It looks like the official props crew of the BBC, and the BBC itself, have now licensed for sale Official Daleks. They are full sized replicas built from the same moulds and specifications used to create the ones you see on TV, and if they seem a bit pricey at £3,000 (just under $5,000), remember that each one is hand-built to order. Being the same as the TV versions, you can not ride around in them like cars, but you can wear them like costumes if you crouch down and manipulate the transport directly (foot powered). Thanks to the folks at io9 for the heads up on this one.
I don’t see any movies this week in wide release I am excited about, but I have to mention Cars 2 simply because Pixar always does an amazing job with their animation. However, if you are in Seattle, the new Philip K. Dick movie Radio Free Albemuth will be having its theatrical world premiere at the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, kicking off their annual awards presentation. Wish I was on that coast.
The top movie this week is The Adjustment Bureau, yet another Philip K. Dick story given the big screen treatment. I thought the early 1960s stylization of the sets and costumes was a good choice, since that matched up with the era it was written in. Another good one is The Eagle, the dramatization of what might have happened to the Ninth Legion in 120 AD. To counterbalance those, we have Van Von Hunter, a silly live action movie based on an American comic but filmed by Tokyo Pop (you may have recently seen their movie Priest), a now defunct American production and distribution company for predominately Japanese properties. The other counterbalance is Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, just to prove silly movies still sell. I have never been able to figure out why these kind of movies made in the US are so offensive to me, and yet I love Gojira and the like from Japan. Actually the US release of Godzilla with Jean and Mathew was a favorite as well; maybe it’s the monsters.
For TV, Medium: The Final Season becomes available, as well as the full series in a single box set. While I am aware this series was based on someone’s real life, to me it will always be Fantasy.
New Anime this week starts with Bleach Uncut Box Set 9, another handful of episodes in this long running series about the world of the Soul Reapers. When I say a handful, I mean just that; episodes 146 through 156 are included here, only 11 of them. At this rate, it will be a while before we catch up with the current production run, which is somewhere around episode 275. The Kanokon OVA Collection is all about summer break and how the relationships evolve as the Fox Goddess and Wolf Goddess continue to vie for the heart of the human Kouta.
While not actually Sci-Fi or Fantasy, You’re Under Arrest is one of my favorite Anime series, and the Complete Full Throttle set is also the complete season 3. It has been a while since the last season, and this one starts off with one partner having returned from forensics training in the US, while the other one just finished JSDF (Japanese Self-Defense Force) Ranger training, which is as close to Green Beret as makes no difference. If you thought these two were dangerous to everyone anywhere near them before (criminal or not), wait till you see them now! And Kekkaishi – Part 1 has two childhood friends battling it out to see who gets to be the destroyer of monsters using barrier magic. While both are doing their best to protect their people, they are not the same gender, so some romantic tension gets added to the story.
Finally, this weeks classic series re-release is Blue Gender, where our protagonist wakes up from a few decades of suspended animation to discover that instead of the cure for his terminal disease that he was expecting, humans are being hunted as food by giant insects. As usual with such releases, you can pick up this quality series for dirt cheap if you shop around, $20 being the est price I found.
If you have seen any of my previous posts on the subject you know I have been looking forward to Green Lantern for a while now. The wait is finally over, and I will be in my local theater on Friday.
In movies, Red Riding Hood pits the darling caped cutey against a werewolf, or perhaps the werewolf hunter is the true evil one? The Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke put this together, but did rather a better job of it than in that series of films, or perhaps just had better source material to work with. For alien invasion fans, Battle: Los Angeles is hitting the shelves. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, is a martial arts movie about a wealthy playboy by day who becomes a masked crusader by night, fighting the Japanese occupation forces and Chinese mafia in 1920’s Shanghai. Staring Donnie Yen, playing the hero first portrayed by Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury, this one is tasty. And while it probably isn’t genre, Miente looks pretty interesting with a double handful of film festival awards and a killer soundtrack.
In TV, Haven: The Complete First Season is sort of what would happen if you merged Twin Peaks with Castle; each week there is a murder to be solved, but they died in some really weird, near supernatural way. Based on Stephen King’s novel The Colorado Kid, there is an overlying mystery to be solved about the town itself that makes these things happen there driving the story arc. There is some good dynamic tension between the FBI lady, the local cop with no sense of touch, and the bad-boy rouge type who might be one of the good guys.
There are two classic Doctor Who episodes being released this week. Doctor Who: Frontios is a Peter Davison era story with Tegan (Janet Fielding) and Turlough (Mark Strickson) as the companions. A group of human colonists who fled the destruction of the Earth are being used as spare parts for some underground aliens with gravity control technology and a mining operation. Time and The Rani is the first Sylvester McCoy episode, with Mel (Bonnie Langford) as the companion. The Rani has enslaved a planet and built a supercomputer by networking a bunch of really smart beings together, including Pasteur and Einstein from Earth, as the first step in her master plan.
There are a number of Best of the 80s packages involving a couple of disks with eight or ten of the best episodes from the show, usually including the pilot and series finale, coming out this week. I mention it because one of them is genre: Knight Rider, but I will not be adding any of these to my collection.
For western animation, Marvel Knights: Spider-Woman Agent Of S.W.O.R.D. was a 2009 TV series that now becomes available on disc. While I have been loving the live action films Marvel has been putting out, I have not been very impressed with the quality of the animations as a rule. Which is kind of strange when you consider how much I have been enjoying the animated comics productions, but there it is.
In Anime, Demon King Daimao – Complete Collection is the new series for the week; when he took his entry aptitude tests at the Constant Magical Academy, the results he heard were Future Occupation… Devil King. While trying to avoid that fate, he ran into more than the usual amount of girl trouble, some trying to help, others trying to hinder, but every one with their own agenda. In re-release in a cost effective package is the masterpiece Last Exile – The Complete Series Viridian Collection. One of the best steampunk anime’s ever made, one of the best aerial combat anime’s ever made, and one of the best anti-war anime’s ever made, it is hard to believe you can now pick the whole thing up for around 20 bucks. I think this one has to be on my top ten list of best anime’s of all time.
This Friday the movie of choice is Super 8, yet another J.J. Abrams project by way of Steven Spielberg. Something escapes a train wreck while being transported from Area 51, and a group of kids catch some footage of it on a super 8 camera. Also out in extremely limited theatrical release (but available On Demand starting today; check your local interactive guide) is the Norwegian film Troll Hunter, about a group of students investigating a government cover-up of trolls in northern Norway. This one is a mocumentory in the Blair Witch style, Norwegian with English subtitles.