December 4, 2025

Dec. 4 – The Nostalgia Spot Christmas Special Countdown #179 – 170

By Joe

We’re getting closer, ever closer to the Christmas specials that are most worth watching every year. That’s not necessarily a bad thing that we’re still kind of in the weeds considering today’s entry covers entries 180 through 171. It’s a reminder that there are a lot of Christmas specials out there. Yesterday’s entries on short subjects is so far the outlier in that some of them are worth watching just because they’re so brief. And there’s some historical value. Today’s entries are not so brief and not so old so they need to get by on entertainment value and nostalgia. And, for me anyway, there’s not a ton of nostalgia to be found in this cast of Christmas specials. Oh, there is some, including one that I pretty much watch every year because of how I know it, but there’s a lot of “filler” here as well. These are mostly from children’s entertainment and if there was a theme I suppose it would be Christmas episodes from cartoons that are not well-remembered. There are a few exceptions and as I look over my list and the days to come I can see some that I could have flip-flopped out of here. Though in the case of many, it’s more an issue of seeing a special yet to come that I really don’t think is all that good and wondering why it’s not here, but then I look at what we’re talking about today and it starts to make more sense. I could tinker with this list all month and never feel like it’s perfect so let’s just move on, shall we?

179 – Donkey Kong Country – The Kongo Bongo Festival of Lights

Donkey Kong managed to elevate himself above his more popular genre-mates Sonic and Mario, but let’s not pretend like his Christmas episode is all that great. For me, it’s most memorable for being the kind of show I had very low expectations for going in and it managed to exceed them. That doesn’t mean it rose to the level of something I’d consider good, but it’s not terrible. There’s some silliness to be found with the long lost brothers plot to the point where it kind of works. What does not and never will are the visuals. If this ranking was purely on visual quality, Donkey Kong might be in last place. It’s hideous. Those early 3D CG shows have not aged well.

178 – Aaahh!!! Real Monsters – Gone Shopp’n

This is a Christmas episode that was always going to have to really knock it out of the park to be placed higher in the rankings. That’s because it’s a Christmas in July episode and in it our monstrous protagonists find themselves trapped in the mall after hours. The Christmas element is purely visual as the mall is decorated for a big summer sale, but there’s a lot of actual Christmas episodes that don’t do much more than add a visual element as well. This one is also short since it was only one segment from a half hour television spot and judged strictly on the quality of the entertainment it’s probably better than where I have it. It’s just not very Christmassy. Plus, I’ve never liked the visual style of this show.

177 – Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town

This is the one I teased as being a special I watch annually, even if I don’t really like it that much. It was featured on my beloved Christmas tape growing up so I saw it all of the time and I still see it quite often. As a kid, it was the spot on the tape where I was most likely to drop-off. Thankfully, it had Rudolph backing it up so that’s what usually got me through. Had it been last on the tape then I probably would have seen it far less. If you somehow have not seen this Rankin/Bass production, it’s the origin story for Santa Claus and Mickey Rooney’s debut as the character. The story is pretty silly with a local ruler outlawing toys, but the approach isn’t silly. There’s a lack of fun here and it’s just so long and plodding. None of the songs are particularly good either. Sure, “One Foot in Front of the Other” can get lodged in your head, but that doesn’t mean I want it there. For nostalgia’s sake, I’ll sit through this one at least once this month, but that’s all I’m giving it.

176 – A Flintstones Christmas Carol

For a little while, there was an attempt at making the Flintstones into some sort of holiday tradition in the 90s. There was a A Flintstone Family Christmas and there was this, A Flintstones Christmas Carol. Now, I have some affection for The Flintstones. I never actively sought the show out, but if it was on I’d often watch it as a kid. I do like A Flintstone Christmas and the episode of the show “Christmas Flintstone” it was based on, but that’s sort of my limit. And when you take a dated franchise like The Flintstones and pair it up with one of the most overused Christmas tropes on record by adapting A Christmas Carol, well, you don’t really end up with anything remotely special. I’ll give it some credit in that the special tries to blend a meta component by having it be a production in-show, but Fred lets stardom get to his head to the point where he starts acting like Scrooge. It’s for serious fans of The Flintstones only, the rest need not apply.

175 – Little Dracula – The Bite Before Christmas

There have been many attempts at melding Halloween with Christmas. The most famous is obviously The Nightmare Before Christmas and it’s also probably the most successful. On television in the 90s though, we had stuff like Little Dracula. It’s a cartoon where the cast is basically all monsters, but the approach to the macabre is so tepid that it tends to undermine any real spooky element it could have. In this one, the goal is to capture Santa Claus. I guess that’s what vampires do. It’s very by the numbers for such an unusual plot as we just get a lot of setup where the entertainment is supposed to be seeing how monsters decorate for the holiday, but nothing is particularly clever. The villain of the show, Garlic Man, wants to pose as Santa to enter the house or something, even though he knows they’re trying to capture the big man. And, of course, the real Santa shows up and we all learn something. Or not? It’s not very memorable.

174 – Don Coyote and the Christmas Bell

Make way for Don Coyoooooote! Don Coyote hails from a mostly forgotten Hanna-Barbera cartoon and rightly so. The main character is incredibly annoying and he just bumbles his way through adventure after adventure in a model similar to Inspector Gadget, only Don Coyote didn’t have a niece and a really smart dog looking out for his well-being. The only saving grace for the show is that most of the other characters see Don Coyote for what he is: an idiot. The villagers in the town he tries to help in this one all think he sucks and it’s a bit humorous to see. It’s not a big Christmas vibes sort of episode either, it just takes place at Christmas and the bell referenced in the title has some meaning for the holiday. There is a light faith element to the plot, so if you like your Christmas to appeal more to that aspect of the holiday as opposed to Santa and Rudolph then maybe you can appreciate this on that level. Maybe. It’s still not very good.

173 – Heathcliff – North Pole Cat

Heathcliff may have originated close enough to Garfield that the two can be considered peers, but he’s mostly lived in the fat, orange, cat’s shadow in my lifetime. And that’s despite sounding like Bugs Bunny! Heathcliff did have a solid run on television in the 80s getting two similar, but separate, cartoons and around 100 episodes of entertainment. His grand finale is a Christmas episode in which his letter to Santa is returned so he and Spike (all dogs were required to be named Spike in cartoons) head to the north pole to investigate. There they encounter a jerk of an elf who is hell-bent on destroying Christmas, but as is often the case, things work out in the end and it turns out the elf isn’t such a bad guy after all. There aren’t any memorable gags to find and this one does something I hate. It has Santa literally tell the audience that a year of bad behavior can be redeemed at the last second to get on the Nice List. What a crock! I get needing to give kids something to reach for, but to come out and say it like that is just wrong.

172 – Ace Ventura: Pet Detective – The Reindeer Hunter

Okay, I really didn’t know where to rank this one. Visually, it’s offensive to my eyes. It’s cheap and ugly. It’s also Ace Ventura who is a pretty annoying character. On the big screen, at least the physical acting of Jim Carrey can help make him tolerable, but as an ugly cartoon the charm is gone. This one does have a somewhat clever plot though and it feels pretty original. Since the character is a detective (which allows them to make liberal use of the term dick), there’s a mystery component and it’s not bad. Santa’s reindeer have gone missing, and Ace needs to get them back. It’s a good setup for a pet detective. It’s just…a lot. I can only handle so much of this character. I do think if you really like the character then you’ll like this a lot more than I do. It’s the sort of Christmas episode where I’m glad I did experience it, but once is enough.

171 – Christmas in Tattertown

The Nickelodeon Christmas special by Ralph Bakshi that doubled as a pilot for a show that never was, Christmas in Tattertown is quite possibly the most uneven special in this countdown. There are moments in this one that look terrific. There’s a throwback quality to the character designs and animation of the 1930s and it mostly works. There’s also moments where the quality dips and then there’s just the uneven performances. This is especially seen in the character Muffet, who is at times sympathetic and at times a horrible villain. She is a doll that doesn’t really want to be a girl’s doll and she’s frustrated that her life has seemingly been decided for her. She just decides to go full villain in response to that. The voice work is also so up and down that watching this is like experiencing whiplash. I wanted to like this because the premise is solid, but there are too many moments for me where I questioned if I actually hated it. It’s exhausting to watch, but it looks so interesting that I think it’s something everyone should see once. At least, everyone who has ever been enchanted by a cartoon.

170 – I Am Weasel – Happy Baboon Holidays

Our last entry for today comes courtesy of that other children’s cable network, the Cartoon Network. I Am Weasel was a spin-off from Cow and Chicken which in turn was born out of the What a Cartoon workshop. I have no idea why I Am Weasel was chosen to be spun-off. I liked Cow and Chicken to a certain degree, but I did not care at all for I Am Weasel. It’s a setup where the weasel is basically an ideal character and does everything right and he’s juxtaposed with I.R. Baboon, a selfish, stupid, jealous character. He basically tries, and fails, to undermine the weasel and steal the spotlight for himself. In this Christmas edition, Baboon is surprised by his family when they show up for Christmas. He is ill-prepared, so he runs out to get a tree and all the trimmings, but leaves his family out in the cold. Weasel then comes by and notices the frozen solid group of baboons and invites them into his palatial estate. They become rather enamored with Weasel which just makes Baboon jealous when he finds out. He then tries to sabotage Christmas. It has a happy ending, and it’s actually a lot of plot for what is a short cartoon. It’s a solid setup and premise for the show, it’s problem is it’s just not very funny. Maybe I’ve aged out of this era of visually loud humor, but I didn’t really laugh. If you have fond memories of this or Cow and Chicken then maybe you’ll get more out of it.

And that does it for today’s entries. Tomorrow, we take a break from the countdown to spotlight a forgotten Christmas special. I think it’s a bit of a crowd favorite, but maybe the winds have changed for it over the years and I’m mistaken. Or it’s just become properly rated since we are talking about entry #169. What is it? Well, you’ll have to come back tomorrow and find out. Unless you’re not reading this on December 4, 2025. In that case, you can just click the little button for the next entry. I hope you were surprised!

