Keebles World

Well, I'm still living in the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, although it was a shorter night on Monday. I started with Super Adventure and this one is now my favorite one! It didn't focus too much on the whole preschool education thing (although I think watching all these might have just improved my horrible math skills). There were four episodes on this disc. It's really hard to find only clips of these episodes, most people just post the entire DVD, but for anyone interested: I only watched one other disc, Around The Clubhouse World . I must have picked the best two because this one also focused more on story than education and I didn't feel so much I was regressing to my two-year old state after watching these. This disc at least had five episodes, so I feel like I at least got my money's worth. I still have about four more and then there is the newest one that I've preordered, but I'm going to continue on until I'm done with these before I move...

It was a very Mickey Mouse Clubhouse weekend and I'm still not through them all! This should also be pretty short since there isn't much to say about them other than, as much as I hate to admit it, I do really like watching them. I'm not going to post any clips of these because I either can't find good ones, or it's the entire episode, and I'm kind of lazy today. . Saturday started with Mickey Saves Santa . This is another one of those disc that only has three episodes instead of the five that should be on it. In the bonus features on most of these discs though, there is a game of some sort, so those must really hog the disc space or something. The next disc, Mickey's Adventures In Wonderland was at least a full length movie and one episode, so I can't knock the shortness of it. Quest For The Crystal Mickey actually turned out to be my favorite, even though it was only an episode. The other four episodes on the disc were all adventure-themed...

I so wanted to finish the second row of Maleficent this week, but with two days of barely any stitching, and none on Friday, there was no way I was going to get through it. It shouldn't take me but a couple days next week if I have good stitch days and then I can move on to something else (Sleeping Beauty Castle is eye-balling me again). I left off here last weekend: And got to here tonight for a total of 249.4 hrs so far: As ticky as I am about using the right photo settings in Disney World, I can't believe it never occurred to me to change it to night portrait for these cross stitch pictures, especially since I always finish at night and it's pretty dark in my house. Oh well, problem fixed now! the actual true color of the project is closer to the first one, but I can see the details better close up than the dark picture shows them, whereas the brighter one shows them all. I've also got to be really careful about stitching when I have a headache. I go muc...

Things have been extremely busy the past couple of days and I've gotten a bit behind in all my personal stuff like blogging and stitching. I figured if I didn't go out of routine a bit and get caught up on my Disney movie watching challenge posts, I would get really far behind, so here we are on the weekend. I went in a pretty unusual direction and started watching my Mickey Mouse Clubhouse videos. These are actually preschool videos, but I find it very relaxing just to hear Donald's voice, even if he's counting or figuring out shapes. And despite the full-on, very simple style of computer animation, it actually works very well in this format and gives life to the characters when flat animation doesn't. It makes me think a lot of the characters in the parks, so again, it's comforting. But don't worry, I don't own the entire collection of all the other Disney Junior shows, so we won't be in preschool-land forever. There isn't a lot to say ...

Last night wasn't a good night. I rarely have headaches now since they put me on muscle relaxers (who knew I was such an uptight bitch?), but when I do have them, whoa nelly! Needless to say, I managed to stitch for approximately 20 minutes before I had to give up the goat, so I decided to try to clear off my Hulu queue because my mind wasn't clear enough to focus on animation (my mind runs like mad when I'm watching animation because I'm focusing on the art as well as the story and I just couldn't deal with that last night). Anyway, I had three episodes of Star Talk with Neil Degrasse Tyson to watch and he finally had two of those episodes about astronomy! In the history of the show so far he had only done one or two episodes about it, so it put me in quite the space mood. I really wanted to just go to bed, but I needed to get through at least one movie or else my challenge would be kaput, so I chose Roving Mars . Before the Disneynature movies took off, the...

I guess in a normal 30-day challenge, this would be the end but, since I've really only started to reach the halfway point in my Disney DVD collection, I guess we've got a ways to go yet. I went light Monday and Tuesday because I really have been taking this a bit too far and watching too many movies at a time (plus, I've already plowed through my favorites, so I'm just at the "getting through it" point). My Sofia The First: The Curse of Princess Ivy disc came in and, considering this disc's princess is Rapunzel, I was kind of excited (kind of sad really that a grown-ass woman is excited over a toddler show). Curse of Princess Ivy was a full-length movie and I was a bit surprised that not only did Mandy Moore actually do Rapunzel's voice, she actually even sang a song! In every other Sofia movie, the princess is there for all of two minutes and I'd say Rapunzel had about 10 minutes of screen time, so all in all, pretty darn cool! And despite...

I've got to try to speed this up a bit even though I watched 6 movies Saturday and an additional 6 plus 6 compilation videos on Sunday. What's going to make this one shorter is the lack of comments I have for all the crappy sequels I had to be exposed to. Since Lilo & Stitch kind of put me on the path of dogs (Stitch hides himself as Lilo's dog), this weekend was an almost all dogs weekend. So, of course, I started Saturday with the ultimate of Disney dog movies, 101 Dalmatians . As a kid, I had animation issues with this movie. The sketchy lines and the graphic nature of the backgrounds bothered me to no end. Watching the special features on the disc, you have no idea how relieved I was that Walt shared my misgivings about the animation. He loved the classic style, with Sleeping Beauty being the pinnacle, and I definitely agree with him...it's kind of like comparing the masters to Picasso, or worse, Pollock (don't get me started on Jackson Pollock or I...

