In order for this to make sense, you will have to be a fan of 2 different UK TV shows: Doctor Who and Top Gear. In this episode Matt Smith not only becomes the fastest Doctor Who ever on the Top Gear Star in a Reasonably Priced Car test track, he does it while channeling Malcolm McDowell in his A Clockwork Orange persona. This gets even funnier when you see Matt go head to head with The Stig!
The first Official Doctor Who Convention will be held in Cardiff the weekend of March 24th and 25th. The guest list is every bit as impressive as you would expect, and since they actually film in Cardiff there will be outrageous new opportunities, including a TARDIS set tour on the actual sound stage. Pretty much every special presentation ever held at the Doctor Who Experience will be part of the weekend, which makes sense when you realize they have already closed in London and moved it to Cardiff, where they are now putting it back together, along with various new bits. I feel the need for another excursion to the UK coming on…
This absolutely has to be my favorite video of a schoolteacher (specifically a German teacher) building a Tardis. This was obviously a true labor of love, appropriate for the month that contains both Valentines Day and Leap Year.
The only US live action movie selection this time around is good, but isn’t genre: The Rum Diary, where once more Johnny Depp channels Hunter S. Thompson. Sword of Desperation from Japan tells the tale of a Swordsman who tries to raise his niece after the death of his wife and his release from prison while developing his own school of fighting. Also out is the classic film Three Outlaw Samurai, more of an origin story than a pilot for the TV series of the same name. And I am going to mention Nude Nuns With Big Guns because I figure that has to have some kind of a bizarre effect on my search engine results.
The top TV choice this time around is the Dr. Who show The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe which I am sure everyone recognizes as the 2011 Christmas Special. Like all that went before, this one has its own special moments. To counterbalance that, They Came From Outer Space: The Complete Television Series lasted on the air for nearly a season back in 1990, being the story of two alien brothers touring California in a classic corvette while government agents tried to capture them.
There are several western animations offerings this time around, but all spinoffs or direct to disc sequels. From Dreamworks, Dragons: Gift of the Night Fury is a sequel to How To Train Your Dragon. The other two are from a single source, the Penguins of Madagascar TV show, with the titles New to the Zoo and Operation Get Ducky being released separately.
In Anime, Chrome Shelled Regios – The Complete Series brings it out in a single package now, and drops the price from the $60 of the Part 1 and Part 2 release down to $45 or less if you shop around. In addition the Hell Girl: Three Vessels – Complete Collection does pretty much the same thing, but with different price points for each package.
In November of 2013 Doctor Who will be 50 years old, having first aired in November, 1963. Moffat and company have been doing a great job of building up to it, and promise a really exciting series of events throughout the year. In honor of that, a trailer for the last question, and a snippet of an interview with Aldred and McCoy about their interest in joining in on the fun.
It is more Captain Robert, of course, than the band as a whole, but the first several chapters of The Wrath Of Fate are available to purchase, or to listen to online if you need a taste before making your decision. This is the fictionalized story of the origin of Abney Park, a kick-ass Steampunk band, and personally I love the way it is evolving so far. Just in case you didn’t know what kind of music a Steampunk Band plays, the second video shows them practicing one of their better songs, Airship Pirates, although the audio with it is from the studio version. This is the music you would have been listening to when the semaphores or telegraph finished sending the digitally processed signals, and Babbage’s Difference Engine used an array of tuned saw blades struck by hammers to play it back out to you. In those days, we would have been called clackers rather than hackers because of the sounds the steam-driven brass logic switches would have made while they ran our calculations, algorithms, and apps.
And a couple of pictures taken in London a few months ago; the first is a picture I took while staring at the actual, completed Babbage Engine (Babbage never finished building the full sized one himself, although he did have a bunch of smaller versions that allowed Ada to develop the worlds first programing language). I tried my best not to drool all over the case, but I may have failed in that particular.
The second was a picture taken of me and the Babbage machine by my traveling companion, proving I was there with it. I know that in this era of photoshoping anything and everything this does not constitute proof in most peoples minds. Since I have the added data point of having been there and remembering the moment the photo was taken, I could really care less if you believe it; for me, this is the photo that locks it down in my memory.
Finally, a bit of Captain Robert’s own attitude, as distributed by G4, about what Steampunk really is…