Can’t wait until tomorrow for more Christmas? Check out what we had to say last year on this day and beyond:

Dec. 4 – Doug – “Doug’s Secret Christmas”

Last year, I made an effort to get to a lot of the Nicktoons that I had yet to cover. My initial thinking when I started doing this Christmas blog was to try and avoid the specials that had been covered in depth many times over. Then I realized that, hey, if you want to…

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by Joe

Dec. 4 – Doug – “Doug’s Christmas Story”

Last year, we covered in depth the inaugural Christmas episodes of Rugrats and The Ren & Stimpy Show, two of the three original Nicktoons that premiered in 1991. Now, we’re going to look at the Christmas episode for the other original Nicktoon: Doug. Doug was created by Jim Jinkins and was one of the first…

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by Joe

Dec. 4 – The Pups’ Christmas

Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising were among the first stars of cartoon creation to burst onto the scene. Together, the duo would work for Disney, Warner, and MGM (among others) creating and overseeing some of animation’s most memorable characters from the golden age. After working with Leon Schlesinger’s studio to produce Looney Tunes shorts, the…

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by Joe

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December 3, 2025

Dec. 3 – The Nostalgia Spot Christmas Special Countdown #189-180

By Joe
There’s going to be a lot of toys in these ones. And some are very familiar looking.

I mentioned yesterday that my rankings of Christmas specials are by quality and personal preference, but also by genre. When it makes sense, I’m trying to keep similar specials together when it comes to the general vibe and the vibe today is public domain shorts. The domain of the short used to be the movie theater and seemingly every major studio had a series of cartoon shorts. Some were bigger than others and a lot of the less popular ones have slipped into the public domain. Most of these shorts fall into that category, but not all. And most of these are going to have a very similar plot. A lot of these shorts liked bringing Christmas to poor kids. And almost all of them have something racist in them which is just incredible from a modern perspective. It got to the point over the years of doing this where it stopped being surprising. Even Mickey gets in on the action. It’s nuts. Anyway, let’s get to it.

189 – Santa’s Surprise

Little Audrey and a diverse group of kids want to leave a surprise for Santa.

This is a Little Audrey cartoon who was a rip-off of Little Lulu and probably less successful. Maybe I’m being a little tough on this one by ranking it last because it does have a unique premise. Audrey and her friends decide Santa deserves some presents of his own on Christmas so they sneak into his sleigh and try to do something nice for him. It’s cute. I just don’t care at all about Little Audrey. The group of multi-cultural children that accompany her on this quest are also not the most sensitive depictions of such one is going to find. Usually, stuff like that is what helps get cartoons into the public domain because the companies that owned them originally don’t want to re-release them and if they’re not going to re-release them then they’re worthless.

188 – Gifts from the Air

He may not look like much, but this toy soldier is pretty special.

Here’s our first one where a poor kid gets a visit from Santa Claus. In this one, it’s a kid who lives alone in a shack with his cat. On the way back to his home, he finds a discarded toy soldier in the street and brings it home. When he goes to bed, the toy becomes sentient and uses the radio to call for Santa who shows up and does his thing. Most of the short is just toys doing stuff, the sort of thing we’re going to see a lot of. The kid eventually wakes up, is happy to have toys (and food) and that’s pretty much it. The short looks okay and it is in color. It’s also been re-released since my entry and there is a much better looking version out there now. It’s still a pretty boring short, but at least it will look nice.

187 – The Captain’s Christmas

Pirates and Christmas? Sure, why not?

Another one that would probably rank a little higher if I cared about the property. The Captain and the Kids is a series I don’t know much about, but it had a brief run of shorts and among them is a Christmas one. It’s basically a Captain character who takes care of some orphans and he’s harassed by the pirate John Silver and his crew. This one is interesting because the Captain is going to dress as Santa to surprise his boys, but John Silver and his crew get to him first. Silver takes the Santa suit for himself and they proceed to enter the dwelling and mess everything up. Because it’s Christmas, the bad guys feel terrible about what they did and eventually make it right. A large portion of the short is dedicated to a song that’s not very good performed by the pirates. It’s not terrible or anything, and the version I was able to find actually looked great, so there are worse ways to kill 8 minutes.

186 – Mickey’s Orphans

Mickey has had many goes at this whole Christmas thing.

Mickey Mouse’s first Christmas cartoon is among his worst. I rank this ahead of Mickey’s Christmas Chaos mostly out of respect, but that mediocre short might actually be more entertaining than this one. Mickey and Minnie wind up with some orphans in their care and try to give them a decent Christmas, but they’re also jerks. The little orphan cats just destroy the place and don’t seem to care that Mickey made the effort to give them a decent Christmas by playing Santa. There’s no real message here, no lesson to be learned, the kids just destroy everything until the short is over. It’s very bizarre in that aspect. It is in black and white, but the animation is pretty smooth, so it has that going for it.

185 – The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives

Santa has a special surprise for this little boy.

This is an early Merrie Melodies short. It’s very similar to Gifts from the Air in that it’s another poor boy who seemingly lives alone. It begins almost exactly the same way with the poor kid walking through the snow on Christmas Eve getting progressively more upset over the sounds of other people enjoying Christmas. Only with this one, when the kid gets back to his shack he gets a visit from Santa before he goes to sleep! And not only is Santa there to bring Christmas cheer, he actually takes the kid back to the workshop and that’s where the toy antics come into play. It’s pretty crazy how similar the toy antics are from one short to another, and not just this and Gifts from the Air, but this and other shorts we’ll talk about shortly. This is another that ends abruptly, a fire breaks out and the kid is able to put it out and that’s it. Did he stay at the North Pole? Did he become the next Santa? Is he Santa’s slave? Is this where elves come from?! No one knows.

184 – The Night Before Christmas (Silly Symphony)

It’s hard to find parking for eight reindeer.

This one is a sequel to the Silly Symphony short Santa’s Workshop. If you like the part of that one where Santa just demoes the toys and laughs at them then this is for you. Santa delivers some toys to a house and we get to see him play with them. There’s even a Mickey Mouse cameo! Santa just laughs at everything and it gets real obnoxious. Eventually, he has to run and the kids come down and find their stuff. One cute kid gets a puppy. There’s a blackface gag, which is probably why it’s never been added to Disney+ to join its predecessor. It’s fine.

183 – The Pups’ Christmas

A couple puppies do cute stuff.

We have a lot of cartoons of kids finding toys under the tree, but not many of puppies finding toys under the tree. We do have this one from Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising and it’s about what you would expect. Santa has made his delivery and the children are up in the middle of the night to check it out. Among them are two puppies who get into all kinds of mischief when it comes to the toys. In particular, there’s a toy tank that apparently has a personality all its own and it battles it out with the puppies. No puppy is seriously harmed, and they are cute. It does run a little long, which is an odd thing to critique a short for doing, but if you’re a dog person then you’ll probably enjoy this on some level.

182 – Christmas Comes but Once a Year

Man, does that look cool or what?

This is one of the oldest Christmas specials in color out there. And it was also recently restored to look as best as it possibly can. And it is a good looking short. It’s a Fleischer Studios production and there’s some use of live-action references including a spectacular Christmas tree spot at the end, but the cartoon itself is pretty similar to everything else here. Grampy wants to bring Christmas to an orphanage, but since he can’t just will a bunch of toys into existence, he uses household objects to make toys and distribute them. The kids have a good time, and it’s a reasonably merry Christmas. Worth a watch to appreciate the impressive restoration, if anything.

181 – Mickey’s Good Deed

Mickey is going to experience some hardships in this one, but it works out in the end.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, a character wants to bring Christmas to some poor kids and so they do. In this case, it’s Mickey Mouse who is very poor as well. He wants to help a family of cats (again), but in order to do so he needs money and the only thing of value he owns is his dog, Pluto. Some rich asshole’s kid wants Pluto so Mickey reluctantly sells him thinking Pluto will have a better life with the wealthy man than he would on the streets with him. He takes the money, buys a bunch of stuff, and makes a Christmas delivery to the kids. Unfortunately, that spoiled, rich, kid really sucks and is abusive towards Pluto who eventually gets away, but not before he makes off with a turkey. He finds Mickey all alone in the snow and there’s a happy reunion in the end. Thankfully. I get the idea of having a character sacrifice to make Christmas better for the less fortunate, but I don’t want to see them give their dog away! At least it all works out, and the animation is really nice. It was made in black and white, but there is a color version out there if you’re adverse to that.

180 – Santa’s Workshop

This one takes place way up north.

The more popular Christmas themed Silly Symphony short. This one takes place at the titular workshop where we see toys being made, inspected, and tested. That’s it. I just rank it this high because I think it looks just lovely. There’s a whole bunch of gags similar to other ones we’ve already seen and it also had its own racist gag (which the Disney+ version omits), but at least it doesn’t have any orphans! Seriously, I’m getting a little sick of that trope. And seeing Santa prepare for Christmas is just more interesting to me than the process of infiltrating homes and the aftermath.

That concludes the public domain theatrical shorts category. Not all of those are in the public domain, but they all have a very similar feel to them, and as we saw, similar plots. There isn’t much separating the worst from the best in this case, I mostly ranked them on visual quality as that’s what appeals to me most. And not just how well it’s animated, but the emotive aspect of the characters since we get a lot of inanimate objects doing interesting things. They are all indeed short though and also pretty damn old. The historical aspect makes them worth watching, in my opinion. And they won’t take up much of your time. I bet they’re all on YouTube or Daily Motion too so they should be easy to find. It will give you something to do until tomorrow when we move onto the next group of 10. In looking ahead, there isn’t much of a theme in our next group other than it’s all stuff made for kids and almost all of it is comedic in nature. There might be one surprise in there, but we’re still firmly in the realm of mediocre and not quite to the point where we’re hitting on some essential viewing type stuff.

