Entertainment
Toy Story 5 Is A Full-Blown Existential Crisis For Original Fans
By Robert Scucci
| Published
My wife and I finally gave in and took the kids to see Toy Story 5 at the drive-in, and now I’m depressed. It’s fine, and my kids had fun revisiting the characters, but I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t feel completely empty and devoid of hope for humanity after watching it. Namely because I work as hard as I can throughout the week to enjoy a day that’s not wall-to-wall screen time, only for the film to remind me that there’s really no escape, thanks to the source of the film’s conflict, a frog-shaped tablet known as Lily (Greta Lee).
On one hand, I understand. The central crew of toys in the Toy Story franchise were already dated in the ’90s. They were all hand-me-downs from decades past, but they still had their charm. It’s only natural for the franchise to keep up with the times by introducing new technology in the form of tablets, but really it just made me ask, “Why make this movie at all?”
I’m not sure what the lesson learned in Toy Story 5 is, but my main takeaway as a 38-year-old millennial with kids is, “My knees and back hurt, this full-sugar soda is going to give me a headache tomorrow, and now I’m afraid to give my kids screen time when I’ll probably need it the most.
Conform Or Be Cast Out
Toy Story 5 centers on Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), who is gifted a Lilypad tablet by her parents, who hope she’ll fit in with other technologically inclined girls her age. Naturally, this incenses Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), Jessie (Joan Cusack), and the rest of the gang because Bonnie is no longer spending time with them or using her imagination. Of course, Woody (Tom Hanks) is called into action, and the toys butt heads with the new device before realizing they’re all part of Bonnie’s life and need to work together to help make her a whole person, developmentally speaking.
Kids need to express themselves through imaginative play. And given how AI-driven the world has become in just a few short years, mastering technology and integrating it across multiple touchpoints is essentially a necessary life skill at this point.
Right away, I questioned my own parenting because my kids sometimes favor their tech over their actual toys. But I’m a working-class dad who needs to fold laundry and cook dinner, and sometimes you just need to get the little rascals out of your hair so a five-minute task like emptying the dishwasher remains a five-minute task.
We’re told a story about a little girl desperately trying to fit in with kids her age, who gets ripped to shreds and cyberbullied as the toys and Lily try to set aside their differences, course-correct, and make things right.
Your Parents Are Supposed To Be On Your Side
What’s unnerving about Toy Story 5 isn’t Bonnie, her relationship with her toys, or even her feelings of rejection when she learns that simply having a tablet won’t be a viable way to form any meaningful friendships. It’s how much her parents absolutely suck here. They buy her a tablet, give her an entire day to get familiar with it, and then tell her they’ll be limiting her screen time throughout the week moving forward. They don’t.
Immediately, Bonnie locks in and glazes over. It’s a look that’s all too familiar when you forget that you tossed your kid the Nintendo Switch an hour ago, and now they’re basically nonverbal. It happens to the best of us, and I don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of. It’s my generation’s version of getting plunked down in front of the TV while your parents lose track of time schmoozing with the neighbors.
In Toy Story 5, however, this behavior continues pretty much unchecked. Bonnie very quickly forms an unhealthy relationship with Lily, and it almost immediately leads to cyberbullying. While Bonnie walks around the house on the verge of tears, her parents barely intervene to find out what’s going on with her. I fully understand that young adult fiction tends to rely heavily on incompetent adults, but their lack of attention toward their own child in Toy Story 5 was so hard to get through.
As a parent, I get that it’s easy to tune your kids out sometimes, especially when you’re trying to get work done or finish a project around the house. Your kids will scream, cry, plead, and 99 percent of the time you know they’re making a mountain out of a molehill. You get on their level, break up whatever scuffle they’re having, and they’re usually pretty good at self-regulating if you do those things consistently.
Bonnie, though, isn’t bickering, crying, or screaming. She’s walking around with the kind of heaviness that would make any reasonable parent sit down with her, ask what’s wrong, and refuse to budge until they got some sort of reasonable answer, or at least enough information to work with. Their behavior here is borderline neglectful, and it made me really sad because a studio spending $250 million to get this point across tells me they knew people would resonate with it because they’ll probably identify with the parents.
