They came up with the idea in 2012, and after million of views they decided there was enough interest to actually do it. This is a Pong game embedded in the traffic crossing controller so you can play with someone across the street while waiting for the light to change. Thanks to i-Programmer for the heads up on this one.
If you are looking for something different in the way of a Sci-Fi TV show, check out Time Taxi. It is a show about choices, and how sometimes when you make the wrong one you need a do-over. It is more philosophical and intellectual than the average US show, but that is part of what makes it worth watching.
I have been waiting for years for Cowboy Bebop to come out in Blue Ray, and it finally happened today. I am going to try not to watch them in one non-stop marathon. I am going to try to savor them, maybe one episode a day. OK, maybe two, and four per weekend day. And I will be listening to the soundtrack a lot, possibly the most amazing Anime soundtrack ever recorded (go Yoko Kanno!).
There are two very good choices this time around. The one I want to see first is Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb; the third film in the Museum trilogy takes place at the British Museum this time, and once more looks to be a world of fun. Also this week The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies brings that expanded story to completion.
If you are in the mood for action/fantasy then Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is probably just what you are looking for. This particular reboot is my favorite of the TMNT video offerings so far, and a whole lot of fun. On the more serious side, we get The Maze Runner this week as well, based on the YA series of novels by James Dashner.
TV gives us Extant: The First Season, a CBS sci-fi program that has been picked up for a second season. With humans, aliens, and robots, it is at its core a story about the human heart.
In Anime, A Certain Magical Index II: Part Two continues the magical story line from Academy City, a place where ESPers are produced through genetic engineering (as explained in A Certain Scientific Railgun). An encoded grimoire containing catastrophe magic has been stolen, and Index must be protected lest the thieves use her to unlock its secrets. In the Ambition of Oda Nobuna our protagonist is thrown back in time, and on arriving in a Sengoku period timeline noticeably different than our own promptly gets a historical figure killed. He will now have to do the work originally done by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, to help unify feudal Japan.
We also get Bleach: Season 23 with episodes 317 through 329 with the continuing story of the Soul Reapers. The really exciting Anime news for me this week is about a re-release: Cowboy Bebop is finally available in Blue Ray! I am going to have to watch that all over again, from the beginning. If you haven’t already seen it, you have a serious treat in store. Besides buying the discs or watching it at the Funimation site linked above, you can catch it on Toonami as Adult Swim does its Cowboy Bebop Marathon the weekend after Christmas.
The new incarnation of Evangelion is taking forever to be released but Hikaru Utada’s excellent closing theme for it, Beautiful World, became available online the other week, so I had to post it here.　The music video is directed by Tsurumaki Kazuya, who also co-directs the films in the reboot of the franchise, and the visuals do justice to the music. I am still waiting to see the third and fourth movies for the new series, but this will do for now; it promises that the balance of the story will still be making it to the big screen and out on disc. Thanks to Crunchyroll for the heads up on this one, and the info that there is a new CD coming out from Hikaru. The video ends before the song does, but it is enough to let us know what it sounds like.