Month: November 2020

There’s always the tweet. And a turkey. Since the 1980s (not the 1940s, as widely believed), the president has pardoned a turkey every Thanksgiving. It’s a weird, barbaric tradition when you think about it for even a second, but so is Thanksgiving. Anyway!

In 2018, Donald Trump pardoned two birds, Peas and Carrots, based on the results of an online poll. “The winner of this vote was decided by a fair and open election conducted on the White House website. This was a fair election,” he said to light-to-nonexistent laughter on the Rose Garden lawn. “Unfortunately Carrots refused to concede and demanded a recount, and we’re still fighting with Carrots. And I will tell you, we’ve come to a conclusion: Carrots, I’m sorry to tell you, the result did not change. It’s too bad for Carrots.” Hmm, this whole “refusing to concede a fair election” thing sounds familiar…

In case you’re wondering, Peas and Carrots “were implied to be still alive as of November 2019,” unlike Trump’s chance of serving a second term. This year’s ritualistic turkeys are Corn and Cob, who will be driven from Iowa “to Washington, D.C. in a van, but the second they arrive, the celebration begins. The turkeys get a red carpet welcome at a fancy hotel. They have their own room, adjoining with their caretaker,” according to WQAD. “On Thanksgiving, they will be 19 weeks, weighing about 42 pounds each.”

If you’re not Team Cob, you’re wrong.

Keeping up with new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best new music this week.

This week saw a bunch of EPs and Megan Thee Stallion deliver some good news. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.

Megan Thee Stallion — Good News

Meg has a lot going on in her life right now, both related to and outside of music. The most joyous of it all is her new album, which starts with an everything-but-the-name shot at Tory Lanez and goes on to see Meg confidently strut her stuff from there.

Miley Cyrus — “Prisoner” Feat. Dua Lipa

Both Miley and Dua have pumped out a lot of collaborations this year, so it was almost a matter of time before they managed to cross paths. That’s what they did last week on “Prisoner,” which averages out their respective styles and comes with a steamy video.

DaBaby — My Brother’s Keeper (Long Live G) EP

This was a strong week for EPs, and DaBaby had one of the finest. The project honors the rapper’s brother who passed away earlier this month from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His passing puts a dour cap on an already-gloomy year, but DaBaby processed his feelings in the best way he knows how, which has resulted in a poignant and impactful work.

Meek Mill — Quarantine Pack EP

It’s been two years since Meek Mill last released an album, which may as well be two decades in a time when rappers drop multiple projects a year and deluxe albums come less than a week after the base record. He broke up his quiet spell last week, though, with a surprise new EP, which he managed to release presumably during downtime from campaigning for James Harden to head to Philadelphia.

Jeezy — The Recession 2

The biggest Jeezy story of the week was his reconciliation with Gucci Mane ahead of their Verzuz battle, but he also dropped a new project. Gucci’s not on it, but Demi Lovato, Ne-Yo, Yo Gotti, Rick Ross, and some others are.

Slowthai — “NHS”

After a year full of collaborations with artists like Disclosure and Gorillaz, Slowthai is ready to drop a new release of his own. He announced that Tyron will be out early next year, and that announcement was accompanied by the introspective single “NHS.”

Tierra Whack — “Feel Good” and “Peppers And Onions”

A song called “Feel Good” creates assumptions of a certain disposition, but Whack takes the tune in an opposite, more introspective direction. She also dropped “Pepper And Onions,” which is similarly thoughtful but with a more upbeat aesthetic.

IDK — “2 Cents”

IDK, always productive, dropped off IDK & Friends 2 this year, his fourth project in four years. He’s not resting yet, as he just shared a new single, “2 Cents,” on which he pleads the fifth and keeps his thoughts (or two cents) to himself after observing what’s going on around him.

Phoebe Bridgers — Copycat Killer EP

After reinterpreting a Goo Goo Dolls classic, Bridgers has gone ahead and reinterpreted her own music. Her new EP features re-worked versions of some Punisher songs that take on a more orchestral vibe thanks to help from Rob Moose.

The War On Drugs — Live Drugs

The War On Drugs is one of the best live rock bands today, so it’s about time they put out a live album. Adam Granduciel said of the collection, “It feels like it’s kind of a reset, to be able to put something out that’s a really good interpretation of the way we interpret our music live. Even though this recording is from a year of tours, this is really how these six guys evolved as a band from 2014 to 2019.”

