Children's Christmas (compilation DVD)/Christmas Double Feature (w/Gumby/Legend DVDs)/Come Dance With Me (2012)/Hitched For The Holidays (2012)/Home For Christmas: A Golden Christmas 3 (2012/Gaiam Vivendi DVDs)/Horses Of McBride (2012/E1 DVD)/It's A SpongeBob Christmas (2012/Nickelodeon Blu-ray w/DVD)/Merry In-Laws (2012/Gaiam Vivendi DVD)

Picture: C/C-/C/C/C/C/B & C+/C Sound: C/C/C+/C/C/C+/B- & C/C Extras: C/C/D/D/D/C-/B-/D Main Programs: C/C-/C-/C-/C-/C-/C+/C-

Though Halloween is about a month away for 2013, here already comes an onslaught of Christmas titles and it's already looking like a glut...

Children's Christmas is a compilation DVD 'presented by Santa Claus' and mostly is made up of unidentified animated Fleischer Studio cartoon shorts, a few rough clips from Babes In Toyland with Laurel & Hardy and ends with a non-descript stop-motion short. Passable for its intended child audience and priced cheaply, this Legend DVD release is fair filler at best. A bad, worn print of Santa Claus Conquers The Martians is included, but a really impressive Blu-ray, reviewed elsewhere on this site with extras, was already issued so this is just filler.

At the same time, Legend has also issued a Christmas Double Feature DVD with a Gumby show called “Gumby's Christmas Adventure” that is not bad and the hand-animated non-Gumby “Santa & The Three Bears in a poor print with most credits missing. Turns out it is a 75-minutes-long theatrical film, here in a poor 42-minutes version. A sad shame.

Extras look better than the main program prints and include “Gumby In The Dough”, a Shari Lewis & Lambchop color short “A Christmas Message” running just over a minute and Howdy Doody's Christmas under 10 minutes in black & white.

John Bradshaw's Come Dance With Me (2012) has a bored-looking Andrew McCarthy dating the daughter of a rich man who does not like him, but gets unexpectedly interested in his dance instructor. Boring, predictable and made in Canada, it is uninspired and a dud. You have been warned.

There are no extras.

Michael M. Scott's Hitched For The Holidays (2012) has Joey Lawrence as another businessman unable to commit to anyone, which around the holiday drives his Jewish mom (Marilu Henner) Italian (read Catholic?) family nuts. With that set-up, the teleplay is clueless where to go and this Canadian production also fails. Fans of the name actors will find it a very lite curio at best.

There are no extras.

Michael Feifer's Home For Christmas: A Golden Christmas 3 (2012) will make you ask “they did this twice before?” as we get another lite, lame, sappy puppy dog melodrama with no humor, plenty of phoniness and more cliches than just about anything on this list. The set-up and writing make this second-rate Disney and the cover (and a paper insert inside the DVD case) ask for your support to a pro-dog charity. Try donating to a local shelter and skip this one outright.

There are no extras.

In another cliched animal outing, Anne Wheeler's Horses Of McBride (2012) is allegedly based on a true story but the facts and potential interest has been replaced in her teleplay by more cliches and obvious horse moments than anyone needs. Aidan Quinn looks tired as the annoyed dad and even the horses look like they want to run away. You will too if you try to watch this one.

A trailer is the only extra.

Our best entry easily her is It's A SpongeBob Christmas (2012) which only runs a half-hour (the time listing on the back of the package is deceptive) but is done not only in stop-motion animation, but specifically that of the classic Rankin-Bass TV classics produced the same way and pulls it off. The famous yellow freespirit this time wants to make the holiday more fun that ever by stealing a food-making secret. It is merely a MacGuffin to get all the characters to get wacky, but it works well enough. Just wish this was longer.

Extras include Digital Copy for PC, PC portable and iTunes capable devices, that extra DVD, 10 episodes of the original series, Yule Log satire, Animatic, Behind The Scenes featurette, 2 MP3 compatible songs, Violent Femmes song on the Blu-ray and More SpongeBob Secrets only on the Blu-ray.

Finally we have Leslie Hope's Merry In-Laws (2012) which does take advantage of reuniting firmer Cheers co-stars Shelley Long and George Wendt as a married couple trying to help their son ease into an upcoming marriage, but he starts to suspect they are hiding a secret that they may be originally from The North Pole. Slightly amusing, but eventually highly contrived, it will be a curio some might like a bit, but it is more fluff than fun, so don't expect much here either.

There are no extras.

The 1080i 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on the SpongeBob Blu-ray is easily the visual champ on the list with a clean appearance, fine color and depth, even if detail can be a bit soft at times, but it is superior to the anamorphically enhanced DVD version which still looks better than any other DVD in this review, but no match for the Blu-ray.

The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on Dance, Hitched, Home, Horses and Married are all softer than they should be, even with holiday-type styling added and amazingly weak throughout, so much so that the 1.33 X 1 image on Children's Christmas can match it when all is added up, but the 1.33 X 1 image on the Double Header compilation is very weak, faded, riddled with aliasing errors and extremely hard to watch.

The DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix on the SpongeBob Blu-ray is also the sonic champ here with a decent, if not always consistent soundfield that the lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 DVD version cannot totally match and has some other glitches and weakness that make it sound poor, so know the disc is not defective. The lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes on Dance, Hitched and Horses should all sound better without errors, yet Hitched is also very weak and might as well be the weaker than expected lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo on Home and Merry. Even the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on Children's Christmas and Double Header, as rough as they are, can match most of the poor DVD performance here.

- Nicholas Sheffo