Season 1 of the show based on the Charlene Harris novels, True Blood, was amazing. Season 2, coming out on DVD in a week, blew season 1 away. So are you ready, Fangbangers and Fans of Telepathic Waitresses? Season 3 of True Blood kicks off in a few weeks, on the 13th of June 2010, and looks like a monster and a half to me! In Season 3 we finally get to meet the Werewolves, and learn a bit more about the unseen history of the world. Thanks to Screen Crave for the trailer link.
This one is a bit silly, and very Otaku. Van Von Hunter rolls with the tag line “Putting the Van in Vanquished“, and is a live-action comedy mocumentary. It takes place in Hollywood and Tokyo, with a hero who is out to vanquish evil and save the world… sort of. Watch it now at Crunchyroll.
The countdown is on for the new Doctor Who; in the UK, it happens on BBC1 this Saturday, April 3rd, here in the US we will be a few weeks behind on April 17th on BBC America. For those in the US who can’t stand the wait, there will also be a Premiere Screening and Q&A Event in NYC on April 14th, with the questions being answered by Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Steven Moffat. Remember, this is the season where Neil Gaiman Is Confirmed as an episode writer. So what, you may be wondering, makes this well-known information worth posting on April Fools Day, when it is obviously not a joke? This wonderful little article at SFX, called Tie-Fi, where they present A brief pictorial history of the bow tie in sci-fi. I couldn’t stop laughing, and yet it is so true! Grin if you got ’em…
If you are a fan of animation, one program you should try to catch every week is Digista, or in English the Digital Stadium. Each week they have a guest who is a professional in the digital arts field, usually but not always animation. That guest, referred to as the Curator, nominates four works by unknown new talent for the panel and the audience to review and judge. One piece each week is declared the winner and goes into the permanent collection of the Digital Stadium Hall of Fame. Once a year all the entrants to the stadium become part of the annual competition, at which the DIGISTA Awards are handed out.
This program is a wonderful showcase for new animation talent, giving them world wide exposure. You can watch each weeks program anywhere NHK World is available. If your local cable company does not carry them (mine does, if yours doesn’t start calling and writing them to tell them to add it, or you can get them off a satellite), you can watch the animations online from the hall of fame page. Other NHK programs I never miss are Imagine-Nation for the weekly Anime, Gaming, and Manga news and features, and J-Melo for news and performances from the Japan music scene. The animation that won this weeks Digital Stadium entry is called Confessions of Fumiko; enjoy.
In 1990, Douglas Adams got together with Tom Baker, and they made a program for the BBC called Hyperland, a documentary about the Web. The Internet had been around for decades at that point, and even became common among early adapters around 1984 through dedicated client services like AOL and Compuserve. But the modern version of the Web was being invented as this program was being made, and only came into being two years later, around 1992. So here is a bit of history; you can find more here. By the way, did you see the Doctor and Romana hawking computers in the early ’80s? How about Captain Kirk?
The word is out that Robot Chicken will be giving the full treatment to Avatar and Twilight, as it did for Star Wars. They have done the first handful of episodes for season 5 and are continuing with production. Seth Green estimates 10 months until we get to see it on TV, but in the meantime season 4 is on the store shelves.
And then there is Fallout, a BBC funded project based on the Dark Horse Comics series Apocalypse Nerd. You can never have too much British End of the World comedy, after all. Right now it is only a pilot but with luck the BBC will pick it up for a full series. Thanks to SF Signal for the heads up on this one.
Fallout: Teaser Trailer from tupaq felber on Vimeo.