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A Claymation Christmas Celebration
Will Vinton's ''Claymation Christmas Celebration'' is an animated Christmas television special originally broadcast on the American CBS TV network on December 21, 1987. The special featured stop motion clay animation and was produced and directed by Will Vinton. The special debuted alongside '' A Garfield Christmas'' and the two continued to be aired back to back in subsequent years. Synopsis The special is co-hosted by Rex (Johnny Counterfit), an erudite ''Tyrannosaurus rex'', and Herb (Tim Conner), a dimwitted and bespectacled ''Styracosaurus'' with a gluttonous appetite. The two appeared in previous Will Vinton videos dating back to 1980 including ''Dinosaur'', but this Christmas special is the first in which they have dialogue and contemporary personalities, vaguely parodying Siskel and Ebert respectively. Situated in a facsimile of London's Christmas Square, Rex and Herb introduce several stand-alone videos of Christmas carols and holiday standards and discuss the orig ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Will Vinton
William Gale Vinton (November 17, 1947 – October 4, 2018) was an American animator and filmmaker. Vinton was best known for his Claymation work, alongside creating iconic characters such as The California Raisins. He won an Oscar for his work alongside several Emmy Awards and Clio Awards for his studio's work. Life and education Vinton was born on November 17, 1947, to a car dealer father and a bookkeeper mother in McMinnville, Oregon. During the 1960s, Vinton studied physics, architecture and filmmaking at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was influenced by the work of Antoni Gaudí. During this time, Vinton made a black-and-white feature-length documentary film about the California counter-culture movement titled ''Gone for a Better Deal'', which toured college campuses in various film festivals of the time. Two more films about student protest followed, ''Berkeley Games'' and ''First Ten Days'', as well a narrative short ''Reply'', and his first animatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shchedryk (song)
"Shchedryk" ( uk, Щедрик, from , "Bountiful Evening") is a Ukrainian ''shchedrivka'', or New Year's song, known in English as "The Little Swallow". It was arranged by composer and teacher Mykola Leontovych in 1916, and tells a story of a swallow flying into a household to sing of wealth that will come with the following spring. "Shchedryk" was originally sung on the night of January 13, New Year's Eve in the Julian Calendar (December 31 Old Style), which is ''Shchedry Vechir''. Early performances of the piece were made by students at Kyiv University. "Shchedryk" was later adapted as an English Christmas carol, "Carol of the Bells", by Peter J. Wilhousky following a performance of the original song by Alexander Koshetz's Ukrainian National Chorus at Carnegie Hall on October 5, 1922. Wilhousky copyrighted and published his new lyrics (which were not based on the Ukrainian lyrics) in 1936, and the song became popular in the United States and Canada, where it became strong ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joy To The World
"Joy to the World" is an English Christmas carol. The carol was written in 1719 by the English minister and hymnwriter Isaac Watts, and its lyrics are an interpretation of Psalm 98 celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. Today, the carol is usually sung to an 1848 arrangement by the American composer Lowell Mason. Since the 20th century, "Joy to the World" has been the most-published Christmas hymn in North America.It was published in 678 hymnals in North America before 1979, as recorded in the ''Dictionary of North American Hymnology''Top 20 Christmas hymnscited at Hymnary.org. History Origin "Joy to the World" was written by English minister and hymnist Isaac Watts, based a Christian interpretation of Psalm 98. The song was first published in 1719 in Watts' collection ''The Psalms of David: Imitated in the language of the New Testament, and applied to the Christian state and worship''. The paraphrase is Watts' Christological interpretation. Consequently, he does not emphasi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in European harmony and African rhythmic rituals. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. But jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soul Music
Soul music is a popular music genre that originated in the African American community throughout the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It has its roots in African-American gospel music and rhythm and blues. Soul music became popular for dancing and listening, where U.S. record labels such as Motown, Atlantic and Stax were influential during the Civil Rights Movement. Soul also became popular around the world, directly influencing rock music and the music of Africa. It also had a resurgence with artists like Erykah Badu under the genre neo-soul. Catchy rhythms, stressed by handclaps and extemporaneous body moves, are an important feature of soul music. Other characteristics are a call and response between the lead vocalist and the chorus and an especially tense vocal sound. The style also occasionally uses improvisational additions, twirls, and auxiliary sounds. Soul music reflects the African-American identity, and it stresses the importance of an Afric ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Black Church
The black church (sometimes termed Black Christianity or African American Christianity) is the faith and body of Christian congregations and denominations in the United States that minister predominantly to African Americans, as well as their collective traditions and members. The term "black church" can also refer to individual congregations. While most black congregations belong to predominantly African American Protestant denominations, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) or Church of God in Christ (COGIC), many others are in predominantly white Protestant denominations such as the United Church of Christ (which developed from the Congregational Church of New England), or in integrated denominations such as the Church of God. There are also many Black Catholic churches. Most of the first black congregations and churches formed before 1800 were founded by freed black people—for example, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Springfield Baptist Church (Augus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Penguin
