Skip to main content

Heroes Reborn

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.

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 Watch: Discs

Some amazing short animations have been collected up in Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection, which I incorrectly identified as being available last week. Most of them are fantasy, and one or two are sci-fi. Non-genre but no less surreal for that, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is a strange and wonderful Swedish film that everyone ought to see at least once. For the musically inclined, the docudrama LAMBERT & STAMP is about a couple of guys out to make a movie about a rock band who ended up being the managers of The Who. They didn’t have a clue what they were doing, but somehow wound up helping to shape one of the iconic rock bands of the last century. Finally the Western animation feature Batman Unlimited: Monster Mayhem has a subset of the Justice League trying to deal with a consortium of criminals in Gotham on Halloween.

TV has Once Upon a Time: Season 4, a show that gets better with each story. The release date gives you a month or so to binge your way through it before season 5 kicks of on September 27th. The week also brings the UK series Atlantis: Season Two Part Two, also a fantasy although not quite as imaginative.

Anime this week is represented by Future Diary: Complete Series, in which a dozen combatants receive a cell phone app which shows them their death three or four minutes before it happens. If they are very quick and very lucky they might live through it, surviving to face the next challenge which will come along much too quickly. If you are a fan of the manga this is based on, you might also enjoy watching the Live Action version, streaming now from Japan.

Something to Stream: Actually, I Am…

One of the more amusing Anime’s this season is Actually I Am… , in which Kuromine is a high school student who supposedly cannot keep a secret. I know that doesn’t sound like much of a premise, but the writers take it and run with it, with quite funny results. This is about all I can say without needing to post a Spoiler Alert: A bit over the half way mark through the first episode he discovers the girl he has a crush on, Yoko Shiragami, has a secret. She will be yanked out of school and he will never see her again if her dad learns that anyone knows about her, so he spends the rest of the episode going to great lengths to help keep her secret. Things just keep getting funnier from there, episode after episode, at least through the first half dozen of them. I have no idea if they can keep up the momentum and the humor all the way through the series, or first season, or however long it ends up being, but I really like the show so far. Check it out and see what you think.

Something to Watch: Discs

Movies have no genre this week, but they do have the latest in Jackie Chan’s breakout drama series Police Story: Lockdown. Police Captain Zhong Wen is seeing his daughter for the first time in many years, and meeting her fiance in his nightclub. But the fiance has plans to take her, him, and the entire club hostage; plans which the Police Captain has to defeat if he wants to save his family. The original 1985 film Police Story was the movie that went beyond anything his comedy’s had done, making him a major star once and for all. The Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection has some excellent animated short features, including Frozen Fever and Tangled Ever After. They have been previously released as extras on various Disney feature film blue rays, but this is the first time that a number of them have been compiled together.

TV brings us Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, based on Susanna Clarke’s award-winning novel of the same name. The battle between these two magicians over who was the more powerful was fought while the Napoleonic Wars raged around them.

In Anime, Captain Earth: Collection 2 has things looking grim for Earth’s defenders. The Planetary Gear’s direct attacks have been beaten off so far, but the numbers against them slowly get worse as the enemy strips off various layers of their defenses and allies. Kawai Complex Guide to Manors & Hostel Behavior may be a slice-of-life type Anime rather than Sci-Fi or Fantasy, but it has a ton of humor built in and is quite entertaining in its own way.

Then there are a few re-releases; the Kite Collection tells you the whole story about this pint-sized assassin, and just how bleak her situation is, while Basilisk: The Complete Series give detailed information about the rivalry between the Ninja clans who saw to the end of the Samurai era.

Something to Watch: Streams: Rin-Ne

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.