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

In a move that surprised even Netflix, The Queen’s Gambit is now its most-watched limited series ever. According to the streaming platform’s internal numbers, the chess drama starring Anya Taylor-Joy has been watched by a “record-setting 55 million households” during its first four weeks. The Queen’s Gambit has also been an global hit as the show made the Top 10 in 92 countries and ranked No. 1 in 58 countries.

Of course, Netflix doesn’t share its numbers with third parties for verification, but it does point to external signs that The Queen’s Gambit is making an impact on the cultural zeitgeist. According to a press release from Netflix, the original 1983 book The Queen’s Gambit has reappeared on the New York Times bestseller list, and the show is driving demand for all things chess. Google searches for “how to play chess” are at an all-time high and sales of chess sets are through the roof as Goliath Games has seen a 170% increase in chess set purchases while eBay is reporting a 250% increase. On top of that, the number of players on Chess.com has increased “five-fold.”

It also didn’t hurt that Taylor-Joy worked intensely on her chess skills to bring authenticity to The Queen’s Gambit, and she recently described to us how it felt like learning dance choreography:

Thomas [Brodie-Sangster] and I had the best time in the speed chess matches because chess is historically a solitary game. But when you’re learning sequences, you have a dance partner. You cannot move until he moves. So we both felt very chuffed and very proud of ourselves whenever we would finish those sequences, because it was like, “Oh, we achieved something together. You were great. I was great. This was great.”

The Queen’s Gambit is currently available to stream on Netflix.

The Los Angeles Lakers will enter the 2020-21 season looking to defend the NBA championship they won just over a month ago in the Orlando Bubble, and while LeBron James and Anthony Davis will still be the starring pieces, the roster around them will look quite different.

L.A.’s run through the Bubble playoffs was impressive, going 16-5 as they rolled past the Blazers, Rockets, Nuggets, and Heat en route to their first title in a decade. Such a run could have lulled them into a sense that all they needed to do to position themselves for next season was to bring back the same rotation players and add some on the periphery. However, Rob Pelinka and the Lakers front office recognized that their run to the title wasn’t perfect and also didn’t come up against the expected top teams in either conference, and with the possibility of those teams loading up to make a run at L.A., the Lakers had to be proactive.

The result has been an offseason overhaul that has seen a number of contributors from last year leave L.A. and new faces brought in with the hope of raising the team’s ceiling. Gone are Rajon Rondo, Dwight Howard, Danny Green, Avery Bradley, and JaVale McGee, all of whom played fairly significant roles in the regular season, with Rondo, Green, and Howard all being key contributors in the playoffs. In their place, the Lakers have brought in Dennis Schröder, Wesley Matthews, Montrezl Harrell, and Marc Gasol, bringing a balance of savvy veterans and a touch more youth than the Lakers had a year ago, along with ensuring they re-signed Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and got Markieff Morris back on a minimum deal.

What’s most interesting about the Lakers moves is they hinge on the playoff readiness of two players who, to this point, are quite unproven on that stage. Schröder’s raw production in the postseason has been fine over his last three trips since becoming a heavy rotation piece in Atlanta and OKC, but the concern lies with his shooting. Last year was the best shooting season of his career, but in the first round loss to the Rockets he hit just 28.9 percent from distance on 6.4 attempts per game. Meanwhile, Harrell’s playoff woes from this past season with the Clippers were well documented, as he struggled mightily to match the productivity that made him the league’s Sixth Man of the Year as the other L.A. squad bowed out in the second round.

The hope of the Lakers is that putting those players around LeBron and Davis is enough to alleviate some of the pressure they may have felt that contributed to some playoff shakiness. Harrell, on top of that, was coming off of a personal tragedy and significant time away from the court, and may simply have not been able to regain his rhythm once he arrived in Orlando. Matthews and Gasol are the known commodities and will slide into the roles of Green and Howard, although Gasol’s skillset is wildly different from any of the centers the Lakers had on the roster last year.

If it all shakes right, they’ll be prohibitive favorites once again no matter what else happens with the Clippers and Bucks and the rest, but questions certainly persist. If Schröder’s shooting uptick from last year is real, he’s a massive upgrade in the backcourt. If not, he’s not really an upgrade from Rondo. If Harrell’s playoff issues were the result of his absence and not a referendum on him as an 82-game player compared to a 16-game one, he’ll inject some much-needed life into the bench unit. If not, he might find himself on a shorter leash than Doc Rivers provided a year ago. If Gasol’s shakiness at times in the Celtics series was simply a bad seven-game stretch and not signs of decline, he’s a delightful fit alongside LeBron as two of the great modern basketball savants. If not, Lakers fans will be pining for Howard’s athleticism as Gasol plods along.

