Otakon kicked off today, and included the east coast premiere of EVANGELION 1.0: YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE, and a fun little project called Pirates vs. Ninjas. Musical guests include VAMPS for those wondering what Hyde has been up to since he left L’Arc-en-Ciel, and MELL. It is being covered by all the usual suspects, including Anime News Network, Ani Gamers, Funimation, and more. The con has an official Twitter link and a dealers room webcam, but that’s not as much fun as being there yourself. It runs through Sunday if you still want to grab a daypass.
The comic-con is coming next week, already sold out, and filled with some amazing guests. For those of us who can’t be there, G4 will cover it, as will several hundred bloggers.
Test your Star Wars movie knowledge at the Star Wars movie quiz at SciFi Scanner (thanks on the heads-up on that one to SF Signal).
IO9 scores again, with two excellent articles today. The first talks about the new shows on SyFy, and how they are for the most part recycled old shows. They are right on the money about Warehouse 13, and the combination of two old favorites is quite entertaining (the web page is nicely done as well). They also touch on Eureka (I disagree with their conclusions on that one), and the forthcoming Alien Nation and (possibly?) Quantum Leap. The other article I enjoyed today was on science fiction lawyers, which is a larger list than I would have expected. And that’s surprising, because I knew everyone mentioned; but they forgot Eli Stone and a few others. The first teaser trailer is out for Burden, a movie that has already been nominated for multiple awards before being released. Independent films often make the festival circuits pre-release, and this one is no exception; you can see it at the DragonCon Film Festival in September, Action On Film IFF on the 25th, and the International Film Festival Ireland at the beginning of September.
Word has come out that the new season of Dollhouse will be starting a week later than the announced original air date, but this is not a bad thing. They made the move to give a bit of extra production time to the team, since they only start building the new episodes this month. If Fox wasn’t already aware there was a serious following for the program, they probably got a clue when their sales servers crashed from people hammering on it to order the limited edition season 1 box set available only to Comic-Con 2009 attendees. Fox finally got it right, now can NBC do the same with Day One? The last TV show built by Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the creator of Day One, was The Middleman, which comes out on DVD on July 28th.
SFX has a nice interview with the producer of Torchwood about the new special Children of Earth. Originally the BBC America presentation was announced as happening 5 hours or so after it aired in the UK, but that has changed. It starts tomorrow night, July 6th, in the British Isles, and three Torchwood Radio Plays aired last week on BBC Radio 4 (you still have a few days to listen to them in streaming format, but they are only downloadable in the UK). The Torchwood special is being held until the launch of BBC America HD on July 20th. Also airing in Hi Def that week is the new Doctor Who special Planet of the Dead, the series finale of Primeval, and the series premiere of Being Human.
If you haven’t seen the web sites the viral marketing department has put up for the new movie District 9, the bad guys are located at Multi-National United, while the resistance lives at MNU Spreads Lies. The movie has a scheduled release date of August 14th in the US, and is based on the short film Alive in Joburg.