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Kool-Aid/Cereal Update.

Hey folks -- Decided to spend my X-E time this weekend polishing the new sections, starting with a start page for the Kool-Aid Section. Also, the section's been beefed up with one of the holier flavor reviews, this time for Sunshine Punch! The stuff in the packet is from 1982, and it still makes for one marvelous punch. There's also a few reviews of different Wacky Warehouse toys added -- just check out the big list at top right to see what's new. Okay, back to work...see you later.

Edit: The comments space now doubles as this weekend's Saturday Night Stupid Thread. To get the ball rolling, here's a random survey: Name your five most favorite DVDs, which may or may not differ from your top five most favorite movies depending on what you own and what special features really lit your fire.

Edit 2: Group 006 of the Cereal Prize Project has been posted.

Posted by Matt on 06/18/2005. E-mail me!



Discussion Thread: 75 comments

Just read the Cereal Group 006, and the mention of "Jarvis" the old-skool Cookie Crisp mascot made me recall viewing a comercial the other day with a new mascot. Apparently they’re ditching the dog and going with some sort of eXtreme wolf or something. Did anyone else notice this change?

Chestnuts roasted by Gozer @ 06/19/2005 7:49 PM

Goz, it was mentioned when the cookie copper was featured on the CPP.
JLA, wouldn’t Tale Spin be considered movie related?
DeepdiscountDVD.com is having a 20% off sale this week, and this thread is giving me tons of ideas. I’m definitely getting Pete and Pete and Clone Wars Volume 1, and I plan to buy the Trilogy too. Any recos for wide screen versus full (I’m leaning towards wide)?

Chestnuts roasted by squee4242 @ 06/19/2005 8:08 PM

I’m guessing that the Cookie Crisp Wizard (or whatever) is pre-1983 (??). I seem to recall that there were also 2 flavors of the cereal: chocolate and vanilla. (I don’t think the latter stayed around very long.)

Chestnuts roasted by Tell Her No @ 06/19/2005 8:13 PM

1. The Andy Griffith Show seasons 1-5 (I only actually have season 1 at the moment, but I will have seasons 1-5 at some point in the near future)
2. Star Wars trilogy
3. The Odd Couple (movie not the crappy series)
4. Oh Brother Where Art Thou?
5. James Bond movies

Chestnuts roasted by Jason @ 06/19/2005 8:59 PM

DVDs, in no specific order since i cant decide:
1.Lord of the Rings EE
2.The Rise and Fall of ECW
3.The Pretender season 1
4.Interview with the Vampire
5.The Shawshank Redemption

Chestnuts roasted by DemonWeb @ 06/19/2005 11:13 PM

1. First Blood Part II
2. First Blood
3. Rocky
4. Cobra
5. Over the Top

The rest of you are clearly mad.

Chestnuts roasted by Robert @ 06/20/2005 12:46 PM

darn it, this is hard! I guess I’ll go with the dvd’s where I watch the special features as much as the actual programs themselves. In no particular order:

1.Beany and Cecil: the cartoons and puppet shows on this are hillarious, but the unfinished works by Bob Clampett are incredible.

2.Wallace and Gromit

3. Tron

4.Robotech:Love those special features! especially that spanish pepsi commercial.

5.Rock and Rule 2 disc set: yeah, I only heard about it from the date release, it’s only been out 2 weeks, and a major deciding factor in buying it was a certain band performing in it(any guesses?), but this film literally rocks!

Chestnuts roasted by cheaptrick @ 06/20/2005 1:13 AM

I don’t consider Talespin to be movie-related. Even though Jungle Book characters were used, that was about it. Different concept.

Movie-related cartoons tend to be shorter-lived and just does the movie in 30 minutes usually. (Timon and Pumba, Hercules, Tarzan, Lilo and Stitch, Buzz Lightyear, etc.)

Chestnuts roasted by JLAJRC @ 06/20/2005 1:28 AM

Star Wars Trilogy
Fight Club
Transformers season 1
Transformers the Movie
The Wall
The Neverending Story
Karate Kid Collection
Curb Your Enthusiasm seasons 1-3
Scarface

Chestnuts roasted by phunqsauce @ 06/20/2005 2:05 AM

OOps forgot Sifl and Olly: the unaired 3rd season

Chestnuts roasted by phunqsauce @ 06/20/2005 2:08 AM

1) Lilo & Stitch: Special Edition – 2 hour documentary and directors commentary which pokes fun at A-Teens makes it worth finding.
2) Star Wars Trilogy – picked it up secondhand the same week it went retail.
3) CSI: Season 1 – I love the series and I wish I had more of it.
4) Lion King: Special Edition – it’s Lion King. Nuff said.
5) Gargoyles: Season 1 – the way an animated series should be done. With Star Trek actors as a bonus.

Chestnuts roasted by Matt @ 06/20/2005 4:39 AM

I don’t have a lot of DVDs as of yet, so only the Top 3 coincide, albeit slightly out of order, with my favorite movies.

5. My newly acquired Pete & Pete Season 1!
4. Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone.
3. Princess Bride.
2. Goonies.
1. Back to the Future trilogy.

