The latest chapter in the groundbreaking Cyberpunk Anime series is Ghost in the Shell: Arise, the story of how the various members of Public Security Section 9 got together and became a team. If you have signed up with Funimation you can stream it from their site, if you don’t have an account with them you can pick up the discs at your favorite Anime supply store. This first showed in theaters in Japan as four feature length films, when they reformatted it into a television series they called it Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Alternative Architecture and added two additional episodes to transition it into the 2015 version of Ghost in the Shell: The Movie.
Season 4 of Arrow kicks off on Wednesday, October 7th, the day after The Flash has its season opener, and both shows look like they are up-leveling their game. That makes sense, since they have cranked up the tension each season from the beginning, and since they are building towards next year’s Legends Of Tomorrow. Both with these series and with the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad movies, it looks like DC is finally going to give Marvel a serious fight for the hearts and minds of the audience. I for one hope the competition stays intense for many years to come, if it causes both teams to keep cranking out quality science fiction of this caliber.
Over at the official site the headline reads Cassini Finds Global Ocean In Saturn’s Moon Enceladus, which isn’t an overnight discovery. They had to go back over images takes across the past seven years and carefully measure the wobble it goes through in its orbit to prove the liquid water below its ice shell pretty much covered the globe, instead of being confined to the southern pole as they had originally thought. Now the mystery is what keeps it liquid, and what do the simple organic molecules contained in the water vapor being vented at the south pole indicate about the possibilities of its evolving life of some kind.
CGI is getting downright amazing as this trailer for Disney’s new The Jungle Book proves. The film will be hitting the big screens on April 15th, 2016, and as you can see from the trailer it does a great job of blending live action footage of the man cub with computer created animals to bring Rudyard Kipling’s classic story to life.
The primary selection this week is Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, based on the second book in James Dashner’s Maze Runner YA series. There are 5 books so far, so if it does well enough at the box office there may be three more films coming. For those wondering, I linked to the Japanese page for the movie because the US site set off my Site Adviser with warnings about aggressive linking. For those who were hoping for something sillier this weekend also brings us Cooties, in which a virus turns the elementary school kids into killer zombies. The teachers, led by Elijah Wood, have the fight of their lives trying to escape while three of them have an ongoing verbal battle trying to resolve their love triangle. I think I might go for silly this time around.
In movies we have Cinderella, a new live action take by Disney on the classic story. If you are looking for something a bit sillier you might want to check out Lego Star Wars: The New Yoda Chronicles Complete Collection. TV has Sleepy Hollow: The Complete Second Season, and Fox actually signed off on season 3. And I suppose I should also mention The Big Bang Theory: The Complete Eighth Season, even though I don’t personally watch it.
In Anime the The Irregular at Magic High School: Nine Schools Competition Arc siblings Tatsuya and Miyuki Shiba are at two different levels, Practitioner and Engineer, but the lowly engineer is changing the way the science of Magic is applied, and overturning the way everyone from the Military to the Yakuza thought the world worked. This show is following a rather unusual release pattern in that they are not putting it out by season, but by story arc. Since it ran for two seasons but was made up of 3 separate story arcs of different lengths that can become a little confusing, and it doesn’t help any that this set is priced around twice as much per episode as the usual initial release run. I will be waiting for a better deal and the complete series in a single box before I pick this up. If I feel the need to watch it again before that time comes I will stream it. Also out this week is The Comic Artist & His Assistants, which isn’t exactly genre, but rather a recursive story about creating one of the media formats the stories are told in.