Carolyn Anderson and her 4-year-old daughter, Maren, were recently spending the day in Leesburg, Virginia — visiting shops and enjoying time together outdoors. It’s a simple enough activity, but the two haven’t done as often as they’d like this summer.

Maren has a rare disease caused by a genetic mutation, and only recently started using a wheelchair. Her mother, Carolyn, told TODAY that her daughter is still getting used to it. “This evening in particular, she was showing a lot of confidence, which is not typical of her. And so we were just so excited and letting her go and cruise and drive her wheelchair, and then all of a sudden she stopped,” Carolyn told The TODAY Show.

Maren had spotted a line of ULTA Beauty Posters — one, in particular, catching her attention. It was a model in a wheelchair. Her mother recalling the look on her daughter’s face. “You could just tell that she identified with it from the get go. And for her, a 4-year-old child … to sit there in awe at this photo for close to a minute was pretty profound.”

That feeling of joy was quickly joined by ones of empathy and sadness as she realized how her daughter’s fascination was likely due to how rare ads like this are in the media.

“Our hearts sort of sank because it’s such a wonderful feeling to see her do that, but then it also is somewhat saddening that this is so profound for her to see in public because of the lack of representation for the disability community, particularly for children.”

Carolyn’s post went viral by the next morning as she woke to thousands of messages of support, including one from ULTA Beauty. The brand behind the ad telling Washington, D.C. affiliate NBC4 “We love that this family shared such an amazing moment and were touched to see Maren looking at the image in our window — it makes us incredibly proud.” ULTA says they’re also working on arranging a meeting between Maren and the model in the ad.

While the ad and the gesture are a great start, Carolyn looks forward to more companies following ULTA’s lead and becoming more inclusive in their marketing. “We appreciate that there is progress being made with accessibility, with inclusion, with representation, but there’s still a really long way to go,” she said.

“There’s a lot of families out there that (are) going to have potentially a child that’s disabled. And right now, there’s just not a very large place for them to go to seek support, to know that their kid has a place in this community and in our society. Because that’s really what it meant when Maren saw this photo the other day,” Carolyn added.

“It just really spoke to us saying that she feels included, and she feels like she identifies with that, and belongs here just like everybody else.”

“This is my husband, Cameron, front and center delivering our third son. (He delivered our first too!)

What the photo doesn’t show is that Cameron lost his right leg, most of his right hand and the use of his right eye in an IED blast while serving our country in Afghanistan.

Despite his limitations, he is the most amazing stay at home dad to our three wildlings and remains the most upbeat, funny, silly dad and husband.”

– Madison West

Want to share a story about fatherhood? Email [email protected]

Check out the previous editions of Father Figures here.

Mac and cheese rules and almost every evolution of it is a revelation. Anyone with a special mac n’ cheese recipe is someone that understands food and joy. And now there’s a new player in the mac and cheese game, one full of potential and one that knows the cheese-flavored game. Cheetos mac and cheese is now in stores.

The snack maker makes the logical jump into the mac and cheese game with three flavors, Bold and Cheesy, Flamin’ Hot and Cheesy Jalapeno. Swap out your cheese-dusted fingertips for a spoon and enjoy your Cheetos is a brand new way.

For now, the boxes and individual cups are on sale only at Walmart but will be hitting other retailers in 2021. To differentiate from other mac and cheeses, Cheetos is using corkscrew noodles to evoke Chester the Cheetah’s tail.

In a statement, the company said Cheetos lovers are some of the most passionate snackers in the game and are only matched by fans of mac and cheese. The brand is also bringing something to the table that mac and cheese lovers have improvised on their own for years informally.

“We’ve seen incredible culinary creativity from our Cheetos fans through the years, taking our product and using as an actual ingredient in recipes — whether at restaurants, or now more than ever, at home,” a spokesperson said. “Cheetos Mac ‘n Cheese borrows that culinary inspiration to provide a mischievous mashup of an ordinary fan favorite. We’re putting our orange-dusted fingerprints on an at-home staple at a time when home mealtime occasions are on the rise.”

You can spice up your dinners with the new Cheetos mac and cheese now. Or, if you’re into living dangerously, you can combine the best of both worlds, and add crushed up Cheetos to the Cheetos mac and cheese for the boldest, cheesiest dinner imaginable.