Chestnuts roasted by Mike Fireball @ 06/20/2005 6:11 AM

All my DVDs suck compared to all the others.

1. Back to the Future (Just because I don’t have the Star Wars Trilogy yet.)
2. Sliders Seasons 1 & 2
3. UHF
4. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
5. The Simpsons Season 2

Chestnuts roasted by Ekkostar @ 06/20/2005 8:38 AM

In no order….

1-Almost Famous (Bootleg Edition)

2-Scrubs S1

3-Sopranos S5

4-The Holy Grail (Special Edition) – Lego Camelot? Rock On!

5-Futurama S4

Chestnuts roasted by selvig @ 06/20/2005 9:16 AM

nylon = party time! OH YEAH!

Chestnuts roasted by kidneyboy @ 06/20/2005 11:05 AM

Thanks to everyone who offered me congrats on the last blog postings….I guess the excitement of the new job was too much for me, I’ve been horribly sick on the couch for 2 days! I finally dragged myself to a computer, hoping XE would cheer me up….and it did! Thanks, everyone! I can’t wait to get home and start getting ready for the school year (ugh, I sound like an ultra-nerd.)

Top 5 DVDS I own:
1.) The Goonies (took me WEEKS of hunting before I found it)

2.)Stand By Me

3.)Star Wars Trilogy

4.)Back to the Future Trilogy

5.)Hmmmm….UHF or all 3 Harry Potter movies!

Chestnuts roasted by Muppet Baby @ 06/20/2005 11:10 AM

In no order:

Back to the Future Trilogy

Original Star Wars Trilogy

Indiana Jones Box Set

Batman Returns

High Fidelity

Chestnuts roasted by Enda @ 06/20/2005 6:56 PM

friday the 13th part 6, super troopers, halloween h20, o brother where art though?, and mall rats.

Chestnuts roasted by danoslayer @ 06/20/2005 7:14 PM

Squee, I don’t know about "Head" as I have a video copy, but the packaging on the Monkees DVD IS a pain. The cardboard slips are recreations of the Monkees singles record covers…nifty idea on paper, but lousy coverings for DVDs in practice. The tranfers aren’t great, either. Even so, if you can afford the price tag, the DVDs are highly recommended. There’s commentary from all four members on Season 2 and three on Season 1 (Micky Dolenz was apparently busy when they recorded the first commentaries), director Jim Frawley (who went on to do "The Muppet Movie"), songwriter Tommy Hart, and producer/director Bob Rafelson, along with the completely bizarre special "33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee" in Season 2.

"Tale Spin," "Duck Tales," and "Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers" are three long-time favorite cartoons. I recently saw all three on Toon Disney and still enjoyed them for the most part. I recall the Chip and Dale Kellogg’s premium very well; it’s another one of those little trinkets we had tucked into the crevices of our room for years. I think we had Dale, though.

Chestnuts roasted by starwenn @ 06/20/2005 7:21 PM

DVDs!

Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Brilliant movie with lots of super-hilarious extra features (you can get it in Lego. LEGO!). This movie makes me laugh every single time I watch it, so it obviously is up here on my list.

Royal Tenenbaums. I love this movie, and with the DVD I can watch my favourite scenes over and over, whenever I want! Yes!

This is Spinal Tap. Again, hilarious every time, and the commentary is filled to the brim with comedy gold.

Roman Holiday = classic, restored. Bueno.

Elf is barely on here, because it’s an adorable movie, but I saw it a trillion times in a row this past Christmas, so some of its charm was definitely lost.

Chestnuts roasted by Becca @ 06/21/2005 3:57 AM

1. Transformers: The Movie

2. BaseKetball (from the creators of South Park)

3. Waterboy (Sander & C.Bates)

4. Bicentennial Man

5. I, Robot

Chestnuts roasted by Traynor @ 06/21/2005 1:43 PM

A couple of days late.

Hmm… five favourite DVDs?

In no particular order besides alphabetical:

  • Dawn of the Dead: Ultimate Edition: Three different cuts of the film spread over three DVDs plus a fourth disk with all sorts of behind the scenes features, including Document of the Dead, a documentary about George A. Romero’s technique with segments from 1978 and 1989; the 1989 stuff is mostly Tom Savini setting up a special effects shot from a long-forgotten film, it’s boring and drags on too long, but the 1978 portion is precisely the sort of "point-the-camera-and-shoot" documentary I prefer that’s largely raw footage from around the Monroeville Mall with minimal narration. Also, there’s a shorter segment with footage of how the Monroeville Mall looks now. By the way, despite what some people may think, I think that the U.S. theatrical cut of Dawn of the Dead is superior to the extended cut, since the extended cut, for the most part, just has longer versions of the same scenes, mainly longer "takes" with very little "new" worth seeing (very, very few of the extra 18 minutes of footage involve zombies at all). The theatrical cut just feels much tighter.