The adventure the toys and Lily have in Toy Story 5 is fine, and I know Bonnie’s story is supposed to pull at your heartstrings because everybody has trouble fitting in at some point in their life, and it does have a happy ending. And it makes sense that the parents would have a sparse presence in an adventure movie about toys, but the whole thing just makes me want to hug my kids and lock the TV up in the closet.
Entertainment
The Latest Poster For Avengers: Doomsday Secretly Spoils The Plot
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
With less than five months left until the film’s release, Marvel has taken their marketing for Avengers: Doomsday to the next level. Right now, fans are mostly focused on the trailer that dropped today, which is no surprise; after all, it’s not every day that you see the reunion of Thor and Steve Rogers or, for that matter, a battle between Shang-Chi and Gambit. Amid all the breathless hype over the trailer, however, a more powerful advertisement is lurking in plain sight. At the same time Marvel launched the trailer, they also released a new Avengers: Doomsday poster.
Compared to that crowded character poster, the new poster is downright subdued. It features Doctor Doom staring at a huge tapestry with a broken world and two characters: a woman and a boy. Some comics fans think this image is Doom and his mother, a character who is eventually damned to Hell. However, other fans are convinced that this is actually an image of Doom’s wife and child; if true, this would effectively ruin the biggest plot twist. How does it do that? If you don’t mind some potential spoilers for this year’s biggest film, just keep reading!
You Can’t Spell “Painting” Without “Pain”
So, let’s start this story in reverse (just don’t let the TVA get me!): why do some fans think the woman in this poster is Doctor Doom’s mother? In the comics, she’s a big deal. To defeat an evil dictator who was ruling her country with an iron fist (an actual fist, not the kung-fu guy), she made a deal with the devil. As usual, the deal went wrong, and she lost control of the powers that she gained from Mephisto. She renounced those powers, got killed, and was then dragged into Hell. To see her again, Doom later mastered magic, visited Mephisto, and conducted an experiment that ruined his own face.
However, all of the lore behind this origin story is too dense to fit into Avengers: Doomsday, a movie which is already crowded with endless character cameos. It seems the movie is taking a different direction, as multiple reports have claimed that the two figures are actually Doom’s wife and child. An unconfirmed leak of the movie’s plot (don’t say I didn’t warn you about spoilers, kids!) claims that Doom actually lost his family to one of the incursions, which is when one reality collides with another. This motivates Doom to learn more about the incursions and to plot his revenge.
A Hero Will Be Broken
Revenge against whom, you ask? According to the leaked plot, Steve Rogers! Reportedly, Loki visits the former Captain America in the past and warns him that the TVA will prune his entire timeline because he’s not supposed to be there. In an act of seeming kindness, Loki brings Cap, Peggy, and their young son to the Fantastic Four’s universe. However, the leak claims that Steve’s presence in this universe somehow triggers an incursion and that Doom disfigured himself and killed his own wife and son trying to stop it. In a shocking twist, Doom reportedly kills Steve’s son in front of the hero in an act of vengeance.
Now, again, all of this comes from a leaked plot summary that hasn’t been confirmed, so all of this could be an Ego-sized bottle of hogwash. But it’s worth noting that the Avengers: Doomsday teasers last year prominently focused on both Captain America and Thor becoming fathers. This potentially adds credence to the idea that this is a film about family and how far someone will go to protect the ones they love. If the leaks are true, this innocuous poster featuring Doctor Doom is spoiling the motivation the villain will have to cross time and space and cross countless moral event horizons along the way.
A movie where costumed vigilantes (like Batman, Spider-Man, and so many more) are driven by the ghosts of family members they lost when they were children? Well, nobody ever accused Marvel of being all that original!
Entertainment
The Best Horror Series Ever Made Is Now Streaming For Free
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
My absolute favorite kind of movie is the anthology. When you have a collection of short films all rolled into one, it provides the ultimate ROI for the audience. Don’t like one of the stories? You can just thug it out with the short runtime or skip ahead to the next tale. Either way is infinitely preferable to slogging through a two-hour film that started boring you to tears in the first scene. The anthology is much rarer in television, however, because networks and streamers have learned just how attached fans get to the same characters and stories, causing them to run these shows into the ground.