Can’t wait until tomorrow for more Christmas? Check out what we had to say on this day last year and beyond:

Dec. 3 – American Dad! – “Season’s Beatings”

It feels like it has been a minute since we took a look at an American Dad! Christmas episode. The show can be counted on to produce such an episode almost annually and often times the Christmas episode is among the best of the season. 2024 is also the year we had to say goodbye…

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by Joe

Dec. 3 – Animaniacs – ‘Twas the Day Before Christmas

Children’s cartoons often take to Christmas when the season rolls around. The holiday is usually ripe for parody or just direct adaptations so it’s easy for the writers to kind of phone it in. What’s not customary is for a cartoon series to feature two dedicated Christmas episodes in a single season! That’s what Animaniacs…

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by Joe

Dec. 3 – Popeye the Sailor – “Mister and Mistletoe”

Last year for the Christmas Spot we took a look at the 1960’s TV series Popeye the Sailor and its Christmas episode “Spinach Greetings.” There are a lot of Popeye fans in the world and my assumption is that most would not put Popeye the Sailor above the theatrical shorts that helped catapult Popeye to…

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by Joe

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December 2, 2025

Dec. 2 – The Nostalgia Spot Christmas Special Countdown #199-190

By Joe
Sorry folks, but today’s gifts are stinkers.

Today, we move on with our Ultimate Christmas Special Rankings starting with number 199. As you can probably guess, we’re going to generally stick to 10 a day in order to have this neatly conclude on Christmas, but we’ll have a couple spots where we’ll have to do more. This isn’t one of those spots as you just get 10 today. Like yesterday, these specials are what I would consider to be genuinely bad, for the most part, but we’re working our way to the “meh” part of the rankings. We’re also going to kick things off with one I probably dislike more than most. There is a part of me that feels like I’m being unreasonable, but I pretty much loathe number 199.

199 – Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas

Hah! It’s a snowman with a nut right where…his nuts…you know…

The Ice Age franchise had a nice run for itself, commercially speaking, during the 2000s. I can’t say I really loved any of it, but my memory of the movies I did see are that they were fine. Decent family entertainment that I never have to see again. For some reason, I hate this Christmas special. Maybe I was just in a bad mood when I went back to it last year for the countdown, but I just hate-watched the damn thing. Every plot point irritated me, it was so predictable, cliche, and talked down to the viewer. The attempts at humor were supremely irritating. I think this style of humor just didn’t age well. The competent CG doesn’t come close to rescuing it and I get no feels from it other than white, hot, rage. I honestly expect most people to see my take and not quite get it. Most probably see this as a pretty by the numbers, ho-hum, Christmas special. Let’s move on though as I’m already sick of talking about Ice Age.

198 – We Wish You a Turtle Christmas

Good God that’s terrifying!

Okay, this is a bad Christmas special. Very bad. It’s also entertainingly bad and it helps that I didn’t make my parents spend $30 on a VHS of this thing when I was a kid. It’s brief which helps. If this was your more typical hour long special then it would likely be intolerable. The only bummer for me with this one is that it’s the only Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Christmas special from this era. The ’87 cartoon had an episode where the turtles met the freakin’ Easter Bunny, but no Christmas episode. Instead we got this: repurposed live show costumes with unrecognizable voices and actors. It’s bad, and the budget must have been almost nothing. The songs suck in such a way that they’re funny, and the special is so well known now that we even got some NECA toys last year based on it. What a time to be alive.

197 – Super Mario World – The Night Before Cave Christmas

He’s laughing, but there’s nothing funny about this one.

This one is barely a Christmas episode as it’s a made-up version of the holiday by Mario to supplicate some cave people he deems as lesser than him. Poor, misguided, cave, people, if only they had a holiday to believe in? Mario the missionary brings them Christmas and it just turns one cave person, Oogtar, into a spoiled brat. He almost ruins Fake Christmas, that little Ratgoo, but everything turns out fine in the end. It’s just phenomenally stupid and the Super Mario World cartoon was pretty terrible. There’s a reason why Nintendo wants nothing to do with it or its predecessors these days.

196 – The Smurfs Christmas Special

In this holiday special, the Smurfs are tasked with saving some kids from Satan. Yes, you read that correctly.

Oh boy, this one took a pretty surprising turn. The Smurfs holiday themed episodes manages to be both forgettable and also get mixed up in my brain. The other Smurfs holiday episode I covered is a better Christmas special, but so unmemorable. This one? This is the one where the Smurfs have to take down the god damn devil! What other conclusion is there to draw from the villain? Every other plot point here is pure corn, just garbage, Christmas, stuff. The Smurfs are a pretty terrible franchise that has somehow endured – I guess people really like little, blue, men?

195 – Sonic Christmas Blast

That’s Santa Sonic, if you please.

Another video game mascot with a Christmas special, and it’s not much better. This is a cheaply thrown together episode of The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, the wacky cartoon and not the more serious Saturday morning one. I hate the visual style and the plot is nonsense, plus an unspeaking Sally Acorn role? They did her wrong. It just manages to be memorable because of the wild turn at the end. Spoilers if you haven’t seen it, but Santa Claus retires! Yes, the big man hangs them up, but don’t worry as he has a successor ready: Sonic the Hedgehog. In the world of Sonic, he is now Santa Claus. It’s canon and I’ll hear no argument against it, I’m just patiently waiting for one of the video games to acknowledge this fact.

194 – The Super Mario Bros. Super Show – Koopa Klaus

And I bet you thought Frosty was the fastest.

Pretty convenient all of these video game cartoons landed so close together, eh? It’s by design. This list has a subjective element to it where I did try to group things together to some degree. Especially when it comes to kids specials and the more subversive adult comedy ones. And spoiler alert, tomorrow very much has a theme to it. Anyway, this is another lousy Super Mario Bros. cartoon that takes place during Christmas and this one has a more conventional holiday plot. Koopa is out to take over Christmas and Mario and the gang have to save Santa. Toad learns a lesson and Luigi gets to help out. It’s all pretty conventional. There’s some awful animation and if you watch the full episode this is from you get some live-action stuff that has nothing to do with Christmas. Seriously, what a wasted opportunity. The only redeeming element to this one is basically the same as the Super Mario World cartoon: Koopa. I find him entertaining. Oh, and it’s also really short.

193 – Mighty Morphin Power Rangers – I’m Dreaming of a White Ranger

This is the extent of the action in this one.

The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers had one Christmas episode and it came during the White Ranger era post the departure of the original red, yellow, and black rangers. In other words, it’s from an era of the show I didn’t watch as I fell off during the second season. I came back for the White Ranger mini series falling for the hype, but didn’t stick around. This one is pretty damn stupid. The Rangers have to go to the North Pole and stop the forces of Lord Zed who have taken it over. It’s an episode that was clearly conceived of on the US side because we don’t get a single shot of the Rangers in action. They stay in their teen persona so there’s very little action. Instead, there’s lots of bad acting that wouldn’t even be passable for a soap opera. The storyline back at Angel Grove with the sad kid or whatever? Terrible – no one cares. I wanted to see the Megazord slice and dice some massive reindeer monster or something and this did not deliver.

192 – Krazy Kat – Krazy’s Krismas

These are some ugly-ass character designs.

I have to admit, I don’t remember anything about this one. Or rather I didn’t until I went back to it before writing this. And yeah, it’s not very memorable. It’s from an era of cartoons on television where budgets were very small and the animation was very limited. This thing is capital U Ugly and I find nothing charming about the character designs. The audio quality is poor as well, though that may be a preservation problem and not something that was apparent at the start. It’s very similar in tone and quality to Tennessee Tuxedo, but shorter and therefore better. And for a character named Krazy Kat, she’s not very crazy. The craziest thing about her is her choice in grammar.

191 – Extreme Dinosaurs – Holiday on Ice

It’s big, beefy, dino-men in Santa hats – did you expect something else?

When it comes to cartoon dreck, there isn’t much lower than the direct-to-syndication cartoon that only exists to sell toys. And it gets even worse when that toyline is just a blatant rip-off of a more popular one. That’s Extreme Dinosaurs for you, which was an extension of Street Sharks. It’s terrible. It is the sort of cartoon where it can look okay in still shots because the character designs are big and colorful, but once things start moving around it turns to shit. I hate all of the attempts at “extreme” language or whatever and this is the sort of show that somehow makes dinosaurs seem lame. As for a Christmas special, it’s another let’s help Santa plot. Not a full-on The Santa Clause, but yeah, dinosaurs are going to help save Christmas.

190 – Mickey’s Christmas Chaos

Mickey does not subscribe to the whole “love thy neighbor” thing.

Around the turn of the millennium, Mickey Mouse tried to make it again in shorts and the results were mixed at best. Mickey’s Christmas Chaos is one of those shorts and it’s tonally kind of a mess. Mickey behaves more like a Warner Bros. character here as he goes to war with his neighbor Mortimer as each tries to one-up the other with their Christmas decorating. The animation is so flat that it limits the impact the gags can have. Plus, there’s really nothing new here. There are no pieces of physical comedy that feel original or offer a new twist on an old concept. I get trying to redefine Mickey or show a different side of him, but this isn’t it. Paul Rudish would figure it out much later. At least this one has a nice ending for best boy Pluto, and if you’re someone who disagrees and actually likes this one then good news! There are a pair of Christmas episodes from the House of Mouse series full of crap like this!

That’s all for now. Come back tomorrow as we move into the bland and the meh that also happen to be free and easy to view. We’re going into the public domain, folks!

Can’t wait until tomorrow for more Christmas? Check out what we had to say on this day last year and beyond:

Dec. 2 – Dinosaurs – “Refrigerator Day”

Nothing puts one in the Christmas Spirit like carols about the refrigerator. Or so Dinosaurs would have you believe. Not that Christmas is actually mentioned at all in today’s special because it takes place in a setting on Earth millions of years before the Christ in Christmas was born. Back then, the sentient beings of…

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by Joe

Dec. 2 – Justice League – “Comfort and Joy”

In 1995, Warner Bros felt it was a big enough entity that it could launch its own broadcast television network. Dubbed The WB, it would try to compete with the big four of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, but never really achieved that level of success which is why it no longer exists. The strategy…

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by Joe

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December 1, 2025

Jada Toys Frosty the Snowman

By Joe
Happy birthday!