Penguins (order Sphenisciformes , family Spheniscidae ) are a group of aquatic flightless birds. They live almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere: only one species, the Galápagos penguin, is found north of the Equator. Highly adapted for life in the water, penguins have countershaded dark and white plumage and flippers for swimming. Most penguins feed on krill, fish, squid and other forms of sea life which they catch with their bills and swallow it whole while swimming. A penguin has a spiny tongue and powerful jaws to grip slippery prey. They spend roughly half of their lives on land and the other half in the sea. The largest living species is the emperor penguin (''Aptenodytes forsteri''): on average, adults are about tall and weigh . The smallest penguin species is the little blue penguin (''Eudyptula minor''), also known as the fairy penguin, which stands around tall and weighs . Today, larger penguins generally inhabit colder regions, and smaller pengu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ice Dancing
Ice dance (sometimes referred to as ice dancing) is a discipline of figure skating that historically draws from ballroom dancing. It joined the World Figure Skating Championships in 1952, and became a Winter Olympic Games medal sport in 1976. According to the International Skating Union (ISU), the governing body of figure skating, an ice dance team consists of one woman and one man. Ice dance, like pair skating, has its roots in the "combined skating" developed in the 19th century by skating clubs and organizations and in recreational social skating. Couples and friends would skate waltzes, marches, and other social dances. The first steps in ice dance were similar to those used in ballroom dancing. In the late 1800s, American Jackson Haines, known as "the Father of Figure Skating", brought his style of skating, which included waltz steps and social dances, to Europe. By the end of the 19th century, waltzing competitions on the ice became popular throughout the world. By the ea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Walrus
The walrus (''Odobenus rosmarus'') is a large flippered marine mammal with a discontinuous distribution about the North Pole in the Arctic Ocean and subarctic seas of the Northern Hemisphere. The walrus is the only living species in the family Odobenidae and genus ''Odobenus''. This species is subdivided into two subspecies: the Atlantic walrus (''O. r. rosmarus''), which lives in the Atlantic Ocean, and the Pacific walrus (''O. r. divergens''), which lives in the Pacific Ocean. Adult walrus are characterised by prominent tusks and whiskers, and their considerable bulk: adult males in the Pacific can weigh more than and, among pinnipeds, are exceeded in size only by the two species of elephant seals. Walruses live mostly in shallow waters above the continental shelves, spending significant amounts of their lives on the sea ice looking for benthic bivalve mollusks to eat. Walruses are relatively long-lived, social animals, and they are considered to be a "keystone species ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Angels We Have Heard On High
"Angels We Have Heard on High" is a Christmas carol to the hymn tune "Gloria" from a traditional French song of unknown origin called "", with paraphrased English lyrics by James Chadwick. The song's subject is the birth of Jesus Christ as narrated in the Gospel of Luke, specifically the scene outside Bethlehem in which shepherds encounter a multitude of angels singing and praising the newborn child. Tune "Angels We Have Heard on High" is generally sung to the hymn tune "Gloria", a traditional French carol as arranged by Edward Shippen Barnes. Its most memorable feature is its chorus, " Gloria in excelsis Deo", where the "o" of "Gloria" is fluidly sustained through 16 notes of a rising and falling melismatic melodic sequence. In England, the words of James Montgomery's "Angels from the Realms of Glory" are usually sung to this tune, with the "Gloria in excelsis Deo" refrain text replacing Montgomery's. It is from this usage that the tune sometimes is known as "Iris", the nam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christmas Ornaments
Christmas ornaments, baubles, "Christmas bulbs" or "Christmas bubbles" are decoration items, usually to decorate Christmas trees. These decorations may be woven, blown ( glass or plastic), molded ( ceramic or metal), carved from wood or expanded polystyrene, or made by other techniques. Ornaments are available in a variety of geometric shapes and image depictions. Ornaments are almost always reused year after year rather than purchased annually, and family collections often contain a combination of commercially produced ornaments and decorations created by family members. Such collections are often passed on and augmented from generation to generation. Festive figures and images are commonly preferred. Lucretia P. Hale's story "The Peterkins' Christmas-Tree" offers a short catalog of the sorts of ornaments used in the 1870s: The modern-day mold-blown colored glass Christmas ornament was invented in the small German town of Lauscha in the mid-16th century. History ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
O Christmas Tree
"" (; "O fir tree", English: O Christmas Tree) is a German Christmas song. Based on a traditional folk song which was unrelated to Christmas, it became associated with the traditional Christmas tree. History The modern lyrics were written in 1824 by the Leipzig organist, teacher and composer Ernst Anschütz. A '' Tannenbaum'' is a fir tree. The lyrics do not actually refer to Christmas, or describe a decorated Christmas tree. Instead, they refer to the fir's evergreen quality as a symbol of constancy and faithfulness. Anschütz based his text on a 16th-century Silesian folk song by Melchior Franck, "". August Zarnack in 1819 wrote a tragic love song inspired by this folk song, taking the evergreen, "faithful" fir tree as contrasting with a faithless lover. The folk song first became associated with Christmas with Anschütz, who added two verses of his own to the first, traditional verse. The custom of the Christmas tree developed in the course of the 19th century, and the song ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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