Five Favorites

Geek Punditry #152: Blake’s Five Favorite Unorthodox Christmas Specials

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With Thanksgiving behind us (save for a refrigerator stuffed with leftovers) I for one am ready to dive headfirst into the Christmas season. I’m ready for decorations, lights, radio stations that play holiday classics 24/7 and, of course, Christmas movies and TV shows. But today, I want to focus on wonderful little subset of entertainment we know as the Christmas special. It’s not a regular episode of a TV show, it’s not long enough to count as a movie, but somehow it’s just not Christmas without them. We all know the Rankin and Bass all-stars, of course, and we’re well-versed in the antics of the Peanuts gang and the wiles of the Grinch. Those of us who are particularly sophisticated even indulge annually in Garfield’s Christmas shenanigans. But in the decades that Christmas specials have existed, there are many that have come and gone without leaving the mark that these other, better-known specials have… and some of them are outright BIZARRE. This week, to help you kick off the season, I’m going to give a spotlight to five lesser-known, sometimes baffling Christmas specials that you may have forgotten – heck, that you may never have heard of at all.

Twelve Hundred Ghosts

We’ve all seen A Christmas Carol, of course. In fact, we have no doubt seen it dozens of times, maybe even HUNDREDS of times, and we can do that without ever watching the same version twice. The story is a perennial that we’re all familiar with: On the night before Christmas Ebenezer Scrooge, professional miser, is visited by three spirits who show him visions of the past, present, and future in an attempt to get him to change his ways. Charles Dickens’ book was originally published in 1843 and became not only a classic, but in many ways helped reinvigorate the popularity of Christmas itself in a world where it had been waning. It is well-known and well-loved and this, combined with the fact that it’s in the public domain, means that it has been adapted perhaps more than any other story in history. Just think about how many different movies there have been based on the story, how many TV shows have borrowed its plot for Christmas episodes, how many times it’s been produced on stage, spoofed in commercials, adapted into comic books, and basically translated into every storytelling medium imaginable.

Heath Waterman imagined perhaps a bit TOO much, and in 2017 his imagination gave birth to Twelve Hundred Ghosts: A Christmas Carol in Supercut. Waterman spent a year and a half assembling clips from virtually every iteration of the story he could find – TV shows, movies, parodies, and plenty of others. Using only these clips, he assembled a retelling of the story that is surprisingly cohesive. Despite the fact that we can roll from a clip with Patrick Stewart to Mr. Magoo to Basil Rathbone in the blink of an eye, it’s amazing how well the narrative holds together. Even someone who has only a passing familiarity with the story could easily follow along with the tale as assembled by Waterman, and by the time its 53 minute running time is over, you’ve got a more complete telling of the story than many of the different versions tell you on their own.

Being a supercut made of copyrighted works, Waterman can’t market or sell his creation, and you won’t find it on Netflix or on DVD. But the whole thing is available on YouTube, and it’s worth the time to watch if you’re even remotely curious about how it works. 

The Great Santa Claus Switch

Before The Muppet Show, Jim Henson’s Muppets appeared in a variety of different forms – in commercials, as performers in sketch comedy programs, and of course, on that new kids’ show Sesame Street. In 1970, Henson and his team produced The Great Santa Claus Switch as a special episode of The Ed Sullivan Show. In this hour-long special, an evil villain named Cosmo Sam (played by the great Art Carney) has decided he wants to take over Christmas for himself. To carry out his nefarious scheme, he’s going to kidnap Santa’s elves one at a time and replace them with his own minions, furry creatures called Frackles. 

As you can tell from the description, Henson was never one to shy away from reusing certain resources. “Frackle,” for example, sounds an awful lot like the name of another pretty popular Henson production. He recycled actors as well – Art Carney wasn’t just Cosmo Sam, but also Santa Claus himself. (Carney, of course, would go on to star in another of the greatest Christmas movies of all time – The Star Wars Holiday Special.) And then there are the Frackle PUPPETS. Several of them were reused and repurposed into background characters a few years later when The Muppet Show premiered. You’d see them dancing in the background during sketches or hanging around in crowd shots…well, all except for one. One particular Frackle, a blue and purple weirdo with a hooked nose named “Snarl,” was given a new set of clothes and a new personality for The Muppet Show, not to mention a new name. You may have heard of him – these days he goes by Gonzo the Great.

This is a rare Muppet production that, as best I can tell, has never had an official media release. However, like 1200 Ghosts, the curious among you can watch it all right now on YouTube. It’s a decent enough special, and it’s really interesting as a piece of Muppet history that you may not have known about. 

Beebo Saves Christmas

The “Arrowverse” era of DC Comics television was a fun one. Beginning with Arrow, the line went on to encompass shows like The Flash, Black Lightning, Batwoman, Supergirl, and most pertinently, Legends of Tomorrow. That last one featured a team of superheroes on a time-travelling ship, with a cast that rotated with surprising frequency over the years. After a couple of seasons the show got stranger and stranger and eventually, they just embraced it. At one point, for reasons that are far too complicated to explain, the heroes wound up summoning a giant version of a blue, furry doll called Beebo to help fight demons. I swear, it makes sense in context. The show was utterly bonkers and once it accepted that fact, it transcended to the level of genius.

In 2021, they took it one step further and made an actual Christmas special, Beebo Saves Christmas. This was ostensibly an animated special that existed in the world of the show, a tie-in to the Beebo toys, kind of like how Pixar told us that Lightyear was the movie that Andy’s favorite Toy Story character was based on, except that the Beebo special was actually entertaining. In the special, an elf named Sprinkles (Chris Kattan) becomes obsessed with efficiency and convinces himself that he can handle the demands of the Christmas season better than Santa Claus (Ernie Hudson). So it’s up to our fluffy pal Beebo (Ben Diskin) to gather his friends and…well, you read the title. 

The astonishing thing about this special is how genuine and earnest it feels. It has all the hallmarks of a TV special that’s meant to shill toys but, at the same time, has a sort of warmth and heart to it. The people who made this weren’t just phoning it in to sell merch, because there WAS no merch. They were making a show to PRETEND they were selling merch, and they clearly had fun with it.

“So Blake,” you may be asking, “Where can we watch this holiday masterpiece?” Well, that’s the bad news. The main Legends of Tomorrow series is currently streaming on Netflix. (Why not on HBO Max? Because – and I cannot stress this enough – Warner Bros doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing.) But the Beebo special, which was not technically an episode of the series and was never presented as such, does not appear to be streaming anywhere. And I think we can all agree that this is a true disgrace. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: We Wish You a Turtle Christmas

Remember in the 90s, at the height of Turtlemania, when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles somehow transcended the pages of comic books, fought free of the television screen, broke out of the movies, and became a real-life rock band? How they actually toured and you could see them live? And somehow, in 1994, they got a live-action half-hour musical Christmas special? How could you possibly FORGET, right? 

There’s not even an attempt at a plot for this one. It’s a series of short music videos, some of them original songs, some of them turtle-ized twists on Christmas classics, and all of them absolutely terrible. These are some of the worst Christmas songs you’ll ever hear in your life. The music is lousy, the voices are awful, and the attempts at humor fall flat and cause ear-splitting, heart-rending agony in anybody unfortunate enough to have to hear them. It is perhaps the single worst Christmas special ever made.

