Around the dial

It's kind of sobering to sit here, with the anticipation for Christmas rising, and realize that a week from now, the big day will have come and gone (though the Christmas season will continue throughout the 12 days). Have no fear, though; there's still plenty to read about in the meantime. It's a light week, as weeks go (I can't understand why anyone would be busy with anything else. . .) but, as always, the quality is high.

At RealWeegieMidget, Gill commemorates the 100th anniversary of Richard Burton's birth by looking at three of his movies with wife Elizabeth Taylor, including the made-for-TV movies Divorce His/Divorce Hers. This was quite the coup for ABC's Movie of the Week when it was announced, to significant fanfare.

John's official Cult TV Blog Christmas post is here, as he focuses on the BBC children's anthology series Shadows, and the episode "The Waiting Room," which may be a ghost story, or it may be a time-slip story; either way, it's a perfect ghost story for Christmas.

At Mavis Movie Madness!, Paul continues the Christmas theme with a look at 1980's Yogi's First Christmas, which brings everyone's favorite bear together with many other Hanna-Barbera characters for a Yuletide story that's still plenty pleasing to watch.

Rick celebrates the end of the year with his annual review of his most-read posts of the year at Classic Film & TV Cafe. It's hard to limit them to ten, because Rick offers some of the most thoughtful and informative (not to mention fun) posts about classic movies and television.

I know that YouTube has something for everyone, but I'd never known there was a channel devoted to "Sandwiches of History." Well, I know now, thanks to Bob Sassone, who challenged the channel to try a sandwich made by one of our favorite TV dads, Ward Cleaver at Leave It to Beaver.

At Comfort TV, David honors the most recent losses in the world of classic TV in a year that's seen far too many of them. Fortunately, Terence balances this out at A Shroud of Thoughts with a tribute to Dick Van Dyke, who hit the century mark this week.

Finally, you've probably read about the Academy Awards moving to YouTube in 2029. There are a lot of jokes going around about this, so it's futile for me to even try and add to it, but it demonstrates in a pretty dramatic way how far out of the public consciousness the Oscars have fallen. Yes, I know streaming is the future, and the future is increasingly now, but still, considering the memorable moments the show has been responsible for in the past, it's kind of sad to see how unimportant it has become to television—or, for that matter, how unimportant movie theaters have become. But today's movies are, for the most part, so far out of mainstream interest that one can hardly be surprised. This isn't all bad news, however; perhaps now there can be an Oscarcast without Jimmy Kimmel as host. And that would be further proof, if we needed it, that God exists and wants us to be happy. TV

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