By Walt's mustache, for me that's actually more infuriating than if they hadn't released it at all!

What the adorable little owl said.

Oh sh*t, that makes sense and is all the more horrifying for it.

I have nothing to add here except that I find your misremembered version of this special fascinating.

Meteora is just an insane/awesome character all around. I love how even the other characters in the show (especially Mew, who is just in sheer awe of her - notice how he's kind of terrified of Meteora in the beginning of her song and a raging fanboy by the end) don't quite know how to approach her.

I think you may have accidentally explained why so many kids were freaked out by Apple back in the day.

Thanks for reminding me that I've got to look for "Ziggy's Gift" this year. That was by Richard Williams, right? Have you seen his version of "A Christmas Carol"?

My Christmas wish is for all the various entities who own the rights to all the many and varied things Jim Henson was involved with to just join hands in harmony and cooperation in order to finally let us fans have easily accessible legal unaltered versions of the things we grew up with. Also for Disney to get off…

I have to wonder, in the vast sea of the Internet, if anyone has preserved them? It'd be kind of fun to subject my guests to the relatively-less-horrifying recipes…

"Fellowship" hands down. It has the aforementioned journey, character development, world building, and what battles there are go on just long enough. Plus it's the only one that really needed or benefited from the extended edition.

Freaked me out as a kid too. Still freaks me out as an adult because if a frogbear can father a (relatively) normal frog and bear, (a) how does that work and (b) what would their mother have had to look like?

(Puts her hands out in front of her miming scales.) Wayne D. Barlowe designed kaiju or Wayne D. Barlowe designed Smaug…?

I love this special partially because it's the "Fraggle Rock" crew at the top of their game, partially because it's so unusual in its darkness. I loved it as a kid and was happy to see how it still held up as an adult.

I'll see that line and raise you "Oh, Weejee, you're as bad as the kids!"

That makes me wonder if Balthazar - who looks like he's almost been loved to pieces, so *somebody* was playing with him - was inherited from a well-meaning older relative of the kids, like their grandmother. That's why I have such an inordinate love for "Christmas Toy"; there's a lot of hidden depth.

I was never able to shake how much both of them cribbed from "The Brave Little Toaster".

Yeah, I can get the common "Apple freaks me out" complaint, but *that's just what dolls looked like back then*, and I was more fascinated by how they managed to fashion both her and the not-a-Barbie into puppets with moving mouths. Honestly, Raisin looks stranger to me.

A kind soul has uploaded all of those commercials on YouTube: http://youtu.be/8wUtjDd3jEQ

Seconded. "Christmas Shoes" is the very absolutely worst thing to happen to Christmas prior to the Elf on the Shelf.

If you like that, do yourself a favor and look for Darius Rucker's adorable-in-a-not-awful-way "Candy Cane Christmas".