I say this not to pour cold water on their signings, but to note that none of these moves are sure things. The Lakers hope that enough of them pan out to raise their ceiling, which we already know is tremendously high.

There is very real upside to all of the moves the Lakers made, and for that they are being rightfully commended for a strong offseason.

They were able to remove the rose-colored glasses in the post-championship fog and take real stock of their weaknesses as a roster, and for all the crowing about criticism of the team’s construction being over the top last season, this front office clearly recognized there was legitimacy to some of it. They needed more playmaking and added Schröder to the backcourt and Gasol to the frontcourt. They had to let a veteran 3-and-D wing go to make the Schröder deal happen and managed to pick arguably the best one up off the free agent market in Matthews. Howard’s presence last year was terrific, but he wasn’t as versatile as they’d like to be able to play against every team and so they let him walk to Philadelphia and landed Gasol, who won’t be the shot-blocker Howard was but gives them the aforementioned playmaking and shooting Howard couldn’t.

Because they are new players and different moves, it’s easy to point out the potential pitfalls, but running it back had the same, if not greater risks. Rondo was tremendous in the playoffs last year, but he was genuinely shaky in the regular season and for the money he was commanding, it would’ve been a hefty investment to try and bring him back. Howard looks revitalized, but the combination of he and McGee isn’t exactly guaranteed stability, and while Danny Green did a lot of things that go unnoticed because of the shooting woes, it might just be possible that he’s taken a step back as a sharpshooter. Had they run it back, few would’ve batted an eye, but it would’ve been risky in its own right.

As such, Pelinka and company deserve the praise they’ve gotten for the roster overhaul, because it’s so easy to rest on your laurels as the defending champs and assume you can replicate it with the same group. They recognized the danger in doing that and have done what they can to give this team a chance to get even better next season, which always should be the goal because every other contender is going to be putting in the effort to close the gap and pass you.

We’ll find out next postseason if the moves pay off, but the status quo wasn’t going to be enough for the Lakers and they certainly took advantage of their position as the top contender to lure in more talent.

Who knew the saga of The Croods was so … fraught. Look, I’ll be honest here, I had little to zero working knowledge of The Croods backstory before Universal sent me a screener of the new sequel, The Croods: A New Age. If you had asked me when the original The Croods came out I would have guessed 2017. But, no, it was way back in 2013, somehow. And that movie made over half a billion dollars. This sequel was supposed to come out in 2017 with the original directors, Kirk DeMicco and Chris Sanders (who is one half of the How To Train Your Dragon directors), but obviously did not and DeMicco and Sanders left the project. Now, seven years after the original, right smack in the middle of the worst time in history to release a movie, The Croods: A New Age, directed by Joel Crawford, is upon us. Reading between the lines here, it sounds like there are people walking the earth today who hear the words “The Croods” and respond, “I’m just not ready to talk about that yet.”

Also, the release strategy with this movie is pretty interesting: It will play in theaters over Thanksgiving weekend (if you look around at how the pandemic is very much out of control right now, you should probably not – beyond drive-in theaters or renting out a theater of your own – risk your life to see The Croods: A New Age in a movie theater; and if you want to spend the money to rent out a full theater to watch The Croods: A New Age, well that is between you and your god) and then on December 18th it will be available for streaming (if you want to see this movie, this should be your course of action).

Honestly, it’s hard to make heads or tails out of all these different release strategies, which seems to tell us that no one quite has this figured out. The Croods: A New Age gets a three-week run in theaters, while Wonder Woman 1984 will be on HBO Max, with no extra charge, the same day it hits theaters. Sure, the latter is to boost HBO Max subscriptions (over the last few months, I’ve probably used HBO Max more than any other streaming service, so I get why they probably want to promote it more, thinking, hey, we’ve got a good thing here), but why doesn’t Universal to the same thing with Peacock? (Speaking of Peacock, a few days ago I tried watching Mad Dog and Glory on their premium service and it still had commercial interruptions. It was so maddening I wound up renting it on iTunes instead. This seems like a bad way to run a streaming platform.)