There are a number of Christmas specials out there that are basically known by all and I’ve written about most of them here. Some have been annual traditions especially when we had more of a monoculture in the US, but the slow death of cable television has made those annual traditions fade away. One holiday icon endures though (well, two counting Rudolph): Frosty the Snowman. The story of a snowman come to life based on a 1950 song premiered on CBS in 1969. There it aired every year until 2023 when CBS at long last let the rights expire. NBC was there to pick it up where it aired in 2024 and is set to air this year on December 4th continuing its run in prime time television for another year.

Specials like Frosty the Snowman were appointment viewing for me as a child even with my beloved Christmas Tape at hand. It was just a thing to get excited for on the road to Christmas and with how popular specials like it have been I’ve always been surprised at the lack of toys. These are Christmas specials, after all, a holiday synonymous with toys. Jada apparently felt the same for it unveiled its own take on Frosty as seen in that Rankin/Bass special which coincidentally arrives a year after Super7 did the same with its ReAction line. Unlike that toy, Jada went all out in making Frosty an actual, modern, action figure. Is this something that’s long overdue for the magical snowman or is there a reason why Frosty has never made the leap to plastic in such a way?

Frosty has some pretty rad packaging.

There may have been some trepidation about wading into the Frosty waters as Jada opted to partner this release with Big Bad Toy Store. It’s an exclusive there where it will set you back $50 and I wouldn’t expect a sale on it anytime soon. That’s a steep price for an action figure, especially one from Jada. I don’t know if they’ve ever done an action figure at this high a price point. I suppose the release is technically a two-pack as it does come with the rabbit, Hocus Pocus. Still, is that enough?

He seems to size pretty well with other 1:12 figures.

The packaging for Frosty is pretty damn fun. The window box is modeled after an old, 80s, television set which is probably similar to the actual set many people saw Frosty on for the first time. It has faux wood paneling and even the rear of the box resembles a CRT television. The bubble is shaped to have a curve in it as well and if you’re an in-box collector this will display pretty well like this. I, of course, am not so I broke into this thing and I do think it will go back together after the holidays just fine, should I choose to pack-up and store Frosty in such a manner.

Until we get a proper Santa, one of these will have to do.

Out of the package, Frosty stands at about 6.375″ to the top of his head. The default portrait has the hat affixed to it so that one will take the snowman over the 7″ mark. From a distance, he’s basically just a big hunk of white plastic, but upon closer examination it’s evident that Jada applied a pearlescent overcoat to the figure to give him a little shine. It’s about as close to approximating the look of snow when the sun hits it they could come up with and it does help to at least give him a little nicer finish, though there’s no hiding from the fact that this is just a big, white, toy. There is paint on the face for the eyes, button nose, and the inner mouth which they opted to paint blue. This had me running back to the special to see if that’s what Rankin/Bass did and, no, they did not. Frosty’s inner mouth was red so I’m not sure why blue was chosen, but it may have been an artistic choice to work off the white. I don’t hate it, it just stood out to me as an odd choice.

And I guess the Peanuts gang will have to stand-in for Karen and the others.

The likeness of the sculpt is decent. The face is pretty much spot-on, though there wasn’t a lot Jada had to get right there. Where I do think the figure comes up a little short is just in the overall shape of the snowman. His torso is very pear-shaped when the character in the show was more round. It’s possible they had to mess with the proportions a bit to better suit the articulation. The head also sits a touch high as it’s not sunk-in at all into the body. Was this done to better accommodate the articulation? It’s possible, but I don’t know if the trade-off was worth it. I feel similarly about the waist cut on Frosty. I appreciate the attempt, and maybe I’ll appreciate it more if we ever get a Karen for him to interact with, but I wouldn’t mind seeing how the figure looked without it. And if I’m going to nitpick further, the hat seems a touch too tall, but on the other hand, it’s not consistent in the special and there are shots where it’s more like it’s presented here and others where it’s more squat.

For some reason, Frosty has acquired a scarf over the years. Even the Super7 ReAction figure (right) came with one.

Frosty does come with a handful of accessories, most of which are basically essential to the look of Frosty. We have his corn cob pipe which plugs into his smile. It’s basically essential since without it he just has a hole in his face that looks kind of lame. It doesn’t bother me as I would never choose to display him with out, but if you want your Frosty to quit his bad habit you may be disappointed. He does have his broom stick which is well-painted and sculpted. It’s basically in solid colors which matches the animation fairly well. He also has some optional parts. For hands, Frosty has a set of relaxed hands, a wide-gripping left hand, a tight-gripping right hand, a pointing left hand, and a right fist for when someone disses his fly girl. There’s also an optional portrait of “dead” Frosty from before the magic hat is applied. It looks fine and has the same hole in the mouth for the pipe and I like having this one as a means of displaying the figure in the lead-up to December. Lastly, there’s a soft goods, red, scarf which is a thing that has sprung up over the years. I’m not sure the origin, but lots of Frosty merch over the years has placed a red scarf around his neck despite him never wearing one in the cartoon (in the sequel, he wears a striped scarf). Super7 did the same thing so I can only assume it’s just something that has been added into the licensing art over the years. It’s here if you want it, though I don’t think I’ll ever use it.

If you prefer your Frosty to be non-animated.

Of course, the other accessory in the box is Hocus Pocus. The little white rabbit stands at just a tick over 2″ and has a goofy looking smile fitting the character. His pupils are not aligned, presumably as intended, though I can’t recall him looking that way in the special (I’m not saying it didn’t happen, just that I can’t remember a specific moment for it). Like Frosty, he’s essentially a lump of white plastic with the only paint being reserved for his red nose, the pink of his eyes and inner ears, and the black of his pupils. He has his freckles sculpted in, but they get lost in the plastic since there’s no outline applied. His whiskers are represented with black wire and his arms are permanently sculpted into the torso. He does feature articulation at the base of his ears, head, waist, hips, and ankles, but it’s pretty limited. He has one accessory – the hat. Hocus is designed to separate at the head which reveals a super long double-ball peg that can plug into the hat. There’s some sculpted out area for his arms inside the hat to get a snug fit and it successfully recreates the look of Hocus from when he makes off with the hat and delivers it to the children. It’s a good idea and a fun way to display him if you’re opting to display Frosty with his “dead” portrait.

This is pretty much the extent of his posing.

Frosty’s articulation is also nothing to write home about. He has the same double-ball peg setup at the “neck,” and another one at the hat. This is where the figure is most expressive as he can rotate and tilt at both the head and hat which provides enough nuance to be fun. He has hinged shoulders, single-hinged elbows, and hinged wrists that rotate. Unlike NECA and their many TMNT figures, Frosty actually has the proper vertical hinge for his broom and any other weapon you feel he should have. That waist joint is a ball joint so Frosty can rotate and tilt, but don’t expect too much forward and back. The legs are connected via ball-sockets, but they’re functionally useless due to the shape of the character. He has no knees and instead some ankles that hinge and rock. If your dream is to recreate Frosty’s marching pose on your shelf then you may have to get a little creative. He also doesn’t have any peg holes on the bottoms of his feet so finding a stand to work with him might be a challenge.

They’re both pipe enthusiasts.

Frosty isn’t going to impress with his poses, but no one likely expected him to. What will sell this figure are the aesthetics and the power of nostalgia. Nostalgia for Christmas. Is that sort of thing worthy of your $50? It’s a legitimate question and one not easily answered. If I were to grade this release on the quality of the figure and the amount of stuff in the box then I’d have to say “No,” this isn’t a $50 release. I’d feel better about it if we got a more expressive Hocus or maybe some optional parts for Frosty to recreate the signature poses from the special. This Frosty can’t even belly-whop because the range at the head doesn’t allow for it. He basically needs a third head with the socket for the ball joint in the back. Perhaps a future Karen release could come with such a thing?

“You want a hit of this, snowman?” “Happy birthday!”

Despite my feelings on the value present, I am happy to have this. I have a huge soft spot for Christmas specials (obviously) and there’s no way I was passing on this. It’s still a better value than a Super7 Ultimates! release (and cheaper) and it looks good enough on my Christmas shelf. And I do selfishly want this release to be successful because I’d like to see more from Jada and Frosty the Snowman. I already name-dropped Karen, but throw-in Santa and Professor Hinkle and that will make me pretty happy. It would be fun if each came with a different Hocus since he had some different looks/poses in the special, and in the case of Karen, that belly-whopping head would be nice. If you’re interested in this release as strictly an action figure, then it probably won’t win you over. If you have a lot of affection for the old television special and won’t miss the $50 then I say go for it. There’s plenty of Christmas magic in this box to take away the sting of the price.

If you’re curious to read my thoughts on the original special or just have an interest in Christmas toys then check these out:

Dec. 1 – Frosty the Snowman

Welcome back, lovers of Christmas, to the 7th edition of The Christmas Spot! If you missed the introduction a few days ago, we’re doing things a little differently this year. Yes, you’re still getting a dedicated write-up each day through Christmas about a beloved or not-so-beloved holiday special, but this year we’re also going retro…

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by Joe

Naughty or Nice Classic Santa and Cyborg Santa

It was looking like we were in for a photo finish this year. Last year, toymaker Fresh Monkey Fiction partnered with online retailer Big Bad Toy Store to launch the Naughty or Nice collection. Structured similar to a Kickstarter campaign, FMF posted several action figures for preorder with a minimum order quantity needed for the…

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by Joe

Naughty or Nice Father Frost & Mall Santa

Fresh Monkey Fiction is back with Naughty or Nice Wave Two and just in time for…(checks calendar)…Valentine’s Day? Okay, so things didn’t go quite as planned with this line. In 2021, Fresh Monkey Fiction partnered with Big Bad Toy Store for this line of action figures based primarily on Santa Claus. That preorder took about…

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by Joe

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December 1, 2025

Dec. 1 – The Nostalgia Spot Christmas Special Countdown – #209-200

By Joe
Yes, it’s that time of year again!