Here’s a link to see it on YouTube. Watch it twice. 

Christmas Comes to Pac-Land

Speaking of trendy pop-culture characters that got overexposed, isn’t it wild that Pac-Man had a hit cartoon show? The game is just a circle running through a maze eating dots and occasionally ghosts. Somehow, Hanna-Barbera turned that into a Saturday morning TV series that built out the world and the mythology of “Pac-Land” and Pac-Man’s family crafting an entire world where everything is round and bulbous and susceptible to the kind of puns that I am absolutely DYING to make except that I try to keep these columns as PG as possible. And in 1982, that popularity spilled over into a half-hour special.

In Christmas Comes to Pac-Land, on Christmas Eve Pac-Man and his family munch the ghosts, as they do, and the ghosts’s eyes float away, as they do. But on this Christmas Eve, the eyes happen to spook Santa’s reindeer, causing a crash in Pac-Land. But the Pacs, as it turns out, have never heard of Christmas before, and Santa has to explain it to them, then enlist their help to find the toys that got spilled across the countryside before Christmas is ruined.

I’m never sure what to make of this special. Are we to understand that Pac-Land is a place in our own world, a place that Santa Claus glides over in his sleigh every year, but has never visited before? That we’ve never spotted? And if that is the case, what does the existence of ghosts imply? The theological implications of this special cannot be understated, and conflicting Biblical scholars have been debating the results of its teachings for over four decades now. Frankly, it was highly irresponsible of Hanna-Barbera to release this at all, and they now bear the responsibility for causing the greatest religious schism since the Protestant reformation. Merry Christmas!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He may have gotten a little carried away on the Disney Universe thing, but he has no regrets. 

Geek Punditry #114: Blake’s Five Favorite RiffTrax Movies

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It’s time once again, my friends, for “Blake’s Five Favorites,” that Geek Punditry mini-feature where I talk about five of my personal favorite examples of whatever tickles my fancy on that particular week. These lists are neither objective nor comprehensive – they are based purely on what gives me the most joy to talk about on the day that I write the list. The list may be different if you ask me again tomorrow. This is the way my brain works. But for today, I want to tell you guys all about five of my favorite movies that have been tackled by the good people at RiffTrax.

Oh yes, my friends. We are, indeed, talkin’ RiffTrax.

A quick history, in case you don’t know what RiffTrax is. Back in the late 1980s, a group of comedians from Minnesota brought the world the gem that is Mystery Science Theater 3000, a series that showcased classically bad movies while the performers (some in puppet form) cracked jokes about them. This wasn’t a new idea, of course. People have been making fun of bad movies for probably as long as movies have existed. But these guys were really good at it, really funny, and MST3K lasted for many years across many networks and even their own feature film before fading away in the late 90s. In 2007, MST3K alumni Michael Nelson started RiffTrax, a new platform where he and various guests would continue the movie-riffing treatment. Originally, RiffTrax focused mostly on commentary tracks that viewers could synch to major motion pictures like Iron Man, but over time the focus on big movies dwindled as they gravitated more towards the older, low-budget fare that had been the lifeblood of MST3K. They still do the occasional big movie, but most of their output these days are on older films they can buy the rights to. Nelson was joined by fellow MST3K performers Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, and the three of them have been the lifeblood of the company ever since.

What I love about RiffTrax, and MST3K as well, is not just that it’s funny. It is, of course, there would be no point to the exercise if they weren’t funny. But I’m impressed in the way they can recontextualize movies, turn them into time capsules of the era in which they were made, or wring gold out of the most baffling creative choices. And not for nothing, when you’ve been hearing these three guys cracking wise for upwards of 30 years now, there’s a comfort to it. It really is – as the old MST3K commercials used to claim – “like watching cheesy movies with three of your funniest friends.” So here are my five favorite RiffTrax features. This does not include the many, many shorts that they’ve riffed, nor any of the “RiffTrax Presents” films, which feature other riffers than the main three (although I’ve grown to be a huge fan of the Bridget Nelson/Mary Jo Pehl riffs, and I could easily do a Five Favorites just for them). When I’m looking for a laugh and I want a classic riff, these are five that I turn to time and again, in no particular order.

The Apple

Somewhere, Jason Biggs is salivating…

This amazingly ill-conceived musical from 1980, released by the legendary Cannon Films, was a sort of science fiction take on the Garden of Eden story. The movie is set in the distant future of 1994, and just to make sure you don’t forget it, they remind you about 20,000 times in the opening number. It’s almost as persistent a message as the fact that Bim – whoever the hell Bim is – is in fact “on the way.” The plot, such as it is, follows a young woman who sacrifices her true love for a musical career that seems to spiral her downwards into a world of sin and debauchery. The greatest sin, though, is probably the costume choices.

A great Rifftrax movie is one where you can tell the guys are having fun making fun of it – on occasion they’ll even include them laughing at one another’s jokes in the track. This is one of those movies where you get a sense early on that they’re enjoying the cheese in front of them, and The Apple serves up a veritable buffet of dairy products. It’s the kind of movie that makes you not only question the filmmaker’s choices, but makes you wonder what ever made anybody think it was a good idea in the first place. It is, in short, a gold mine of riffing.

Cool As Ice

It’s like having your eyeballs violently assaulted by 1991.

Remember the 90s? Don’t worry, this movie will make damn sure that you do. In 1991 Vanilla Ice – kids, he was actually a musical performer of some sort – released this film that is to motion pictures what New Coke was to soda. Ice “plays” a…honestly, I’m not really sure who the hell he’s supposed to be, but he rides with his buddies into a small town where they have to rent rooms while one of them gets their motorcycle fixed. He ends up getting involved with a local honors student whose dad was in the witness protection program and who winds up on TV during the slowest news day in a century. 

Cool As Ice is what you would get if Mad Libs were a movie. There are a few plot points that seem to have been pulled randomly out of a hat, with a script hastily assembled by some intern desperate to find a way to link these various points into something resembling a narrative while, at the same time, providing several excuses to showcase a Vanilla Ice song somewhere along the path. Nobody in the movie behaves in a way that is recognizable as a sane human being, and the Rifftrax guys are eager to point that out, as well as spend several moments trying to reconcile the fact that this movie has the same cinematographer as Schindler’s List. 

Super Mario Bros.

This is literally the most game-accurate shot in the entire movie.

No, not the recent The Super Mario Bros. Movie that came out in 2023. We’re going back to the first Super Mario Bros. movie, the live-action film from 1993 that Bob Hoskins referred to as the greatest regret of his entire career. Hoskins and John Leguizamo are Mario and Luigi, transported to another universe that in virtually no way resembles the colorful, exciting world that fans of the video games have loved for decades. Instead we get a sort of bland, cliched dystopia where Dennis Hopper (of all people) as King Koopa is ruling with an iron fist. If you have ever wondered what would happen if somebody did a lot of cocaine and tried to make a version of 1984 with video game characters, the result might be something like this. 

