Weekly Blog Update: What I Watched and Picked Up During the Week (May 12th, 2020)

Hey guys! How was everyone's weekend? Mine was pretty good. It was quiet as usual, and the weather kind of sucked, but I finished up Star Wars Week here on the blog which was a lot of fun to do. Especially because I got to watch Spaceballs AND Fanboys as part of that mix. As if you couldn't tell from my quite lengthy reviews, they are my favourite comedy films of all time, hands down. I also finally started my VHS review series, starting with The World of Teddy Ruxpin Volume 1: The Treasure of Grundo and ending with Barney & The Backyard Gang Volume 8: Rock with Barney. But that's going to be quite a ways away as I have eleven more Teddy Ruxpin tapes to watch plus a ton of the Disney Sing-Along Songs tapes to watch as well.

You may have noticed that I changed the cover images on all of my movie reviews from the VHS, DVD and Blu-ray covers to the movie posters. Going forward I'll be using the movie posters only for my movie reviews. They're just easier to find online without having to resize the image before I upload it onto the blog. This way I can just go onto IMDB (Internet Movie Database) and grab the movie poster from that site easily. As for TV show season, series, and episode reviews, I'll be using the DVD covers for each one. Let's get into what I picked up on iTunes during the week, as I picked up some really cool stuff.

The first thing I picked up on iTunes is a movie from 2016 called Time Toys. I was looking something up on IMDB last week and I came across this film. So I clicked on it, read the description and decided to pick it up on iTunes. It has Ed Begley Jr. in it, which is really cool. For those of you who don't know who he is, Ed Begley Jr. has been in a lot of movies and TV shows. However I know him from two shows. The first thing I ever saw him in was a two part episode from season 3 of Star Trek: Voyager called "Future's End", which ironically has him doing the exact same thing that the bad guy in this movie is trying to do, except there's a fully trained Starfleet crew stopping him instead of a group of middle school kids. The second show I know him from is 7th Heaven where he plays Stephen Collins's brother-in-law. I haven't watched this movie yet, but I think I'm going to on Friday night for this week's movie review.

The other movie that I bought from iTunes is of course Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. My parents used to rent this movie for me all the time on VHS when I was a kid, but I've never owned a physical copy of it on any home media format, so to have it digitally so I can watch it is pretty cool. Of course I'll get a physical copy of the movie at some point, but for now, I'm just happy that I can actually watch it now. Also, it's a lot better than the Tim Burton movie from 2005.

I also bought another episode of Animorphs. This time I bought Episode 4, "On the Run", which I guess was produced so that they'd have more time to have a permanent Hawk on the set, since Tobias was going to get stuck in his Hawk morph at the end of episode 3. Either way, it's part of the initial batch of episodes that I remember watching on Global TV when I was a kid, before I found out that the show was also airing on YTV.

I know people always rag on Full House because it's cheesy and sappy, but it was one of my favourite shows growing up and even today whenever it's on I watch it. I already had the first episode on iTunes so I bought the episode I remember clearly from when I was a kid, because my parents had taped it off TV for me because I was in the hospital and we weren't sure if I'd get the channel that Full House was on on the TV in my hospital room. That episode is "The House Meets the Mouse Part 1", from the two part season 6 finale.

The final TV episode that I bought is the 200th episode of The Big Bang Theory from season 9, where Adam West shows up for Sheldon's birthday party and Sheldon has a nervous breakdown due to being overwhelmed by the amount of attention he's getting. That is probably my favourite episode from the later seasons of the show.

I did buy some music with the iTunes gift card that I got. In this case I got the soundtrack for the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Encounter at Farpoint". Of course as soon as it had finished downloading to my computer, I listened to the entire soundtrack and as the music was playing I could picture in my head the scenes a particular piece of music came from. I've been aware of this soundtrack for a really long time, as it appeared in many Star Trek magazines over the years, so that was cool to be able to actually listen to it.

The last thing I bought on iTunes is a track from the soundtrack Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Ron Jones Project, which collects previously unreleased tracks from TNG's musical score. The track that I bought is the opening track from the first regular episode of TNG to ever air, "The Naked Now". It's not a really good episode or anything but it's one that I watched on VHS all the time when I was a kid and the music in the episode is pretty decent.

So that's all I picked up during the week. Let's get into what I watched since my last Weekly Blog Update post shall we.