Oh, right, The Croods: A New Age. Like I said, I knew very little about The Croods mythology before watching this movie. I had never seen the first one, but, I guess not surprisingly, I caught on pretty quickly and got the gist. They are cave people (voiced in part by Nic Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, and Catherine Keener), who have the intelligence of people today, but haven’t set up a Flintstones-style community with foot-powered cars, or jobs down at the gravel pit, or having an alien friend named The Great Gazoo.

In this adventure, the gang stumbles upon a utopia of food and safety, run by a guy named Phil (Peter Dinklage), his wife, Hope (Leslie Mann), and their daughter, Dawn (Kelly Marie Tran). Everything seems fine and dandy, except the one rule about not eating any bananas and Nic Cage’s Grug really wants a banana. Hijinks ensue! Whatever! I actually found myself enjoying this movie even though I didn’t think that would be remotely possible. What a world.

Again, it should be noted, “I actually found myself enjoying this movie” is not an endorsement for, “and I think it’s worth risking your life to see it in theaters.” Please do not do that. Wait until mid-December and, if you have kids, they will probably love this because it’s very colorful … and even I found myself mesmerized by how colorful it is. A cornucopia of colors! (I guess that’s my pull quote.)

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

The Fargo Frozen Five is Uproxx’s weekly collection of thoughts, observations, and goofball screencaps from each new episode of the FX limited series’ fourth season. We do not guarantee that there will be five items every week. There could be four, or six, or a dozen. Who knows? This show doesn’t follow the rules. We shouldn’t have to either.

Episode 10 — “Happy” (or “Good Night, Large Ornery Prince”)

5a. A great week for Ethelrida Pearl Smutny is often a great week for Fargo. I’m not sure if this is a 1:1 correlation or a coincidence, although I’m starting to lean toward the former after this week’s episode. Maybe it’s because she’s someone we can root for on a show filled with scoundrels and murderers. Maybe it’s because the actress who plays her, E’myri Crutchfield, is doing such a good job surrounded by a crew of heavy hitters. Maybe it’s a combination of both. Whatever it is, it sure was nice to watch her tell off Oraetta and tick off all the evidence she has right there on the porch with Jazz Cannon — yes, I know his name is Lemuel, but if you like jazz and your last name is Cannon, you are Jazz Cannon to me — standing between them trying to look tough, in the same episode Mama Smutny warned him that she keeps a shotgun next to her bed and is “a light sleeper.” Fun family, the Smutnys. And then Ethelrida showed up at Loy Cannon’s office with an invoice for mob war funerals and Donatello Fadda’s ring and turned the whole situation right on its head. She’s the best, and increasingly the only competent person on the show, which should work out well for her as the various warring factions around her tear themselves apart. She should be the President. Maybe one day.

5b. We also learned the nature of the ghost business, the creepy wet one that haunts members of the Roulette/Smutny family. Turns out it’s the captain of a slave ship that one of their ancestors choked out while half-drowning as the ship was tilting about in a storm. That is… kind of awesome. I mean, it’s a tragedy, and I do not particularly like the idea of a ghost haunting generations of a family, and I especially do not want to be haunted myself, but if you think you’re about to go out, taking the cackling captain of a slave ship with you with your bare hands is a decent way to do it. Fun family, the Roulettes.

4. Not such a great week for Oraetta, though, which is a good thing, because very few people had a comeuppance coming quite like the Minnesota-nice serial killer nurse. And hoo boy, did she get it. Her plan to murder Ethelrida was foiled by Captain Slaveship, who now haunts her too (I guess), and then she returned home to find a house full of cops waiting to arrest her for the attempted murder of Doctor Harvard, who is now awake, and is still somehow the least of her problems because Loy Cannon has Papa Faddas ring and seems like a guy who would be very happy to inform Josto that his freaky mistress actually murdered his father. And, again, the ghost. I really can’t stress that enough. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I truly believe I would react this exact way if a scary moist ghost snuck up behind me. I don’t have much in common with Oraetta (I’m not good at baking, to list one of the less important ways), but we are very much simpatico on this. Ghosts are bad. Get them outta there.

