If you happen to stay up late night on the Disney Channel, around 2 or 3 am, you might catch this little special airring every once in a while. It's a bizzare, strange, yet informative look at old school film making trough the magic of special effects...or at least that's what the intent is of it.
The special was made to tie in with the release of the Disney sci-fi bomb, "The Black Hole", so the show is hosted by Joseph Bottoms from the movie. Bottoms starts off as an old man who wishes to be young again (sort of a "Damn Yankees" thing) So he askes the god of special efx (or something in that matter) to make him strong and young. Hence, he becomes Major Effects, a super hero that describes special effects from movies. The rest of the show is a look at now dated methods of photography and filmaking (including stop-motion animation) which are now dominated by computers and CGI. Again, it's merely to plug the movie, "Black Hole", so many clips are shown from it, as if to say that Disney was expecting it to be the next "Star Wars". The show gets slightly weirder and weirder, when suddenly "wizards" of special FXs start showing up (one of them looks like a giant gopher) and Bottoms describes Stop-motion through a song. Yeech!
If this comes on late night, chances are there isn't anything better on any other channels, so just call it a night. Then again, its always nice to see prime Disney and it's use of cheap marketing ploys...or at least ones that Walt would approve of.
