Saturday Grab Bag Cartoon Edition

Hey, remember the Cheat Commandos? If not, that's understandable. There was a hot minute around 2003-2004 where homestarrunner.com was the website all the kids (or at least a surprisingly wide cross-section of my various circles of friends) were into, and the Cheat Commandos were a minor recurring feature on that site, a parody of GIJoe modeled on the HR character The Cheat. Again, if a lot of that previous sentence seems like gibberish, don't worry about it. The important takeaway is that there was this funny website which has since fallen into obscurity, and I was really into it at the time, so much so that I bought a lot of merch from the site. This included little figurines of the Cheat Commandos.

One of the jokes inherent in the Cheat Commandos premise was that in addition to being weird little creatures, they were all special ops soldiers with codenames like Firebert and Crackotage and Gunhaver. Another complementary joke was that one member of the team was not like the others: instead of cool military gear, he wore glasses and a necktie; instead of being a weapons specialist, he was a government contractor; and instead of a codename, he was simply called Reynold:

Now, I thought Reynold was a pretty funny joke character when I bought the figurine set, and that was when I was working in the private sector. When I took my current gig and became an honest-and-for-true government contractor myself, Reynold became my little mascot. I left the rest of the Cheat Commandos set up on a bookshelf at home, but I brought Reynold to work with me. He has been sitting in my cubicle, on my desk next to my monitor, for years.

I bring this up because earlier this week, someone noticed Reynold and asked me what it was. For the first time in all the the time I've been working here. When I say that by and large I come in and keep my head down and people leave me alone, you guys, I am not even kidding a little bit.

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So there's a plan this weekend to take our two older kids to see Frozen on the big screen. It's available On Demand right now, which would be cheaper than a trip to the multiplex, and it's going to be released on Blu-ray in a week or two, which would be more permanent. But an excursion to the movie theater is just a fun treat in and of itself (including for the parent who ends up leading the outing - we still haven't decided which one that will be yet) and it gets the kids out of the way for valuable housecleaning-during-pause-in-messmaking time.

Last time I got together with my buddies (which I guess was the Super Bowl?) they were all talking about "Let It Go" parodies, which they appreciated largely because they had already seen the film. So of course I feel like I'm playing catch-up. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this explicitly, but several of my closest friends have only girls (two for one, three for another, an only child for yet another) and one had a girl first and just a year or so ago had a boy. So my buds have long had a very female-informed, princess-centric view into pop culture which I'm just starting to access as my little girl gets old enough to sit through feature films and have opinions about things in general. Anyway, I look forward to my belated initiation into that club, as it were.

As far as the movie itself, it's Disney, it won a couple Oscars, I'm sure it's going to be entertaining. If I'm the one who ends up catching it with the kids, and I have anything more insightful than that to offer, I'll be sure to post a follow-up.