If Astronomy and Space excite you, there is some good news. It seems Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has teamed up with Ann Druyan and Seth MacFarlane to create a new show, Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey, very much in the tradition of Carl Sagan’s original Cosmos. Ann Druyan is the widow of Carl Sagan and one of the co-producers of the original Cosmos series, while animator Seth MacFarlane helped pull in the network funding. The two of them will share the Executive Producer duties for the new show, which will be running on Fox and National Geographic on the same night. Word of this project was first announced back in 2012, but now we are getting close: the first episode airs on March 9th.
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We get animated silliness this week in the form of The Nut Job, a comedy about some overly ambitious squirrels who destroy their home while trying to stock up for winter. Also out this week is Collider, which looks pretty interesting. The official site is a bit unclear as to what country it is coming out in; it might just be Ireland. I hope it includes the US, since this one appears to have an original plot line, something that is getting hard to find out of Hollywood.
In Movies Riddick hits the shelves this week, both as a stand-alone and as part of the Riddick: The Complete Collection 4 film package. For those scratching their heads, this includes an animated story called Dark Fury that was released direct to DVD just after the first film came out. The remake of the cult film Carrie is also out this week.
I haven’t found any genre TV coming out this week, but Top Gear: Season 20 is being released, and they are always a lot of fun.
In western animation, Marvel Knights: Wolverine versus Sabretooth is being billed as the final battle between these two long-time foes. The Marvel Knights brand is for showcase stories that allow the best writers and illustrators to push the bounds of cannon, if not ignore them entirely, so anything is possible. I should also mention that this is a motion comic, rather than a true animation, a media style that Marvel excels at.
In Anime, Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic is your basic dungeon quest, merging and changing the stories of Alibaba and Aladdin. This set is season 1, giving you the first 13 episodes of the series. The show is also streaming on a number of services, including Crunchyroll and Hulu. The release of Naruto: Shippuden Box Set 17 brings us episodes 206 through 218 of the ongoing story of the 9 Tailed Fox. The current episode streaming on their site is 344, if you were wondering. Also beginning to catch up, One Piece Season 5 Part 5 brings the tail of Luffy and the Straw Hat Pirates to episodes 313 to 324. Of course, the currently streaming episode from Tokyo is 627.
Another great alt rock band out of Japan is Owarikara, their new single came out in October. I can’t tell you what the names of these tracks are, but I really like them a lot, especially the way they use rhythm and the instrumental melodies. The lead singer definitely adds an edge that wraps the whole package up; now if only I could understand more than one word in three of the lyrics. Of course, I have that same problem with a lot of rock songs sung in English, too.
This looks like a fun little time travel movie. Welcome to Yesterday is about some friends who find parts for a time travel machine along with some instructions in Dad’s old workshop, and proceed to figure out how to make it work. As is usual in such cases, the law of unintended consequences exacts its price from our protagonists. No way to predict the survival rate based on the trailer, hopefully it won’t be too brutal.
I was watching the epic fantasy The Gu Family Book, about a nine tailed fox guardian spirit who falls in love with a human and fathers a demi-god with her before tragedy strikes. That tragedy kills her, turns him into a thousand-year demon, and leaves the child to be raised by a human family who have no concept of what he is. I was watching it off of my local independent outlet which included programming from the Korean language channel MBC by having my DVR set to record a two hour block of time Monday through Friday on that channel number. It had to be set that way because the program guide information submitted to TV Guide by the local re-broadcaster bore no resemblance to reality, so timed recording was the only option.
I managed to record and watch the first 22 episodes, then my cable company changed the programming of my set top box to “improve” it’s ability to locate shows by title or actors when running a search. In the process they broke the DVR function so it could no longer do recording by time blocks but only by program names as listed in the TV Guide service or in one of their online streaming affiliates. Not only have I never seen how that show ended, having lost the final two episodes of the series, but I have also lost all the shows they ran after that, as well as shows off of another 7 channels that also are rather slipshod in updating their TV Guide listings. It looks like I am finally getting some relief from this issue from two separate quarters. First off, as you can see from the embedded trailer, NBC/Universal will be releasing the series to DVD in 3 months or so, allowing me to add it to my permanent collection. Of course, since I can not speak or read Korean I am a bit unclear on whether it will be released in the US or only in Asia, but one can hope. I consider this show to be the best epic fantasy out of Korea for 2013 that I have found so far, so I will certainly be picking it up. More immediately, this series and a whole lot of other Korean TV Dramas are available for streaming on the MBC Hulu Plus channel, so I can finally see how the story ended.
Now if only my cable company would fix its broken set top boxes to give me back the ability to record program blocks by time and channel. If they don’t solve it soon, I guess I will have to buy a TIVO box, which does have that ability, and give my cable company back their broken DVR.