A MarkInTexas Made-For-TV Christmas: How to Train Your Dragon: Homecoming (2019)

While DreamWorks Animation is the house that Shrek built (the four Shrek movies are still the four highest-grossing DWA films), arguably their most beloved and best reviewed franchise is How to Train Your Dragon.  The first film is the highest-grossing non-Shrek DWA film, though the other two are farther down the box office list.  The movies have also begat two separate TV series as well as a number of stand-alone specials, including another holiday special, Gift of the Night Fury, which I wrote up during the summer of 2017.  February's third movie, subtitled The Hidden World, seemed to bring the franchise to a definitive conclusion.  But never underestimate DWA's ability to wring every last dollar out of its properties, so How to Train Your Dragon: Homecoming arrives to serve as a prologue to that film's epilogue.

Warning if you haven't seen The Hidden World: Here be Dragon spoilers.

Picking up ten years after the end of the main action of The Hidden World, which ended with the dragons moving to a huge underground caravan nearly impossible for human to get to to protect themselves from poachers who wish to harm them, the special stars a now fully-grown Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), who sports a beard, is married to Astrid (America Ferrera), and has two kids of his own, including daughter Zephyr, who is both as technically proficient as he is, and extremely skeptical that dragons are as friendly as advertised, especially after finding the now-outdated tomes about how to deal with the creatures. 

With the approach of Snoggletog, the franchise's stand-in for Christmas, Hiccup decides this is a perfect time to resurrect the old tradition of a holiday pageant, devoted to explaining to the village youngsters the special relationship between Vikings and dragons.  For whatever reason, Gobbler (Craig Ferguson) is put in charge of the pageant, which he turns into a tribute to Hiccup's father, who died in the second movie, usually at the expense of Hiccup, who ends up making a costume of Toothless, his old dragon.

Meanwhile, the actual Toothless is now mated with the light fury that he met in the third film, and they have three baby dragons of their own.  The baby dragons grow curious about their father's old friend, and take off for the island without permission, with their parents in pursuit.

I liked this special better than Gift of the Night Fury, though it is still a step below the movies.  The plot of the special requires the humans and dragons to mostly be separated until the very end, and even then, human-dragon interaction is extremely limited.  And again, this is all to set up The Hidden World's epilogue, which didn't really need any setting up.  It also, however, might be setting up a How to Train Your Dragon 4.  While the story of Hiccup and Toothless is probably over, a case could be made that there's a new generation of both humans and dragons to get to know one another.

How to Train Your Dragon: Homecoming is better than it probably needed to be.  If this is the end of the line for the entire franchise, it does get to go out on a high note.

Next time: One last special, this one from a pair of siblings.