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Something to Watch: Discs

In movies we have Cinderella, a new live action take by Disney on the classic story. If you are looking for something a bit sillier you might want to check out Lego Star Wars: The New Yoda Chronicles Complete Collection. TV has Sleepy Hollow: The Complete Second Season, and Fox actually signed off on season 3. And I suppose I should also mention The Big Bang Theory: The Complete Eighth Season, even though I don’t personally watch it.

In Anime the The Irregular at Magic High School: Nine Schools Competition Arc siblings Tatsuya and Miyuki Shiba are at two different levels, Practitioner and Engineer, but the lowly engineer is changing the way the science of Magic is applied, and overturning the way everyone from the Military to the Yakuza thought the world worked. This show is following a rather unusual release pattern in that they are not putting it out by season, but by story arc. Since it ran for two seasons but was made up of 3 separate story arcs of different lengths that can become a little confusing, and it doesn’t help any that this set is priced around twice as much per episode as the usual initial release run. I will be waiting for a better deal and the complete series in a single box before I pick this up. If I feel the need to watch it again before that time comes I will stream it. Also out this week is The Comic Artist & His Assistants, which isn’t exactly genre, but rather a recursive story about creating one of the media formats the stories are told in.

Something to Watch: Discs

This week Movies bring us The Age of Adaline, the story of a woman who stopped aging around 1927, and fell in love in 2014. TV has Gotham: The Complete First Season and Supernatural: The Complete Tenth Season, both action dramas which are a bit on the dark side.

There is nothing new in Anime this week, but Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust has only been released on VHS in the US up until now, so this will be its DVD debut. It is based on the third novel in Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Vampire Hunter book series, which has 27 novels so far. That is a bit misleading, since some of the novels take as many as 4 volumes to complete, there are a total of 40 books, with more expected to be in the works.Then there are two different spin off series of light novels; for the complete list, see the Wikipedia article about the franchise. Everything else coming out this week is a re-release, including the classics Patlabor Movie 3: WXIII and Ranma ½ – Set 7.

Something to Stream: Sky Wizard’s Academy

One of the new Anime shows streaming this season is Sky Wizard’s Academy, being hosted on the Funimation service. The story is straightforward enough according to the official site: Forced to retreat to floating cities due to an invasion of magical armored insects, humanity must now depend on Sky Wizards to battle the menace. The primary characters are almost that simple and straightforward, except for the collection of misunderstandings surrounding the protagonist as he meets his team for the first time.

I have to admit, this show did not attract my attention right away, so I only watched the first episode a few days back. I found it quite enjoyable as an introduction to a new series goes, and it does look to have a great deal of potential. If reviewing these kind of things was my day job I would have no doubt binge watched my way up to this week’s offering, episode 8, but sadly I have to work for a living. But I did enjoy the first one enough to make it worth mentioning in this post, complete with the link to its streaming home page and the trailer from there, so you could watch it and come to your own conclusions.

Mice and Mystics, Family version

This is about a terminally kawaii game called Mice and Mystics which Wil Wheaton brought in and showed on his program Tabletop!. Not being content to let it stop there, he also brought in some family members, specifically Anne Wheaton, Ryan Wheaton, and Nolan Kopp to demonstrate how the game should be played. Or maybe he was trying to show us how his family plays simple but interesting games together, which quite frankly reminded me about how my families gaming sessions go. This is the TableTop Season 3 finale, or at least the first part of it, and if you haven’t been following from the beginning this episode should make you realize why you want to go back and binge-watch the entire season. And then maybe the 2 before that. And if you have missed this, perhaps the channel the program is on might have snuck past you in the darkness; Geek And Sundry is a Felicia Day project that has gathered together some of my favorite people on the planet and given them a platform to prove to the rest of us why they are fun folks.

Drop It Like Its Spock

This is apparently a Trek parody of the song Drop It Like Its Hot, put together by K Face TV, and it is a fun little video. In fact, this is the best Trek parody video I have seen this year, quite tasty! I also appreciate they give full credit to everyone who worked on this production with them. I hope they put more of these together, I liked this one a lot.

Something to Do: Movies

Hot on the heels of last weeks brush with U.N.C.L.E. we get two spy thrillers, the first being Hitman: Agent 47. He got that number because he is the 47th in a line of genetically engineered soldier/assassins, and he is not terribly happy about his fate. Now someone is out to unlock the secret of his creation and build an army of unstoppable killers, and he is the only thing standing between them and world domination. Then there is American Ultra, where a stoner turns out to be a highly programmed MK-Ultra sleeper agent, accidentally activated while working the overnight shift at his convenience store. Now the government is trying to shut him down permanently and he is running for his life. This one is as much a comedy as an action/adventure film.