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Something to Watch: DVDs

In movies the best bet looks to be Legendary Amazons, based on the historical Yang family of the Song Dynasty. There have been a number of previous movies made about this group of 11th century women generals, of which the most well known is probably 1972’s 14 Amazons from The Shaw Brothers. Like the Shaw Brothers, the action in this latest incarnation is a bit over the top, relying heavily on wire work and springboards, but it looks to be quite a fun movie. On the other hand, the less said about Alien Dawn the better; it is every bit as campy, but this one they were trying to be serious.

I still can’t believe Fox cancelled it, but because they did we have Alcatraz: The Complete Series coming out this week, instead of just season 1. In fact, while Fox still maintains the Alcatraz home page, when you go there all you get are New Girl videos with a paragraph at the bottom of the page about the show. Hence the alternate link to a fan site. Touch got renewed though, so for that one we do get Touch: The Complete First Season as well as an actual web site. A documentary series worth noting that comes out this week is Stephen Hawking: Brave New World, a UK science series that is really good.

For western animation, Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted hits the shelves, with quite a good voice cast. And lets face it, Dreamworks animation projects are usually some of the best.

In anime, Someday’s Dreamers II Sora returns to a Japan where you need both training and an official license to practice magic. The next generation of Suzuki magic users, Sora, has no problem with the spells but is completely confused by some of her fellow students, because the people in Tokyo are nothing like the folks in the small village she grew up in. Ga-Rei-Zero: The Complete Collection is also from 2008, and also about magic users, but this time it is two sisters who battle evil as part of an elite anti-demon task force. This one was made by the people who did Full Metal Panic, and considering how much I loved that series (3 series in total, actually), I am really looking forward to this one.

In IDOLM@STER: Xenoglossia season 1, the moon was shattered into thousands of large rocks a hundred years ago, but they don’t fall onto the Earth so most folks don’t think about it. When a young aspiring singer gets taken on by an IDOL company with visions of advancing her career she has no idea that in this case I.D.O.L. is an acronym for the giant robot she will be piloting to defend Earth from those rocks.

The rest of the Anime titles coming out this week are re-releases of some classic works of earlier years. My favorite of these selection has to be Tenchi Universe, the entire 26 episodes in a single box set. This series was not season two or three of the original, they retold the entire Tenchi story in an alternate universe. What didn’t change? The names, the back stories (the space pirate girl is still a space pirate) and appearances of the characters, and the fact that Tenchi has only bad luck whatever the situation. Other re-releases this time around include Casshan: Robot Hunter Casshern about the guy trying to stop his dad’s killer robots, Hellsing Ultimate: Volumes 1-4, yes, any time you see the name Hellsing with or without the Von you can expect Vampires, and Galaxy Express 999: Eternal Fantasy.

Babylon 5 Remembered

The Babylon 5 article they posted over at Tor Online, which ran under the title All Alone in the Night: When Babylon 5 Invented 21st Century Fandom is excellent, and reminded me yet again what an amazing series it was. J. Michael Straczynski created the entire story arch and wrote the majority of the episodes himself, with maybe 20 episodes written by others and few of them key. He also knew how to work the internet to directly work with the fans, as anyone who lived through those times online knows, and anyone who digs into the JMS Message Archives site will soon learn when they go back far enough. He used a lot of pre-Web tools, such as Usenet and IRC, even though the first episode of Babylon 5 did not air until 1994, by which time the first graphical Web browsers, Mosaic and its successor Netscape were already in widespread use. And he used them as a creator directly reaching out to the fan base, which had never been done before.

I still tend to disagree that he invented modern internet fandom, although he did make some major contributions on how these tools were used, because back all through the 1980s USENET and IRC were being used for fans to talk, and the first file repositories were being assembled for those who knew how to use Telnet and FTP to share text, audio, and images. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database started out being called The Internet Science Fiction Fiction Database, which was a USENET newsgroup with the name structure rec.arts.sf.written which began in 1984. If you want to dig back to the beginning and read your way to the present for a complete understanding of its evolution over the decades, check out The Linköping Science Fiction & Fantasy Archive, and yes, lots of the best early SF sites were out of Finland and Sweden. And that is just a single instance; there were many more in those days, listing them out could take me the next year.

Here is a single earlier example from my own experience. One of the prizes of my personal text file collection is a moderated chat held on Q-Link back in 1985 (Quantum Link, at the time just a Commodore computer online gateway service, later rebranded as something called AOL and opened up to all computer types) with Gene Roddenberry as the guest. It was a long distance call to Vienna Virginia from where I lived at the time, and a state of the art 300 baud telco connection (I had to solder the parts together for the hardware myself from $7 worth of Radio Shack components, you could not buy a Commodore modem) meant it took me 15 minutes to read the first 4 paragraphs of the conversation, showing up on my screen one painful letter at a time. So I typed in my question, uploaded it, waited the several minutes it took to type out the confirmation the service had received the question, and went offline. Three days later I received the information that the full text of the event had been compressed and posted, so I downloaded it. What a treat to discover that the moderator had passed on my question, and he actually gave it a considered answer!

That being said, even if J. Michael Straczynski didn’t invent modern fandom like the article author claimed (I suspect Ryan is just too young to know about the earlier stuff), he did set up a lot of the principles that modern content creators use to connect with their audiences. And he also created some of my favorite content, which besides Babylon 5 includes 1990’s Jeremiah, last years Thor, and next year’s Living Dead: The Musical.

