happy easter! easter should be, i think, filled with fluorescent eggs and flowers and hyper-colored candy and sunshine, but today is cold and rainy and all the blossoms have been knocked off the trees outside. as tommy said, "jesus picked a shitty day to come back." i'm starting to wonder what sort of bizarre weather phenomenon we've had going on this year. we had hurricanes (though they were fairly weak and not nearly as destructive and exciting as i'd hoped) in the fall, and a nine-month long winter. i've heard that this fall will see the most hurricanes, real hurricanes, that the washington area has ever had, and we can already guess that the summer will be an unbearable inferno, probably more so than usual. and do i have to mention the cicadas?

besides weather and cicadas, yet another impending sign of the 2004 apocalypse: home movies was canceled by the cartoon network! this was by far the saddest news i've had in ages (well, as sad as i'm letting myself hear, seeing as i'm insulated in my world of puppies and alcohol and baby ducks that lay chocolate eggs, etc). if you never watched home movies, you were doing yourself a disservice, and i can only hope they'll have a dvd of some sort released. it was a little show on the adult swim portion of sunday nights, a cartoon about three eight-year olds who incessantly make wacky movies and interact with the even wackier adults in their lives. it was sweet and hysterical and bizarre--everything a good show should be. especially a good cartoon. i am so freaking indignant that home movies was canceled before some asswipe adult swim stuff such as seaquest 2020 or that show about a birdman lawyer.

the last episode was depressing (yet one of the funniest ones i've seen), because at the end, the three children, jason, melissa and brendon, are watching over all the movies they've ever made, and this follows:

Brendon: This is gonna sound really weird, guys, I don’t…honestly…I don’t think our movies should be watched.
Melissa: They shouldn’t?
Brendon: No.
Melissa: Then why are we making them?
Brendon: I have no idea. All I know is this: We keep coming here after school every single day and we just keep doing it. And I don’t know…and we just do it and feels and it feels like we should just be doing it, I guess, I don’t know.
Jason: (sighs) Weird. Weird. We are…God, we’re weird.
Melissa: What’s wrong with us?
Brendon: I don’t know!
Jason: We’re weirdoes!
Paula: (from the top of the stairs) Guys, upstairs! Grill’s ready!
Brendon, Jason and Melissa: (raising their hands) Yay!

then a few minutes later, after the grill has exploded, naturally, everyone's riding in the car to mcdonald's, and brendon is taping the houses and sidewalks going past. suddenly, he drops the camera on the road, and it's smashed. then a car runs over it. and that's the end.

tommy and i were sitting there for a few minutes, and i was thinking about the episode, and how brendon said their movies shouldn't be watched, and how his precious camera was broken and he didn't even say anything, and it suddenly became very clear that i was NEVER GOING TO SEE HOME MOVIES AGAIN. sure enough, i asked tommy to look up home movie's status, and turns out it was canceled at the end of march. cartoon network isn't even going to show reruns. thankfully, tommy saved most of the episodes on his server, so we'll have our own little personal collection. but still, it was so sad. shows this good deserve to have the entire country, ages 8-88, watching it.

like i said, the ending was sad and wistful, but i think it was brilliantly done; it showed a growth of brendon, who often used movies to deal with problems in his life, moving past using the camera and movies as a form of therapy and instead interacting directly with his friends and mother and pseudo-father figure, coach mcguirk, and melissa finding a mother figure in paula, and jason just being his awesome self. yeah. i'm sad. please allow me some melodramatic over-interpretation of the cartoon, okay? it's HOW I DEAL.

there's a petition to save home movies here, but i don't hold much hope for it coming on again. i just don't understand, in a market where a subpar simpsons and the craptastic family guy can hold such cachet, why something like this can't succeed. rip, home movies. you may not be sure why you kept making episodes, but i think they deserved to be watched.