This is the kind of movie that you watch and wonder how anybody involved actually agreed to be in this thing. Hoskins, remember, had recently had his star blown up by Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Dennis Hopper was already a legend. Leguizamo was a popular up-and-comer, and yet for some reason they all agreed to be in this film. Much of the meat of the riffing here comes from the incomprehensible disparity between the film and the video game that it was ostensibly adapting, and the utter confusion we get from these guys is what makes it so much fun.

Birdemic: Shock and Terror

Can you imagine how humiliating it must be to get killed by something with such few JPEGs?

There are actually TWO versions of Birdemic available on the RiffTrax site, the studio edition and the RiffTrax Live version, performed on stage in front of an audience and then broadcast to theaters all over the continent via Fathom Events. I love the RiffTrax Live films, and on those rare occasions when I get to go to one these days, there’s nothing like being in a theater full of RiffTrax fans enjoying the show together. There’s a certain energy that comes with the live shows that the studio versions – enjoyable as they are – just don’t have. If you’ve never had a chance to go to a RiffTrax Live screening, the next one is going to be Timecop, scheduled for this August, so try to pencil it into your calendar now. In the meantime, several of the previous ones are available on RiffTrax.com.

Anyway, Birdemic is director James Nguyen’s 2010 “thriller” about an invasion of birds. Killer birds. Just attacking people for no reason. Nguyen is an unrepentant copier of Alfred Hitchcock (his earlier film Replica is an attempted sci-fi ripoff of Vertigo) and he calls this a “tribute” to The Birds, minus any degree of tension, quality, believable effects, or anything resembling entertainment. In fact, the birds themselves (which look like they were lifted from a mid-90s Windows screensaver) don’t even show up until the halfway point of the movie. The first half of the film is a weak attempt at a love story between a woman whose face betrays the fact that she signed the contract to make this movie before reading a script and what appears to be a mannequin being controlled by some sort of inner mechanism, perhaps powered by rodents on a wheel. Watching this movie without Mike, Bill, and Kevin cracking wise about it is difficult. I tried it only once, with a group of my own funny friends, and it was only our own relentless mockery that made it survivable. Watch it twice.

Fun in Balloon Land

For the kids.

The last thing I want to point out about RiffTrax is how they will find movies that you never would have known existed were it not for them, and then bring you along as they descend into madness trying to make sense of them. Fun in Balloon Land is such a feature. Released to two theaters in Davenport, Iowa in 1965 (that sounds like a joke but it’s the truth), this “film” features a child being read a bedtime story and then having a dream, probably heavily influenced by mushrooms, about a huge empty warehouse full of hideous balloon figures and people in disturbing costumes, intercut with scenes of more balloons in what appears to be a Thanksgiving parade.

There are other RiffTrax movies that appear to have been made mostly for advertising purposes. Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny was somehow supposed to entice people to visit a now-defunct Florida theme park, while the Jim Carrey-starring Copper Mountain was an unapologetic plug for the Club Med resort. But making and releasing a feature film to promote a giant balloon company, something that the average human being will never have any reason to patronize, is one of the strangest decisions in all of cinematic history. The film itself is disjointed and bizarre, with a narrator that sounds as if she’s describing all the events on screen under duress. Listening to the riffs, you hear the guys get increasingly more confused as the film goes on, until the end when they, too, sound as though they’ve been driven to the brink of insanity. This movie has become a Thanksgiving staple for me.

There are many, many other RiffTrax movies I could have mentioned, of course. They’ve done classics like Night of the Living Dead and House on Haunted Hill, obscure superhero flicks like Supersonic Man, holiday clunkers like I Believe in Santa Claus and literally hundreds more. If you’re new to RiffTrax, though, these five are great movies to get you started. Check them out and join in the fun.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Dammit, he forgot all about Rollergator! And Santa’s Summer House! And To Catch a Yeti! And…

Geek Punditry #108: Blake’s Five Favorite Frigid Fables

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Here in Southern Louisiana, we’re known for a few things: food, music, and a general manager that none of the best potential head football coaches in the country want to work with. But this week, we got put on the map for something pretty unusual for us: snow. On Tuesday, we were hit with a snowstorm that dumped more of the white stuff than anybody alive has ever seen in the state of Louisiana before, as much as 10 inches in some areas. I know some of you in the north are scoffing at that – ten inches of snow is nothing to you if you live in North Dakota, for example, but this is insane for us. We don’t get snow like this. Every few years we get a dusting that makes us giggle until we have enough to make a snowman roughly the size of a Funko Pop and then we hope it happens again before we’re drawing social security. But this was more snow than Louisiana has had since 1895. That’s not a typo, it’s more than we’ve had in 130 years, and pretty much everything was shut down: roads, schools, businesses…everything except the Waffle House. As a result, I got three days to spend with my wife and son in a winter wonderland.

Seriously, this NEVER happens.

So naturally, I’m thinking about horror movies.

Well, not exactly. But spending so many days unable to leave the house because of ice and snow got me thinking about stories with that premise: people stranded together due to cold weather. And the fact is, most of those are scary movies. (Or Hallmark Christmas movies, but I’m not gonna write about those in January.) Pretty much every great example I could think of qualifies as a thriller, if not an outright horror film, and I guess it makes sense. Being forced in a confined space with people over a period of time can start to wear on you, the edges can be chipped off, and before long you’re staring at each other like Daffy Duck does when Porky Pig starts to look like a steamed ham. 

So in honor of this once-in-a-lifetime event, I decided to break out my Five Favorite Frigid Fables, five great movies about people stuck together in the cold. As always, these lists are highly subjective. They’re the five best movies I thought about that fit my criteria, and it’s always possible that if I made this list tomorrow I’d pick five totally different movies. I’m going to go from the most well-known movie on this list to the least, at least, according to the viewing numbers on Letterboxd. The first three are movies that will make most of you say, “Well obviously,” but I’m hoping by the end you’ll find something you may not have heard of before.

The Thing (1982), directed by John Carpenter

My family made it through the Louisiana Sneauxmageddon pretty easily, but if I hadn’t included this movie on the list my wife may have left me anyway. This is probably the defining example of a cold weather confined area horror movie, as well as being one of the best sci-fi/horror mashups ever made. In this film, if you’re one of the three people on the planet who aren’t aware of it, a group of researchers at an Antarctic base uncover an alien creature that has been buried under the ice for hundreds of thousands of years. Although it is literally never a good idea to thaw one of these out, the alien escapes and begins to prey on the men.

Making matters worse, they discover that the alien is a shapeshifter. Not only is it a murderous beast, but it has the ability to transform and look like any one of them, so they can’t even trust each other. The resultant film is a masterpiece about fear, mistrust, and paranoia, a world where even your best friend may be the thing that’s out to kill you. The ending in particular is wickedly clever and absolutely perfect for this film. The movie is a remake of the 1951 film The Thing From Another World, itself based on the novella “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, thereby simultaneously proving that sometimes the remakes are better than the original and sometimes the adaptation is better than the book. On the other hand, the remake/prequel of THIS movie from 2011 is…well, it’s just okay. But of the four iterations of this story, John Carpenter is the one who did it best.

