion King), this still built a certain resentment within me. Now, ever, all this should not be interpreted to mean that I would be forgiving if olderish Disney cartoons started showing up on broadcast televisual, because I'm in a much better position now to hate them based on their own lack of merit, regardless of the merit-lackitude of the people currently making decisions. Even during a time when I slept under Disney-themed bedsheets (no, not last year. Har har, whore) I wanted to beat Mini/Micky Mouse to death[s] with a steel pickle for the predictable plots and lousy dialogue of its own features. For more on this, I shall refer you to the contents of a file dated 4/10/03 that for whatever reason I never got around to putting here. Most people who hate Disney hate it for the wrong reasons. Some hate it because Disney doesn't hate gay people. This one really bothers me, as this sort of thing actually makes Disney look good in the gay-encouraging media, so it can only detract from my quest. Yes, it's a quest. Shut up. Some hate the business because it's an ominous corporate entity masquerading as a friend to all who embrace it. This group will also occasionally claim that the original Walter Disney ousted communists or oppressed women or cleaned Hitler's pool at a discount. You're on the right rail, but this would only mean that Disney is as bad as Nike or McDonalds, but it's much, much worse. The third group complains that “the magic” is missing from recent endeavours. No, no NO. You're completely in avoidance of the point. That goes to imply that if they made stuff like The Jungle Book and Peter Pan again then all would be forgiven. One more time I must say NO. They actually found a way to make the show Doug worse. As in worse than it already was. You remember Doug, don't you? I'm pretty sure that was one of the first woeful loser programs specifically targeted at children. It was a funny show, but not, I suspect, ever on purpose. The things that the characters themselves laughed at were always fairly pathetic. Those "looks like everything's back to normal round these parts!" sort of incidents. But before any of that, Doug would be making a paperclip chain or something, and then he'd go to buy more paperclips, but the paperclip store would be out of stock on the kind he wanted. WLAHHHHHHHHHHHHHLLLLAU! And that would be the plot of the episode. Doug would have a drug induced paper clip dream sequence, write in his diary about it, go to The HonkeyBurger*, play some Beetball, say something retarded to his female aboriginal acquaintance Patte McMayonnaise. At the end, Doug would probably stop whining and use another brand of paperclips or figure out another disappointing compromise rather than getting what he desired. *an accidental misspelling that I have decided to keep. Ehhh, so Disney acquired the show from the Nickelodeon channel and aired the "new" version on their “Disney's One Saturday Morning” television line-up. I guess that name is sort of like a challenge, as in “I bet you won't last one Saturday morning watching this trash without your brain turning to toothpaste,” and that's how they got people to watch it. I never fancied myself a gambler (if indeed I've ever done anything to myself worthy to be called “fancy”), so I was fortunately able to resist that one. Indoodles, even before Disney [entirely] took over, ABC was showing stuff like Schoolhouse Rock (more recently than that was made), so they would have had to commit quite an impressive string of atrocities to Disnify anything going on there. I can just imagine the executive meeting... What's this show? Doug? You bought the rights to this? Yeah, it's pretty godawful, but it's not Disney godawful. Let's see if we can't make this show just a bit crappier. First order of business: New voices. No one ever likes new voices. Sure, we've got enough money to buy ABfruppingC, but that doesn't mean we can go spending it paying people what they demand to return to work on a soulstealing show like this one. Second, new baby. Now we can use taglines like “Doug's a big brother now!” in addition to having limitless orifice leakage gross-out potential on a show that managed to nauseate without any. Third: Everyone's in high school now. What? Yeah, sure. The new baby's in high school too. Go ahead. Polls have shown that our demographic reacts positively to angsty, insignificant non-crises better if the school-involved has a name ending in “high.” Apparently our demographic never call it high school, they just call it high. Kids? I don't know what age-bracket it is. As long as they're buying stuff, I don't care! Anyway, fourth and most important of all, prefix the show's name with “Disney's.” And just because I'm evil, let's put the word “spanking” in the title, too. Yes! Yes! “Disney's Brand-Spanking New Doug!” I think I just killed an angel when I said that! Eh? They're dead already? You know what, you're laid off. Get out. This makes me angry. What is it? It is the movie Holes. I thought you would know by the promotional image I have just displayed. I hope, that if I type all this and totally disremember it and then suddenly come across it in, say, January of 2006, that I have not also forgotten what I did with that picture, because in such a case as that I would not been able to just have shown it to you. But the movie, ehhh, normally, I would just try to ignore it (hey, that sounds will sound familiar), and hope for Disney to not have bought enough critical praise to keep it around for more than a month. But in this case, and perhaps for the first time ever, a film has been made about a book I've actually read. I don't read a lot, but there was a brief period around October 2002 during which I literally had nothing else to do (as evidenced by my brief misguided return to sprite comic making). So I read this book someone had bought me a few years before that. I thought since it was by Louis Sachar it would be like those Wayside School books. I'd possibly find them about as funny as Garbage Pail Kids if I read them now, but in the event I also still found those hilarious it would work out very well. This book, then, I was certain would have a lot of stupid jokes and bizarre circumstances in it, but it was actually about a bunch of criminal children who have to dig pits in the desert as their punishment. A very bizarre circumstance, yes, but no stupid jokes, unfortunately. Undoubtedly the movie has stupid jokes a-plenty, but the other kind of stupid. Not the funny kind, the Disney kind. Not unlike the kind of stupid that has Eugene Levy saying “you got me straight trippin', boo” once in a ninety minute period during a movie, but six times in a thirty minute period every thirty minutes for weeks and weeks during any television show with the same demographic. Yes, the outright evil kind of stupid. The kind of stupid that requires a movie to include a scene in which Bat-Man says "I'll get drive-thru" just so McDonald's can use it to sell stuff (because that's what they sell. Stuff). In an advertisement (have you noticed that I always spell out that entire word and rarely substitute the word “commercial” in for it? Would you if I hadn't mentioned it?) for what I was talking about originally, a bunch of weird kids are shown one at a time with some prententious scrab announcer saying their nicknames. Zig Zag. Flim Flam. Mad Dog. Jack Boot. Florian Helmberger. Like they're some rag-taggart band of crazy funsters who have zany adventures together (as opposed to just going outside and digging for hours every day), which they weren't, which they didn't. At least, I don't think they were, and I do not believe they did. But then, I don't remember anything about a box containing an object which would make people not be family, so as to necessitate the saying of "no matter what's in this box we're still family!" either, and some such borsch't as that is shown in the same ad (there, I did it!), so maybe I'm losing my mind. I ought to start enjoying life more, at least, without it. Now, I realize I said in another page that I never finished and thus never uploaded unless I did after writing this one that sometimes you need to change stuff in a book for a story to make sense in a film, and I still believe that. However, it's obvious in this instance that it's only being done to meet the Disney quota for sappiness, and that's just not right. In fact, it's wrong. Good. Now I never need to read this again.