Hey guys! I know you were all looking forward to a review of The Nightmare Before Christmas from me today. I've decided to wait until next year to review it. Instead I decided to do a list of my favourite Christmas VHS tapes from when I was growing up. These aren't in any particular order. They're just the tapes I grew up watching at Christmas time, in addition to all the Christmas specials on TV.
You can't have a list of VHS tapes without talking about The Muppet Christmas Carol. I'm pretty sure we got this from my grandparents for Christmas just after it came out in 1993. I loved this movie when I was a kid. We watched it all the time when we were kids. I'll talk about it more in my favourite Christmas movies list which will be posted on Wednesday.
As I mentioned in my review of the movie, we didn't watch this tape as often as we did the other tapes on this list. However, we did watch it a few times just because it is a midquel to Beauty and the Beast with most of the same cast from the first movie. Check out my review for more on this movie.
I don't know how many of you will remember this, but something that I had on VHS as a kid was The Teddy Bears' Christmas which came out in 1992 and is a sequel to The Teddy Bears' Picnic. Sort of. Technically it's a prequel, but there was no real continuity to these short films so it didn't matter in what order you watched them in if you had more than one of them. We just had the one, though I remember seeing The Teddy Bears' Picnic either on TV or renting it on VHS from the video store. Anyway, we had this tape when I was a kid and I remember watching it quite a bit.
I loved the Berenstain Bears when I was a kid. My mom would get me the books from the CHEO gift shop quite often, and I think I also got some from my grandmother at a garage sale or something. Regardless, I had a lot of the books. I had one VHS tape and that was The Berenstain Bears' Christmas Tree. It was a special that originally aired on NBC in 1979 and was released on VHS in 1984, 1987, and 1989 and on DVD in 2002 and 2008. I had the 1989 VHS release when I was a kid. I really don't remember how often I watched it, but I'm pretty sure I watched it once or twice at Christmas time.
This is the Home Alone movie that I watched when I was a kid. I know that Home Alone 3 isn't as much of a Christmas movie as the other films in the franchise are, but it's still a Christmas movie. It's also the Christmas movie that I watched all year round, it didn't matter what time of the year it was. Like it could've been the middle of summer and I'd still watch this movie. Just because I liked it so much, and because it wasn't as much of a Christmas movie as the previous two movies in the series had been.
I'll Be Home for Christmas was one of my favourite Christmas movies growing up. Being alive in the '90s two TV shows were hugely popular. Home Improvement, starring Tim Allen, and 7th Heaven starring Catherine Hicks and Stephen Collins. So naturally some of the kids from both shows would get to star in a movie together. Jonathan Taylor Thomas from Home Improvement and Jessica Biel from 7th Heaven play the lead roles in this movie. The movie has it's problems, but I've always enjoyed it even if Jake, the character that Jonathan Taylor Thomas plays, ends up being a "genuine butthole" as Jessica Biel's character calls him at one point in the movie.
I've already talked about The Santa Clause on this blog, but c'mon this was the first of the two live action Disney Christmas movies that starred a cast member from Home Improvement in it in the '90s. My sister also confirmed for me that we did indeed own this movie on DVD when we were younger. So that's cool. Anyway, we didn't own it on VHS, though we did rent it at least once on the format when it first came out.
Aside from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie, the only Power Rangers VHS I owned was Alpha's Magical Christmas. Which is probably the most obnoxious Power Rangers VHS tape a kid could own in the '90s. Personally, I loved it but there are better Power Rangers VHS tapes I could've owned. The special doesn't hold up that well watching it as an adult but like I said it was the only Power Rangers VHS tape I owned as a kid besides the 1995 movie that is.
Barney & The Backyard Gang: Waiting for Santa, which is the fourth entry in the Barney & The Backyard Gang video series, is the last Barney tape that we actually got when I was a kid. I don't actually remember how old I was either. Probably around 7 or 8 years old. This was the 1993 printing that we got so it probably couldn't've been more than a year or two after it's release that we got it since this edition was re-released in 1996 or 1997 and again in 1998. While this was the only Barney Christmas special that my siblings and I owned, we watched the heck out of it just because it was Barney. Though we were no longer watching Barney & Friends on TV, we were still watching the three Barney & The Backyard Gang tapes we owned as well as the two Barney & Friends era tapes we owned. In fact I remember watching this at someone else's house during the Icestorm of 1998.
I don't actually know how many times I watched this tape of Frosty the Snowman when I was a kid. If you read my review from the end of November, you know how much I love this particular Christmas special. I won't go into it again here. I will say that as soon as I had the opportunity I bought a new copy of this edition of the special on VHS. Which is how I watched it when I reviewed the movie.
Does anyone remember this movie? My sister and I used to watch The Nutcracker Prince pretty often when we were kids. I haven't seen it in years and it wasn't until recently that I discovered that it was released by Warner Bros. because we had the Canadian VHS release, which wasn't released by Warner Bros. but by Cineplex Odeon Video, an arm of the theatre chain here in Canada. I haven't seen it in years so I don't remember a whole lot about what happens in it. I'd love to watch it again but I don't own a VHS or DVD copy of it, it's not streaming anywhere and both DVD editions have been out of print for over a decade. So maybe I'll get lucky and find a VHS copy or an old DVD copy at a thrift store after this pandemic is over and I'm able to go out again.
Well guys that is going to be it for me for tonight. I will be back on Wednesday with my favourite Christmas movies list which will close out the year of 2020 here at the Review Basement. Have a great night everyone! Later.
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