The Hateful Eight (2015) directed by Quentin Tarantino

I feel like this is kind of a “forgotten” film. It’s not so much that people don’t know about it, but it rarely seems to make the conversation when people talk about their favorite Tarantino movies, which is surprising to me, because I’d easily place it in my top three. (The others are Inglorious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, since you asked.) In some ways, you could almost call this a western version of The Thing. Several travellers are snowbound at a haberdashery during an intense blizzard, including some bounty hunters, a condemned murderer, a sheriff, a cowboy, and a former Confederate general. As the storm rages outside, inside the lodge we start to learn that all of these people may not be the strangers that we assumed. These are people with deep wounds, some of them caused by the others that they’re now trapped with, and there is a hunger for revenge.

Even for Tarantino, this is a dark film. There is a rage and anger brimming beneath the surface, and there really aren’t any “good guys.” The movie is about bad people, badly damaged people, and the things they do to one another. The entertainment factor comes from trying to unravel the mystery of exactly how all of these people are connected and who has a past with whom. In that way, it may be the most well-written of Tarantino’s movies, with a complex plot that rewards multiple viewings as you try to untangle the web. There’s also an extended version, released via Netflix as a four-part miniseries, which I never got around to watching, but writing about it now is making me want to do so. 

Misery (1990) directed by Rob Reiner

Do you ever stop to think about how weird the career trajectory of some people turns out to be? Rob Reiner, the guy who played Meathead on All in the Family, grows up to direct two of the best Stephen King adaptations of all time (this one and Stand By Me) along with stuff like The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally. Go figure. 

Anyway, in this magnificent movie based on one of King’s best stories, novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan) gets in a car accident in the snow and is rescued by a former nurse named Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates). Annie tells Paul that she’s his biggest fan and is delighted to help nurse him back to health, but from the very beginning things feel…off. Things get much worse when Annie discovers Paul killed off her favorite character in his newest book, and the two enter into a deranged battle of wills as Annie fights for the survival of the fictional Misery Chastain, while Paul has to fight for his life. 

The movie is incredible – taut, tense, and full of legitimate chills. This was Kathy Bates’ breakout role, and garnered her an Oscar for Best Actress back when the Academy Awards still actually meant something. Everybody involved in this movie is at the top of their game, and it’s just as engaging and exciting today as when it was released 35 years ago.

Frozen (2010) directed by Adam Green

Elsa is going to be crowned the queen of Arendelle and her sister–wait, wrong Frozen. No, this movie came out three years before that other one, and it is most definitely NOT a beloved musical about the power of familial love. This film involves a trio of young skiers (Shawn Ashmore, Emma Bell, and Kevin Zegers) who – through a series of mishaps that make Kevin McCallister getting left behind in Home Alone seem plausible – get stuck on a ski lift as the weekend mountain resort they’re visiting shuts down for the week. 

Although the circumstances necessary to get the three of them trapped up there admittedly stretch credulity a little bit, once you get past that the movie is fantastic. You’d think a movie about three people stuck on a ski lift would run out of steam quickly, but the way the situation rapidly escalates into a life-or-death battle against the elements is totally gripping. It’s the kind of movie that makes you question what you would do in that situation, forcing you to wonder if you could possibly survive such an experience, dangling from an immobile ski lift with no hope of rescue for days as the temperature keeps falling and wolves begin to prowl in hard-packed snow beneath you. This was actually the first Adam Green movie I watched, before I discovered his signature Hatchet franchise, and it’s usually the one I recommend to people first. I love this movie.

Scare Me (2020) directed by Josh Ruben

The final film on this list is the most recent and least well-known, but by god, it deserves an audience. Writer/director Josh Ruben plays Fred, a writer on a retreat in the mountains. While taking a jog one morning he encounters Fanny (Aya Cash), a fellow writer who’s also on vacation. When a storm knocks out the power to their cabins, Fred and Fanny decide to ride out the weather together, passing the time by telling chilling stories as they challenge one another to – well, as the title says – “scare me.”

This is a movie that’s so simple, but absolutely brilliant. Almost the entire film is simply these two in a cabin talking to one another, but it’s done in such a way that you get sucked right in from the very beginning. The tales they tell are inventive and entertaining, but also slowly reveal things about the two main characters that lead you to question the entire situation. As good as the writing is, though, it wouldn’t be anything without the performances by Ruben and Cash. Both of them are probably better known for their comedic work (although after this movie, Cash hit it big on The Boys), but as I’ve said many times, the line between comedy and horror is very thin and the two disciplines rely on a lot of the same skills. That is to say, a great comedic actor very often has the chops to be a great horror actor, and these two prove it with this movie. They’re both wonderfully funny, but on a dime they can turn the entire situation around and scare the pants off of you. If you haven’t watched this movie, it’s currently available on Shudder and Hoopla, as well as the usual digital rental services. This movie proves how possible it is to tell a killer scary story without relying on gore and special effects, but just great performances. In fact, it could very easily be turned into a stage play, and it would be amazing.

There you have it, guys – five stories about people trapped in the cold. If it’s your thing, I hope you check them out. And if you’ve got suggestions for other such movies beyond these five, let’s hear it! Drop your own suggestions in the comments.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He briefly considered including the 2002 Cuba Gooding Jr. terror film Snow Dogs, but he thought that might be a bit too much.

Geek Punditry #103: Blake’s Five Favorite Santa Claus Stories

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Once again, it’s time for Five Favorites, that semi-regular feature here in Geek Punditry where I give you my five favorite examples of something. “Favorite,” of course, is a relative term, and is actually pretty fluid for me. I may think of something tomorrow that would supplant one of the choices on this list if I were to write this again. But for here, for today, I want to talk about five of my all-time favorite Santa Claus stories.

With Christmas only days away, the big guy is up north checking out his list, loading up the sleigh, and slopping the reindeer, so it only seems fair to me that I talk about some of the stories that have made him such a beloved icon to the young and the young at heart for centuries now. Let’s talk about the tales that make St. Nicholas so great.

The Autobiography of Santa Claus as told to Jeff Guinn. 

This book, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, has long been a favorite of mine. You see, when Santa decided it was time to tell the truth about his life story, he recruited journalist Jeff Guinn to help him compose the book, a deep dive into the life of the man who was once known as Nicholas, Bishop of Myra. 

If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while you’ve probably heard me talk about this book before, because it’s one I return to every few years. Guinn’s book mines actual history, including the true life of Nicholas, and combines it with a sort of subtle, beautiful magic. People expecting a superhero-style origin story for Santa Claus will be disappointed, because the truth is that Nicholas was just sort of “chosen” by unexplained forces, and to this day still doesn’t know why…but he knows that his mission is to give the world the gift of hope. 

The story is lovely, and I love the way he mixes real history with fantasy. In fact, the history doesn’t stop with Nicholas’s life, but goes on to show Santa’s interaction with things like the composition of the song “Silent Night,” his influence on Charles Dickens and Clement Clarke Moore, and the lives of some of the very unusual and unexpected helpers he’s accrued in his many centuries on this Earth. 

