I didn’t find any genre movies or TV shows this time, but there are still a few worth mentioning. Spare Parts is a true story of the four undocumented Mexican-American high school students who went head to head with the team from MIT in the National Underwater Robotics Competition, using robots made from spare parts. The TV series Halt and Catch Fire: The Complete First Season takes place the year after IBM came out with the Personal PC, with a fictional company comprised of renegade engineers reverse engineering it and improving on it, as the computer race got off the ground. While the characters are fictional, the engineering issues they face and the solutions they come up with for them are the very ones the entire industry was working on at the time. The personality mix of the engineers will look very familiar to anyone involved with any cutting edge engineering project; thinking outside the box and radical innovation are not done by ordinary engineers, but by the exceptional. Masters of Sex: Season 2 is also a story about real-life cutting edge science which actually took place in the past, as doctors Masters and Johnson did the research that would change our understanding of the most basic aspect of human nature.
In Anime Natsume’s Book of Friends: Season 4 follows our protagonist as he continues to give the yokai their names back. He is learning how to deal with the yokai and humans that surround his life and now must learn about himself as well. The World God Only Knows: OVA Collection finds the girls forming an Idol band among other wacky goings-on, now that Keima has become something of a wizard. I should also mention that the classic Patlabor: The Movie, previously available only in SD, is coming out on Blue Ray this week.