Posts Tagged ‘tv’
Spike, the Bionic Woman, and Darth Maul coming to Orlando
February 4th, 2009 | 
Author: The guest list for the 20th annual FX con, one of the area's biggest pop culture conventions, has been announced:
James Marsters - Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Smallville, Dragonball and Torchwood
Julie Benz – Dexter, Buffy, Angel, Rambo 4 and one of the Punisher movies
Lindsay Wagner – Bionic Woman (the good one)
Ray Park – GI Joe, Star Wars (prequel) and X-Men
Mark Goddard – Lost in Space
Going to an FX con is like going to several different cons at the same time (and in the same building, all using the same bathrooms). While the celebrity guests are signing autographs and posing for pictures, comic book fans are meeting famous guest writers and artists, horror fans are buying up memorabilia, doll and stuffed bear fans are doing whatever doll and stuffed bear fans do, and the rest are busy cosplaying, gaming or just trying to get by for the golf convention in the next wing. It's a madhouse, and a fun one.
This year they're also launching a celebrity poker challenge. According to the release: "The FX Celebrity Poker Challenge is a charitable event with 100% of the net proceeds being donated to the American Cancer Society and other related organizations. Dealers will consist of FX guest celebrities, local celebrities, comic book professionals and tournament staff. The celebrity dealers will rotate from table to table, allowing all players an opportunity to meet them." Meaning you'll have to keep your poker face on while various vampires and Lords of the Sith loom over you. Watch those tells!
FX 2009 is later in the year this year, running April 17th-19th at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. Get more details at the FX Web site.
Posted in 
Tags: 
'Dollhouse' Whedon's newest, strangest work
From left: Harry Lennix, Fran Kranz and Eliza Dushku in "Dollhouse."
What if you could be anyone?
What if you could do anything?
If your memories were erased, again and again, would there be anything left of you?
These are the questions to be examined in Joss Whedon's new TV show "Dollhouse," starring Eliza Dushku, premiering Friday, Feb. 13 on FOX. Other, equally important questions to be answered are: Can Eliza Dushku convincingly play several different people every episode? Will viewers tune in and follow a storyline guaranteed to be as psychological as it is action-packed? Will viewers tune in at all on a Friday night, in enough numbers to satisfy FOX?
My quick review, for those "don't tell me anything, la la la I can't hear you" people who are avoiding even the slightest hint of plot: It's good. It's going to get even better. Watch it.
More details, and a promo video, after the jump.
At last! New Star Trek toys to bash
Courtesy Playmates Toys
New Star Trek movie? New Star Trek toys. It's a fact of life, a universal constant, a law of brightly-colored, polypropylene nature.
"Thou shalt exalt every franchise movie, yea, unto the seventh generation, with a full line of toys, dishware, tie-in novels, comics, and commemorative plates, all of them limited-edition-collectible-first-run-mint artifacts to be treasured from a distance behind velvet ropes and saved for future generations to also not touch."
That's the way it's been for toys from Star Trek, Star Wars, and superheroes of all stripes for years now. Ever since some enterprising geek sold his pristine childhood memory for more than the one with chew marks and its head missing, new toys have been carefully removed from the peghooks at Walmart and Toys-R-Us and lovingly transported to their new and permanent home in a storage locker while the new owner enjoys the smug satisfaction of knowing it's there, somewhere.
I've never been a good collector. I open my stuff. I sort of always thought that was the point. When I was a kid if someone told me my toys were collectible I'd have thought they meant finding all the pieces again. Back in the 70s I asked for and received the original line of Star Trek dolls from Mego ($2.87 each, any two for $5.50), complete with vinyl-and-cardboard Bridge set ($12.97, with working transporter!). And I can guarantee that the crew of the Enterprise never had a more harrowing mission than the ones they experienced daily in my backyard.
Watch the Super Bowl ads now and avoid all that football
Super Bowl Sunday! It's coming! The day you've been waiting for! The greatest day of television ever! The day you gather unto you your friends and family in a joyous shared activity filled with action, suspense, laughter, soaring triumph and crashing defeat. Unfortunately there's also a bunch of football mixed in there to distract you from the highlight of the day: the ads.
The Super Bowl is the day ad men dream of when they go to sleep. After all, nearly a third of the country will be watching the game, and many of them watch as much (or more) for the ads as they do for the sport. And why not? Super Bowl ads are always the wildest, most outrageous, most controversial commercials you'll see all year, and more people will be talking about them the next day than whatever goalie made a free throw from the green, or whatever it is they do.
So why not jump straight to the meat? Head to AdWeek and watch a lot of them right now. Learn how to tell when you need a new job, watch a conspicuously non-wired man in an avatar-filled world, see how insects are plotting to steal your refreshments, discover how Danica Patrick was enhanced, and get a jump start on getting this year's annoying SoBe Lifewater CG-lizard dance song stuck in your head.
Daaay-um! Afro Samurai is back
You were thinking "samurai," weren't you?