Heroes, Stranger Things, Star Trek: Discovery…what do all of these shows have in common? They were designed to be anthologies that would change things up each season, but their early success meant we were stuck with the same cast for years as the show got worse. Fortunately, true anthology lovers are just a click away from getting their fix. Right now, Tales From the Crypt is streaming for free on Tubi, just waiting to delight all you ghouls and boys. It’s not just the perfect anthology show; it is, in fact, the greatest horror series ever made!
Meet The Cryptkeeper
Tales From the Crypt fully embraces its anthology format, with every single episode focusing on different characters and different terrifying tales. What ties all of them together is our host, the Cryptkeeper. He’s a snarky, hilariously mean corpse of a character brought to life by a small army of puppeteers. The show originated on HBO, and its creators embraced the fact that it didn’t have to abide by any of the restrictive standards of network television. As such, episodes were filled to the brim with vulgar language, nudity, sex, and more buckets of blood than you can shake a bodybag at.
Younger horror fans should know that it’s almost impossible to overstate the popularity of Tales From the Crypt and its ghoulish host. Despite all the blood, breasts, and beasts, the show was wildly popular with kids, including my own underage self. Accordingly, it got two spinoffs aimed directly at children: Tales From the Cryptkeeper (a Saturday Morning children’s cartoon) and Secrets of the Cryptkeeper’s Haunted House (a weird gameshow). If that seems odd, this was during the same time that Kenner marketed toys based on Terminator 2 and Aliens directly to kids. What can I say? The ‘90s were weird, man!
Friends In Low Places
One compelling reason to check out Tales From the Crypt is that it had plenty of awesome guest stars, all of whom were happy to do an episode without being tied down to a long contract. Guests included Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brad Pitt, Michael J. Fox, Tom Hanks, and so many more. In most cases, these actors are performing against type, making what happens to them onscreen that much more shocking. Trust me: if you only know actors like Robert Picardo and Wil Wheaton from Star Trek, you’ll never look at them the same way after watching Tales From the Crypt.
For me, though, the single best thing about Tales From the Crypt is the show’s wicked sense of humor. With his relentless puns, wild expressions, and unhinged laughter, the Cryptkeeper sets the tone for a show that has black comedy running through its veins at all times. This adds serious entertainment value and also helps position the show as a light (but filling) bite for horror fans. Not in the mood for elevated horror and don’t have the time for a two-hour psychological thriller? You can always count on Tales From the Crypt to deliver a perfect slice of scary entertainment in under 30 minutes.
There’s not much more to say, especially without spoiling these awesome episodes. Ready to see if this early HBO success story lives up to the hype? Maybe you want to laugh and scream in equal measure, or just write down some weird new puns with which to torment your children? Whatever your reason, the best horror series ever made is just a click away. Tales From the Crypt is currently streaming for free on Tubi, which is arguably the best platform for any boils and ghouls who love a good scare!
TALES FROM THE CRYPT REVIEW SCORE
Entertainment
The Eufy E25 2-in-1 robot vacuum is $400 off at Amazon right now
SAVE 40%: As of July 20, you can get the Eufy E25 robot vacuum-mop combo for $599.99, down from $999.99, at Amazon. That’s a 40% discount or $400 in savings.
$599.99
at Amazon
$999.99
Save $400
As you’ve probably read by now, I have two beagles who love to destroy my floors (particularly right after I’ve cleaned the entire apartment). To keep my sanity intact, I own an arsenal of cleaning supplies, including the Dreame L60 Pro Ultra and the Aero Pro Steam (I call it my “Dreame Team“). But I also know that brand loyalty usually takes a backseat when a really good discount pops up. (Plus, it’s my job.)
Right now, you can get the Eufy E25 robot vacuum-mop combo for $599.99, down from $999.99, at Amazon. That’s a 40% discount or $400 in savings.
Mashable Trend Report
It features 20,000 Pa of suction, empties its own dustbin, and even washes its own mop roller. It also comes equipped with AI obstacle avoidance to dodge everyday clutter (like rogue dog toys), and an extending arm to scrub right up against your baseboards. But, according to some Amazon reviewers, there are a few minor drawbacks, including a louder-than-usual drying cycle and finicky rollers.
Even so, picking a good spot for the base or doing occasional maintenance is a small price to pay to never have to mop your own floors again.
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