It has been said before and so it shall be said again, but Christmas is the holiday that is the most commercialized of all. A massive component of that commercialization has been The Christmas Special, that one-off theatrical short, television event, or just a Christmas-themed episode of a popular (or not so popular) show. These often take the form of animation, but are not limited to that. Certainly, there are many live-action sitcoms out there that have made Christmas the subject of an episode or two and there’s no shortage of movies centered on the holiday. It’s impossible to know at this point how many such specials exist. I’m sure folks have tried to catalog them all, but such a task seems futile at best.

Here at The Nostalgia Spot, every December has been turned over to the Christmas holiday. And for the last decade that has meant an advent calendar style rundown of many popular and not so popular Christmas specials. Last year, when the countdown concluded I revealed that I intended to retire The Christmas Spot as an advent calendar countdown and I’m sticking to that. It’s a lot and I feel like I’ve said almost all that I have to say on the subject of Christmas specials in this space, but not everything.

This year, we’re going to go back through them – yes, all of them! It’s time to take the specials that have been covered here and sort them out. The Christmas season is only so long and if you’re in what I consider a typical Christmas-celebrating household, the season begins on the Friday after Thanksgiving. This year, Thanksgiving fell on the 27th of November which is almost as late as it can fall in a calendar year. This is an especially short season – how can one possibly fit all of this essential Christmas viewing into such a short window of time?! And it’s already December 1st!

Fear not, for I am here to help guide you and your viewing schedule. Well, kind of. Since we’ll be unveiling this list in 10 special increments each day that means we won’t get to the good stuff for awhile. I guess this will be more helpful in the years that follow. It obviously can’t be all inclusive. I just said cataloging all Christmas specials would be a futile activity. However, there are a few that I’ve declined to report on in this space that feel like major omissions. When we get to them in the countdown, we’ll do an old school style write-up to make sure a wrong has been righted. I will almost surely miss someone’s favorite or one that simply stands out, but we can’t hit them all. I feel good about this body of work though and if I was only allowed to watch holiday specials from this list for the rest of my life I’d be okay with that.

Before we can get to the good stuff though, we have to talk about the bad stuff. Figuring out the best Christmas special of all-time is easy. It’s the Grinch (sorry, spoiler?), but what’s the worst Christmas special of all time? Now that’s a question with many answers. I’ve seen my share of crap throughout the years, and this dubious honor has more than one contender, but when the dust settled and I looked at my list there was really only one worthy of this title:

Oh yeah, the one that’s full of crap.

209 – Mega Babies – A Mega Christmas

What a diaper-filled crap-fest! I wasn’t harsh enough in my rundown of this one back when it was covered. I think because it was so early in the season and I wasn’t feeling run down just yet. This show is brutally ugly, almost offensively so. I’ve seen and laughed at plenty of gross cartoons, but this is too much for me. It’s not particularly funny nor is it memorable. If I have to say one nice thing about it then it’s that it didn’t parody a popular Christmas special. That’s a low bar though and plenty of dreck at the end of this list can claim the same.

This redesign is worse than the one Toucan Sam got.

208 – George of the Jungle – “Jungle Bells”

This special featuring semi-famous character George of the Jungle isn’t as offensively bad as some others, but I loathe its visual style. It has little to say or do to hold my attention and the art is just gross. It’s so cheap looking and comes from an era where everyone was cutting costs when it comes to animation. It’s basically Newgrounds quality and it makes me mad someone thought this was acceptable to put on television. Granted, I think it was on the equivalent of Canadian PBS, but the point stands. It has no reason to exist.

Just look at the dumb expression on the fox’s face. You just know this is going to be bad.

207 – Chucklewood Critters: T’was the Day Before Christmas

Chucklewood Critters represent something we’ll be seeing more of on this list. It’s a very bland, very boring, inoffensive sort of Christmas special. Well, inoffensive if you’re not offended by having your time wasted. There’s a bunch of stuff like this, but a lot of it is relegated to shorts where not much happens but at least it happens fast. And those shorts mostly look good since the shorts I’m thinking of were theatrical shorts. This is just an ugly, cheap, cloyingly sweet half hour of television. It probably won’t enrage you or anything, but it might put you to sleep. And these little bastards had a whole series of television specials! It’s crazy to think about and those poor children that were forced to watch them. I somehow dodged that bullet, but I took in this one in the interest of Christmas viewing as an adult. In that, I feel I was a worthy sacrifice.

It’s the terrifying story about the murder of a tree!

206 – Christopher the Christmas Tree

Speaking of sacrifice. Here we have the story of a tree that just wants to be given a purpose. And that purpose is to be cut down and put on display in front of the UN. Or White House, it depends on what version you saw. This is one of those specials that wants to put the Christ back in Christmas, or at least it appears to, but then it does this weird pivot to putting the Christopher back in Christmas. As in, Christopher Columbus. What an odd thing to insert into a Christmas special. And inappropriate. It’s a dumb special, but I place it slightly higher than something like Chucklewood Critters because it has moments where the animation looks nice. Basically, they blew the budget on the tree and some select sequences while side characters and backgrounds look like trash. I’m guessing there’s not a lot of websites out there that have dedicated as many words to Christopher the Christmas Tree as I have as this one is actually one of my most viewed Christmas entries. Weird, right? I guess it makes sense since there’s tons of places talking about Mickey, Frosty, Popeye, and so on, but what fool wants to waste their time on the tree that gave its life for Christmas? Me. I’m that fool, and because of my sacrifice you don’t have to be too.

Just look at this unbelievably stupid thing.

205 – Popeye the Sailor – “Spinach Greetings”

And speaking of Popeye (we’re just mastering transitions today), here’s a terrible Christmas cartoon starring the famous sailor! I like Popeye, he’s the reason I ate my spinach as a kid even if I thought it was terrible. We’d get that frozen kind that smells like garbage after it’s cooked so you can’t blame me for not liking it. As an adult, fresh spinach all the way! Anyway, this cartoon sucks, but at least it’s mercifully short. It’s just a dumb Popeye saves Santa bit, but it’s so nonsensical and for some reason Santa flies around in an airplane shaped like a reindeer. It’s the most ludicrous visual I think I’ve seen in a Christmas special yet and that’s saying something because we already talked about Mega Babies. This series is from Popeye’s dark ages, best not to revisit them.

Yes, shoot them please!

204 – Tennessee Tuxedo and his Tales – “The Tree Trimmers”

These 1960s cartoons tend to all have one thing in common: sucky animation. Tennessee Tuxedo is one the biggest offenders as characters barely move. Worse though, the whole thing feels incredibly lazy. Nothing happens! This is the Christmas special about nothing, they just have to decorate a stupid tree, but since they’re zoo animals they’re all dumb. We even have to pause so a character can teach us how to make the worst Christmas ornaments around. I don’t blame this thing being bad on whoever wrote it, they were probably charged with writing a whole series in a weekend or something. The only somewhat charming thing about this show is hearing Don Adams in the lead role. It’s just fun hearing the Get Smart/Inspector Gadget voice again.

Yeah, that’s more or less how I feel watching this one.

203 – The Soulmates in the Gift of Light

I tried to leave this one out of here until at least the next entry just because of the whole story surrounding it, but I just couldn’t do it. It sucks too much. This is another one of those inoffensive holiday specials that’s trying to launch a franchise, but it’s so inoffensive that it’s boring and no one cared about it. Really, like at all. This thing was lost media for a long time, but now it’s back. Sort of. I suspect it was really only back for that one magical moment in 2022 and now it’s rightfully forgotten again. The song might get stuck in your head though, so it has that going for it.

What the hell is this stupid thing?

202 – Pillow People Save Christmas

Okay, I have this thing way back in the rankings and yet I’m not sure if it’s far enough. That’s the thing with rankings, they’re pretty subjective unless there’s some sort of math behind it. And even then, you may just be using a subjective component to create an objective outcome. That’s probably way more thought already than Pillow People Save Christmas deserves. This thing is awful and it’s a garbage one-off special designed to sell dumb pillows. Watching it made me mad at my mom more than 30 years later for buying me one of those pillows. There is zero subtlety to this one as it’s just a big commercial complete with a tour of available products you can buy now. Well, now when it aired, today no one cares about Pillow People. If you still have a Pillow Person in your possession might I suggest burning it? It won’t take away the stink of this special, but it would make me feel a little better and it would probably do the same for you.

This is how I choose to remember Santabear.

201 – Santabear’s High Flying Adventure

Pillow People is just plain bad, while Santabear commits a different sin: boredom. A lot of these backend specials are going to be placed here because they’re just so boring. The ones that are dull and combine it with bad music and visuals are the biggest offenders. Here we have Santabear, better known for his television spots in a Cinnamon Toast Crunch commercial. It probably would have been better if that’s all he was confined to because “high flying” this one is not. The cast is solid too, but everything is dialed down to a sleepy pace. I don’t want to hate you, Santabear, because you are cute, but I really hope to never watch your Christmas special again.

That is certainly a visual.

200 – George & Junior’s Christmas Spectacular

We end today’s entry with a cartoon that is not exactly sleepy and would prefer to announce its presence with a scream. Well, except for Santa who just kind of strolls in. This is a What a Cartoon original from Cartoon Network’s early days. An attempt to revive the duo of George and his gigantic son Junior. They’re a bit of a rip-off of the bears from the Warner Bros. shorts just minus the mama bear character. This one I actually liked as a kid, but now I can barely watch it. It’s so offensively ugly and the animation is so minimal. I can’t decide if that’s by design or by budget, but it’s bad. The gags are tired and lazy and about the only good thing I can say about it is that it’s brief. When I revisited this one way back in 2017 I wasn’t really expecting to like it, but I definitely didn’t think I’d hate it.

Well, that about covers the worst of the worst. Unfortunately, we still have some crap to get through before we can start talking about the actual good Christmas specials. At least now you know the ones to absolutely avoid. See you tomorrow!

