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It seems somewhat appropriate that I get to wish everyone Happy Halloween before I talk about the first selection today. And ordinarily it would be a sad week when the only live action movie title on offer had a name like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead, but this one pulled a ton of awards on the Film Fest circuit, and the trailers look wonderful. Independent films are pretty much the only place you can find non-formula original work these days, at least out of America where most studios either want to re-imagine something that made a ton of money 20 to 50 years ago, make a sequel of something that made a ton of money in the last few years, or make a film based on a youth cult mega-selling book/graphic novel/TV series. The other new film to DVD this week is an animation, and a sequel, but it is an instant classic: Toy Story 3. The original Toy Story was one of those works that changed everything within its field, and the sequels have been on a par.

In TV, the gorilla in the room is the re-imagined version of V (2009): The Complete First Season. I love the actors they have brought together for this variation of the story, definitely a number of my favorites, and the improvement in FX tech over the last few decades also helps make it more enjoyable. But I do not see the kind of quality upgrade that Battlestar Galactica brought to its franchise, where they re-examined the core concepts and the consequences that grew out of them, building a worldview with more realism and relevance to the current human condition. An actual original miniseries based on a book set, The Fallen ran on ABC Family back in 2006, telling a tale of a Nefilhim (a human-angel hybrid) who had the power to redeem fallen angels. It was originally broadcast as a sequence of three made-for-TV movies, and finally compiled into a complete program on the disks. The final TV series with new episodes this week is Doctor Who, with two entries: Dr. Who: Revenge of the Cybermen (the Tom Baker story, not the Hartnell/Troughton sequence) and Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis from the Silvester McCoy period. Classic Doctor is always worth watching, even if they didn’t hit the bulls-eye every time.

In anime, for the first time ever as near as I have been able to tell, the Original Dirty Pair: Part 1 becomes available in this country. I have the Feature Film box set, various OVA series, and Dirty Pair: Flash (a sort of remake), but I am really looking forward to finally getting my hands on the series that started it all. The original Girls With Guns program, I can’t wait to see how many times they say It’s not our fault per episode as they destroy the cities and planets they are protecting. Yes, this series inspired a lot of others, including the recently mentioned Birdy The Mighty.

As a former professional pyrotechnic engineer and avid sci-fi fanatic, I have been waiting for Oh! Edo Rocket for a number of years. The basic premise is simple; an alien princess lands on Earth and needs to be returned to outer space. In Edo period Japan (a few hundred years later they named the town Tokyo) the only man for the job is a fireworks expert that keeps tying her to a flying bomb and lighting the fuse. The local government officials frown on this practice, since in Edo during the mid-1800’s there was a set of harsh frugality laws that banned all luxuries, including fireworks. And then they threw in some silly factors, just to make the animation even more entertaining. They ran this one as two 13 episode seasons, and are releasing each season as a separate box set. I know I should wait until they release a complete series box set and pay $10 less for the combined product, but that is not an option for me this time. I have been waiting too long to have this as part of my permanent collection, I am not waiting any longer.

We have two other new choices this week, starting with Uta∽Kata, in which a school girl comes across a mirror that does not reflect the world around her. When Manatsu steps from inside the mirror, offering friendship and magical powers for the summer, it may be a promise too good to be true. The other? Blassreiter – The Complete Series rolls out in a single box set, for those that didn’t pick it up when it came out a season at a time, with the usual associated price drop. The Pale Rider series (for those who speak only English) is all about melding flesh with machine through a blood born virus, and those who fight against the spread. Another economical re-release, Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino – The Complete Series [Viridian Collection] also from Funimation continues the story of of the cyborg child-assassin teams begun in the first series.

That also brings up a question about the difference between a season and a series; a season would seem to be a complete year, and a series would seem to be a complete story. But a season often starts in one year and finishes in the next, while a story might constitute everything within a story arc, or everything involving the same characters taking place inside the same universe. Various sources explain it various ways, but no explanation I have ever come up against works for every instance and example. Answering that question should be a fun project and an interesting mental exercise; I will share my results (assuming I ever come to any) here when they happen.

On October 30th, 1938, the Wells Brother (Orson and H.G. of no actual relation to each other) terrified America with their broadcast of an alien invasion as a news event on Mercury Theatre on the Air. Many people ignored the beginning of the program where they were told it was a fictional tale written by H. G. Wells, and only started paying attention when told of the giant war machines ambling across the countryside. Part of the problem was that Orson Wells had a truly magnificent announcers voice, so it was easy for everyone to believe they were really listening to the news. You can’t blame peoples reactions on the fact that the opening moves of WWII were going on; those smart enough to see the signs of the gathering storm were the kind of people who paid attention to disclaimers and didn’t get fooled by the program. At this point the Wells broadcast has been mentioned in as many movies and TV shows as the original Wells book, I think, with Buckaroo Banzi as one of my favorites. Listen to the original broadcast now:

I love Halloween, and all the monsters and ghoulies it brings out. But my favorite aspect of that are the heroes (of either gender) who slay the monsters for us, starting when I was a kid with Riki Tiki Tavi. I was thinking about putting together a best of list, but I didn’t have to, because once more the folks at io9 beat me to it. Ash and Buffy, Dresden and Ripply; what an excellent collection of my favorite people (and near people).

