Just wanted to drop a line to Mike, Ron, Lisa and the Star Trek: Origins gang on the morning of their first filming. Much as I’d love to be there for that, I’ll just have to “settle” for blowing stuff up in post-production.
Good luck, we’re all counting on you!… Read more
TVshowsonDVD.com unveils the next two region 1 Doctor Who DVD releases, and my Lord, if Arc Of Infinity isn’t about the crappiest cover I’ve yet to see Warner Home Video stick on one of these – and that’s actually saying something there – I don’t know what is. Dudes. Seriously. Can you afford to put cover art that craptastic on something you’re actually hoping will sell? Simon Holub and Thomas Evans and Lee Johnson and Kurz are Photoshopping circles around your art department. “Sure,” I hear you argue, “they have the free time to do that sort of thing.” Maybe so…but they also clearly have the talent too.
I had held out hope that maybe Robot and Survival marked the beginning of the region 1 releases using more or less the same artwork as region 2, but I guess that was wishful thinking.
It’s a good thing that I already “re-cover” all of the Who DVDs I buy anyway; I’ve got quite a few actual region 2 releases, and truth be told, I just like their cover style better – more stylish, understated, classy, and better artwork by miles and miles. (Okay, actually, better artwork by Clayton Hicks and Lee Binding, but you get the idea.) But man…this is a new low for the region 1 covers. Yeesh.… Read more
More loot from the housecleaning wars. Long-lost goodies for your amusement.
Oh yeah, baby. I was 18, and I was gonna go straight from Fort Smith to Hollywood to be a scriptwriter. (Nobody told me that this spec script wasn’t going to be a viable ticket for that trip.) Getting stuck in local TV never occurred to me.
Quite why there was a whole box of this children’s magazine that I’d been hauling around with me for 14+ years, I’ll never know. But it was worth it just for this. 😆
More to come.… Read more
Sliders + Dawson’s Creek + threadbare western mythological tropes about a young man searching for his long-lost father + a few Flash Gordon place/character names = Sci-Fi’s new Flash Gordon? 🙄
The good news is, the new Doctor Who’s still on Friday nights. 😆
Sorry I haven’t had much else to say lately. We’re just waiting for the baby. Jan’s been pulled off of work and is stuck at home going crazy. And let me tell ya, the premiere of Flash Gordon didn’t help her mood! At one point, one of the characters said “We’re looking for something,” and in an opportune MSTie moment, I said to the TV, “Yeah – an original plot!”
Feel free to write this off as me being tired and cranky, but even when I’m up and chipper, this show’s gonna have an uphill battle to win me over now.… Read more
At lunchtime today, I went to Hastings to look for Babylon 5: The Lost Tales on DVD. They were sold out! Let me recap that string of improbabilities for you:
😯 To further my list of seven impossible things by lunchtime, I stumbled upon a Doctor Who merchandise rack that I didn’t realize was there, and picked up two new action figures that I didn’t know were out (much less in the U.S.), Martha Jones and the bloody space rhino (they’ll look great next to the Face of Boe). (I also snuck out with The Hand Of Fear on DVD, which I had been keeping an eye out for.) I then had no choice but to go to Best Buy. There was a time, about ten years ago, when I couldn’t walk into Best Buy without dropping $50 at least. These days, their selection has become so watered down into mainstream pablum that I have a hard time finding $50 of things I’d like to buy there over the course of an entire year. In this case, though, they got not quite $20 out of me, as they had three copies of The Lost Tales left. I didn’t realize until I opened up the box that there was a Best Buy exclusive comic inside, written by JMS himself. Quite nice artwork, but story-wise more sentimental and symbolic than meaty at only six pages.