The book has two sequels. How Mrs. Claus Saves Christmas gives us a dive into Oliver Cromwell and his war on Christmas, and how Santa’s wife saved the holiday. The Great Santa Search rounds out the trilogy with a story set in the modern day, in which Santa finds himself competing on a TV reality show to prove who is, in fact, the true Santa Claus. All of the books are great, but the first one is my favorite.

Santa Claus: The Movie

If it’s a superhero origin that you’re looking for, though, this 1985 movie is for you. It was produced by Alexander and Ilya Salkind, riding the success of their Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve. And in fact, this movie is pretty much a straight rip of the structure of the first Superman movie: it begins with the character’s origin story (Santa and his wife are saved from freezing to death by the elves, who are there to recruit him), spends about half the film showing the hero’s development, and then introduces the villain at about the halfway point. From there we get to the real story, Santa fighting for relevance in a modern world where a corrupt toymaker is stealing his thunder.

I was eight years old when this movie came out, and that was apparently the perfect time to fall in love with it. I still love it. And David Huddleston – aka the Big Lebowski himself – is still my Santa Claus. When I close my eyes and picture St. Nicholas, it’s the David Huddleston version – his smile, his charm, his warm laugh are indelible parts of the Santa Claus archetype in my head. John Lithgow fills in Gene Hackman’s role as the villain, playing a cost-cutting toy executive named B.Z. who sees Christmas as nothing more than a profit margin. Dudley Moore is also along for the ride as Patch, one of the elves who finds himself in a bit of a crisis of faith. 

It’s a shame that this movie never got any sequels, because it was set up in such a way that there were many more stories to tell, but it underperformed and apparently did major damage to Dudley Moore’s career. Before this he was a rising comedy icon, and afterwards he fell off the A-list. I still think it’s a fantastic movie, though, and I have to admit that when I watch it, I wonder what would have happened if John Lithgow had ever had a turn playing Lex Luthor.

The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum

For a different take on Santa’s origin, let’s wind the clock back to 1902. L. Frank Baum is riding the high of his hit children’s book The Wizard of Oz and he’s looking for a new project. Rather than return to Oz, though, he goes in a different direction and a different fairy tale – that of a young child abandoned in the woods and raised by fairies to become the most giving man in the world.

This is a very different take on Santa than most modern versions. It’s light on the fancy and heavy on the fantasy, with Santa being forced to do battle with monsters and creatures that are out to stop his quest to bring toys to children, and a conclusion that feels like it could have fallen out of the likes of Tolkien or C.S. Lewis. It’s hard to remember sometimes that the way we think about Santa Claus today was sort of codified by lots of little things over the early part of the 20th century – influences from poems, books, songs, and even the original AI-free Coca-Cola Santa Claus ads. But Baum’s book was before most of those things, and although his Santa doesn’t exactly jive with the Santa we know and love (no North Pole workshop, ten reindeer instead of eight, different fairy creatures instead of elves, and so forth), it’s still a fascinating read. It’s especially interesting if you’re a fan of the Oz books, as I am. This was two years before Baum would go back to his most famous creation and transform Oz from a single novel into a franchise, but it feels like it belongs in that “universe.” In fact, in later books Baum would link many of his unrelated books to the world of Oz through the connections of characters, other fairylands, and creatures that would grow in prominence. If you want to consider this the origin of Santa Claus in the universe of Oz, it’s not hard.

The Year Without a Santa Claus

Let’s get away from origin stories, though. We all love the Rankin/Bass classics, and their Christmas specials are legendary. In the top two specials, namely Rudolph and Frosty, Santa is just a supporting character. But they did give Santa a few specials of his own, and this second one is my favorite. In this 1974 Animagic classic, Mickey Rooney voices a Santa Claus that’s down with a nasty cold. This, coupled with a feeling of apathy from the children of the world about his annual visit, brings him to the conclusion that he’s going to skip a year. As the world faces the prospect of a Year Without a Santa Claus, it’s up to Mrs. Claus and a couple of helper elves to convince the big guy to pop a Zyrtec and get his act together.

This is the best of Rankin/Bass’s Santa-centric specials, although the most memorable thing about this cartoon isn’t Santa itself. We have this special to thank for the introduction of the Heatmiser and Coldmiser, battling brothers and sons of Mother Earth. They’re the best original Rankin/Bass characters by far, they have the best original song from any Rankin/Bass special by far, and even now you see them showing up in merch and decorations every year. It’s not easy for a new character to break into the pantheon of Christmas icons, but the Miser Brothers made the cut thanks to this awesome special and the fantastic musical arrangement of Maury Laws. The boys are a delight.

DC Comics Presents #67: Twas the Fright Before Christmas

Let’s wrap things up with this comic book from 1984. DC Comics Presents was a series in which Superman would team up with a different guest-star in each issue. Usually it was his fellow superheroes like the Flash, Batgirl, or the Metal Men. On occasion he’d have to partner up with a villain like the Joker. On more than one occasion he had to pair off with different versions of himself like Superboy, Clark Kent, or his counterpart from Earth-2. And on one memorable occasion he met up with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, characters who were still on the rise.

But my favorite issue of the book is this one. Written by Len Wein with art by the most iconic Superman artist of the era, Curt Swan, in this issue Superman stumbles upon a little boy who tries to hold up a sidewalk Santa with a toy gun. Superman whisks the child off to his Fortress of Solitude at the North Pole where he determines that the child was hypnotized by a device in the toy, made by his old foe the Toyman. Leaving the Fortress, the boy’s toy zaps Superman with a burst of “white dwarf energy” which knocks him from the sky and leaves them stranded in the Arctic Circle. Luckily, they’re saved by some of the pole’s other residents. Superman and Santa then team up to save Christmas from the machinations of the sinister Toyman.

It’s a pretty silly story, but silly in a fun way. This is towards the end of the era in which Superman was allowed to be a little goofy, just two years before John Byrne would reimagine the character in his classic Man of Steel miniseries. And although that depiction of Superman has largely informed the character in the years since, it’s nice to see that modern writers aren’t afraid to bring back the kinds of things that made this story so memorable every once in a while. It ends with one of my LEAST favorite tropes, especially in a Christmas story (the whole “It was all just a dream…OR WAS IT?” nonsense), but that doesn’t diminish my love for it at all. I tend to go back and read this comic again every Christmas

Once again, guys, ask me tomorrow and there’s a good chance I would pick five totally different stories to populate this list, but as I write it here on December 20th, these are five of my favorite Santa Claus stories of all time. But I’m always open for new ones – what are yours?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Honorable mention goes to a story John Byrne did for Marvel’s What The?! comic where Santa twists his ankle delivering to Latveria and Dr. Doom has to take over and finish his route for him. 

Geek Punditry #99: Blake’s Five Favorite Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade Displays

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Hello, everyone, and welcome once again to “Blake’s Five Favorites,” that semi-regular Geek Punditry mini-feature in which I pick some aspect of pop culture and just wax poetic about my five favorite examples of that thing. As always, “Five Favorites” is totally subjective. I’m not saying these are the BEST five examples, just that these are five that make ME smile…and it’s important to note that, when it comes to ranking things like this, I can be kind of fickle. If I were to write this column a week from now, I might pick five totally different examples.