To put it simply, I watched a crap-load of Disney movies this weekend! I'm definitely going to have to split it up, it's just too much to cover in one post and I think Friday needs its own because of the subject. There is one other Disney character that can hold his own against Donald in my book and that character is Stitch. I absolutely ADORE him almost as much as the duck-man, so much so that his stuff takes up quite a large corner of my duck room and, if I had a real house, I'd probably have a Stitch room too. I'm also one of the few people on earth that love Stitch's Great Escape at the Magic Kingdom in Disney World (the secret is to know when the chili dog burp is coming and hold your breath, that is usually everyone's biggest complaint about it) although the story continuity is off to Stitch fans and it confuses some people, especially little kids. There is a four foot audioanimatronic Stitch standing in front of you, I don't notice the storylin...

I haven't had time this past week to post my TUSAL pic, so I saved it for Stitch Sunday (which just also happened to be the International Hermit & Stitch Weekend). Since I have been doing my Disney Movie watching, I figured that this month's TUSAL should be shown in front of my favorite Disney Movie Club Reward Points collectible: I didn't think about it until I was posting the pic, but I should have opened the sculpture up because it's covered with all these neat carvings inside and out and you can arrange them however you see fit. I just arrange them that way so that they will take up less room. Space is not a luxury I have in my duck room. You'll notice all that beaver gray fuss...yeah, that's all the stupid frogging I had to do on Sleeping Beauty Castle. I had the urge to work on it a bit this weekend too, but I managed to resist and stayed on my path. Before I get to the IHSW stitching, guess I'd better cover the week first. I've been...

It's time to play Speed Racer now. Since I started the Fantasia post, I've been debating how to handle days 24 and 25. Technically, Fantasia is really nothing but a collection of shorts that are melded together into one piece, but it was created as one piece at one time. Tuesday and Wednesday's selections are the same with one specific difference, most were designed to be shorts first, then packaged together. So the issue is, do I count them as shorts, or as one full-length animated feature? Well, there is no easy answer to that, so I guess we'll just find out together. Even though Fantasia was a flop for Walt, he really actually didn't give up, he just changed the format up a bit. There were a few films he put out in the 40's and 50's, with a definite Fantasia-esque flair, but with popular music versus classical and a more traditional, simpler style of animation without all the bells a whistles (so to speak). I started Tuesday night with Melody Ti...

I have REALLY got to finish Sunday's Disney movie viewing already! I am seriously behind. So let's speed it up a bit now. Fantasia 2000 is not like it's predecessor in it's accomplishment to showcase the Disney animation department's talent, as a matter of fact, from an animation standpoint, it shows the early failures of what was still the early days of CG animation. They may have spent more time on the special effects for this version, but I didn't "feel" them at all and could barely even tell they were there most times. What makes this version notable is that each segment is still very high on musical quality, including one very surprisingly different selection of Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue (which also happens to be my favorite animation-wise of the pieces...it has a very graphical style that works). I managed to find a clip of snip-its from this section: I really like that each segment is introduced by the likes of Steve Martin, Qui...

I held off on posting reviews on Fantasia (and Fantasia 2000) simply because, even though Sleeping Beauty is my all-time favorite Disney movie, Fantasia is my all-time animation fan-girl movie crush. I have been in love with this movie as long as I can remember and it influenced a lot of my early art styles (when I was still actually did art). It's not like other Disney movies that comes out of the vault every 7 years, these two are very rarely released, usually only when a new format becomes available, and rarely ever stay out of the vault for more than a month or two. You can still buy it (I've seen it on Amazon), but they are usually foreign releases or worse, knock offs, so beware. Both movies are really a collection of shorts tied together, but we're gonna call them an entire movie. People either love Fantasia or hate it, I rarely ever run across anyone who says, "yeah, it's OK" and everyone has probably seen a bit of it and not known it, especiall...

I'm going to split this up into two parts since it's probably going to get long when I start talking about Fantasia. I did technically watch Fantasia first, but let's cover all the other ones before I dive in to the big "F". I thought my theme for the day was going to be the classics and their crappy direct-to-video sequels, but after my first set, I was done with that idea. I was still kind of riding that 60's-70's animation style high, so I went with Jungle Book . This is another one of those great classics that I watched dozens of times in my childhood. I adore this movie, probably more so for the music versus the story, but I adore it nonetheless. As much as I love Baloo, I think it's the Beatlesesqueness (is that a word?) nature of the vultures that makes me laugh every single time. Unfortunately, no one was nice enough to share the link to the scene I love on YouTube, so we're relegated to the trailer. It was the last film that Walt...

This was a very busy weekend on the Disney front, so much so, that Day 22 will probably have to be divided into two parts thanks to Fantasia and Fantasia 2000. But Friday and Saturday are first, so let's get started! After dissing my friend Kate's favorite Disney movie of all time, Beauty & The Beast, I figured I needed to make it up to her somehow. Granted, this is kind of a weak make-up, but it's the effort that should count, right? When she was here visiting, she mentioned that she had seen one of the Sofia The First movies and was pleasantly surprised, so I figured, since I had all of them, it was time to finally open their cases and give them a shot. Now, before I even started, I knew a bit of their history, that they were movies based on the Disney Junior TV show, so I wasn't expecting much animation-wise and had already decided to not even look at the animation quality. Of course, I had trouble sticking to that (and the animation was HORRIBLE to say th...