It’s hard to believe that 14 years have passed since the end of Malcolm in the Middle, a show that was brilliant and endearing enough to resonate with adults and children alike. The show was a departure from the typical family sitcom trope in the sense that it didn’t sugar-coat the struggles that life brings, even the mundane ones. The show followed a lower-middle-class family with four kids (eventually 5), an authoritative mom named Lois, and a goofy, overly-emotional dad named Hal. While the family does get into some ridiculous situations – like the time they all went to Burning Man and Hal, Malcolm’s dad was so outrageously protective of the RV he borrowed from his boss that festival-goers thought he was a performance artist. Despite the frequent absurdity of the family’s predicaments, they felt so much more like a typical family than most we’d see on TV.

Since the season finale of the show in 2006, fans have wondered what their favorite characters have been up to. In 2013, we got a small taste of our favorite TV couple when Bryan Cranston (Hal) and Jane Kaczmarek (Lois) teamed up to film an alternate ending to the best show of the 21st century: Breaking Bad. This brilliant clip showed Hal screaming frantically as he awoke from a nightmare, breathlessly telling Lois about his horrible dream. He explained that he had been cooking Meth, to which Lois replies, “You? Cooking anything?” The scene continues as a distressed Hal recalls detail after detail about his dream, like someone who had watched half an episode of Breaking Bad and attempted to piece together the rest. At one point, he refers to Jesse, his meth-making partner in the hit show, as “a man child who always looked like he was wearing his older brother’s clothes, and used the b-word a lot.”

Aside from the brief and ingenious Breaking Bad alternate ending, the rest of the Malcolm in the Middle cast has more or less stepped away from their iconic characters. That is until Bryan Cranston made an announcement that fans had only dared to dream about. Yesterday, Cranston announced on his Instagram that the cast would reunite to celebrate 20 years since the show’s premiere.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Here we are… all are stuck in this five months of quarantine! Can you imagine how Hal would have gone bonkers on #MalcolmintheMiddle if he had to stay inside with his five knuckle-headed boys?! Makes me smile to think about that. So, if you’ve been missing some silliness in your life, check us out this Saturday night 8/8 for a 20th anniversary celebration of the show’s premiere. The cast is back!! This time we’re reading the pilot episode on Zoom. The whole thing is the brain child of Linwood Boomer, our show’s creator, to benefit his charity @HealingCalifornia, an amazing organization that provides FREE dental, medical, and vision care to those in need. There’s also lots of great stuff from the show that could be yours. Bid now on @Charitybuzz, link in bio. @RWQuarantunes See you on Saturday!

A post shared by Bryan Cranston (@bryancranston) on Aug 3, 2020 at 5:59pm PDT

The caption reads, “Here we are… all are stuck in this five months of quarantine! Can you imagine how Hal would have gone bonkers on #MalcolmintheMiddle if he had to stay inside with his five knuckle-headed boys?! Makes me smile to think about that. So, if you’ve been missing some silliness in your life, check us out this Saturday night 8/8 for a 20th anniversary celebration of the show’s premiere. The cast is back!! This time we’re reading the pilot episode on Zoom.”

Well, time to listen to They Might Be Giants’ “Boss of Me”, the show’s theme song, on repeat for a while. This is one reunion we don’t want to miss.

The excitement of checking the mail is an underrated lost joy of adulthood. Aside from the occasional Amazon package, mail means bills, appointment reminders, and junk that sits on the counter for a week before getting tossed unopened into the recycling. The Blue’s Clues “Mailtime” song mocks the parents of wide-eyed kids who still fully believe that mailboxes are mysterious wells full of exciting surprises. Most kids truly do love getting mail, but one dad became understandably confused when his 11-year-old daughter eagerly awaited the arrival of the mailman each day, despite the fact that there was never any mail addressed to her.

Well, one day this curious dad decided to investigate. What was it that so fully captured his daughter’s attention? Mind racing with possibilities both good and bad, he pulled open the mailbox door. What he found inside was quite possibly the most wholesome thing to ever happen in this history of mailboxes. Taped to the inside of the mailbox flap was a tic-tac-toe board drawn in light pink marker, with “Tik tac toe play with me!” written at the top in his daughter’s handwriting.

The post was shared on Reddit by a user named BallCoach79 with the caption, “My 11 y/o daughter has insisted on checking the mail the last couple of days. Today, I checked it. This is what I found…” and hearts around the world were warmed.