Well…four different examples. Number one for this week holds a permanent place in my heart.

Next week is Thanksgiving, the second in the great Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas extravaganza that makes the last three months of the year my favorite time. Last year, if you’ll recall, I wrote about the sad dearth of Thanksgiving-related entertainment: with few movies other than Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, few specials beyond Peanuts and Garfield, and few bingeable TV shows other than Friends and Bob’s Burgers. But that doesn’t mean there’s NOTHING fun to watch for Thanksgiving, and this week I’m going to talk about one of my favorites: the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. This year is going to be the 98th annual parade, and I have to admit, I’m already kind of a-tingle looking forward to 2026 and wondering what they’ve got in store for the centennial edition of the greatest Thanksgiving tradition since Ben Franklin stuffed the first duck inside of George Washington’s chicken and then fed it to Alexander Hamilton’s turkey. Or whatever happened.

A tradition as precious as Uncle Fred making comments about Aunt Judy’s ‘vacation to Motel California” and making everyone feel awkward.

This week, I’m going to look back at the great parades I’ve watched over the years and talk about some of my favorite displays, be they floats, musical performances, or the legendary balloons. These will be in no particular order except for number one. I’m saving the best for last.

#5: The Spider-Man Balloon

I remember, for Spider-Man’s first crawl down the skies of New York in 1987. That first Spider-Man balloon was remarkably exciting for me, for reasons that are maybe a little difficult to articulate, especially to modern fans. It’s hard to remember, in this day and age when geek culture IS popular culture, that there was a time when things like comic books, sci-fi, and fantasy were looked down upon. They were considered “low” culture by the hoi polloi and expressing a love for such things was as good as placing a target on your back from the schoolyard bullies. So seeing Spider-Man appear in the Macy’s parade was…kind of a revelation. In a strange way, it was a sort of validation, seeing something that meant so much to me get mainstream attention. It was the first time I had an inkling that MY culture COULD be pop culture…and let’s face it, guys, the years since have proven me right.

Spidey’s original balloon lasted from 1987 until 1998. He came back in 2004 with a new, updated balloon that continued to fly along until 2014. And that was it…until next week.

“Peter One…Peter Two…Peter Three!”

A brand-new Spider-Man balloon is going to debut this year! Yes, May Parker’s favorite nephew is making his return to the Macy’s Parade for the first time in a decade, and I cannot wait to sit on the couch with my son and watch him soar across the sky once again. I don’t know how long Spidey Mark III will last, but I feel like the wallcrawler has become something of a perennial. And I can only hope that if Eddie ever has kids of his own, he’ll be watching Spider-Man on Thanksgiving day with them. 

#4: The Marching Bands

I was a band geek in school.

I know, it’s shocking, but try to compose yourself.

I was a band geek all through middle school, high school, college. And of course, that means I was a marching band geek. I spent a lot of Fridays and Saturdays glide-stepping across a football field, slinging my trombone and wearing pants that rode entirely too close to my nipples. And to this day, I still love watching a marching band…but I hate the fact that they never seem to get any love on TV. Nearly every one of these college football games we watch has at least ONE marching band out there at halftime, playing their hearts out. I’d love to see them get a little credit for once.

You laugh, but you’d be shocked at how many girls swooned over the guy who could play “Land of 1,000 Dances” on trombone.

…None. The number is zero.

So the Macy’s Parade is great because that actually happens. For one day a year, we get to watch as dozens of schools from across the country strut their stuff on the biggest stage a marching band can get. The thing to remember is that the kids you see in that parade busted their butts to get there. Not only have they given countless hours rehearsing music and practicing drills, but the schools also have to pay their own way to the parade. So bands do fundraisers of all types: car washes, bake sales, soda sales…even mattress sales seem to have become popular in recent years. For those of us watching at home, we see 30 seconds of a marching band performance, but that could be the result of up to two years of hard work, planning, fundraising, and rehearsal. I love to see them get to show their stuff, even if half the country uses their appearance to go baste the turkey. 

#3: The Marvel Superheroes Float

The same year that Spider-Man’s first balloon premiered, we got another Marvel presentation, the Marvel Universe float. The float rolled three times before retiring after 1989, but similar to the Spider-Man balloon itself, it left an indelible mark on my geek psyche. (Side note: I’m realizing that this column is getting much deeper into my assorted nerdities than I would have expected.) The float was full of costumed performers dressed as characters that – in the 80s – were pretty damn obscure to the general public. I mean…Dr. Strange? Wolverine? Who the hell would ever make a movie about THOSE guys, right?

Pictured: Life before High Definition

This was long before Marvel was purchased by the Walt Disney Corporation and Global Underground Shadow Government and Falafel Stand, so the production values were at a level that I would describe as “Six Flags Knock-Off Amusement Park Show.” The costumes look like they were sewed together by somebody’s mother, and calling the “stunt” work stunt work is a bigger gift than anything Santa could bring. Despite the incredible cheese factor, I’ve never forgotten how much I loved watching that float, and in the week before Thanksgiving every year, I still pull up the clip of the 1989 parade on YouTube and watch it again, immersing myself in lovely, lovely memories. 

#2: The Garfield Balloon

This is another one that scratches that nostalgia itch, but when I think about Macy’s parade balloons, if it’s not Spider-Man, the first thing that comes to mind is Jim Davis’s legendary fat cat. I know, in this day and age it’s not fashionable to be a fan of Garfield. It’s bland. It’s homogenized. And the most recent movie took WILD liberties with established series canon. But I feel like I need to remind you that I was born the year before the first Garfield comic strip came out. The cat and I literally grew up together, so I have a soft spot for him. Plus, the old Garfield and Friends cartoon show was actually really good, and the holiday specials were great.

Garfield never rides in the Canadian Thanksgiving parade because he hates Mondays.

All that said, I remember seeing Garfield in the Macy’s Parade for years. It was the sort of thing that felt like a perennial to me, something that was just always there and always would be. Looking back, I see that it wasn’t QUITE that constant, but he did have a heck of a run. The original Garfield balloon traveled down the streets with the parade from 1985 until 1989, with a second stint from 1992 through 1999. A new Garfield balloon, this time carrying his teddy bear Pooky, showed up in 2003 and lasted through 2006. 

It’s hard to explain what exactly it is about the Garfield balloon that I find so comforting. Yeah, the character is as corporate as it gets, and in fact, Jim Davis deliberately crafted the comic strip to be as inoffensive and all-encompassing as possible. But in a way, that’s kind of appropriate. Hell, the parade itself is put on by a department store, and every float and balloon comes with a sponsor whose name is announced on national television during the broadcast – are we really going to pretend we’re NOT watching a three-hour commercial every Thanksgiving morning? And for that reason, I think Garfield is actually kinda the perfect mascot for the whole shebang. So yeah, I love seeing that balloon for the same reason I get a little smile every time I’m reminded of the days when every other car on the road had a Garfield plush stuck against the rear window. It just kind of feels…right.

