Blog Update (Friday, July 10th, 2020)

Hey guys! How're you all doing on this extremely hot Friday morning? I'm hanging in there. I've got air conditioning so I've been staying indoors for the last couple of days. Which sucks, but what can ya do? I wanted to do this update because I haven't done a blog update in a while. I was doing them weekly for a while, but I got out of the habit of doing them somewhere around Star Wars Week or so. Mostly because I haven't really had anything to talk to you about concerning the blog. But I do have a few things to talk about today, so let's get into it.

First off, I'm three posts away from finishing the reviews of the Hi-Tops Video Teddy Ruxpin VHS releases. Those reviews have been a lot of fun to do as I've been able to revisit the ones I had as a child and enjoy the ones I didn't for the very first time and it's been great. I was originally going to go through all of the tapes in the Disney Sing-Along Songs VHS series after I finish with the Teddy Ruxpin tapes, but I think I have a different way of approaching the series instead. I'm still going to review each tape in the series, but I think the way I'm going to do it is focus more on the content more than the format, especially since the later Sing-Along Songs episodes came out on both DVD and VHS and even a few of the earlier ones were released on DVD as well. As I was looking online for cover images, particularly on the Disney Wiki, I found that in some cases the DVD covers were in a better quality than the VHS covers were, so in those cases I'm going to use the DVD covers instead as my cover image for that particular installment. 

There's also not going to be any consistency between the VHS covers either. Most will be the third wave releases from 1994 and onward, and others will be the second wave releases from 1990 until 1993 as very few of the first wave releases from 1986 until 1989 actually had the cover images in any decent quality. Which is the same problem that I ran into with the Teddy Ruxpin VHS covers. The only difference is is that I actually knew somebody who had scanned high resolution images of the covers for the Teddy Ruxpin tapes, whereas I don't for the Disney Sing-Along Songs tapes. And it seems that anyone I do know or have seen online who still owns the Disney Sing-Along Songs tapes have either the 1990 to 1993 re-releases of the 1986 to 1989 wave or they have the newer 1994 onward releases or even the DVD releases from the early to mid 2000s.

I also wanted to talk a little bit about the movies I'll be reviewing over the next few weeks, as well as give you my intended schedule for when I'm planning on putting out those reviews. Tonight I'm going to be watching Don Bluth's 1994 animated classic, Thumbelina for this week's movie review. I recently discovered that Thumbelina is on Disney+. In fact I was pretty shocked because I knew the movie hadn't been released by Disney or even produced by Disney. However, it turns out that Don Bluth Productions became Fox Animation Studios in 1994, the year this movie came out, and I guess since Bluth's last few films were released by 20th Century Fox in the late '90s and early 2000s, even though Thumbelina was originally released by Warner Bros., Fox got the distribution rights for the film from WB sometime in 2002. And because Disney owns Fox now, the movie is on Disney+. Which works for me because now I can watch it.

Next week and the week after are also locked in. In fact I have my movie review schedule locked in up through September 4th. So last week after I watched That Awkward Moment on Netflix for last week's movie review, I decided to go on IMDB to check out the filmography for Addison Timlin, an actress who shows up in the movie twice. As I was scrolling through the list, I saw a movie called Odd Thomas on it from 2013/2014, around the time that That Awkward Moment came out. So I clicked on it, saw that the late Anton Yelchin, who played Chekov in the three Star Trek movies directed by JJ Abrams and Justin Lin, was in the lead role as Odd Thomas, the titular character of the movie. Intrigued, I watched the trailer on YouTube and was hooked. So I'm going to buy the movie on iTunes. I also discovered that Odd Thomas is based on the first book in a series of novels written by Dean Koontz, and I have the series in eBook form from a batch of eBooks that I got when I originally had a Kobo eReader. I don't have the Kobo anymore, but I downloaded the Kobo app on my iPod, loaded the book onto the app and read the first two chapters before bed last night.

My plan for this is to read and review the book and then watch the movie and review that. Then I'll probably do a book to movie comparison after I've done the movie review because chances are pretty good that there were some changes made for the movie when the book was adapted. But again, it will all depend on when I finish the book. Though that shouldn't be too much of a problem since I'm a fast reader when I want to be so I should have the book finished by July 17th, which is next Friday. 

In two weeks the movie I'm planning on reviewing is Star Trek (2009), the first movie in the JJ Abrams produced Star Trek Trilogy. So that's the plan. Now I'll give you the movie review schedule up through September 4th as I have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to review and when.

July 11th - Thumbelina (1994)

July 18th - Odd Thomas (2014)

July 25th - Star Trek (2009)

August 1st - Casper (1995)

August 8th - American Pie (1999)

August 15th - Forrest Gump (1994)

August 22nd - X-Men (2000)

August 29th - Digimon: The Movie (2000)

September 5th - Jetsons: The Movie (1990)

That's all I wanted to tell you for today. I'll be back tomorrow for my review of Thumbelina. Also, don't forget to join me on Monday for the 10th volume of the Hi-Tops Video Teddy Ruxpin VHS series, with another comic book review coming your way on Tuesday. Until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you all later. Bye for now.