The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special

I was surprised. No "Tremors" reference

 

Tremors didn't come out until after Peter left Earth.

 

I'm not a big fan of the Guardians, but this was pretty entertaining -- largely because of the heavy focus on Mantis. I'm definitely a fan of Pom Klementieff now. The story was fairly fun and sweet in a corny Christmas special kind of way.

I was disappointed at the way they found Kevin Bacon. I was hoping they'd ask someone about him, and be directed to a second person who had a lead, who would direct them to a third person, who...

I forgot that Drax had learned to lie (when he denied to Mantis that he'd just turned on the cloak). Did that happen in the second movie? I've only seen it once.

The bracketing 2D-animated flashbacks were ugly. I've always hated cel animation that's too closely rotoscoped from live action, like in Bakshi's Lord of the Rings. It just looks wrong. And the really low frame rate didn't help.

Gunn said this would set up the third movie. I guess it does so by establishing the status quo that the Guardians bought Knowhere, and that Cosmo is now on the team, and maybe some other bits that will become clear once the movie comes out.

 

That's because it was in the style of old animated Christmas cartoons.

 

It was funny seeing Cena on that celebrity map. That would have been a funny one for Drax to meet. With their wrestling connection and their ability to become invisible.

 

No, it wasn't. That's exactly the problem. It was mimicking them, yes, obviously, but in a broad way that didn't match what they actually looked like. That kind of rotoscoped-from-live-action style was rarely used in TV animation; it was more of a feature-film kind of thing. And the frame rate used here was much jerkier than in most cartoons -- more along the lines of Rankin-Bass's stop-motion specials. It looked like it was maybe as low as six frames per second. Conventional 2D animation was usually at 12 fps ("on twos," or two frames per image at 24 fps), or 8 fps ("on threes") for low-budget TV animation.

Not to mention that the art style here was cruder, with rougher lines and more simplified character designs, than you would've gotten in classic 2D animation. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they filmed the sequences in live action and used some kind of digital effect to convert it into a 2D animation look and low frame rate, hence the over-slavish rotoscoping that gives it that ugly Bakshi-esque quality. Good animation is a distillation of reality, smoothing out the details and irregularities, which is why rotoscoping live movements too faithfully looks wobbly and wrong.

 

Okay--I stand corrected.

 

My mom and I watched it together this morning, and we both enjoyed it. It was exactly what it advertised itself as a fun, silly Christmas special with a whole lot of heart.
After the cameos, it was fun to finally spend a little more time with Cosmo. Is she female in the comics? I thought I'd seen Cosmo referred to as he in stuff I've read about the comics version.
I'm a big Kevin Bacon fan, so I really liked his whole role in the special, although I'm still a tiny bit disappointed he didn't live on a farm, with a whole bunch of animals. It would have been so fun to see Drax and Matis interacting with goats, pigs, lamas, ect.

 

I got confused with Cosmo at first since we last saw the character with a male voice but then I remembered that was the game.

 

According to the wiki, Cosmo is male in the comics, but James Gunn decided to make her female in tribute to Laika, the dog the Soviets launched into space aboard Sputnik 2, and the inspiration for the Cosmo character. https://marvelcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/Cosmo

 

That's actually kinda cool.

 

Here's some commentary on Gunn's creative choices in the special, including the animated segments:

https://www.cbr.com/james-gunn-guar...oBk7QNzf1Of5sGVAuxoulMRs-Y#Echobox=1669583333

 

Kevin Bacon talked to IGN about how he got involved with the special and his experience working on it. Sounds like he had a great time!

Ah, now I don't feel bad about missing Mark Hamil. It wasn't actually him!

 

Evidently not, but I sure thought it looked like him.

 

It should have been stop motion in the style of Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer.

 

Is Kevin Bacon the first IRL person in a Marvel production in a bigger role beyond mere cameo?

 

I'd say Megan Thee Stallion's appearance in She-Hulk is a bit more than a cameo, since the episode's plot largely revolves around a legal conflict involving her, though her own onscreen presence is limited.

Otherwise, they do mostly seem to be cameos, such as news anchors on TV screens or musical performers at the club in Luke Cage. https://marvelcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Characters_based_on_real_people

 

Megan the stallion is a real person?

 

Elon Musk had a cameo in Iron Man 2 pretending to have an idea for an electric plane that he wanted Tony to invent for him so he could take the credit.

If I recall correctly, Agents of SHIELD season 1 villain Ian Quinn was based pretty much whole cloth on Elon Musk.

 

Yeah, but Elon Musk really was just a cameo, as he had no influence on the plot during his 3 seconds of screen time.
Megan Thee Stallion I forgot, as I had no idea who she even was before She-Hulk.
Edit: as I have said before, Bacon presents some interesting Multiverse shenanigans as the X-Men universe is now sort of canon, and he played a role in First Class.
It is theoretically possible that the actor could meet his character.