In 1986 ABC aired Jim Henson’s made-for-tv movie “The Christmas Toy”.  Nine years later, Disney/Pixar kicked off the Toy Story trilogy, which I discovered tonight has strikingly similar elements to the 1986 Christmas special.

My family and I settled in tonight to watch a Christmas themed movie since we opted not to attend a local holiday event as planned.  After skimming the featured holiday favorites on Netflix my kids settled on Jim Henson’s “The Christmas Toy”, after all, who can resist a movie cover with Muppets on it.

As the movie kicked off it seemed familiar, which means I probably saw the Christmas special when it first aired in ’86, but as the story progressed there were a number of other elements that felt familiar.  Familiar, because they carried similar plot elements to the beloved Toy Story franchise.

The story revolves around a stuffed tiger named Rugby.  Rugby is an arrogant toy that thinks that the Christmas holiday is all about him since Christmas is when he was unwrapped and he became the favorite toy of the little girl that owns him.  Striking resemblance to Toy Story protagonist Woody, no?

Because he doesn’t understand Christmas he thinks he needs to get downstairs and get back inside a Christmas gift to be unwrapped again.  As he escapes the room to head downstairs, a much older beat up bear with a cane draws the attention of all the toys to explain to them what Christmas is and how they’ll need to welcome to the new toys who won’t be used to their world.  Hmm, an overly friendly beat up bear with a cane who heads up a welcoming comity for new toys…Didn’t Lotso play that part in Toy Story 3?

Anyways, there are some crazy misadventures in between and eventually a handful of the other toys venture out of the room to try and save Rugby along with a cat toy named mew.  When they get downstairs Rugby is in the process of trying to get inside a box to put himself in when he discovers Meteora, Queen of the Asteroids, this year’s Christmas toy.

Meteora busts out of he box quickly thinking that she is on a bizarre planet and begins making her way around the living room trying to locate her arch nemesis, which from her statements sounds to be some sort of robot. At first Meteora has no idea she is a toy and feels that the box she was in was nothing more than a prison.  It take some coaxing, but finally the other toys are able to convince her she is a toy and get her back in the box.  Wait, a space toy that doesn’t believe they are just a toy? Where did we see that?  Oh yeah, Buzz Lightyear!

As you can see, at the core Toy Story shares a lot of similar elements to the 1986 Christmas special.  Some additional elements include.

• A ditzy doll that shares a striking similarity to Barbie in the Toy Story films
• A scene in which the doll is dressed like Little Bo Peep (I never understood the Bo Peep character in Toy Story, so maybe this explains it)

I’m not saying that Toy Story ripped off The Christmas Toy, but there are definitely some striking resemblances.  If you have about 45 minutes jump on Netflix and stream it and let me know what you think.  My memory of the Toy Story films isn’t that fresh, so there may be other elements I simply didn’t pick up on that both movies share.

So tonight I watched something bizarre unfold on Twitter and I realized that celebrities using social media are susceptible to the same insane behavior online that they are offline.  What caught my eye was the tweet below from actress Rose McGowan:

After digging a bit I discovered that user mygirlrose1 had actually been harassing Rose McGowan and a number of her fans via twitter for roughly 5 hours straight.  Tweets from both McGowan and Baptiste Piriou, the author of the Rose McGowan fansite mcgowan-rose.com, hinted that the user had been harassing them not only through this account but a number of aliases on twitter.  You can view some of the highlights from his tweets below.

The tweets featured above hint that perhaps this was a crazed fan that felt ignored by Rose McGowan, but other tweets blatantly attacked people with racial slurs, hate speech, and various other rants towards fans defending McGowan against the user.

What’s sad about this particular case is that it goes to show that even online celebrities are faced with the same sort of insanity and dangers that are posed in public.  On one hand social media gives us insight into the lives of celebrities that we never knew (personal pictures, anecdotes, etc.) and many times even a direct line of communication with our favorite stars.  Unfortunately that same sort of access and interaction opens celebrities to a whole other threat like the one that has unfolded this evening.

Have you ever seen something similar to this with one of your favorite celebrities?

I don’t hide the fact that I’m a fan of the Twilight Saga.  I have read all the books, saw the first two films at their midnight showing on their opening nights (And have my tickets for the midnight release of Eclipse), partnered to launch a Twilight Fansite, and have done a number of Twilight posts over the years.  So when I saw that one of my favorite Social Media sites, Mashable, started covering random Twilight news I was intrigued.

In the beginning it made sense.  Their first post covered the story of how the New Moon trailer leaked on the web, which I guess to a degree is news relevant enough since it was a huge social media hit and the studios tried to cover it up.  Then they had a live video chat with Twilight stars Peter Facinelli and Billy Burke about social media, again relevant since it was meant to be a social media interview.  Those of us who attended the event might recall the poor audio quality, choppy video and masses of teenage girls that flooded the room with no interest in social media.  And every month or so since then the Twilight stories have continued to roll in.

In each instance there is some sort of social media tie in.  They either cover a twitter reaction, Myspace premier, YouTube video, or other loose tie in, but the fact of the matter is Twilight is the only pop culture phenomenon that really gets this sort of attention on Mashable.  I made a comment to Mashable on Twitter in late in April asking them what their connection was to Twilight, but never got a response.  And my buddy Danny Brown left a comment on a recent post on Mashable about release of the Twilight Saga: Eclipse trailer simply asking, “And this is social media…. how?” Which has left me to believe that I’m not the only one out there thinking it’s a bit odd that Mashable has given the series so much love.

At first I thought maybe it was a specific author writing all of the posts and perhaps they were fans of the Twilight series, but as I dug a little deeper I found that the social media giant has been generating content about the films from a variety of writers; Ben Parr, Jennifer Van Grove, Barb Dybwad, Christina Warren, Adam Ostrow, and a handful of others.  I never pinned Parr or Ostrow as Twilight fans, but then again most people don’t pin me as one either, so what do I know?  The regular Twilight news just doesn’t seem to make sense.  It’s not as though Twilight is doing anything new or innovative with social media, so what makes it so newsworthy to the Mashable staff?

This is my plea to you Mashable…What is your connection to the Twilight Saga movies?  I know I’m just a lone blogger and a search and social addict, but I would love to know what it is about Twilight that dazzles you.  How did the Twilight Saga inject itself into your editorial calendar?  Do you have some sort of marketing tie in with Summit Entertainment?  Are your staffers a huge group of Twi-hards?  Are the posts an easy piece of link bait because they have the word “Twilight” in them? I’d love to know, and based on some comments I am reading on some of your past Twilight posts so do a lot of other Mashable readers.