Roy F. McCampbell's Blog

The list of accolades for Disney’s Frozen is turning into a pretty lengthy one. It became just the seventh movie in the last 50 years to be No. 1 at the box office on two separate occasions at least six weeks apart. The film has managed to stay in theaters for more than two months when many other titles have already come and gone. The soundtrack was on top of the Billboard Top 200 for two weeks. Frozen already won a Golden Globe for best animated film and is up for the same category at the Academy Awards (along with best song for “Let It Go”).

Frozen is a great movie, but it also happened to stumble upon a perfect storm at the box office. With a release date right around Thanksgiving, it got to capitalize on two big holidays with limited competition. Sure, some other heavy hitters like The…

Something hit me the other day as my son watched his Elmo toilet training video for the three thousandth time. We don’t see a lot of the Muppets’ home lives, but what we do see is generally pretty traditional.  Baby Bear lives with his parents.  Abby Cadabby talks about her mom all the time.  Prairie Dawn tells a story about underwear shopping (no, really) with her mommy on the DVD.  Cookie Monster has referenced both his mommy and his daddy, Grover has a mommy and a daddy too.  Elmo definitely lives with his mommy and his daddy, although I suspect the Muppet he calls mommy is secretly daddy’s second wife.

Basically all the Muppets have at least one parent around who they refer to every now and again.  Generally it’s a mommy, but there’s always at least one.

Except for Big Bird.

I have seen four thousand episodes of…