This time around Humble Bundle is offering a Doctor Who Comics Bundle currently with about 50 titles in it. If you haven’t hit Humble Bundle before, they have deals on various nerd-approved things, often including ebooks, games, and audio dramas. You get to select what price you will pay, but if you pay above a specified amount you unlock additional titles. Each deal comes with a charity being supported, and you also get to select what percentage of your payment goes to the creator, what goes to the charity, and what goes to the site itself for setting it all up. I generally just leave the percentage at the default since it is usually very equitable, and for the Doctor Who Comics Bundle the charity is Children In Need, a most worthwhile organization. As little as $15 unlocks all 50 issues of the comics and puts money into the Children in Need coffers; or if you are not a Doctor Who fan, look into their other current bundles, odds are good you will find something you like coupled with someone you want to support.
A classic lost story of Doctor Who will be available in select movie theaters for one night only. On Monday, November 14th, Doctor Who: The Power of the Daleks will be on the big screen thanks to BBC Worldwide. This was the 1966 story with the very first regeneration, when William Hartnell’s Doctor was killed off, and regenerated into Patrick Troughton’s version of the character. No one had any idea if it would work or if they would lose the audience, but with 20/20 hindsight it is obvious it worked very well indeed. The original broadcast now only exists as a handful of 15 second film clips totaling maybe 3 minutes or so, and a number of semi-complete audio recordings. So they compiled, cleaned up, and merged the best of the audio into the full soundtrack, and had a team of animators create the visuals to go with it. I have never heard this particular story, and while I could just buy the DVD and watch it at home (it becomes available in November as well) I feel the need to be in a large auditorium with a bunch of other serious Whovians and experience it for the first time it has been shown in public in 50 years.
The only genre piece I could find this week is the fantasy Inferno, based on the Dan Brown book. But there are a lot of great films coming out this season, some very soon indeed. I think this weekend would be a good time to catch up on some binge streaming while I wait for them.
While there doesn’t seem to be any actual genre movies or TV this week, Nerve comes pretty close, and is an edge-of-your-seat kind of adventure. Skiptrace is a Jackie Chan action/comedy worth checking out as well.
In Anime In Search of the Lost Future: Complete Series is the 12 episode story of a time traveler hiding out in the Astronomy Club, sent from the future to save a life that ended too early. Owarimonogatari Part 1 is just as surreal as anything else in Nisio Isin’s Monogatari series of light novels, and they transitioned that to the anime rather well. This package has the first 7 episodes of the 12 episode series. The Perfect Insider: Complete Series has an architecture professor and a math prodigy teamed up to solve a locked room murder of a genius programmer.
Flip Flappers is the most visually interesting anime of the new season, as well as being more than a little surreal. It compares favorably with Gurren-Lagann, FLCL (pronounced Fooly Cooly), and Paprika, at least so far. We will have to see if the story can grow as amazing as the visuals, like the other three I mentioned did. There are only three episodes posted so far, so if you like the first one you can binge your way through it in just over an hour.
Goro Miyazaki created an Anime version of Astrid Lindgren’s fantasy novel Ronja the Robber’s Daughter, and Amazon has picked it up for their Amazon Prime streaming service. Gillian Anderson will be narrating the story for them, and as a fan of all things Studio Ghibli I am looking forward to watching it. My only question now is when it will be available; they only finished dubbing the English audio in the last week or two, and searching the US and UK Amazon sites reveals no information.