3. Not a super great week for Loy Cannon either, now that I think about it, at least not until the ring handoff at the end. He’s losing soldiers left and right and he’s going to a gangster named Happy for help and Happy proved, well, happy (sorry) to doublecross him as revenge for whupping the hell out of Leon, Happy’s nephew, without clearing it with Happy first. Now Happy and Leon are meeting with the Faddas as part of the Faddas’ plan to back a new Black crime leader and run the Cannons out of town once and for all, which is something that will happen when family members start getting killed (like Mama Fadda) or “killed” (like Satchel Cannon). Honestly, if I were Happy, I’d be more scared of Mrs. Cannon than Loy, in part because she straight-up used his full government name like she was his mom and he was a little boy making a scene in the grocery store, and in part because of the thing from the other week where she pulled a shotgun on Calamita and called herself a mama lion. She and Dibrell Smutny should just take over Kansas City. And Zelmare, too. The women of this season are strong as hell. Let them run the chumps out of there.

3b. Happy may be an opportunist and a duplicitous weasel but I do have to give the man credit for the phrase “podunk thuggery,” which is another one of those things like “strychnine macaroons” that is both a blast to say out loud and a potential character name for a future season of the show. Podunk Thuggery and Strychnine Macaroon, midwestern bandits. It could work.

2. A big and heartfelt shoutout to Satchell Cannon, my tiny badass Dorothy from Oz, all by his lonesome on the streets with his little doggie and his handgun, taking no crap from yokels in pickup trucks, ready to take on the world and everyone in it, just filled with sadness and rage and independence and ready spill it all out of his prepubescent body at a moment’s notice.

I keep forgetting he’s a part of the show while the other stuff is happening — the ghosts and skullduggery and gunplay and such — and then I never want to leave him once I’m reminded he’s out there a-wanderin’. I’m still fully convinced he grows up to be Mike Milligan, as everyone else is at this point, but I’m increasingly less excited about it. We know how things end for him if he becomes Mike. I think I might enjoy it more if his future was a big question mark. I could dream, then. I could pretend he keeps walking straight to Los Angeles and becomes a player in Hollywood, kind of like Chili Palmer in Get Shorty. I might just pretend that happens anyway. I need something to brighten me up, especially considering…

1. Fine. Let’s do it. Let’s talk about it.

Good night to my beautiful large ornery boy, Gaetano Fadda, a self-described lion and ox and bull, a big strong rhinoceros who knew only violence and extremely exaggerated movements of his limbs and face, whose eyes were always *thisclose* to bulging straight out of his head and onto the floor. I loved him. I knew he was not going to make it through the season, both because you cannot live like that and expect to survive and because most people — even the innocent ones — don’t survive a season of Fargo anyway. And then he and Josto had that sweet moment in the car, with Gaetano explaining why he was sent to Italy (stabbing a man in the eye with a jagged piece of glass at age 11), and what his life was like there (not great!), and then sharing a tender sibling embrace. I knew he was not long for the world when I saw that. I did not expect him to go out by stumbling after assassinating Odis Weff and blowing half his head off via accidental bullet, but that’s more of a failure of imagination on my part than anything else. Fargo loves to zig when you think it will zag, and vice versa, and there’s not much more of a zig/zag than “one of the big bads explodes his own head after falling on the trigger of his gun.” I will miss him very much. As will Josto, who has now lost his father, mother, and brother, and does not generally seem like the type of guy who thrives in the world without a protector of some kind. But this isn’t about Josto. This is about me and my loss. I’m grieving. I’m legitimately sad. If I had more time and was a stronger man I might have put together a bunch of clips of him doing everything the most and ran them in slow-motion and set them to the saddest song I can find. Pretend I did. That’s close enough.

Rest In Peace, my ill-tempered mustachioed prince.

DIY rappers Tobe Nwigwe and Big KRIT link up to advise listeners to embrace their individuality in the exquisitely-styled video for “Bozos.” Set in an empty amphitheater, the video sees the two Southern rappers flanked by a flight of dancers and draped in crimson tunics emblazoned with their iconic album art as they call out “Bozos” who just go along with the crowd. “Don’t join the circus if you ain’t a clown,” they warn while spitting verses full of warm encouragement for the iconoclasts who follow their own path.

If you haven’t heard of Dallas rapper Tobe Nwigwe before this, it’s time to get familiar (here’s his immaculate NPR Tiny Desk Concert as a primer). Earlier this year, Tobe went viral with a series of short songs this summer referencing Breonna Taylor and police brutality. Displaying his full capabilities as a rapper, singer, designer, director, and producer, the videos for “I Need You To (Breonna Taylor)” and “Try Jesus” took off on Instagram after being shared by Diddy, LeBron James, and more. They launched the rapper, who’s been steadily toiling as an indie artist for the past several years, to a new level of well-deserved stardom. He’s an artist that serious rap fans should be keeping an eye on in the future, as he’s just getting started.

