Last year someone called for March 22nd to become Talk like William Shatner Day. That someone was Maurice LaMarche, who bills himself as the 3rd most prominent William Shatner impersonator, and he is also the Voice of the Brain (as in Pinky and the Brain). It is coming around again Monday, gang, so practice your dramatic pauses and get ready…
The word from Red Dwarf is that Hattie Hayridge, the female Holly of Red Dwarf, has been interviewed by Robert Llewellyn for his Carpool program on Llewtube. In other UK SF news, Tom Baker will be doing one or more additional turns as The Doctor, recording for Big Finish Productions. That is according to Comic Mix News, who pulled the tidbit from Tom Baker’s own web site. Besides pointing you to the forum entry, I should also mention that his Home page is very nicely done, but now I am going to have to re-watch Blackadder to see if I can spot him.
KamikazeCon 3 in Houston, Tx, will be the massive anime event of the weekend. This is no great surprise considering it is the town that has created a full third of the English dubs for anime DVDs over the last decade. They have a ton of guests and a events for the gathering; wish I could be there.
SenshiCon, Alaska’s Original Anime Con (their tagline) takes place at the UAA Student Union in Anchorage, Alaska. While their web site seems to be in need of some help, they do have a strong voice actor guest list which seems to be primarily from FUNimation. Another anime convention this weekend is MomoCon, which I would love to tell you about. Unfortunately their web site is a blank black screen when I go to it, but perhaps you will have better luck. As near as I can tell from their source code, the Georgia Tech Anime Con is using a script to gracefully degrade to standard HTML if you don’t have Flash installed, and has a script which hides the standard HTML if you do have Flash; in my browser both scripts seem to be active at the same time, hiding both the Flash and the HTML.
LunaCon 2010 in Rye Brook, NY is a general Sci-Fi Con with author GoH Tanya Huff. They look to have pretty much everything going on, including Dancing in the Gears, the 2nd annual LunaCon Steampunk Ball, and a massive number of Events and Programs scheduled for the festivities, as you can tell by the list of participants. Meanwhile, in Chattanooga, Tn, FantaSciCon is happening, and it gets my vote for the best Con T-Shirt I have seen this decade. It also has a good selection of guests and a lot of fun events.
Connected is an interesting independent short sci-fi western made on a micro-budget in Denmark. You can watch the whole thing here, or you may be one of the lucky ones who has it shown at a film festival near you. Thanks to Atomic Popcorn for the heads up on this one.
In wide release the rather bloody Repo Men gives everyone something to think about this weekend. An excellent cast and a great premise, this one should be a favorite among the adrenalin junkies (that includes me). In more limited release, Hubble 3D is showing up at IMAX theaters in museums across the country. As more of these become available, a 3D DVD player and TV become more attractive.
There are some quality DVD’s coming out this week, and some much anticipated releases; but the two are not always the same. The one expected to pull the best numbers this time around is the perfect example of that: The Twilight Saga: New Moon sold tons of tickets to the prepubescent estrogen brigade, while generating noticeable amounts of negative reviews. Which attitude is the correct one depends on who you are, as always, but the saga will continue since the investment has been rewarded by the audience.
The other film that requires actual people to play the parts is Ninja Assassin distributed through Warner Brothers.
From the realm of TV we have the History Channel classic Clash of the Gods TV series. This is a bit different from most of the TV entries I post here, since it has some basis in reality. Some, but not a lot, thanks to the subject matter, so it gets a mention here.
The American animation of note is from Disney (what a surprise), with the title of the Princess and the Frog. Once again, they do a nice job on fitting the best music to the animation, and create a thoroughly enjoyable movie experience.
For imported animations, AstroBoy The Movie finally makes it to DVD, for those of us who missed it on the big screen. It has a serious history, starting in the 1930s or 1950s depending on which path you follow. It has also inspired every robot variant since then, many of which have been real-world builds.
While they don’t have any robots (yet), Genshiken 2 does have an interest in robots, and any other topic you might build a Manga, Anime, or Game out of. Even though it is called 2, this is actually the third series in the franchise. They took a break after the first series, and actually built the anime the characters in that series were watching, Kujibiki Unbalance.
And then there is Tayutama: Kiss On My Deity The Complete Collection. This one comes somewhere between Ah, My Goddes and Ah, My Buddha, and is a ton of fun. The final entry worth noting is Slayers Revolution, season 4 of the classic series. This season was built a decade after the others, reuniting the original cast and creating some closure (and delivering some new excitement).