Reddit sleuths figured out that the 11-year-old’s grandpa is a retired postal worker, which means she grew up thinking very highly of the mail carriers she saw each day. It makes sense then, that after months of being quarantined with her two rowdy little brothers, that she would seek out other friends in a familiar place. Fortunately, the mail carrier obliged – each day, this adorable little girl and her new friend take turns placing X’s and O’s on their game board.

The mail mystery has been solved in the most precious imaginable way. It doesn’t matter what the board says, everyone here is a winner.

A month after releasing Hamilton well in advance of their original intentions, both platform and timing-wise (it was originally set to arrive in theaters in 2021), Disney has announced that another highly anticipated movie will premiere on their service. But there’s a wrinkle.

The latest in the growing catalog of live-action versions of their animated classics, Mulan was supposed to debut in theaters this fall. Now, with the pandemic still keeping theaters shuttered and consumers stuck inside their homes, Disney announced to stockholders that Mulan will premiere on Disney+, but not for free.

Instead, subscribers will need to access the title via the forthcoming Disney+ premium feature, where Mulan will be available to stream for $30.

In a call with stockholders, Disney CEO Bob Chapek said Mulan will arrive on September 4, for $29.99, via “premiere access” according to Variety.

On the call, Chapek, who also announced that Disney+ has over 60 million paying subscribers, informed stockholders and the media that the “premiere access” feature was to be a singular event and not necessarily a permanent aspect of their service.

“We’re looking at ‘Mulan’ as a one-off, as opposed to saying there’s some new business windowing model that we’re looking at,” he said. “We find it very interesting to take a premiere offering to consumers at that $29.99 price and learn from it.”

This may mean that the book is not closed on whether or not premiere access is here to stay. So long as the coronavirus limits out-of-home entertainment options – which, for Disney, includes their amusement parks, causing massive financial losses for the company – streaming may continue to be the best option for studios, many of whom have been experimenting with in-home releases for months now.

Chapek says this direct-to-consumer offering is “top priority and key to the future of the company.” Odds are, some version of it will exist even after the pandemic subsides, whether it’s via a premiere access feature like Mulan or not.

Here’s the trailer:

We’ve been living through the age of cinematic remakes, reimaginings, and reboots for years now, and finally, it seems like television is catching up.

Every day, another classic cartoon or sitcom or drama is being remade or relaunched for some streaming platform. Today we learned about Ren and Stimpy joining Beavis and Butt-Head and Animaniacs, among other 90s cartoons being revived, I’ve recently been watching HBO’s Perry Mason reboot, and last year Netflix hit gold with their Full House redux, which had a successful two-season run.

That is probably what Sony Pictures Television is hoping for with the announcement of another family sitcom that’s coming back: Who’s the Boss?

Who’s the Boss? was a high-concept sitcom from the 80s in which Tony Danza starred as a former Major League Baseball player who moves his daughter Samantha (Alyssa Milano) and himself into the Connecticut home of Angela and her young son Jonathan, to serve as their housekeeper. Eventually Tony and Angela fall in love because, obviously. It ran for eight seasons (196 episodes!).

The reboot will star Milano as a single mother living in the house she grew up in, and will co-star Danza as her now-retired father, per Deadline.

🚨ANNOUNCEMENT🚨

I AM SO EXCITED!#WhosTheBoss is coming back!!!

I’ve wanted to share this for so long and now I can! 😭

We feel the time is right to tell the story of where these amazing characters are today. Can’t wait to share their stories with you. So happy. https://t.co/vhAM3OB21S

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) August 4, 2020

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Very excited to bring Who’s The Boss back to television! #whostheboss

A post shared by Tony Danza (@tonydanza) on Aug 4, 2020 at 4:49pm PDT

No word yet on whether Judith Light and Danny Pintauro, who played Angela and her son Jonathan, will appear, but according to Deadline, there’s hope. Unfortunately, Angela’s mother Mona, the show’s sharp-witted fan favorite, will not be able to appear, as Katherine Helmond passed away in early 2019.

Like the recent ‘One Day at a Time’ remake, there is ample opportunity for the new Who’s the Boss, which won 10 Emmys and was fairly progressive in its depiction of gender roles (even if it was mostly played for laughs), to transcend its sitcom trappings and deliver a product more in line with 2020 than 1985.

I just hope we get to hear Tony tell Samantha to get out of his kitchen.

TOLEDO, OH – Second-grader Jesse Landgraf hailed a local restaurant’s nugget sommelier as “sophisticated and insightful,” in a glowing review posted Tuesday.