#1: Santa Claus

I mean, what else could possibly take the top spot on my rating of the greatest parts of the Thanksgiving parade? I’ve often said that I think gatekeeping is stupid and that anybody who tries to tell anyone else that they’re wrong to start celebrating Christmas “early” is only showing their own prejudices. That said, in my house, I don’t think it’s Christmastime until that last minute of the Macy’s parade, when Santa’s sleigh rolls down the streets of Manhattan. It’s at that moment that I really feel like the holiday season has “officially” begun and there’s no longer any rationale from any of those Scrooges who claim that it’s too early for Christmas to keep flapping their gums.

“Ho, ho, hooold on a second there, save me some pumpkin pie!”

Santa’s most famous ride is still a month out, of course, but seeing him in the parade reminds every kid in the world that he’s on his way, that it’s time to make a list, that they better start behaving themselves, consarn it. And it feels like THE most constant part of the parade to me. Floats and balloons come and go, you don’t see the same marching bands every year, the musical performances are carefully crafted to support whatever is hot on Broadway that season…but no matter what else is going on in the world and who else is being paid to show up in the parade, Santa Claus is always going to be there. Hell, the whole tradition is the centerpiece of the movie Miracle on 34th Street, and I’ll never get tired of either one of them.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. If he had a genie available to him, one of his wishes would be to create a character so universally beloved that they would be immortalized in the Macy’s parade. The next wish would be for an official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time.

Geek Punditry #88: Blake’s Five Favorite Superhero Movie Scenes

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It’s time for a new Geek Punditry feature: Blake’s Five Favorites! In Five Favorites, I’m just going to talk about something that’s been on my mind and discuss my…well…my five favorite examples of that thing. Now keep in mind that this list is inherently subjective and not at all comprehensive. You may disagree with my choices, and that’s fine. And there may be other examples out there that I’d like even better, but I haven’t seen them yet. And if we’re being totally honest, if you asked me again tomorrow, my list may be totally different. I’m funny that way. But for now, as of the time I’m writing this, I want to tell you about my five favorite scenes from superhero movies. This is NOT a list of my five favorite superhero movies (although there would definitely be overlap), but a list of the five individual scenes in the history of superhero cinema that make me feel the happiest, proudest, most excited, or most touched. And obviously, these are going to be FULL of spoilers, so if you haven’t seen these movies by now, you may want to skip. Let’s see if any of your favorites make the list.

#5: James Gordon Lives (The Dark Knight, 2008)

Very few superheroes can really do their job alone, and those that try usually wind up learning early on that attempting to do so is a mistake. And for all his talk about being a lone wolf, decades of storytelling have built up a sizable contingent of heroes surrounding Batman. He’s got sons (biological, adopted, AND surrogate), daughter-figures, father-figures, friends, allies, lovers, and even frenemies. And of all the characters that have taken up arms with the Batman during the years of his crusade, my favorite is police commissioner James Gordon. There’s something inspiring about the one good cop trying to clean up a filthy, corrupt department and forging an alliance with an agent outside of the law to do it. I don’t really care for any version of Batman that casts Gordon as an incompetent, which is perhaps the most unforgivable of the many sins in the Joel Schumaker movies. 

Of all the actors who have played Gordon, Gary Oldman in the Dark Knight trilogy is hands-down my favorite. He really sells Gordon as a good man who recognizes that things are out of control and takes the necessary steps to set things right, and I absolutely LOVED how this film showed the pact between Gordon, Batman, and Harvey Dent that worked so well for all characters in The Long Halloween.

“I believe in Crystal Lig–I mean, Harvey Dent.”

So I was pretty darn startled when, partway through the film, Gordon is killed. I was shocked. I was stunned. And although the large part of me didn’t believe it could be true, I also recognized that director Chris Nolan had already taken some liberties with canon and I couldn’t be TOTALLY sure that he wouldn’t make that big of a turn. A while later, Batman and Dent hatch a plan to trick the Joker into attacking a convoy. The plan works, the Joker winds up on the ground with a gun to his head, and the cop holding that gun whips off his mask to reveal Gordon, alive, his faked death revealed to be all part of the plan.

Gordon: I’ve got you, you son of a bitch.
Me, in the back of the theater, screaming: YEEEAAH, YOU DO!!!

It is a testament to the love of my girlfriend at the time that, after I jumped and CHEERED in that movie theater, she still agreed to marry me. Someday I hope our son gets as thrilled at this scene as I am every time I watch it.

#4: You Are Who You Choose to Be (The Iron Giant, 1999)

Let’s get this out of the way before we go any further: Hell YES, The Iron Giant is a superhero movie. A childlike creature of immense power comes to Earth from outer space and chooses to use his powers to help people. There is no adequate definition of the term “superhero” that can justifiably exclude Brad Bird’s gargantuan guardian. As if that weren’t enough, the Giant befriends a young boy, Hogarth, who teaches him about being human using what is arguably the greatest possible source material: Superman comic books. (The argument, by the way, is whether or not these are a better source than Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, but the movie is set in 1957 and Schulz’s greatest philosophical work was still ahead of him.)

Plus, this looks a lot better than painting a zigzag stripe around his midsection.

Lost on Earth and with no memories, the giant goes through the usual sort of mishaps that ETs usually get into, only with fewer Reese’s Pieces, while the military picks up on his trail and tries to chase him down. Late in the film, the Giant’s true nature is revealed: he was created by some distant alien civilization as a weapon. As he struggles against his own programming, a panicked government agent orders a nuclear attack on the robot, one that will destroy not only the Giant, but an entire town of innocent people. The Giant, however, overcomes his programming and remembers something Hogarth told him earlier in the film: “You are who you choose to be.”

The Giant makes his choice. He is not a weapon. He is not a gun.

He blasts into the sky to intercept the missile, choosing to sacrifice himself to save the town full of innocents, and in the last second before impact, he whispers the name that he has chosen.

“Superman…”

If you can watch this scene without tears, I don’t know if I want to talk to you.

You can’t tell me that Clark wouldn’t be proud to see this guy wearing his shield.

In this scene the Giant proves he understands sacrifice, he understands selflessness, he understands choosing to believe in the fundamental goodness of humanity. He understands what being a hero actually is.

He understands Superman.

A hell of a lot better than most other people, I would argue.

#3: Peter One, Peter Two, Peter Three (Spider-Man: No Way Home, 2021)

Tom Holland, as I’ve often said, is my favorite of the actors who have played Spider-Man on the big screen. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a fondness for the other two, Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield. And it was immensely satisfying to me to see the three of them share the stage together in the final act of Spider-Man: No Way Home. In this film, the MCU version of Spider-Man has screwed up badly, breaking a spell Dr. Strange was trying to cast to wipe memory of his secret identity from the public, and drawing in people from alternate realities, destabilizing the very fabric of the multiverse back before people were doing that every other week. The whole thing builds to a battle against the nastiest rogue any live-action Spider-Man has ever faced, Willem DaFoe’s Green Goblin, who ups the ante in this film by (last time I’m warning you against spoilers) murdering Peter’s Aunt May. 