To open Star Wars Week, I of course watched Star Wars on VHS. You can read my review of the movie on the blog for my thoughts and feelings about this movie.

Then I watched The Empire Strikes Back on VHS. I also have a review of the movie up on the blog, so check it out if you are so inclined.

To finish off the original Star Wars Trilogy I watched Return of the Jedi, also on VHS. There's just something nostalgic about watching the Star Wars Trilogy on VHS and every time I do, I recapture the feeling I had when I first saw the movies back in the '90s.

To finish off the Star Wars movies I wanted to review for Star Wars Week, I watched Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace on VHS. This is my absolute favourite movie of the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy. It's also held up pretty well since it first came out 21 years ago and it was fun revisiting the theatrical cut on VHS, since the DVD has had scenes put back into the movie. Scenes that were completely unnecessary to put back into the movie. Especially since those same scenes were also in the deleted scenes section of the bonus features on the DVD...

As I already mentioned at the beginning of this post, I watched Spaceballs last week too. This is my favourite of the three movies I've seen that Mel Brooks directed. I like Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Blazing Saddles, but this is my favourite.

And then to wrap up Star Wars Week I watched the 2009 comedy written by Ernest Cline and Adam F. Goldberg, Fanboys. I love this movie. It's also the one that made me like comedies like this one because I was not a fan of the Judd Apatow or Seth Rogen type of comedies that this film mirrors in a lot of ways.

On Saturday night I watched last week's episode of DC's Legends of Tomorrow which I recorded on the PVR so I could watch Star Wars movies all week. This season has been a real mixed bag when it comes to the Arrowverse shows. I ended up dropping The Flash earlier this season because, once Crisis on Infinite Earths was over, I just stopped caring about anything that was going on in the show. Especially since the first half of the season, leading up to the crossover wasn't that good to begin with. Legends of Tomorrow has been slightly better, but there have been entire episodes that I just didn't care for, and some of the decisions made by the show's creative team have not been great this season. Oddly enough, for me Supergirl has been killing it this season. It's actually been better than any of the other CW/DC Comics shows this season.

On Sunday I watched The Treasure of Grundo for my new VHS review series. It was interesting going back and watching this tape because I never saw it when I was a kid and I never owned it. So to see how they edited the episodes together was pretty interesting. And a little jarring as well given the third episode on the tape aired AFTER "Guests of the Grunges" when the show was originally on TV back in the '80s. But it was cool to finally get to watch this tape after so many years.

Yesterday I watched two things. I surprised myself with one of them. Which I'll talk about shortly. Right now I want to talk about the first thing that I watched.

Yesterday afternoon I watched Teddy Ruxpin: The Movie. Despite what you may think this isn't anything brand new and it's not even a VHS re-release of the live action/animatronic TV movie from 1985 either. Instead it's simply the first five episodes of The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin edited together into feature length, with new title cards and closing credits added to it. It's similar to how Gargoyles: The Movie - The Heroes Awaken was the first five episodes of Gargoyles edited together into a movie for release on VHS. I'm going to be reviewing this "movie" in the very near future, so I'll talk about the edits they made to the episodes in that review.

Last night is when I surprised myself with what I watched because I put on Netflix and watched the first seven episodes of Community. Yep, I have never watched this show before and I honestly didn't know very much about it, except for who some of the cast was. But I wanted to see if anything new was on Netflix and I happened to see it in the listings, so I decided to put it on. I've never been able to get into comedy shows like Modern Family, The Office, Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. But Community? Yeah, I'm absolutely loving it. I mean it started while I was still in college, and so I never started watching it because I didn't have a whole lot of time to watch a lot of TV, so I ended up passing on quite a few shows that started around this time. This is one of those shows where doing season reviews isn't going to do it justice, so once I'm finished the entire series, I'll be doing a review of Community for sure so I can talk about it at greater length. Right now though, I'm glad that I decided to put on Netflix last night because it is such a good show.

Alright guys that's going to be it for me for today. I just wanted to show off what I got from iTunes and talk about what I watched during the week. I've got a comic book review coming your way sometime tomorrow and I'll be reviewing Mighty Morphin Power Rangers/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1, so stay tuned for that. Otherwise I'll have my review of Time Toys up for you on Saturday. Anyways guys that's it for me for today. I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.