Season 4 of Arrow kicks off on Wednesday, October 7th, the day after The Flash has its season opener, and both shows look like they are up-leveling their game. That makes sense, since they have cranked up the tension each season from the beginning, and since they are building towards next year’s Legends Of Tomorrow. Both with these series and with the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad movies, it looks like DC is finally going to give Marvel a serious fight for the hearts and minds of the audience. I for one hope the competition stays intense for many years to come, if it causes both teams to keep cranking out quality science fiction of this caliber.
The Attack on Titan feature films hit the big screen in the US on September 30th and October 20th, giving them just enough time between the two to run the TV episodes. The theatrical run is fairly limited, but not impossibly so; go to the Find Theater interface to see where the closest place is and grab your tickets. I am quite excited that I have a theater within a few miles of my location, and I am going to have to spend the money to make sure I get to see this one. Hope to see you there, even if “there” is a venue on the other side of the country!
Funimation has announced the US dates for the live action Attack On Titan movies to be in theaters, with September 30th for the first, and October 20th for the second. They made the announcement a bit over a week ago, I have been trying to find a list of theaters that will be showing it to link here, but I just haven’t found one. The official movie page does have an opt-in email registration where you can sign up to get those announcements as they become available, at least. In the meantime, here is the official US trailer.
In Movies I have to consider Big Game a fantasy, even though I don’t think that was the intention of the film makers. The plot has a thirteen-year-old boy armed with a bow and arrows who has to save the President (Samuel L. Jackson) from a group of kidnappers while fleeing across Finland. The trailer was quite nicely done, I think it might just be a fun film. We also get Lego DC Super Heroes: Justice League Attack of the Legion of Doom!, action adventure on the silly side from DC Comics and Warner Bros. Studios.
TV has The Walking Dead: The Complete Fifth Season, which gives you plenty of time to catch up with the show before season 6 starts on October 11th. I figured this program would last two seasons, three tops; I obviously underestimated the attraction of Zombies. While not genre, I enjoy the show a lot and so will mention Elementary: Season 3 also comes out this week. The network the show runs on, CBS, now has its own OTT streaming service, CBS All Access, allowing you to watch the shows the day after they air on your computer, tablet, or smart phone.
In Anime the new show is Kamigami no Asobi: Ludere Deorum, in which Zeus decides that the gods have lost touch with the mortal world. His solution is to kidnap Yui and throw her into a garden with 8 hunky gods, assigning her the job of teaching them about humanity and mortality. The gods being so easily bored, things get way more interesting than most mere mortals would ever find comfortable.
There are also a number of returning shows with new seasons, which run the gamut of categories. Love Chunibyo & Other Delusions! Heart Throb brings season 2 home, to follow in the footsteps of the original story. Not only does he have delusional Rikka to deal with, but now his childhood delusional reinforcement buddy Satone Shichimiya is back, ready to drag him into a fantasy world he may never escape from. The combat-gamer series Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works, better viewed on their CrunchyRoll Page, also brings us a new series worth of episodes. And as usual Fairy Tail: Part 16 brings us another 11 episodes in this wonderful ongoing saga.
I am excited about Heros Reborn, because when the original series of Heroes came to the small screen, it kicked ass for the first season and was almost as excellent for the second. It may have slowly degraded after that, but I stuck with it to the end. Even in the final season it had a lot of story to tell, but sadly had lost some of the threads, and some of the characters were no longer people we cared about.
In the Heroes Reborn reboot we have a number of our favorite characters from the original series, and an assortment of original characters, in what looks like a pretty good mix. We also have a good mix of story telling media, with Dark Mater Webisodes already available to enjoy (I posted the first one after the trailer, you should watch them all), the soon to be released comic book Heroes: Season Five, the App with its plethora of goodies and extras, and the 13 episode TV mini-series itself. This is not that dissimilar to what the first series did with their Heroes Evolution’s series of web sites, which included some strictly for mobile devices (not as common in 2006 as it is today).
Bottom line, the new offering has the potential to be good, and I can’t wait to start watching it and see if it lives up to that potential! The TV show portion of the new series hits the small screen on September 24th at 8/7PM (that whole time zone thing); I look forward to finding out if they did the topic justice, and hearing what everyone else has to say.
The series Rin-Ne is about Sakura, a girl who accidentally crossed into the spirit world as a young child, and ever since she sees all the ghosts around her. It is about Rinne Rokudo, who is one quarter Shinigami, a group of Japanese supernatural creatures occupying the same spiritual niche as the Grim Reaper. Some of them help lost spirits pass on to be reincarnated, while others try to lure people to their deaths. And the show is mostly about all the trouble those two get into any time they are hanging out together. The show started last season, and Crunchyroll is currently simulcasting episode 18, with new episodes airing each Wednesday at 3AM EDT. It is based on the Manga of the same name written and drawn by Rumiko Takahashi, the hardest working, richest and most famous female Mangaka in Japan. Pretty much everything she has ever done has sold millions of copies and been turned into iconic Anime classics. One last detail; the closing theme for the series is the song TOKINOWA by Passepied, one of my favorite art-rock bands from Japan.