"Women aren't funny, all lives matt-"

"Joan Crawford has risen from the graaaave!"

Dan in Real Life 2: Virtual Dan

'Member Charlie Brown Chex Mixes? Charlie Brown Chex: Linus van Pelt Pizza Party Mix was my preschool crack.

"I'm Teddy Roosevelt! Suck a dick, dumbshits!"

Actually, no. Zach Braff is a character played by Johnny Galecki, created for "Scrubs" but taking on a Pee-Wee Herman life of its own.

This time of year I love recommending people get a bootleg copy of "The Seventeenth of November," the full concert from which the live EP "11/17/70" was culled. It's a pre-hits Elton John playing his apocalyptic country rock with just piano, bass and drums.

"Do you drink corn? You will."

A Baconator is never the wrong answer. It doesn't matter what the question is. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

One of the many plot holes fixed in the stage version. The Beast was a young prince, but not a child prince, and his curse was for "many years," instead of before his 21st birthday. The role is usually cast older, but Belle is also played as a young woman in her early to mid twenties as opposed to a teenager, so the…

They even gave Amy Pond an "early-2000s Nickelodeon" spoken monologue before the theme song.

Never QUITE as good, but Tim Rice comes close. His wordplay is a little more self-conscious and verbose, but he's had a hand in most of the Disney Renaissance musicals and his lyrical cleverness (bordering on smart-ass-ness) defines the style almost as much as Ashman's sincerity. His song for Gaston, "Me!," has become…

I posted about this yesterday: they both change each other for the better, as Belle has a tendency towards aloofness and living a strictly internal life that is changed by her interactions with the Enchanted Objects and Beast. There's a whole throughline in the stage show from her song "Home" to "A Change in Me" where…

This line is the best possible to quote at the apex of a long cranked-up ascent on the "big hill" of a roller coaster.

This isn't worth using a True Showbiz Tale, because it was a high school musical, but when I did Beauty and the Beast my freshman year (understudy to Lefou and Lumiere, replacement Msr. D'Arque after a drug bust thinned 1/3 of the cast), a friend of mine was playing the First Crony: "Crazy old Maurice!"

I don't think it's clear in the film, but the stage version (which includes more of screenwriter Woolverton's original concepts for the characters) makes it explicit that the Beast and the Enchanted Objects are getting worse. It wasn't a snap transformation but a gradual de-evolution, and if the Beast waits much…

Near the end of the Renaissance, Disney started to get more experimental, varying the structure and trying new genre blends. With "Tarzan" they made a fairly successful venture into action-adventure while still being a Disney Renaissance musical. When "Empire of the Sun" failed to materialize, "The Emperor's New…

I'm fond of the "Broadway edition" of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Cinderella," which runs as far away from the stodgy, storybook-simple classic version as possible and winds up with a gorgeous, swooningly romantic score paired to a gleefully absurd Tina Fey-esque script.

In the film and onstage, Gaston towers over the show by reputation and charisma, not by stage time. Whenever Gaston appears, it's a huge scene, but he rarely appears. After "Gaston (Reprise)," he doesn't show up again until he meets with the director of the asylum near the climax of the movie/halfway through Act 2.

He's ALSO a borderline sexual predator, a philanderer and a misogynist!