I have only seen two episodes so far, but Arrow grabbed my attention right away, pretty much from the opening sequence of the first episode. I don’t know if they are going to be able to sustain the tempo and evolve the story the way it should be, but I already care about several of the characters and can’t wait to see what happens next. Meanwhile, the revival of George R. R. Martin’s Beauty and the Beast also started nicely if at a somewhat slower pace, much as the original did. I have only seen one episode of that so far, but Kristin Kreuk has already made the Catherin roll her own. I am less impressed so far with Vincent, but Jay Ryan made a strong enough first showing in the roll that there is hope for him to grow fully into the part (or maybe, just for me to get used to him in it). Of course, it is hard to imagine anyone outdoing Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman as Vincent and Catherin, but I am going to enjoy watching this updated version.
The Firefly Reunion Special will be airing on November 11th at 10PM (except no one is willing to state in which time zone that is: EST? PST? GMT?) on the Science Channel, and I for one intend to be watching! But they recorded 3 hours of footage for this one hour special, so for the Firefly 10th Anniversary: Browncoats Unite special they are releasing another 30 second or so clip online for every 5,000 tweets they get using the hashtag #FireflyNov11. Which means we only need to send out 600,000 tweets to see all of it, as long as you also watch the special on the TV channel. I am ready!
Steampunk Japan style comes to US screens this Friday when Tai Chi Zero finally gets released here. The basic plot is Kung Fu vs. the evil railroad barons, and as you can see from the trailer it should be quite entertaining. Of course, it may be a bit of a challenge to find a place showing it if you do not live in or near a major city this being a foreign film and all, but I suspect it will be worth it.
In movies the best bet looks to be Legendary Amazons, based on the historical Yang family of the Song Dynasty. There have been a number of previous movies made about this group of 11th century women generals, of which the most well known is probably 1972’s 14 Amazons from The Shaw Brothers. Like the Shaw Brothers, the action in this latest incarnation is a bit over the top, relying heavily on wire work and springboards, but it looks to be quite a fun movie. On the other hand, the less said about Alien Dawn the better; it is every bit as campy, but this one they were trying to be serious.
I still can’t believe Fox cancelled it, but because they did we have Alcatraz: The Complete Series coming out this week, instead of just season 1. In fact, while Fox still maintains the Alcatraz home page, when you go there all you get are New Girl videos with a paragraph at the bottom of the page about the show. Hence the alternate link to a fan site. Touch got renewed though, so for that one we do get Touch: The Complete First Season as well as an actual web site. A documentary series worth noting that comes out this week is Stephen Hawking: Brave New World, a UK science series that is really good.
For western animation, Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted hits the shelves, with quite a good voice cast. And lets face it, Dreamworks animation projects are usually some of the best.
In anime, Someday’s Dreamers II Sora returns to a Japan where you need both training and an official license to practice magic. The next generation of Suzuki magic users, Sora, has no problem with the spells but is completely confused by some of her fellow students, because the people in Tokyo are nothing like the folks in the small village she grew up in. Ga-Rei-Zero: The Complete Collection is also from 2008, and also about magic users, but this time it is two sisters who battle evil as part of an elite anti-demon task force. This one was made by the people who did Full Metal Panic, and considering how much I loved that series (3 series in total, actually), I am really looking forward to this one.
In IDOLM@STER: Xenoglossia season 1, the moon was shattered into thousands of large rocks a hundred years ago, but they don’t fall onto the Earth so most folks don’t think about it. When a young aspiring singer gets taken on by an IDOL company with visions of advancing her career she has no idea that in this case I.D.O.L. is an acronym for the giant robot she will be piloting to defend Earth from those rocks.
The rest of the Anime titles coming out this week are re-releases of some classic works of earlier years. My favorite of these selection has to be Tenchi Universe, the entire 26 episodes in a single box set. This series was not season two or three of the original, they retold the entire Tenchi story in an alternate universe. What didn’t change? The names, the back stories (the space pirate girl is still a space pirate) and appearances of the characters, and the fact that Tenchi has only bad luck whatever the situation. Other re-releases this time around include Casshan: Robot Hunter Casshern about the guy trying to stop his dad’s killer robots, Hellsing Ultimate: Volumes 1-4, yes, any time you see the name Hellsing with or without the Von you can expect Vampires, and Galaxy Express 999: Eternal Fantasy.
The Babylon 5 article they posted over at Tor Online, which ran under the title All Alone in the Night: When Babylon 5 Invented 21st Century Fandom is excellent, and reminded me yet again what an amazing series it was. J. Michael Straczynski created the entire story arch and wrote the majority of the episodes himself, with maybe 20 episodes written by others and few of them key. He also knew how to work the internet to directly work with the fans, as anyone who lived through those times online knows, and anyone who digs into the JMS Message Archives site will soon learn when they go back far enough. He used a lot of pre-Web tools, such as Usenet and IRC, even though the first episode of Babylon 5 did not air until 1994, by which time the first graphical Web browsers, Mosaic and its successor Netscape were already in widespread use. And he used them as a creator directly reaching out to the fan base, which had never been done before.
I still tend to disagree that he invented modern internet fandom, although he did make some major contributions on how these tools were used, because back all through the 1980s USENET and IRC were being used for fans to talk, and the first file repositories were being assembled for those who knew how to use Telnet and FTP to share text, audio, and images. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database started out being called The Internet Science Fiction Fiction Database, which was a USENET newsgroup with the name structure rec.arts.sf.written which began in 1984. If you want to dig back to the beginning and read your way to the present for a complete understanding of its evolution over the decades, check out The Linköping Science Fiction & Fantasy Archive, and yes, lots of the best early SF sites were out of Finland and Sweden. And that is just a single instance; there were many more in those days, listing them out could take me the next year.
Here is a single earlier example from my own experience. One of the prizes of my personal text file collection is a moderated chat held on Q-Link back in 1985 (Quantum Link, at the time just a Commodore computer online gateway service, later rebranded as something called AOL and opened up to all computer types) with Gene Roddenberry as the guest. It was a long distance call to Vienna Virginia from where I lived at the time, and a state of the art 300 baud telco connection (I had to solder the parts together for the hardware myself from $7 worth of Radio Shack components, you could not buy a Commodore modem) meant it took me 15 minutes to read the first 4 paragraphs of the conversation, showing up on my screen one painful letter at a time. So I typed in my question, uploaded it, waited the several minutes it took to type out the confirmation the service had received the question, and went offline. Three days later I received the information that the full text of the event had been compressed and posted, so I downloaded it. What a treat to discover that the moderator had passed on my question, and he actually gave it a considered answer!
That being said, even if J. Michael Straczynski didn’t invent modern fandom like the article author claimed (I suspect Ryan is just too young to know about the earlier stuff), he did set up a lot of the principles that modern content creators use to connect with their audiences. And he also created some of my favorite content, which besides Babylon 5 includes 1990’s Jeremiah, last years Thor, and next year’s Living Dead: The Musical.
Before Dorothy headed to Oz, many others proceeded her. One of them was a circus magician later referred to as The Wizard, and coming up next year Disney is going to be telling his story, in Oz The Great And Powerful. L. Frank Baum wrote a lot of Oz books, and while this wasn’t one of them I am really looking forward to the film. It should be hitting the big screen in March of next year.