Can’t wait until tomorrow for more Christmas? Check out what we had to say on this day last year and beyond:

Dec. 1 – Mickey’s Orphans (1931)

It’s December 1st and you know what that means – time for Christmas specials! Not to “well, actually,” myself, but the Christmas special viewing season began before today in my house as it’s annually the day after Thanksgiving. What you may call Black Friday, I dub the start of the Christmas Special Season. And this…

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by Joe

Dec. 1 – Christmas Comes But Once A Year (1936)

We’re back with another year of The Christmas Spot! And to kick things off this year we’re taking a look at a bonafide Christmas Classic. Christmas Comes But Once A Year may not be the household name that Rudolph and Frosty are, but for Gen X and millennial kids it’s probably familiar because it was…

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by Joe

Dec. 1 – 35 Years of The Christmas Tape

Welcome back to another year of The Christmas Spot! This year we’re kicking things off with a post I’ve been sitting on for a few years now. When I utter the title “The Christmas Tape,” I’m curious what comes to the minds of readers. It sounds both generic and specific and I suspect a few…

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by Joe

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November 30, 2025

Marvel Legends X-Men ’97 Cable

By Joe
Say “Hello,” to the Wild Man of Borneo.

Today we finish our look at wave 3 of X-Men ’97 Marvel Legends action figures and I think I saved the best for last. Cable was one of the non-members of the X-Men to play a pretty substantial role in the original animated series. He showed up in multiple episodes in both the first and second season and was a key player in what was to be the show’s big finale, “Beyond Good and Evil.” It wasn’t a surprise to see him return in X-Men ’97 where he once again was a soldier displaced by time, only this time the show actually showed interest in explaining just who the heck this guy is.

They fed him well in the future.

In the episode “Time Fugitives – Part 2,” there’s basically a blink and you miss it moment where Jean Grey mentally probes the mind of Cable. We see images of Cyclops and Jean when she does, but the show doesn’t bother addressing that at any future moment leaving most of the characters in the dark, save for Jean, apparently. Obviously, if you’re a fan of the comics then you probably knew all that, but he must have been a pretty confusing character for those who were only exposed to the X-Men via the cartoon. In X-Men ’97, we finally find out that Cable is the son of Cyclops and Jean from the future. Only there’s a twist as Cable is actually the son of Cyclops and the clone of Jean, who decided to adopt the alias Madelyne Prior. Cable plays a large role in the back-half of the first season and appears to be set to play a big role in the upcoming season. Might we finally see him form X-Force? I kept waiting for him to do that in the old show so it would be long overdue if he does.

I suspect we’ll see something like this in season two. Only Apocalypse will be much taller.

This depiction of Cable is his traditional look. It mostly conforms to what we saw in the ’92 series as well as the first chunk of X-Men ’97. By the finale, Cable (like everyone else) gets a costume change meaning X-Men ’97 is perhaps the most action figure friendly show we’ve ever had. We’ve already seen one of those finale outfits via Jubilee in this wave while others have been reserved for some two-packs that I didn’t pick up. I’m most interested in figures that fit in with my ’92 display and this Cable accomplishes that.

Cable, like Morph, is an all new sculpt. Initially, I thought he might share some parts with the Bishop from the first wave, but if he does I can’t find them. He’s pretty tall as well standing a little over 7″ making him the tallest in the line thus far. His sculpt is pretty intricate with lots of straps, pouches, and other assorted details pulled from the show. He has that animated look to him via a lot of flat colors, but there’s also a slight touch of realism to the face like Hasbro knew comic collectors would want to add this Cable to their display. Cable has a pretty distinct face in the show and it’s not quite captured here. It’s almost like it’s halfway between the ’92 version of the character and the ’97 one.

This is the “little gun.”

As is the case with most of the wave, there isn’t a lot of paint to be found on Cable. It’s mostly reserved for his face which looks good. Hasbro elected not to go with a glowing eye which is fine. The X-emblem is painted onto the collar as well as the red lines on his suspenders (I guess that’s what they are). Perhaps the best paintwork and nicest little detail is the dark blue piping on his chest and abdomen. A lot of the other colored parts are just plastic. The green straps are bands of plastic and they even run under the chest which is an odd look. The arm band on his left arm is plastic as are the thigh straps. The dark gray on his shoulders pads is paint as are the yellow rectangles on the boots, but they’re not that clean. There’s no slop, but they don’t quite reach the edges of the piece. He looks pretty good, all things considered. Obviously, more paint is best, but this muted color palette works better in plastic than some of the brighter offerings. The only aspect of the presentation that bothers me is the left arm. For that, we get Hasbro’s swirly, twirly, silver plastic. It would look so much better if it had a painted finish and since it’s such a small area it’s disappointing that they didn’t go that extra mile, but not surprising.

And this is the Big Gun.

Cable further blows the budget by having some unique accessories as well. I could be wrong, but I don’t think even his hands are recycled, but I also don’t buy every Marvel Legend release that comes out. He has a trigger hand for each arm plus a right fist and a wide, gripping, left hand. That one is intended to support his big, freakin’, gun. It’s a big hunk of plastic with some nice, sculpted, detail and a little bit of red paint. He also has more of a sidearm which too has that futuristic look to it and a little bit of red paint detail. Both guns can utilize a blast effect and Hasbro so kindly provided two. They’re yellow with some red at the base giving it a nice transition. These are recycled from many releases, but they work just fine here and they’re nice to have.

It too has its own blast effect.

The one area that may leave collectors disappointed with this Cable is the articulation. Big guys don’t always articulate the best, but Hasbro made some curious choices here. He does have a double ball peg at the head and a single joint at the base of the neck. Maybe Hasbro is finally figuring these joints out because his range there is terrific. It goes south pretty fast from there though as the arms feature your basic, Marvel Legends, articulation with no butterfly joint. That’s not the problem though, what is are these shoulder pads. Hasbro made no effort to work them into the articulation. Like Emma Frost’s cape, you just have to deal with it. Only in this case, you can’t remove them if you so desire. Cable can raise his arms out to the side, but he can only raise them out front so far. The shoulder pads are a softer material, but not soft enough to just get out of the way. It makes it hard for Cable to hold either gun out straight. For the big one, he has to hold it across his chest while the smaller one is always going to be pointed out at an angle.

“The name’s Cable, Apocalypse, remember it!” “I shall not forget this IMPUDENCE!”

It’s a shame, because the rest of the articulation is solid. He has a ball-jointed diaphragm that provides some forward and back, tilt, and rotation. The straps don’t get in the way because they’re separate pieces between the chest and the abdomen. There is a waist twist and it’s basically hidden by the belt. The legs are pretty standard with the thigh swivels hidden behind the straps on his legs and the only other shortcoming really is the lack of a boot swivel. You don’t really need it, but since he has such big boots that are clearly a separate piece why not have it there anyway?

Is the poor articulation at the shoulders a deal-breaker? For me, no. I like the look of this Cable and it’s a character I’ve wanted to add to the collection for a long time so I’m mostly content. The sculpt and the accessories are great by Marvel Legends standards and I can finagle the figure into a pose that suits me. More than the shoulder range, I think I’m more disappointed by the lack of weapon storage.. All them pouches, but not a single holster for either gun. I know in the show he wore the big gun on his back most of the time, but I don’t know if he actually had a holster like Bishop or if it just attached via cartoon magic. I couldn’t spy one in any of the screenshots I looked at, but Hasbro could have at least given us a peg hole or something. At any rate, Cable is the standout of X-Men ’97 wave three. If you like the show and you’re collecting the figures, then you probably already have him. If you’re someone more into the comic-based figures then I’d still give this one a look. If Cable is missing from your display I think this one works just fine as more of a classic Cable, but that’s just me.

For more action figure reviews from X-Men ’97 look no further:

Marvel Legends X-Men ’97 Logan

I knew who the X-Men were when the show premiered in 1992, but I didn’t know much about them. That show really was the proper introduction to the franchise for me and one thing I couldn’t wrap my head around as a kid was that these were heroes who didn’t really have a secret identity.…

Keep reading
by Joe

Marvel Legends X-Men ’97 Morph

I’m always going to have a soft spot for Morph. It was rare to see a character killed off in a children’s show, but that was the fate of old Morph who didn’t make it out of the show’s second episode. I wouldn’t call it traumatizing, but there was definitely a haunted quality to that…

Keep reading
by Joe

Marvel Legends X-Men ’97 Emma Frost

If you have seen the first season of X-Men ’97 then you may be wondering why Emma Frost, aka the White Queen, is receiving an action figure in the show’s companion toy line. She didn’t play a big role in the show having a speaking role in just one episode and then what amounted to…

Keep reading
by Joe

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Television, toys

November 28, 2025

The Christmas Spot Returns with The Nostalgia Spot Christmas Special Countdown!

By Joe

Last year concluded ten years of advent calendar style countdowns of classic and not-so-classic holiday specials. Twenty five posts on consecutive days for one person with a family and a full-time job is a pretty big time sink each year. It’s a year-round endeavor of hunting for specials never before seen or covered, viewing them, viewing them again, viewing them often a third or fourth time, then writing and capturing images for a blog post that routinely runs for thousands of words. I spend days on each post as a result and while I love Christmas, the sense of accomplishment I feel each year from doing The Christmas Spot dwindles. That’s why last year I decided I needed to make 2024 the last year. I knew I’d do something Christmas-related in 2025 and I figured I’d actually have several posts to make, but 25 posts in 25 days? No, those days are gone. Sort of.

Let’s not sugarcoat things: 2025 has sucked. It might be one of the worst years I’ve lived through and I’m not even factoring in things that have happened in my personal life. There’s a lot of unrest, social and economic. My favorite hobby, toy collecting, has been hit hard by tariffs and other sanctions delaying releases, cancelling some, and making the hobby a whole lot more expensive. The grocery bill reaches past $400 and things are unlikely to get better in the near term. In short, we need The Christmas Spot! We need a season where we can wrap ourselves in warm blankets and good feelings, even if we’re just lying to ourselves temporarily. Christmas itself brings along its own stresses, but let’s push past it, and here’s some free content to get you through the month of December.

Is The Christmas Spot back? Yes and no. Yes, there will be 25 posts in 25 days about Christmas specials. Actually, once you factor in the toy reviews there will be even more than 25 posts this holiday season. What there won’t be are 25 posts on 25 different Christmas specials like we’ve been doing for the past decade. Instead, I’m going to lay out all of the Christmas specials covered on this blog in order to figure out the proper viewing order. Or rather, the ones you should seek out year in and year out and the ones you probably don’t need to.

