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Something to Watch: Discs

Movies bring us Mad Max: Fury Road, in what seems to be a non-stop chase scene. TV has the Vampire Diaries: The Complete Sixth Season, just ahead of the season 7 opening episode in October. This show is the top rated program in the CW network lineup, with 2 million regular viewers and a spin-off, The Originals. The animated Star Wars Rebels: Complete Season One continues the ever popular series, and with Disney now in charge of the franchise we should be getting new tales for years to come. While it mostly isn’t genre, there seems to be at least one episode each season that is genre related, so I will mention that Castle: The Complete Seventh Season is also out this week.

In Anime Argevollen: Collection 1 brings the first dozen episodes of this giant mecha combat series home. The protagonist joins the military to uncover who in the chain of command murdered his sister, but when war breaks out he finds himself on the front lines with no way out. One Piece: Season 7 Voyage 2 has episodes 397 through 409 of pirate goodness for everyone. And if you haven’t seen it, they are finally releasing Robot Carnival, an anthology of 7 short pieces about robots put together into a feature-length film. This is the first time I am aware anyone has put an English sound track to it as well as the first time it has been released in Region 1, although you can also watch it in Japanese with English subtitles. Not that that is hard to do, there are only a handful of spoken lines in the entire thing, most of the soundtrack is music.

The Baseballs

The Baseballs are a German Rockabilly band that got together in 2007 and have been cruising Europe ever since, with the occasional expedition to Australia and other interesting places. The first track here is 2014’s Goodbye Peggy Sue, from their recent album Game Day!. The second song is On My Way from the same source, and the third is Hello, the 2011 classic which evokes Dwayne Eddie, Jan and Dean, and The Beach Boys. This is only a small selection of the quality music created by this band band, if you like these there are many more songs to check out and enjoy.

Something to Stream: Sky Wizard’s Academy

One of the new Anime shows streaming this season is Sky Wizard’s Academy, being hosted on the Funimation service. The story is straightforward enough according to the official site: Forced to retreat to floating cities due to an invasion of magical armored insects, humanity must now depend on Sky Wizards to battle the menace. The primary characters are almost that simple and straightforward, except for the collection of misunderstandings surrounding the protagonist as he meets his team for the first time.

I have to admit, this show did not attract my attention right away, so I only watched the first episode a few days back. I found it quite enjoyable as an introduction to a new series goes, and it does look to have a great deal of potential. If reviewing these kind of things was my day job I would have no doubt binge watched my way up to this week’s offering, episode 8, but sadly I have to work for a living. But I did enjoy the first one enough to make it worth mentioning in this post, complete with the link to its streaming home page and the trailer from there, so you could watch it and come to your own conclusions.

Aurora Official Trailer #1

This is the first Aurora Official Trailer, and it makes the potential movie look very interesting. In 2020 super-computer Kronos concludes that human beings are the biggest threat to the planet, and takes action. The movie begins in 2080, when Andrew meets Calia, a girl heading back to robot-free Aurora and latches on to her for dear life. This is yet another of those movies where frail humans like ourselves go toe-to-toe against our Evil Robot Overlords, and I have to tell you, our prospects are not great. But we might just have a chance. This Swiss science fiction film looks like it has some potential, and I hope I get a chance to check it out on the big screen.

Attack On Titan Movie US dates

Funimation has announced the US dates for the live action Attack On Titan movies to be in theaters, with September 30th for the first, and October 20th for the second. They made the announcement a bit over a week ago, I have been trying to find a list of theaters that will be showing it to link here, but I just haven’t found one. The official movie page does have an opt-in email registration where you can sign up to get those announcements as they become available, at least. In the meantime, here is the official US trailer.

Something to Do: Movies

The film Z for Zachariah takes place after the end of the world, where the three known survivors end up in a love triangle. It was nominated for the Grand Jury Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and author Robert C. O’Brien had another of his books turned into a movie, The Secret of NIMH. But I am just not sure that a movie with only 3 actors in it can hold my attention all the way through. The other option this week looks more interesting to me, but may be on far fewer screens: Memories of the Sword is a Korean historical fantasy taking place during the Goryo Dynasty.