“I have a sophisticated palate — I eat literally any kind of nugget,” the 7-year-old said in his review of Big Papa’s Diner. “Having a trained nugget professional to communicate with is really important to me.”

Many kid-friendly restaurants now offer a nugget sommelier — or “nuggetista” — since that is the only thing kids will eat.

More than simply providing options for different kinds of nuggets, the 7-year-old said his nugget steward asked insightful questions so he could find the right nugget style for Jake’s palate.

“I was initially leaning toward the beef nuggets, but he said that wouldn’t pair well with my chocolate milk,” Jake recounted. “I appreciate that kind of expertise.”

Ultimately, Jake said he opted for the chicken nuggets because they were shaped like dinosaurs.

Despite being completely plausible to parents, THIS JUST IN is satire and intended for entertainment purposes only. For more stories like this one click here.

Back in my day (the 90s!), there was some bizarre, and often groundbreaking animation floating around. From Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead to Liquid Television’s Aeon Flux on MTV to the meta Animaniacs and the just plain batshit Ren and Stimpy, animators were going off.

Now, 20+ years later, many of those shows are coming back. Animaniacs is returning to the airwaves this fall, Beavis and Butthead is being revived in a very different era (are they still going to make fun of music videos?), and now it’s been announced that Ren and Stimpy is coming back as well.

The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that 25 years after its initial run on Nickelodeon, Ren and Stimpy, an adult-focused cartoon featuring the misadventures of Ren, a manic, often exasperated chihuahua, and his dopey sidekick, Stimpy. The show ran for 5 seasons and 100 episodes and often featured content – about religion, politics, and more – that didn’t jibe with Nickelodeon’s kid-centric content. Still, it gained a cult following.

Now the show is being reimagined for Comedy Central, which will also air the new Beavis and Butthead and Jodie, a series based on MTV’s Daria.

“We are excited to reinvent this iconic franchise with a new creative team and our partners at the Nickelodeon Animation Studio,” said ViacomCBS Entertainment & Youth Group president Chris McCarthy. “Ren & Stimpy joins our rapidly expanding roster of adult animation including South Park, Beavis and Butt-Head and Clone High as we continue to reimagine our treasure chest of beloved IP for new generations.”

The new, “reimagined” Ren and Stimpy will be made with a new creative team and entirely without the involvement of creator John Kricfalusi, who will also reportedly not benefit financially in any way from the new series. He’s been a controversial figure since Buzzfeed published a story about his relationships with underage girls.

Keanu Reeves is a popular guy on The Dad.

Not only does he star in some of our favorite movies, including the John Wick Series, The Matrix (the fourth installment is due next year… we hope!), the Toy Story series, and Bill and Ted‘s (which hits on-demand in about a month), he’s an all-around good dude who is constantly behaving like a real-life version of the superhero-type characters he often portrays on screen.

For his latest project, Keanu is finally joining the comic-book game, but not in the way you might think. He’s not suiting up – yet; instead, he’s leaving acting behind for a minute and shifting gears into writing.

He is teaming up with writer Matt Kindt to pen a 12-issue limited comic book series called BRZRKR.

According to USA Today, BRZRKR is illustrated by Alessandro Vitti and is “action-packed and hyperviolent.” It’s about a warrior who has spent centuries fighting battles and in 2020 finds himself doing dangerous jobs for the U.S. government – to prevent them from exposing his identity. It sounds a little bit like Netflix’s recent The Old Guard, with former Keanu co-star Charlize Theron, which was itself based on a comic series.

“This character who was born 80,000 years ago, half man, his father’s a war god. It’s a little fantasy in reality,” Reeves explained. “I had this image in my head of a guy fighting through the ages because of his father’s compulsion to violence.”

The main character of BRZRKR resembles Keanu, so perhaps one day he’ll play his own creation on screen: “I’d love to play Berzerker!” he admitted. “It’s a really fun story so if it’s not me, hopefully someone can play it.”

For now, he’s enjoying being behind the scenes.

“I guess I’m in the writing room,” he told USA TODAY from Berlin, where he was prepping for “Matrix 4” and “Skyping pretty regularly” with his co-writer.

“We’re excited about what’s happening,” Reeves says. “The story’s taking some really interesting twists and turns.”

So has his career, which is entering its fifth decade and shows no signs of slowing down. Especially if he’s able to parlay his stardom into comic book success.

You can get the full sneak peek from Boom! Studios here.

The first issue of the comic hits shelves on October 7th.