If you ever wondered how many Christmas specials have been covered here then I have an answer for you: 209. Now, if you run over to the index page and tally them all up you actually won’t find 209. That’s because five (well, technically four, but we’re doing one redo this year) haven’t been written yet! I always intended to rank the specials I’ve looked at, and while I’d love to say it’s all-encompassing the short order of it is that it’s almost impossible to view every Christmas special out there. I’ve covered most of the essentials and most of the well known, but I did feel like I had a few missing ones. Some I avoided because they’re very well known and I didn’t feel like I needed to add to it. Some I avoided because they’re an hour long and I hate doing specials longer than a half hour (it just gets tedious, even if I like it). And in the case of at least one of them, I just don’t particularly care for it, but it’s popular!

So here’s the deal: each day in December starting on December 1st, come here to see me rank each special ten at a time. Because we’re dealing with odd numbers, there will be some days when I rank more than ten, but no days where I do less. I will do a mini review of each special, tell you what I think, and move on. I also have five traditional write-ups planned which will go up in the order in which they appear. I’ll tell you right now that the first one is schedule to go up on December 5th. That special is the one I decided was fit for number one-hundred and sixty-nine. I did consider doing more since 209 is such a stupid number, but once I was past 200 it felt pointless to extend myself further.

That’s the deal though: one massive ranking spread out over twenty-five days. It’s not exactly a quick way to do things, but it’s certainly a far smaller workload than Decembers past. I have no idea what I’ll do in 2026, but for now we have plenty of Christmas content and a whole month ahead of us to fit as many holiday specials into that window as humanly possible. Happy viewing and merry Christmas!

It’s Christmas, baby! Let the good times roll:

The Christmas Spot is back for 2024

Welcome back for another year of The Christmas Spot here at The Nostalgia Spot! 2024 has been another long year in some respects and I think we could all use a little Christmas right this very minute. Just like in years past, December 1st will mark the start of the advent calendar countdown to Christmas…

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by Joe

NECA TMNT Dimension X-Mas Vacation

If you know anything about me then you probably know that I like collecting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures and I like Christmas. Strangely, those two things have not come together all that often. Most of the television shows featuring the famed four opted not to feature the holiday in an episode. And without…

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by Joe

Figura Obscura – The Ghost of Christmas Past

For past few years Four Horsemen have been bringing us surprise Christmas figures each holiday season. The first was Krampus and the second Father Christmas. Last year, Four Horsemen surprised us with the Ghost of Jacob Marley. A ghost character, especially one in 19th century clothing, can make for a fun design and figure, but…

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by Joe

2 Comments | posted in christmas, Television

November 27, 2025

Marvel Legends X-Men ’97 Emma Frost

By Joe
Enter the White Queen.

If you have seen the first season of X-Men ’97 then you may be wondering why Emma Frost, aka the White Queen, is receiving an action figure in the show’s companion toy line. She didn’t play a big role in the show having a speaking role in just one episode and then what amounted to a cameo in a later one. I think she was among the characters shown off in concept art before the show’s premiere so that could be a contributing factor here. Or, she’s set to play a bigger role in the show’s second season. As of this writing, only one trailer has been shown for X-Men ’97 season two and Emma Frost was not present in it. At least I think she wasn’t. It was only shown to attendees of New York Comic Con and for non-attendees we’re left with essentially bootleg cell phone videos from the panel. If she was in it and I missed it that certainly wouldn’t surprise me. Hasbro did use the event to unveil a massive made-to-order Apocalypse figure from the show and we definitely know he’s a big player in season two based on how the first season ended. Could the same be true for Emma?

Those heels means she towers over someone like Jean.

It’s also possible this figure exists because it’s a relatively cheap release for Hasbro. Yes, like Wolverine, this Emma Frost is basically the same Emma Frost we’ve received before in the Legends line, but with minor updates that last year’s Goblin Queen benefitted from as well. The basic formula for this X-Men ’97 line is to take existing molds, add an animated head, and call it a day it would seem. Emma mostly follows in that direction, but she does have a new corset that is slightly less revealing this time around. I don’t have the older Hellfire Club release, but I have seen pictures and I do not like it. She looks like the sort of person who had some bad plastic surgery. This Emma, while the details of her face and hair are toned down to match the animated style, looks like a young Sharon Stone. As such, I think that comic book fans may take more of an interest in this release than some of the other ones in this wave.

That’s a bummer.

Emma is not much to talk about aside from the appearance. The hair is a soft yellow and her face is well painted. Her default portrait has a slight smugness to the expression which suits her. The body is fairly clean and composed mostly of colored plastic – flesh and white. There is some paint on the corset strings and a line running down the front of her boots that’s applied well. The cape is also nice with white on the outside and blue on the inside. My figure does have a splotch of gray paint on the back of her default portrait which I’ll have to try and remove. The figure isn’t as detailed as comic versions, but it works for the source material very well and I think there’s enough here that it can appear on a comic shelf.

The cape makes her harder to stand, but she looks kind of ridiculous without it.

The rest of the figure is basically nothing to write home about. We get one extra portrait which features a smile and a windswept sculpt to the hair. I do like it, but I wonder why Hasbro doesn’t make the hair swappable between the two heads? For hands, we get a set of fists and a set of open hands. No power effects, though more important is no stand. Emma sports some high heels and as a result can be a pain to stand. Without the cape, it’s fairly easy to find a neutral stance to get her to stand in. With the added weight of the plastic cape though it becomes more of a challenge. It’s do-able, but don’t expect to get much use out of her articulation as a result.

These things are going to drive you crazy if you want to get her into any kind of semi-dynamic pose.

And speaking of, the cape plus the heels makes her articulation functionally useless. The head can barely rotate because of the large fur trim on the cape and it locks her shoulders down. Her right arm is more exposed than the left so you can get something out of the elbow, but not much. There is a joint inside the corset, but it’s useless. They way Hasbro did the heels means she has more of an ankle swivel than an ankle rocker. If you want to ditch the cape then, yeah, you’ll get more. Standard arm, hips, thigh, and knee articulation is present, but she looks a little goofy without the cape on account of her long neck. I suppose the real play here is to get a third party soft goods cape, but that can be just as expensive as the figure itself.

This is the maximum amount of nuance I could get out of her legs. And she fell over shortly after.

Emma Frost is basically a barely functional action figure. It looks good in the limited poses available, but it’s not a figure you’re going to want to mess with. Maybe swap the portraits here and there, but that’s it. I thought she looked nice and since she’s a classic X-Men villain I decided to grab her, partly out of fear she’ll sell out. And she did initially and may be one of the harder figures to find in the wave. Mostly, I did worry I’d like her in season two and wish I had purchased the figure, though if she does show up chances are she’ll have a different look. Do I regret my decision? Yes and no. It’s not a great figure, but it’s also not one likely to end up on clearance. And if I just want a White Queen to look good on my shelf, she does accomplish as much. If that’s all you care about then you may be fine with this one. As long as you know what you’re in for.

If you like X-Men ’97 and are interested in more action figure reviews then check these out:

Marvel Legends X-Men ’97 Jubilee

The television event of 2024 for me was none other than X-Men ’97. I loved that show and I can’t wait for the second season to come around. It’s just a shame we may still be as much as a year away, but to somewhat tide us over until then we have this third wave…

Keep reading
by Joe

Marvel Legends X-Men ’97 Logan

I knew who the X-Men were when the show premiered in 1992, but I didn’t know much about them. That show really was the proper introduction to the franchise for me and one thing I couldn’t wrap my head around as a kid was that these were heroes who didn’t really have a secret identity.…

Keep reading
by Joe

Marvel Legends X-Men ’97 Morph

I’m always going to have a soft spot for Morph. It was rare to see a character killed off in a children’s show, but that was the fate of old Morph who didn’t make it out of the show’s second episode. I wouldn’t call it traumatizing, but there was definitely a haunted quality to that…

Keep reading
by Joe

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Television, toys

November 25, 2025

NECA TMNT 2012 Raphael

By Joe
He’s got the most attitude on the team.

We are onto the third member of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its everyone’s favorite hot head. Raphael got softened for the 1987 cartoon series to make him sarcastic and a bit of a goof-off. He didn’t take anything too seriously and had a certain dry wit about him. It’s quite different from his comic book portrayal where he was emotional, easily angered, and often confrontational not just with his enemies, but even his family. That Raphael was immortalized on the big screen and seemed to convert a lot of viewers into Raph fans. Perhaps that’s why his personality has mostly been kept the same for future iterations of the character, though with both Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mutant Mayhem, his character has once again seen a softening.

Sort of like Wolverine, Raph is a bit of a short king.

For the 2012 show, Raphael was confidently in angry teen mode. He could clash with his brothers, in particular Leonardo, and was often irritated by Mikey, but his love for them is never in doubt. And since it was a Nickelodeon show, he had to keep the potty mouth in check. NECA’s take on the character is another sculpt by May Thamtarana with paint by Geoff Trapp and Mike Puzzo. Box art is by Ciro Nieli and Raph is number 3 in the wave making him the first being reviewed by me in proper order. Out of the box, Raph stands at about 5.375″ and unlike the previous two he’s sporting his non battle mode portrait, though since it’s Raph it still presents as a scowl.

As good as he looks, something’s off with that green.

Raph is another excellent sculpt by Thamtarana. His proportions are well captured as are the little details that make Raph, Raph. His neck and limbs are just slightly larger than his brothers as he is the more brawny turtle. There are some harder edges to the shape of his thighs and biceps and his wrist and foot wraps are the proper color. Like Donatello, there appears to be no shared parts between Raph and Leonardo, or Raph and Don for that matter. The only parts the turtles continue to share are hands. Raph has a more battle-damaged shell and his plastron has that lightning bolt like crack in the top left. He looks great, except for one thing.

I thought it might help to get an array of Raphs to illustrate my point as well as a picture from the source material.