Okay, I promise, I promise, I’ll stop spending money…starting…now.… Read more
Found even more treasures during the Great Clean-Up Of The Baby’s Future Room Wednesday, including my long-lost tape of the original Fox promos for the 1996 Doctor Who movie. I’ve put those up on the site here, just click each of the “preview” buttons to see the various promos Fox ran in 1996. Damned if they didn’t make it look exciting, eh? (And hey, if you like Doctor Who trailers, you can’t miss this one – if ever you don’t dig a trailer from the new series, just come back to this one again. 😆 ) I also found a heap of PAL VHS tapes of such things as “I Was A Doctor Who Monster”, “K-9 Unleashed” and “Who On Earth Is Tom Baker”, all of which I promptly dubbed to a DVD for safe keeping. I’m fond of that now-nearly-extinct breed of fan film/documentary hybrids that Myth Makers excelled at.
The trip to Springfield’s 1984 Arcade is still on, and just a week away. I can’t wait for that. I may have some other Big News in the next few days as well, stay tuned!
Got some swim time in on Wednesday night, then we came home and I proceeded to whip up both dinner and the next day’s lunch for both of us all at the same time. Well, all three of us. That Evan is a hungry little bugger. As usual, I didn’t get near any fireworks – I fired up the fireworks graphic demo on the Christopher Tumber Vix / Tsunami Vectrex homebrew and let it run all day. When other people did start blowing stuff up, Xena was ready to come inside. (Smelling me cooking may also have had something to do with that.) I was getting pretty irritated with some kids who were shooting off fireworks insanely close to our overgrown pasture, when all of a sudden it stopped, and yet I kept seeing flashes of light outside – lo and behold, it was the nightly thunderstorm to the rescue. With all the rain we’ve had, it’s probably too damp for there to really be any legitimate concerns about someone burning down my land, but it’s just the principle of the thing.
I’m just elated with the news that Catherine Tate will be back as Donna for all of the fourth season of Doctor Who. That just about makes up for the hash that was made of Martha’s character development (to say nothing of that finale…oy vey! Sleep, Data, sleep! Am I the only person who thought that Eccleston’s Doctor would’ve wiped the floor with John Simm without a second thought?). But Catherine Tate? I can get behind that, and not just because she’s delicious. She’s not 20 years old, she’s not impossibly stick-figure thin, and she doesn’t have an unrequited love thing going on with the Doctor… yay, she might come across as a real person. I loved that character in The Runaway Bride, although I fully understand that I’m probably in the minority there. (That episode, and the first one with Martha, air this Friday night on Sci-Fi, so hey, you tell me.) I know that I’m just an American who hasn’t suffered overexposure to Catherine Tate via her comedy show, but I just thought she was really cute, and the character was a nice departure from anything we’ve seen in the show before, old or new. And as for Kylie…well…ask me again after Christmas.… Read more
I don’t get into dream analysis too much, but this one’s funny. I had an utterly bizarre dream last night in which I was with a band that happened to be playing on an overpass to a reasonably large crowd below. Why there was no traffic trying to get across the overpass (or plowing through the reasonably large crowd below), I will never know. When I say I was with the band, I don’t mean I was playing in it – I was just…there. For some reason I was invited to step up to the microphone and sing one little verse of something, and for whatever reason made sense within the internal logic of this strange dream, I chose to sing like Johnny Cash (not something I can do on command, by the way), and sang something like “And now I’m standing on this bridge with some little guy named Earl.” That was my whole contribution to this shindig of the subconscious, from what I can tell. I actually woke up laughing, because even asleep, I thought it was funny as hell. What any of it means on some deeper level, I do not know and cannot even begin to speculate.
This week’s big project is to get the furniture that used to comprise my bedroom out of the baby room – cedar chest, bookshelf, and lots of boxes. To my amazement, my wife has given the thumbs up for me to move the chest into the game room, put a seat cushion on top of it, and wrap 0ne of my Pac-Man bedsheets around it to completely cover it and protect the wood from being damaged. And it’ll be guest perfect seating for playing games or what have you, facing the TV or facing the Avid. There’ll be a bookcase swap with the one that’s been right outside the bathroom since we moved into the house; the smaller one that’s been there for three years will go into the game room. And then the work can begin on painting the baby room, pulling up the carpet and putting some flooring down; originally the plan was to do this throughout the house, but at this rate I’ll be surprised if that gets any further than the baby room, the little hallway-ette outside the baby room/game room area, and at most the living room. We’re just running out of time and out of money.
