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.
The Wall is a German fantasy adventure about a woman who suddenly finds herself isolated from humanity by an invisible barrier she can not cross. This looks like it could be a very powerful interior movie if it is done right. The documentary this time is Necessary Evil: The Villains of DC Comics, because there just isn’t enough nerdyness already in the world.
In TV, the excellent but short lived Primeval New World: The Complete Series is available to bring home. I liked that series, and was very sorry it did not get renewed. The other tasty series is Nikita: The Complete Third Season, spy fun for the whole family.
In Anime, Blood-C: The Last Dark is the feature film that complements the TV series about the half-monster vampire killing girl. Kokoro Connect: Complete is about a group of friends who suddenly find themselves swapped in each others bodies with no clue as to why. Even with the cross-gender swapping, objectionable content is mild; this one is played strictly for the laughs.
Winning the award for this rounds longets title, Yamibo – Darkness, the Hat, and the Travelers of the Books: Complete Collection, I find the premise of this one interesting. Our protagonist has had her elder sister/love interest vanish in front of her. In the process of seeking her out, a talking parakeet leads her to the Great Library, where every book is a gateway to its own unique world. Not surprisingly, this is from Bandai, the same folks who distributed Read Or Die.
Di Gi Charat: Complete is centered around an extraterrestrial princess and her friends who descend on Tokyo with the objective of making her an Idol. The original anime and OVA were kind of promotional, since the Gamers store it is set in, in Akihabara, actually exists, and is part of a chain that has stores as far away as LA, California. This is more of a re-release, but it has been quite a while since the series was available in North America.
I just stumbled into this show, and it is excellent! TECHNE: The Visual Workshop Special on NHK Premium is an experiential creative education TV show. In each episode they focus on one one visual technique and shows a whole lot of short video pieces made using that technique. The reason they have all those pieces is they challenge people to create their own new films using it, and then submit it to them. While the show is in Japanese, it runs English as its SAP or Second Audio Program. A lot of the entries are folks using the TECHNE logo in their pieces.
The first video is from NHK Online, and is a bunch of those short logo videos by a boatload of people strung together. The music video I am including is by Masashi Kawamura, one of the shows creators, and it gives you a feel for the kinds of things the program is doing.
SOUR / 日々の音色 (Hibi no Neiro) MV from Magico Nakamura on Vimeo.
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.
I saw Pacific Rim in IMAX 3D, and the screen still didn’t seem big enough to contain all the action. Even though I don’t have a screen that size at home I expect to enjoy it every bit as much there. The other sci-fi film this time around is The Colony, about surviving the next ice age, and the things that come with it.
In TV, Defiance: Season One is something unique, being the first show interconnected with an MMO, to the point where what happened in the next episode was influenced by developments inside the game that week. That had to be difficult, since normally your production timeline has you filming episodes several weeks in advance, but the result was a fairly impressive experience for those who experienced the series through both media. We also get Star Wars The Clone Wars: The Complete Season Five, a story line that is still going strong.
In Anime, Campione! Complete Collection is the story of an ordinary teen age boy who accidentally defeats the God of War in a fight to the death, and gets declared Campione, or God Slayer. His new job means he has to fight heretical Gods when they show up, and he gets assigned a crew of helper demoness’s who mostly end up getting him into still more trouble. Eureka Seven AO – Part 2 concludes the sequel to the original series, in which Eureka’s child finally learns his history and his part in the battle to save Earth from the aliens.
One Piece – Season 5 Part 3 brings another 11 episodes of piratey goodness, bringing us up to episode 299 (and yes, I do know “piratey” isn’t a word, but I used it anyways). Sword Art Online is putting out another of its little 5 episode discs priced just like a full 13 episode box set, so I will be waiting to catch it on sale. It is an excellent series, I just can’t justify paying 8 to 10 dollars an episode for it.
Rurouni Kenshin looks like it should be quite a tasty story; an assassin who is now just a humble wanderer, seeking the life he would have chosen had the option been his. When his past hunts him down, he is forced to return to his old ways to protect his friends and family, as best he can. I suspect the hunters are going to regret their actions. While far from the only variation on this plot line, this is one of the better done. Check it out and let me know what you think, and if what you are thinking is it should have been an Anime, it was, back in the 90s. It was a Manga before that, and quite an enjoyable story in any format.