Something to Watch: DVDs

Starting the movies list this week is The Raven, starring John Cusack as Edgar Alan Poe. I loved it when I saw it on the big screen, but a lot of people did not. My best guess for why is that Cusack was going in a totally different direction with his performance than he has ever previously gone, and most folk were expecting the kind of movie they were used to seeing him in. I enjoy seeing an actor go outside his comfort zone and growing with the effort, plus it was as twisty as one could have wished for, so I liked this movie a lot. Also out this week, Prometheus was an interesting little Aliens prequel. While an oldie but goodie rather than a new release, Steven Chow’s A Chinese Odyssey from 1994 may be the best pair of films out this week. Classic Wuxia Romantic Comedy/Slapstick as only Steven can do it.

I did not find any live action TV worth noting this week, which probably means it managed to escape my notice more than there wasn’t any. The same goes for western animation.

Live action movie from an Anime TV show based on the manga’s… you get the idea. Boogiepop and Others is almost at Miniseries length and a bit sillier than the thriller/horror of the anime, but still packs plenty of punch. Did you know that Jackie Chan did a live action movie from an anime? If you get the chance, check out his 1993 City Hunter, it is funny as hell. The 2011 City Hunter live action film is based on a different story from the manga, and is not a comedy.

There are several good Anime titles coming out this week. Deadman Wonderland: The Complete Series, starts with a classroom full of teens being murdered, and the only survivor gets framed for the crime. The prison they put him in hosts a gladiator style combat event for TV, where prisoners fight each other to the death while the warden rakes in some major profit. Our protagonist would have died in the first round, but he has teamed up with a mysterious female prisoner and discovered he has a rather amazing power to help him. His goal now is to stay alive long enough to prove his innocence and gain his release… and maybe his revenge. This was one of my favorite shows from 2011, one of the few I made sure to log in to watch the day a new episode became available (thank you, Crunchyroll).

Occult Academy: The Complete Series has a school full of students of the supernatural, a principle who died suddenly under mysterious circumstances, his daughter who does not believe in the paranormal, and a time traveler who has been sent back to the academy to try to prevent the alien invasion that destroyed the world. While there is quite a bit of humor in this series at its heart it is a serious tale, and I was rather surprised at the way one of the characters grew and changed between the beginning and the end of the series. This one also sucked me right in back in 2010, I even set my alarm to watch each new episode as soon as it became available.

Heaven’s Memo Pad: The Complete Collection has a NEET (Not Employed, being Educated or in Training) hacker girl/private detective who has gathered a team of strange folks with unique skills, including high school student Narumi who never expected to have his life change like this. Natsume’s Book of Friends is about a boy who can see Yokai (Ghosts/Monsters/Evil Spirits), and inherited a book from his grandmother about all the Yokai she defeated and imprisoned. It came complete with instructions about how to control the enslaved spirits, and now every monster for miles around is out to make Natsume into The Late Natsume.

Naruto Shippūden has box set 12 coming out this time, bringing us episodes 141 through 153.

Robotics; Notes

The folks at Noitamina TV (Midnight TV, a branch of Fuji TV), has a new show coming out called Robotics: Notes. It begins airing on October 11th or 12th depending on which time zone you live in, and is the 3rd in a series of scientific anime’s from Production IG. It takes place in the same world as Chaos; Head and Steins; Gate, two excellent sci-fi anime series. I am hoping Crunchyroll carries it so I can watch it here. Thanks to Danny Choo for the heads up on this one.

Something to Watch: DVDs

There are a number of good movies this time around, with Iron Sky telling the story of Nazi’s on the moon coming back to take over the Earth decades after they fled. I can’t quite decide if this one is more action/adventure or comedy, and I was fairly surprised when it had its world premier in Berlin. Definitely in the comedy category, Dark Shadows is Johnny Depp, Tim Burton, and a bunch of their friends having silly fun. Flying Swords of Dragon Gate is the historical epic adventure entry for the week, being a remake of the Dragon’s Inn series of movies starring Jet Li. If you are a fan of Asian martial arts films you will find you recognize a good percentage of the excellent cast, but that is the only name the average American moviegoer would recognize. Winner of the Silliest Name title this time goes to Atomic Brain Invasion.

New in TV we have season two of the series Nikita, just in time to catch up with it before the next season starts on the 19th. I am guessing they dropped La Fem off the front end of the name so you wouldn’t confuse it with the last time somebody did it as a TV series. Old in TV we have The Six Million Dollar Man: Season Two, a new release for all you Steve Austin fans.

In Anime, Strike Witches: Season Two continues the aerial combat antics of the girls with the propeller boots, in an alternate history where the enemy during WWII was aliens from outer space. Rental Magica: Collection 2 brings the second dozen stories in this magical competition series, with the Astral team hard pressed to resolve their issues, including the protagonists vision problems. I can include Mayo Chiki in today’s listing because the plot line includes both martial artist ghosts and cat girls, but it is really just a high school level romantic farce leaning towards the raunchy.

Hollywood in Space

The Air and Space Museum has a couple of nice presentations they have put together about how Hollywood has approached showing what going into space will look like over the years. On the Rocket Pioneers page they have a list of early rocket scientists, pretty much the men who invented the entire concept of using rockets to get humans into space. As you read through the entries you will see references to the various science fiction movies they consulted on, such as Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond. Be sure to check the film clips at the bottom of the page while you are there. They also have Hollywood Spacesuits, and the subtitle to the article says it all: A sci-fi historian’s guide to movie spacesuits, from wacky to realistic.