With this past weekend’s episode of Doctor Who having shown us real live Time Lords (in a flashback), decked out in old-school, Tom-Baker-era Time Lord robes and headgear, I’m itching to get back to an idea that I’ve had since last year, which is basically to assemble the equivalent of these “catch-up specials” shown for Lost, Stargate or Galactica that lay out The Mythology So Far. Except that this would have to be structured a bit differently, since you’re dealing not with a couple of seasons, not with 10 seasons, but with a grand total of about 30 years of story (with the new series liberally grabbing storylines from the vaults of Virgin Publishing, Big Finish and whatnot, I’m not sure it even pays to try to include anything but the TV series there). Clips galore and music stretching from Tristram Cary to Murray Gold, all in brief segments outlining the history of such concepts as the TARDIS, the Time Lords, the Doctor’s refugee status, the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, regeneration, UNIT, companions, and so forth, letting the clips speak for themselves and not leaning on a narrator to tell the story, just tying it all together.
And what would I do with this monster? I have no idea. Put it on the site? Maybe, but I might hear the BBC calling “Exterminate!” if I did that. Put it on YouTube? I’d rather not if I could help it, as I’m just not that crazy about YouTube, and we’re talking about something that would more or less be designed to be as long as an episode of the current series (~42 minutes). Try to see if Sci-Fi or BBC America or the BBC itself would want this as a video for their site(s)? Hey, that might not be a bad idea – and then they could do the heavy lifting on clearances for clips, music rights, and so on. (Ha! Good luck!) Why spend the time on it? Why, just to see if I can pull it off, and to keep myself in practice too. Why not? And maybe, just maybe, I might just convince my wife at some vague unspecified future juncture that it’s worth it to watch the original series. But the Time Lords’ appearance, in their vintage ’60s and ’70s duds, convinced me that this is something that can be done, and it can all be tied together. By some little guy named Earl.… Read more
Okay, get a load of this. My wife says I’m not blogging enough. Heh. Sorry I’ve fallen off the blawgwagon just a little bit of late. Blame it on the swimming pool: if I’m going and spending an hour or two in the drink every day, that’s a couple of hours I’m not getting to spend on the computer. Where, between moving massive chunks of the web site to WordPress and other projects, I’ve kinda felt like I’m spending plenty of time lately, thanks very much.
I completely forgot to mention how things wrapped up with the little grey kitten. I took her up to my sister-in-law’s farm, where she was immediately set to her first task – mousing in the tack room. I think she’ll do well. So we’re back to the fearsome threesome, though I think Oberon actually missed her for the first couple of days. I don’t think there’s a single honestly mean impulse between him and Olivia.
I was watching the little mini-series spin-off thingamabob “After The Catch” tonight, where the crab boat captains from “The Deadliest Catch” sit around and tell fish stories – well, okay, crab stories – and I’m thinking we need at least a one-hour special just talking to the photogs who shoot that show. Again, talk about a gig I would not want. Yeesh.
Orac 3.0 is up and running, so far, so good. I’m still not-quite-up and hobbling. Hence all the time in the pool.
Mini music brag of the week, with a little ‘support’ from Sy the Cyberman:
…signed by Joel Goldsmith no less. Really, really trippy stuff. Memo to Warner Bros.: this show needs to be on DVD, stat.
I’ll say more when I have more to say.… Read more
These are awesome.
Plenty of cool stuff on the back too.
Rather like the lunar landing stamp and the Muppet Show stamps and the Defender stamp and the severe weather/tornado stamps, these are destined to go in a frame on my wall and never be used. 😆… Read more
Maybe I’m right. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m spoiling three whole years worth of episodes. Click here if you want to read my theory and keep score for the rest of the series. … Read more
