Rumor has it that Patrick Warburton will be back in more live action episodes of The Tick, this time to be run on Amazon’s streaming video service. That is according to Topless Robot, who got it from People Magazine, and then it was confirmed by Comic Book Resources. Also back (courtesy of the interest he generated at the tail end of Guardians of the Galaxy) is Howard the Duck, in the form of the Howard the Duck Omnibus. Basically they compiled all 33 episodes of the Howard The Duck comic series, and every other story he was in from a range of Marvel properties. The blurbs Marvel shows after the credits have been running for a while being what they are, the first thing that came to my mind when I saw him was the Master of Quack Fu was going to be starring in a new Howard the Duck movie. I have found absolutely nothing indicating that is going to happen, but the thought does kind of make me smile.
You can jump over to Nickelodeon if you want to watch the next episode of the new animated version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before it airs on Friday on their cable channel. I don’t know if they plan on doing this on a regular basis, or if it is just the A Chinatown Ghost Story episode that gets to be seen early on their site. Thanks to the folks at Comic Book Movies for the heads up on this one.
Daisuki is an online streaming service created by a consortium of Japanese Anime companies. Some of the titles they are streaming this season include Sword Art Online II, the Irregular at Magic High School, and M3 the Dark Metal. It has taken them almost a year, but finally the first Daisuki App is available for the iPad or iPhone (word is they will have an Android version available soon). Unlike many of the premium streaming services, you don’t actually need a paid account to get to watch programs from them. You will still be limited to their free programs, or the first few free episodes from some of their paid programs, of course. But you only need a free registration from their web site to use their app, which puts them head and shoulders above most such applications, which require a paid subscription. And since even the free registration log in to their app allows you to stream a ton of videos not available anywhere else, you can’t really go wrong by signing up for this.
Ready for this time travel story about war and the need for continuity across the centuries? Have a free glimpse of Outlander episode 1, and see if you don’t want to join the party. I found it quite tasty and I think you will too. Visualize it as Highlander with a Tardis.
The 2014 summer anime season just started, and we are in episode 2 or 3 for most shows this week. There are a lot of great shows this season, with both returning favorites and a bunch of new programs, some of which look quite good even though it is still early in the season. I have my own favorites, but I will wait for one more week’s worth of episodes before sharing them. That is partly because I want an additional episode of each to make sure they are consistently good, and partly because I am still trying out new stuff I haven’t seen yet to decide whether or not to add them to my watched list. What I wanted to share today was a couple of good places to find out about the shows.
Crunchyroll has the Final Summer 2014 Anime Season Chart, with each show individually detailed to include the studio that made it, a description of the program/premise it was built on, what kind of media it began life as (Game, Manga, Light Novel, etc.), the date the show began, and a link to the Anime’s home page (the BAKA.BZ entry for each one). You can find the details about how this grid was created at Neregate, which includes all the entries, not just the ones Crunchyroll is associated with. This is a wonderful resource for figuring out what is available and where it began, but a pretty poor tool for basing your decisions on. With this one, you read about each entry and decide for yourself which ones to check out, without any kind of descriptive streamlining, trailers, rating system, or recommendation. Still, there is a ton of good info here, well worth your time to explore!
Kotaku has Your Complete Summer 2014 Anime Guide, and I do like the format. They give you the title, the genre, when it starts, where you can watch it, a single sentence description of the plot/premise, and a trailer for each show. It doesn’t take much time to go through the article and get a short list of interesting series to check out, with an idea of what other ones might be worth watching once you have discarded the less than stellar members of that first set. This way to go about your decision making takes a personal approach, meaning you have to be involved at every step of the process. While the initial run through the guide doesn’t take long, watching the shows themselves to decide which ones are worth following can take a bit. For instance, if you start by checking the first 3 episodes of the 5 shows you find interesting, you have burned 345 minutes, or just under 6 hours. Drop the 2 you find least interesting and check out a different show, and you have burned an additional 150 minutes. This is way better than doing everything yourself so I find it a serious improvement over the previous method.
Anime News Network has the Summer 2014 Preview Guide, which is built more on a crowd-sourcing basis than a traditional top down reporting structure. Any given show has reviews by multiple people, each of whom has their own perspective on the program. This kind of reporting system has its own advantages, such as allowing you to compare and contrast the different reviews against your own impressions about a given entry in order to build a rating system for the reviewers themselves. Once you rate the reviewers from 1 to 5 in terms of the ones who’s opinions always match yours at 5 to the ones who’s opinions never match yours at 1, the next step is simple. You build a spread sheet or database (depending on which environment you are most comfortable working in) that creates a matrix with your reviewer rating as the X axis and that reviewer’s rating of each show as the Y axis. It takes some time to do the original analysis of the reviewers and then build the matrix, my guestimate being around 12 hours total. But once you have the matrix built, it is just a matter of dropping the current seasons reviews into place, rating any new reviewers since last season, and running the report.
I admit, my conclusions are more about my being lazy while in geek mode than about your own best use of the resources to come to your own conclusions. So you will have to check out the sources for yourself, and see which source/technique makes the most sense for how you like to do things. Please let me know about any new resources or processes you find that I haven’t mentioned here; I am sure there are a number of them, and I would like to add them to the collection.
Sword Art Online will be kicking off season 2 in a few days, on Saturday the 5th. If you liked the first season, I recommend you sign up for a free account with Crunchyroll so you can see the second season quickly, watching each episode a week after it airs in Tokyo. If you REALLY like the show, you might want to consider getting a premium membership, so you can watch each one an hour after it airs in Japan.
「ソードアート・オンラインⅡ」トレーラー by AnimeSlovenija