Watch the “Bozos” video above. Read Uproxx’s interview with Big KRIT here.

Foo Fighters had big plans this year to celebrate their 25th anniversary as a band. Most of those got scrapped, though, since the pandemic shut down the music world (and the world overall). For example, they had a van tour planned, which would have brought them to places they played on their first tour, but that had to be canceled. They did find at least one way to celebrate, though. Today, the group shared “Times Like Those,” a new video in which they take time to sit down and reflect on their musical journey.

For the video, Dave Grohl, Taylor Hawkins, Nate Mendel, Pat Smear, Chris Shiflett, and Rami Jaffee sat down in a small theater, got comfortable in recliners, munched on classic movie theater snacks, and went through some old photos and videos. They flipped through the pictures and clips, playfully roasted each other, dropped some trivia tidbits (Grohl taught Shiflett how to tie a tie), and shared some laughs. Most people won’t have to opportunity to chill out with the entire band, but this video, which runs for 26 minutes, feels like a casual hang with Grohl and company.

The band wrote alongside the video, “Maybe the 25th anniversary year didn’t go *quite* as planned but we were still able to come together for a look back at the last 25 years.”

Watch “Times Like Those” above.

Lil Baby may own a semi-permanent spot on the Billboard 200 top 10 as his album My Turn is one of the best-selling albums of the year but that hasn’t been enough for his fans. They’re convinced he deserves more recognition — especially after missing out on a number of key awards this year despite impressive sales of both My Turn and its singles “Emotionally Scarred” and “The Bigger Picture.”

Last night at the American Music Awards, Lil Baby was one of the six artists shortlisted to win Best New Artist alongside DaBaby, Doja Cat, Lewis Capaldi, and Roddy Ricch. Doja Cat ultimately took home the award, leaving Baby’s fans doubly disappointed after he failed to win Album Of The Year at the 2020 BET Hip-Hop Awards — an award that went to Roddy Ricch for Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial.

The double “L” sent the Atlanta rapper’s fans to Twitter in droves to express their discontent. “How the hell Doja cat win over Lil baby i’m tired of that man getting robbed,” read one complaint. Another referenced Doja’s chat room scandal from a few months ago (because once the narratives are set, they’re impossible to correct): “YALL TELLIN ME LIL BABY LOST TO DOJA CAT??” wrote the apoplectic fan. “OL GIRL WHO WAS IN CHAT ROOMS WIT RACISTS???”

Naturally, in an era where anyone with an email address can have a platform, people will share their opinions (and we all know what they say about those). Lil Baby seems unbothered about both losses, choosing not to respond for the most part, but it seems he’ll have to be satisfied with just having a best-selling album, two of the biggest singles of the year, and a legion of adoring, loyal fans who will take offense for him when they feel he’s been slighted.

Check out more fan responses above.

Some artists mentioned are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Netflix’s The Witcher will return at some point next year with Season 2, and in the future, there will also be an animated, feature length movie called Nightmare of the Wolf and a live-action prequel series called The Witcher: Blood Origin. Jason Momoa has suggested his involvement with the later, which might make the Geralt of Rivia-loving audience feel a little too conflicted in their loyalties. Geralt will have new armor soon, though, and there are plenty of bathtubs in his future. Speaking of good soakings, here’s a video to tide over fans who might be curious to see how the White Wolf would spend the holidays. Here’s how the video was captioned on Twitter:

Save your sleds for another day,
for now is a time to simply slay.
Tis the season of #Witchmas.

Spoiler alert: Geralt is not into this Christmas in November thing. Jaskier loves it, though, and so should the fans. Essentially, this one-minute video re-contextualizes bloody moments from the first season while digitally inserting festive holiday decor as a “slay ride” goes down on the Continent with elf hats and gift-foxes aplenty. And it all goes down with a Christmas tune that you won’t be able to get out of your head, much like the “Toss A Coin” monstrosity. Thank goodness for bathtub respites.

It’s a mood, as people say these days, and Netflix is doing a marvelous job of keeping momentum for the series going while not actually being able to air new episodes yet. Production for The Witcher has halted twice in 2020 due to the pandemic, but we should expect a Season 2 update (and hopefully, a trailer) soon.