Like everyone else on the planet, I have become a big fan of watching streaming video online. For the most part, as new sources became available, they were connected to a service that had something to gain from the offering, and the ones that didn’t gain anything soon went away. The new one that fits that description is XFinity TV from my cable provider, Comcast. It is a bit of a surprise for two reasons: first, they aren’t asking me for more money for the service, it is just there as part of the package I am already paying for. Second, it has a lot of video my TV set top box doesn’t have, and is missing a lot of the things my cable box delivers. Both of these things make sense once I looked into the reasons for them.

On the first point, I suspect I am not the only person that noticed the economy got a bit rough around the edges over the last few years. Lots of folks have cut back on expenses, and if you are Power or Water you have no worries, because those are live or die items. If you are TV, Telephone, or the Internet, people will actually survive if they don’t pay for you, hard though that may be to believe. Except for that occasional 911 call, of course. So every TV, Telephone, and Internet provider is busy building VARs into their service (Value Added Resources) to make their service too valuable per dollar spent for you to want to give it up. Which makes it obvious why my cable company is giving me a very valuable additional resource without charging me extra for it.

The second point stems from the fact that each network and program production team have their own deals with various distribution outlets. A good example of this is from the Big 4 (or so) Commercial Broadcast Networks; ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox/CW. Both NBC and CBS are on my cable set top box Video On Demand service, with lots of the current programs. ABC is not there, nor is Fox/CW. So I can watch Chuck on NBC or Medium on CBS, but I have no access to No Ordinary Family on ABC, Smallville on CW/UPN or Fringe on Fox/WB. Or was it CW/WB and UPN/Fox? But when I log into XFinity, I have ABC and just watched the Pilot for No Ordinary Family, followed by this past weeks episode of Smallville, and tonight I just may rewatch Fringe. This combination works for me; I can watch everything I am looking for now, each through its assigned delivery system. And the streaming stuff goes with me, anywhere I have Wi-Fi access.

I first played with streaming online video in the mid 1980s, using the Multicast Backbone (MBONE) people were just beginning to develop. It could actually deliver low bandwidth audio in a two way environment at a reasonable rate, so even with a 3600 BAUD dial up modem you could do voice chat with people on another part of the planet. As long, that is, as you were both on one of the internet gateways like Q-Net, Compuserve, or AOL, rather than the much more common BBS systems. Video back then was a postage stamp sized picture at 16 colors refreshing at one frame a second if you had a good connection, and if you are interested in the basics of how it worked in olden days this thread is a good place to start.

It still pretty much works the same way today, except computers are much faster and more powerful, the ones on your desk, in your pockets, inside your TVs and DVD players, and most importantly the ones delivering the internet to you. So my Blue-Ray DVD player has its built in Netflix, YouTube, and Pandora widgets that pipe the output to my TV. On my computer, I have a premium paid account with Crunchyroll to watch Japanese, Chinese, and Korean TV programs an hour after they air in their respective countries, and another one with The Anime Network that gives me access to a completely different set of programming from those same countries. Similar fee-based arrangements are soon to be available in the US from sources such as BBC TV and Sky TV for areas outside the UK, and a whole lot of other programming suppliers from many other countries. In each case, you can watch the programs live (or near live, with a one hour delay being most common), which gives the license holder for that programming two instant advantages:

1) They get a regular payment from X number of online subscribers, without incurring any additional cost beyond building their server farm to handle the additional load. That load is minimal in a Multicast environment, and if you realized they have to pay their program suppliers for the additional people watching their show, you should also have realized they can see how many people are watching which shows based on the number of streams requested for each. So if I log into the BBC service, and only watch Doctor Who and Misfits episodes, all of the money they pass on go to the producers of those shows. That increases the odds that the programs I want to watch will be funded and renewed for another season; I know, because I helped fund them.

2) Both the Network/Service as a whole and those specific programs that pull in the subscription viewers get a spike in their ratings. In a commercial network environment, this means being able to charge more per 30 second spot. But even for non-commercial (in the sense of not running advertisements, NOT in the sense of not making money) networks like HBO or the BBC, ratings are king and are at the heart of increasing revenues.

The Steampunk Fortnight continues over at TOR, with multiple articles stories and presentations posted each day. One I particularly like is the The Amazing Fantastic Steampunk Timeline of Music and Things by Evelyn Kriete. This presents a very nice chronology of the various Steampunk bands, and ties it to some other events and milestones of the subculture, liberally sprinkled with links to most of the mentioned performers and publications.

On the last Wednesday each month, the JICC has an Anime presentation free and open to the public they refer to as their Animezing Series. This month the presentation is Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, a watershed animation and a perfect tale for Halloween. Reservations are required for tomorrow night’s event, since the theater has limited seating and there will be only one showing. They invite everyone who is so inclined to wear their best Halloween costumes, but do not bring costume weapons, not even plastic toys. Remember that the Japan Information and Culture Center (JICC) is part of the Embassy of Japan in Washington D.C, and like all embassies their security team is trained to err on the side of caution. I can’t wait to find out what they have in store for us in November, and for this and other events in and around DC be sure to check out their Calendar.