  • The Incredibles: In my opinion, this was quite possibly the best animated film made since Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service in 1989, and the extras on the second disk were spectacular, a notch above even the Toy Story: Ultimate Toybox triple-disk set. I especially like the files on all the "Supers", complete with fake interview clips.
  • Independence Day: I know it’s fashionable to bash this film now, but I still think it was one of the finest of the 1990′s summer "event" films, and I think much of it, like President Whitmore’s jingoistic speech towards the end, is quite intentionally cheesy. It’s a spoof of sci-fi films done with a mostly straight face. I love the old "Five Star Collection" series prestige edition of this film. (I wish Fox hadn’t retired the "Five Star Collection" moniker when two-disk sets became almost the de facto standard way to release nearly every film on DVD; I’m such a sucker for that shiny silver box with the holographic rainbow effect.) You get the normal DVD features, including 2 different cuts of the film and 2 commentary tracks, but you also get a 22-minute "mockumentary" about the aftermath of the invasion, and the absolute most unique feature of all is the Easter Egg where you can see over an hour of video clips that they shot for the television screens in the movie.
  • Project A-ko: Collector’s Series: A hyperkinetic anime comedy classic which deserves more recognition. I once wrote about Project A-ko, "This movie is proof that not all anime films are insightful, haunting, poetic, elegaic, or philisophical with deep subtexts on the nature of existence, asking what makes us human. Some anime films are about schoolgirls with powers and big robots and spaceships and panties and wacky mayhem." The "Collector’s Series" version of the DVD features a remastered picture with a restored full-screen image (this movie was animated full-screen and then "matted" for widescreen), a subtitled commentary track from animation director Yuji Moriyama, and a Japanese behind-the-scenes special from 1986 that’s unintentionally hilarious because the animators are so sexist (and so is the narrator). Project A-ko is also a notable anime film because it’s one of the first anime films to feature music and songs composed by Americans, Joey Carbone and Richie Zito, and the songs were also performed in English (and one of the singers was Samantha Newark, who was the speaking voice of Jerrica Benton a.k.a. "Jem" of the Holograms), so the "Collector’s Series" DVD case also includes a CD of the soundtrack making the Project A-ko DVD an incredible bargain now that Central Park Media/U.S. Manga Corps is selling it for a reduced price.
  • Rushmore: I spent a pretty penny on the Criterion Edition of this back in 2000, but it was worth it, because I find it to be a very elegant single disk presentation, where, somehow, they were able to cram not just a movie and commentary track onto the disk, but also a full hour of Charlie Rose featuring Bill Murray and Wes Anderson, a behind-the-scenes documentary shot, also in the narration-light "point-the-camera-and-shoot" style, by Wes’s brother, Eric Chase Anderson, and lots of other assorted goodies including three short movie parodies, of Out of Sight, The Truman Show, and Armageddon, performed on stage by the "Max Fischer Players", made for the 1999 MTV Movie awards. Eric Chase Anderson, who is also an illustrator, drew the art on the cover, the inserts, the disk label, and even the disk menus, and you get a mini-poster "map" of the places from the film.
Chestnuts roasted by Steve Brandon @ 06/22/2005 7:51 PM

Matt (the New Zealand one): There’s a Lilo & Stitch Special Edition? Is it Region 4 only? I had heard that Disney originally was going to release one in January 2004, but it never made it to store shelves in North America, where the best film Disney Feature Animation has made since at least The Lion King is somehow about the only one without a version with a commentary track.

Damn, and I’m one of the few anime fans who actually preferred Lilo & Stitch to the decent but somewhat bloated, overlong, unfocused, and scattershot Spirited Away. (Though, speaking of Hayao Miyazaki films, I actually liked Howl’s Moving Castle more than Matt, as in X-E Matt this time, did http://www.boxoffice.com/scripts/fiw.dll?GetReview?&where=ID&terms=8297">according to his review at Boxoffice.com. It’s not on par with Kiki’s Delivery Service or My Neighbor Totoro, but I feel it was superior to Spirited Away because Miyazaki seems to have fixed a lot of the issues I had with his unfocused and disjointed storytelling in his previous film.)

Chestnuts roasted by Steve Brandon @ 06/22/2005 8:11 PM

1. Club Dread – Good movie, not great but good enough.. and stupid enough to watch over and over. The DVD extras are okay too I guess, I still haven’t got the extended version.

2. Cabin Fever – This movie really stood out to me when it came out, offering something a little different. Great movie and a great DVD.

3. Freddy vs Jason – Great movie, brought back the feel of the originals but with a contemporary vibe so it didn’t get stale. I say good DVD cuz the director shares some good tips on horror movie making like the color schemes he uses for each character and his kung fu background.

4. My Star Wars Episode III Cam DVD – the only way I could possibly sit through all 3 (2, 3?) hours is in bootleg DVD installments.

5. House of the dead – not a good menu, not really even a good DVD, but it’s got at least one or two hot chicks in it and it’s great to watch when you’re "not sober"..

There you go, a list of 5 good DVDs by somebody who’s baked outta their skull..

Chestnuts roasted by weirdoz weirdo @ 06/26/2005 6:41 PM

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