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Tesla Noir, French Animated Steampunk, and turning people into animals against their will; this is an interesting week for disc releases. April and the Extraordinary World is French animated Steampunk at its finest, and I can’t wait to see it. The Lobster is already coming out on disc, even though it is still in its limited run of theaters. If you don’t partner up and couple down by a certain age, you are transmogrified into an animal and turned loose in the wild to fend for yourself. The American Side has the protagonist drawn into a race to find a secret device designed by Tesla with unknown powers and potential, hidden somewhere near the power plant that Tesla also designed, but which was built by his adversary Edison at Niagara Falls. There is also another DC animated release, Batman: The Killing Joke, which might have been better if they hadn’t brought it to the screen.

In Anime, Gundam Build Fighters: Complete Collection looks like a good choice, as does The Rolling Girls: The Complete Series, kind of a superhero road trip. Plus World Break: Aria of Curse for a Holy Swordsman is the complete series in one box, about reincarnated warriors going to school together, and Jormungand looks at illegal arms dealers out to save the world. For once I haven’t seen a single one of these, so I am going to flip a coin and start streaming the winner.

METAFIVE has a new release about to hit the shelves, METALIVE, a two disc set. The first disc is a Blu Ray with 18 live videos, and 3 songs recorded as studio live sessions including Don’t Move. The second disc is a CD with 14 of those same tracks in audio only format. Like their first album, these are only available as imports at the moment, but CDs play the same all over the world, and although Japan is in Region 2 for DVDs, it is at least using the NTSC format for its videos. The first tune presented here is Gravetrippen’ from the purely live videos, the second is Don’t Stop from the studio live sessions, the third is Maisie’s Avenue also from the studio live sessions.

Alderamin on the Sky is told as a history of a legendary tactician and general, who became great because he was lazy and had no interest in fighting. It is set in a very steampunk universe, with compressed air rifles and airships, and a technology base from around 1820 or so. It opens with our protagonist traveling with a childhood friend he is escorting on her journey to a military academy. They meet new friends on the ship they are sailing on, which runs into trouble leaving them stranded behind enemy lines. I was hooked by the end of the first episode, and every episode since has been better than the one before. We are up to the 4th episode, with a new episode popping up every Friday.

I have always been a Holmes fan, and Sherlock is the best there has ever been. So here are two offerings from this weekends Comic Con event, the new trailer, and the related gathering from Nerd HQ 2016 which benefited Operation Smile this year. The sessions of this project are referred to as A Conversation For A Cause, and it is exactly that. The format is a small intimate room at the San Diego New Children’s Museum, which seats a limited number of people, all of whom pay a noticeable (but not exorbitant) amount of money to attend. A small group of major players of some cult favorite show gather on stage, with another cult favorite actor from an unrelated property as the moderator. The folks on stage have a chat about the program they are involved in, then the moderator invites questions from the audience.

As near as I have been able to tell, 100% of the money raised by this series of events goes to the charity. The audience gets to have the kind of one-on-one experience with the show makers that used to be common several decades ago, when only us nerds and geeks even knew this kind of convention was happening, but which seems to have evaporated around the turn of the century. The participating actors, writers, and directors of these shows all get to contribute their time (and money; lots of them also make a contribution beyond their mere attendance), connect even more personally with their most loyal fans, and by doing so generate an impressive amount of revenue for the charity. As a person who was a member of the group who created the original Beg-A-Thon which was then used as the model all PBS radio and TV stations put into play to raise public awareness and money (crowdfunding decades before most people became aware that it was an option), I don’t see a downside to this project. The fact that they then make these sessions available to the general public (with or without editing, it could go either way but what I see makes me think without) is just yet another bonus as far as all us fans are concerned. Enjoy!