Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week Bennett talks about spoiling, The Peanuts Movie, Glitter Force, and Digimon Adventure tri.

As previously established (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--Well, I Liked It"), I celebrate Christmas Day in the traditional Jewish manner: a Chinese buffet and a movie.  And with a running time of two hours and sixteen minutes (not counting roughly twenty minutes worth of trailers), Star Wars: The Force Awakens is just about the ideal length to fill up the better part of what historically has always been  a dreary, gray anticlimax of an afternoon,  Living in Ohio, I can pretty much guarantee the gray part.

There's no reason why I couldn't have seen it the day it came out, other than the fact that I've never been that big a fan of the franchise; something I've always ascribed to the fact that I was just a little too old in 1977 when A New Hope came out.  While I enjoyed and certainly appreciated it, I just didn't have the same visceral emotional connection to the films that so many others had.

So since I haven't seen it I can't do one of my not-strictly-a-review examinations of it, meaning you are in no danger of me "spoiling" it for you.  Now, I respect the invocation of No Spoilers, but frankly I've found very little can "spoil" a movie or TV show for me.  But in this instance I have been studiously avoiding knowing what happens in The Force Awakens.  While I know those spoilers are out there I participate in a lot of social media and so far as I can tell the majority of people have been respecting the embargo on Spoilers.  I have to admit I'm curious, though, as to just how long basic human swinishness, specifically the impulse to ruin things for others, can be suspended.  Even at Christmas.

One of the nice side effects of this rigorous lack of spoiling is that would-be pundits have been, for the most part, incapable of deconstructing the movie.  Even when the reviews are mostly positive, as they have been here, by now there's usually some kind of dedicated dissection of a big budget Hollywood movie.  No matter how "good" a movie is, the focus invariably shifts to addressing its shortcomings, errors in continuity, casting, script, what could have been done better, and what should have been done instead.  Instead, I'm overwhelmingly hearing how much people liked it, how many times they’ve already seen it.  And, frankly, it's refreshing; it's been awhile since I've seen this much-unreserved enthusiasm for about, well, anything.

I also haven't seen The Peanuts Movie yet which admittedly is odd considering how big a fan I've been of the Charles Schulz comic strip my entire life.  I even saw the original Peanuts movie, A Boy Named Charlie Brown, in the theater, which I know doesn't sound like that big a deal, until you know I grew up in a household where movies were considered to be the most extravagant of luxuries and in my youth I went to see exactly four movies.*  In this instance I'm putting my non-attendance to just plain old inertia; the older I get, the harder it is to get me out of my chair and into a theater to see just about anything.

Apparently in it, there's a fantasy sequence where Snoopy pursues The Red Baron in the killer skies of WWI, which brought back a lot of memories for me.  Like of having owned the Monogram Snoopy and his Sopwith Camel model.  "Easy and fun to build.  Just snaps together so you don't need glue," said the ads that ran in comic books at the time, which was a good thing as I was spectacularly bad at making models.  And of course, I owned the records Snoopy vs. the Red Baron and its sequel Snoopy’s Christmas by the Royal Guardsman.

It also surprised me because the "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron" trope has been in retirement for decades, apparently over a fear of "treating war lightly."  But almost as surprising was a piece from The Wall Street Journal by Daniel Michaels and Sarah Sloat.  As the title, "Snoopy Remembers the Red Baron, but Few Germans Do" would suggest, the historic Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen is all but unknown in his native Germany.

Anyone who likes a good magical girl anime, which sometimes even means me, could do worse than the "Netflix original series" (which factually isn’t quite correct, seeing as this is actually the 9th season of the Pretty Cure Series known as Smile Pretty Cute!) Glitter Force.  It's your standard magical girls and their adorable mascot fighting back a supernatural invasion.  It's also quite pretty and Saban Brands does a nice job with the dubbing.  Things have definitely been changed from the original version but there's been no noticeable attempt to American-ize the material.  For instance, there’s a scene where the girls are seen eating Okonomiyaki, a.k.a. Japanese pizza.

Here's another slightly embarrassing confession for you, I have a strange, inexplicable affection for the Digimon franchise in all of its permutations: Adventure, Frontiers, Tamers, etc.  Maybe because its premise, kid's gang meets giant monsters, always struck me as something that Jack Kirby might have come up with during his years working for Ruby-Spears Productions.  And now for the 15th Anniversary of the original series the latest incarnation, Digimon Adventure tri, is streaming on Hulu.

It's a direct sequel to that series and features the original characters, but it's not a television series.  Rather it's the first of a "six-part theatrical feature" which for some reason outside of Japan is being streamed in four parts.  It's also subbed, not dubbed, I usually prefer the latter over the former in my anime, but in this instance I don't mind as the Digimon dubs have always suffered from a preponderance of really bad jokes.  And it is nice to see the old gang back together again.

* For the record, those movies were:

1)  The Jungle Book
2)  The Rescuers
3)  A Boy Named Charlie Brown
4)  The Magical World of Topo Gigio

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.