While the MCU never showed us Holland getting bitten by a radioactive spider or the death of Ben Parker, they found a different way to demonstrate Peter’s character development by spreading it across three films. Homecoming was about him learning how to be a hero. Far From Home was about him learning to be his OWN kind of hero, separate from Tony Stark. This film is about learning the COST of being a hero. It’s May’s death, not Ben’s, that really hammers that home for us all. 

But Holland doesn’t have to learn this lesson alone, because the multiversal rift hasn’t only brought in villains. Holland’s Peter finds himself allied with his previous incarnations, Maguire and Garfield, each of whom has some baggage to bring to the table, and each of whom is essential to the full development of Holland’s character.

“Wait, you’re the youngest, why are YOU Peter One? This is worse than when Barry Allen called Jay Garrick’s universe ‘Earth-2’.”

While Holland wrestles with his own failures, he sees Maguire, who is implied to have found a sort of stability and love with his version of Mary Jane Watson. In Maguire, Holland sees that there is hope for the future, even in the wake of seemingly unsurmountable tragedy. Garfield, meanwhile, has tortured himself over the death of Gwen Stacy ever since the end of Amazing Spider-Man 2 and become a darker, more broken Spider-Man because of it. But in perhaps the greatest moment of this movie, Garfield saves the MCU version of MJ from suffering the same fate. The look of simultaneous anguish and relief on Garfield’s face is tectonic: he has atoned for his failure. He hasn’t failed again. In him, Holland sees the hope for redemption.

We should all have a moment where we can find that kind of peace.

When the girl who just FELL OFF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY has to ask if YOU’RE okay, it’s an emotional moment.

Seeing what the other two have gone through and how they came out the other side is perhaps the most important part of Tom Holland’s journey in this movie, guiding him to the new life he has to lead at the end with no family and no friends who remember his existence. He’s striking out on his own – lonely, yes, but with the knowledge that hope and redemption are real and possible. And no matter what movie he shows up in next or who directs it, if Tom Holland swings again, that’s the Spider-Man I want to see…the one shaped by the lessons of his multiversal brothers. 

#2: Avengers…Assemble (Avengers: Endgame, 2019)

You want to know what makes Avengers: Endgame so great? You know what it does that so many other attempts at a “cinematic universe” (and even much of the MCU in the years since then) have failed at? Payoff. What’s the point in a cinematic universe if not to introduce long-term story threads that eventually are brought together in a satisfying way? Endgame pulled together the threads of eleven years of storytelling and almost two dozen movies to put together a finale that served as a powerful conclusion for every part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, provided you pretended that there weren’t any TV shows that were related to it.

And the best part of that film, for me, was the final battle scene, probably the most thrilling such scene in the history of superhero movies. The Hulk has undone the “snap” from the end of the previous film, bringing back all of the people Thanos killed five years ago, and as he launches his attack on the broken Avengers, their friends start to filter in. 

It starts with “On your left.”

We remember this signal from the Falcon – one of the lost – and the rest of the heroes begin to arrive. The Avengers who were dusted in Wakanda. The Guardians of the Galaxy, along with Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, brought back from the far reaches of space. The armies of Wakanda, the acolytes from Wong’s temple. The battlefield is populated with more heroes than we’ve ever seen in a superhero movie before, and Captain America kicks it off with the words that fans have been waiting a DECADE to hear: 

Me, squeezing my wife’s arm: He’s gonna say it, HE’S GONNA SAY IT…

“Avengers…assemble.”

But even that wasn’t the greatest part of the scene, wasn’t? Oh, no, as fantastic as that was, there’s still one more bit of payoff to come, when Thor and Thanos grapple on the battlefield and suddenly the mad Titan is struck by Thor’s hammer Mjolnir, scavenged from the past along with the Infinity Stones. The hammer smashes into Thanos’s face, flying through the air, hurtling back to the hand that threw it…but if not Thor, whose hand is guiding it?

It returns to the hand of Captain America, and the movie theater EXPLODED. At least, the theater where I was sitting did. In all my life, I have NEVER heard such an outpouring of cheers and excitement from a movie audience as I did in that moment, and I seriously doubt I ever will again. This, my friends, this was payoff for the entirety of the franchise. As we all know, Mjolnir is enchanted, and can only be lifted by someone who is “worthy.”

“I KNEW IT!!!” Thor shouts.

We all did, Thor. We all did.

I mean, this scene was amazing, but you know the Iron Giant could lift the hammer too, right?

#1: You’ve Got Me? Who’s Got You? (Superman, 1978)

But my favorite scene, guys…my single favorite scene in superhero movie history, the scene I would ask to have playing on the screen if they were strapping me down on one of those tables from Soylent Green, comes from the first Richard Donner Superman movie. We’ve spent half the film watching baby Kal-El become Clark Kent, watching him grow up into Christopher Reeve, watching him shape the persona he’s going to wear as a mild-mannered reporter, but we have not yet seen HIM. We have not yet seen more than a glimpse of the title character. Until Lois Lane – of course – is involved in a helicopter accident. The whirlybird falls and Lois falls OUT of it, and it’s curtains for the Daily Planet’s star reporter.

Until she falls harmlessly into a pair of waiting arms.

This strange visitor, this proud figure in red and blue, lifts Lois in one hand and catches the helicopter in the other, and he reassures her that everything will be fine by simply saying, “I’ve got you.”

And Lois, flabbergasted, shouts, “You’ve got me? Who’s got YOU?”

How anybody can call Romeo and Juliet a love story while this scene exists in the universe is beyond me.

I think we take for granted, in superhero stories, the miraculous things that these characters are supposed to be capable of. We’ve seen so many movies, read so many comic books with people who can fly and shoot lasers from their eyes and walk through walls that we forget how astonishing these things would be in the real world. But Superman was the first movie to attempt such a thing on this scale, and in-universe, it’s something that has never existed before. Up until this point, the world of this film is ostensibly our own. The astonishment that Margot Kidder brings to that moment is absolutely perfect, as is Christopher Reeve’s reaction. He gently places her (and the helicopter) back on the roof, but before he can leave, Lois asks him who he is.

And he gives the only answer that matters:

“A friend.”

There are two things, I think, essential to the character of Superman. One is the protector, the defender, the man who will stop at nothing to save the lives of everyone around him. The Iron Giant showed us that side of Superman. The other side, though, is the man of infinite compassion and kindness, a belief in the better angels of human nature if only there is someone to guide them. Superman is the hero who never gives up on anyone, even his bitterest enemy, because somewhere inside of them he KNOWS there is a flicker of good waiting to be fanned into a flame. Batman tries to strike fear into the hearts of criminals. Superman is there to show us all that there is a better way. 

And when he looks at you like this, can’t you actually BELIEVE it?

I’ve got high hopes for James Gunn and David Corenswet, but it’s hard to believe that anything they can do could ever capture that essence as simply and perfectly as the two words, “a friend.”

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. Next time: his five favorite McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches! (Spoiler alert: steak, egg, and cheese bagel.)