Raphael is just not the correct shade of green. He’s a deep green similar to his Playmates counterpart. In the show, his complexion was far more pale and hued very close to Michelangelo. This darker green appears to be more common in licensing art and some of the offshoots of the show, like the Half Shell Heroes. The question here is did NECA have this color forced upon them based on the reference material Viacom supplied? Or did they just mess it up? Considering how detail-focused director Trevor Zammit is with the ’87 toon line it’s hard to imagine him not knowing what color Raphael is supposed to be. And if your first thought is, “Well, since it’s a newer show maybe he’s not that familiar with it,” know that he is on record as saying the 2012 series is his favorite depiction of the turtles. The prototypes on display at New York Toy Fair showed the same so the only thing I’m willing to rule out is that this wasn’t a factory error NECA had to roll with. It just is what it is and collectors will have to decide for themselves if it’s a deal breaker or not.

Raph comes with a buddy and a not-buddy.

Obviously, for me Raph’s complexion was not a deal breaker since I bought it knowing full well it was wrong. I can’t say I dislike this color, but I would have definitely preferred him to be screen accurate. To go along with the figure we get a secondary portrait featuring his whited-out eyes and a yell. For hands, we get the usual gripping hands, fists, and a set of the relaxed open hands Leo came with. Raph also has the slice of pizza, smoke bomb, and T-phone. For unique accessories, there’s Chompy, the baby space turtle Raph took in for a little while. You may be wondering why he didn’t come with Spike, his first pet turtle, but he’s coming with someone else. Raph also comes with his nemesis: a tiny cockroach with a tracking device. Raph hates cockroaches and this little guy would go on to become the Cockroach Terminator. He looks good, but there’s almost too much paint and it gets a little messy. Lastly, Raph has his trusty sai. They’re very thin and rigid with zero give so they’re a little scary. Do be careful with them. Because of the thinness, you may be tempted to try and fit them into the tight gripping hands, but I would still advise to just play it safe and heat those hands first. He has his weapon storage on the rear of his shell which works well.

“Want this last slice I found under my bed?”
Weapon storage.

Raph’s articulation is exactly the same as Leonardo and Donatello. His range is no better or worse than either as well, though Donnie’s thinner arms seem to get a little more range at the elbow. Like Donatello, my Raph did not have any stuck or stubborn joints. He has been pretty free and easy since coming out of his box. He does present his own frustrations, but they’re not really articulation related. The sai handles are so thin that he doesn’t get a great grip on them. They won’t really fall out, but they’ll spin around a lot when handling him. And if you’re the sort who likes to have their Raph hold his sai with the middle blade between his fingers then you will definitely want to heat the hands first. And I would reheat them to remove the sai as well. It certainly looks cool to display him this way, but I’m hesitant to leave him for too long like this out of fear it might warp the sai.

Too bad Leo has to remain eyes-out.

Raph is another solid entry in NECA’s 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toy line. He is structurally the same as his brothers so if you like them you’re probably going to enjoy Raphael as well. He just comes with the unfortunate caveat that he’s not the right shade of green. And we’re not talking about a minor difference here, but a pretty obvious one. Like I said in the write-up, if that doesn’t bother you then you’re sure to like this figure. If it does, well, it might be the only thing you can see. I confess, it does bother me and it’s in the back of my mind every time I look at the figure, but I wasn’t going to not get Raphael. This isn’t a line I plan to go deep on with variants and such, but if NECA ever does a corrected Raph I might have to bite at that.

Miss any of our TMNT 2012 coverage? Check these out:

NECA TMNT 2012 Donatello

We were able to get through some of the logistics of this line with Leonardo, so for this second review we can just get right to it. One of the best decisions the 2012 iteration of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made was bringing back veteran voice actor Rob Paulsen. He’s voiced countless characters over the…

Keep reading
by Joe

NECA TMNT 2012 Leonardo

We’re going to start this one off with a question: When you order directly from a producer, do you expect to be first in line for product? NECA’s recent launch of its Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure line based on the 2012 Nickelodeon series raised this question. On September 16, NECA launched the line…

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by Joe

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Television, toys

November 20, 2025

Marvel Legends X-Men ’97 Morph

By Joe
At long last, the era of Morph is here!

I’m always going to have a soft spot for Morph. It was rare to see a character killed off in a children’s show, but that was the fate of old Morph who didn’t make it out of the show’s second episode. I wouldn’t call it traumatizing, but there was definitely a haunted quality to that scene, “Wolverine! Fall Back!” Come on, Morph, don’t you know that Wolverine has a healing factor? He’s the toughest, most unkillable, son of a bitch around! You didn’t need to take that Sentinel blast for him! Why, Morph? Why?!

Of course, Morph didn’t stay dead. Turns out, when you kill off a character in a kid’s show the kids who make up the audience want that character brought back. That’s why the character has stuck with me these past 30 years, though I never did take it upon myself to write a letter to Fox Kids to express my sorrow over the death of Morph. Enough other kids did though that Morph tested really high with audiences as a fan favorite so the show brought them back as evil Morph for the second season premiere. Morph had quite the long arc that year that ended with them kind of back to their old self, but the trauma of getting blasted meant that Morph needed some time away. Returning for the episode “Courage” only confirmed that even more and we didn’t see Morph again until the series finale. Now, X-Men ’97 is a thing and really for the first we get to see Morph as a fully functioning member of the team.

Morph is so slender this time around it almost gives them a juvenile look.

The X-Men ’97 version of Morph is similar to the ’92 version, but borrows some from the comics. Morph has a weird history in that the character was originally called Changeling in the comics and began life as a villain. The character would get cancer and have a change of heart offering to take Xavier’s place to basically fake the professor’s death which is why the writing staff for the cartoon decided to use the character as a sacrificial lamb in the first plotline. Changeling was just off the table because of the DC character of the same name, so Changeling became Morph. And since Morph proved popular, Morph got to be a character during the Age of Apocalypse where they sported a new look that included basically a gray, nose-less, face. That’s apparently the visage our Morph now feels most comfortable with in X-Men ’97. It makes sense as it’s like a blank face, and with Morph being a shapeshifter, it seems like a solid choice.

92 vs 97
My Morph with a Casting Cave head.

The action figure for Morph appears to be entirely new. Morph is now presented as more slender than the old Morph. That Morph conformed to the Jim Lee era the show was based on where basically all of the guys were jacked and all of the women were bombshells. This Morph still retains the old X-Men blue and yellow training uniform as well as the flight jacket, they’re just slim and slender. This depiction in plastic might be just a touch too slender, but considering it’s all new sculpt, I do wonder if the intent here is to repurpose this as a New Mutants base? The Sunspot, who I didn’t buy, that’s part of this wave also has a New Mutants look which is likely to be reused for more characters, but this Morph is almost a dead ringer for a character like Cypher. I guess we’ll see. There is some clear stylization in the chest which I have mixed feelings on which probably has little utility going forward. It’s almost like Hasbro tried to match the cel-shading on the pecs, but with sculpt instead of paint. It’s odd looking, but the jacket at least takes away from it. The jacket, like Logan’s, is also very plain to conform with the look of the show which I like. There’s not a lot of paint here, but at least there isn’t a lot of mis-matched colors.

Not a lot of paint…

At least, there are no mis-matched colors concerning the base figure and the optional hands. Morph comes with a set of fists, a right open hand, and a left relaxed hand. Morph also has an alternate portrait and it’s their more humanoid look. It’s very stylized conforming to the show, but I don’t like this look for Morph. It doesn’t look anything like the ’92 version which I always found very distinct. Worse though, Morph’s neck is gray to match the default head which causes a clash when using the alternate head. The figure really needed another neck piece, or they could have made the neck part of the head sculpt. On one hand, I’m glad that isn’t the case because the articulation would probably suffer, but it does make the unmorphed head look silly and it’s something I’ll never use.

“Who are the X-Men?!”

There is one other accessory and it’s an odd one. Morph comes with the head of Henry Peter Gyrich, the bigot who was spearheading the Mutant Control Agency in the show and is the guy indirectly responsible for Morph’s death so he has some connection here. He’s also in the new show and by including his head here it also feels like a callback to the old Toy Biz Morph which came with a Cyclops, Wolverine, and Evil Morph head to simulate the shape-shifting powers the character possessed. Though here, I think the Gyrich head is much better utilized by placing it on a suited Legends body to create a whole new character. For me, the only suitable body is the Professor X body that came with the hoverchair. And since I also have the Savage Land Xavier, I don’t mind sacrificing him for this new character. For a non-super-powered character, Gyrich is a pretty big villain in the series so having him isn’t bad. It makes me wonder if we’ll get Trask in a fourth wave.

“What was I thinking with that look?”

Morph’s articulation is what one would expect of a Marvel Legends release. The slender frame does mean the range is pretty good in places like the knees and elbows, but there’s also still some limitations. The mediocre ball hinge is in place at the head and I don’t know why any new sculpt would go this route unless getting the figure to look all the way up is really important. The arms feature standard articulation (you really don’t need me to list it all out do you?) while the torso opts for an old ab crunch and waist twist. The belt is keyed in and not floating, but the twist is below it anyway so it doesn’t interfere, but it also means you can’t pull it down to hide the joint. Legs are also fairly typical. The thigh straps hide the thigh swivel okay and there is a boot swivel, something not all figures have.

I look forward to the continuing adventures of Wolverine and Morph.

Morph is probably going to move as much as you want the figure to. It’s just always a shame when Hasbro spends money on a new sculpt and doesn’t put the best articulation it can into the figure. I mostly like the figure. It’s a good representation of the character, but I also admit my soft spot bias for Morph. I had some critiques with the articulation, and the extra portrait is useless, but my biggest complaint would just be it has a cheap look due to the lack of paint. The yellow also hues slightly orange when compared with other blue and yellow outfits. The figure would look a lot better with actual paint, but Hasbro appears to be going to even greater lengths these days to avoid having to paint figures. I guess it’s just something we’re going to have to get used to. If you like Morph’s depiction in X-Men ’97 then this is fine.

If you liked this review and want to see more from X-Men ’97 then check these out:

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