I wish I could post the image here, but the artist has asked that no one does that, but rather gives a link to her work on her Deviant Art site. Mimi-Na’s Doctors Girls is quite a nice work of art, and she really caught the iconic female companions perfectly, so you know at a glance who each one is. Between the facial expressions and the font used in each word balloon she even manages to convey the basic personality of each companion. While you are there, take a look at her other sci-i art, including a bunch more Doctor Who images.
Not the Experience in Seattle, home of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, but a real live Museum of Science Fiction is being built in Washington, DC, and it is yet another project being built by crowdfunding. It will cover the history of the genre in all the various media, and examine its relationship to the real world. As they say on their You Tube page: Our mission is to create a center of gravity where art and science are powered by imagination. This effort is headed up by science fiction authors Greg Bear and David Brin, and their crowdfunding is centered at Indiegogo. They are starting by building a preview museum to open next year, and hoping to open the full scale facility by 2017. The preview museum will have exhibits including Star Trek, Star Wars, and Doctor Who artifacts, as both a warm up and an additional fund raising effort. Thanks to USA Today for the heads up on this one.
Yes, there is a Doctor Who: #SaveTheDay hashtag, and you might get some recognition and unlock some sneak peaks at the 50th anniversary celebration. Just upload your most creative content to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #SaveTheDay to get involved. It is also a chance to be featured on the Doctor Who #savetheday web site if they like your creation.
For those wondering what the count down clock is all about, it is all about the Doctor Who 50th Celebration and the episode they will air around the world that night, Day Of The Doctor.
It is a serious treat to learn they recently recovered 11 old Doctor Who episodes from a storage closet in Nigeria, 9 of which have not been seen since they originally aired! And now we can watch the first few.
They have already digitally remastered two of them and made them available for download on iTunes, both Patrick Troughton stories. The Web of Fear previously existed only as a rumor except for episode 1, usually mentioned when talking about how Pertwee’s end as The Doctor came at the mandibles of his old spider foes, who we had never seen before. Every so often someone mentions that was also the episode where we were introduced to Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, later to be promoted, and mostly referred to as The Brigadier. Episode 3 is still MIA, but they have the original audio track and 11 stills to use to reconstruct it, so the story will be intact. How nice to have the rest of them back for the first time in forever, and the missing episode partially reconstructed!
The Enemy of the World has Patrick Troughton being both the Doctor and the bad guy, the first time that had happened (Tom Baker was later to reprise that in The Mind Of Evil). This one they only had episode 3 of previously, with this discovery they now have all 6. Companions Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Victoria (Deborah Watling) are in both of these stories, and while we have seen a lot of Jamie, most of Victoria’s stories were lost, so I look forward to the opportunity to learn more about who she was and what she brought to the role of a Companion.
I also have to mention that the link to download them from iTunes didn’t work for me. The link did launch my iTunes app, but then I had to search for each title before I could find the correct link to buy and download it from. A bit of a pain, but I am willing to go through a lot more than that to get Doctor Who episodes I have not already watched dozens of times each!
My apologies for posting the moral equivalent of commercials this time,but the on-screen words pretty much matched up to my attitude on each episode, so I just posted them as is.
After Earth leads in the movie category this week, one of several very well done films this year about returning to a changed Earth after going to Space to survive as a species. But it is far from the only choice, and the film Europa Report is a near-future thriller that slides between documentary and alternate history as it lays out its story, and it definitely did the space scenes better than most. Finally, the Whedonesq version of Much Ado About Nothing joins the take-home movie ranks.
In TV, the animated series Robot Chicken: Season 6 looks like the best option to me; I love this show, surreal and silly at the same time. American Horror Story: Asylum is the complete second season, and just like the first season, it is a departure from what you might be expecting. The Tom Baker episode of Dr. Who: Terror Of The Zygons is being released, or re-released, depending on whether you count VHS as a valid release option.
Season one of We Without Wings is coming out in Anime this week. The story you get when you throw together a shy boy, an alternate medieval world, an upbeat guy, a hard boiled loner, two gangs, and a girl with a uniform fetish is somewhat adventurous and pretty darn funny. Brave10: Complete Series is 12 episodes of Warring States-era Ninja Vs. Samurai goodness, with our protagonist and her Band of 10 Brave Warriors using their mystical powers to protect the weak and innocent.
In ongoing series, Naruto Shippuden: Box 16 continues with episodes 193 through 205, and we still have a good way to go to catch up with Japan. And Phi-Brain: Puzzle of God runs their complete season 2 series, The Orpheus Order with still more lethal puzzles to solve. Season 3 starts streaming soon.