Academy-Award-nominated Samuel L. Jackson returns as Afro Samurai, hero(?) of the Spike TV animated series of the same name, this time in a two-hour movie called Afro Samurai: Resurrection. He doesn't get a lot of voicing duty here — Afro doesn't say much — but he more than makes up for it by also returning as Afro's foul-mouthed chatterbox/imaginary friend/conscience/whatever Ninja Ninja.
The world of Afro Samurai is not easily pinned down. Feudal Japan, but in the future with motorcycles and cybernetic warriors with boom boxes. A world where duels of honor are fought with naked blades but Ninja Ninja can invoke Martha Stewart. Asian settings with a hip hop score laid down (again) by Wu Tang Clan member RZA.
If you're not already a fan of anime, just imagine Heavy Metal, Shaft and Kill Bill all rolled into one and you'll be on the right track.
The People's Choice Awards and their award-winning red-headed stepchild
Watch the People's Choice Awards last night? This year they added a great interactive feature where you could go to the cool flashy voting thing on their Web site and cast your vote in four categories, with votes being tallied all the way up through the first half of the live awards show itself. Sweet!
Of course, two of those categories were never, at any point, expressly mentioned during the telecast. Those would be Favorite Online Sensation and Favorite User-Generated Video, the online-only awards, which apparently were popular enough to drum up some Internet buzz and traffic for the PCA site but not enough to, you know, explicitly acknowledge on camera in any audible way.
This follows the pattern set by last year's Emmy Awards, which included an online-only poll for people to vote for TV's Most Memorable Moments, winners to be shown during the Emmy broadcast, only none of them ever were, probably because they barely had enough time to cram in all the long, cringe-inducing bouts of reality-show-host banter as it was. Why show a moment from the history of television which touched the hearts of millions when you could just let Howie Mandel rant aimlessly for another 10 minutes?
(Of course, it could be a conspiracy. Joss Whedon's show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" won the "TV's Most Memorable Moments, Drama" Emmy last spring and his "Dr. Horrible" won Favorite Online Sensation last night; maybe there's some sort of legendary Hollywood prophecy, whispered amongst the ancient executives, that California will sink beneath the waves if someone is ever foolhardy enough to hand him an award?)
So we're good enough to fan the flames of buzz, give marketers something to do and make the awards shows seem marginally more relevant, but we don't get to sit at the big kids' table at the ceremony. Fair enough, fair enough. Especially since I don't watch the awards shows on TV anyway.
They're a lot better online.
After all, those are the people's choice…
The Dirtiest Job of all
FADE FROM BLACK TO: A man in an expensive suit, straightening his tie and looking out a window at a line of people below. The people are marching back and forth in front of the building, holding picket signs that say different versions of "Writers on Strike." The man opens the window and heaves a bucket of water out at the line, then slams the window shut and turns to the camera. We can hear distant screams, and a car wreck.
CROWE: Hi, I'm Mick Crowe. And this is my job.
CUT TO: Opening sequence shows CROWE performing different disgusting jobs: sewage pumping, collecting soil samples in a swamp as an alligator approaches, greasing up competitive bodybuilders, working in a high school cafeteria, etc. Over this is the show logo: "FILTHY JOBS with Mick Crowe."
CROWE (V.O.): I travel the world to find hard-working men and women who do the jobs that make life easier for the rest of us. Now get ready… to get filthy.
CUT TO: CROWE walking through an elegantly-appointed hallway. He talks to the camera as we follow him past offices and busy employees.
CROWE: You may be noticing I look a little different today. Usually I'd be in old jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap bearing the name of whatever hapless company whose productivity I would be ruining that day for our show. This job has a different dress code, but trust me, it's one of the filthiest jobs I've ever taken on.
CROWE arrives at a polished oak door. On it is a small gold sign: "MIGHTY MOGUL ENTERTAINMENT, CEO."
CROWE: Today, I'm a studio executive.
Summer time, and the terminating is easy
Hey kids! Look! It’s another great new show that brings back a beloved pop culture icon from years past and revitalizes it into something new and cool and wow!
So far we seem to be batting about .250 on beloved pop culture remakes. Planet of the Apes should have stuck with the first 30 movies and avoided the recent version. The first two Addams Family movies worked, the third was just sad. The King Kong remake in 1976 was a joke* but Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake was pretty good. Almost every movie based on a classic TV show — Bewitched, Starsky and Hutch, I Spy — has been, and I’m being kind, vomitous. In comics, the remake of Spider-Man as a kid again in the alternate universe “Ultimate Spider-Man” comic was a huge success, while last week’s revamp of his main book so that he’s younger, carefree, and somehow never married despite 22 years of continuity has angry fans ready to storm Manhattan and web Spidey editor Joe Quesada’s head to a lamp post. Battlestar Galactica totally worked. And this year The Bionic Woman burst on the scene and dynamically failed to catch on, just in time for this Sunday’s premiere of a new TV show based on the Terminator franchise, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Should we bother watching?
Yes.
Writers Strike – Who needs writers, anyway
As early as next Monday, television – the one-eyed babysitter that has raised generations of us without ever asking for anything back, aside from all of our consumer dollars – could be under attack. Networks must act now to preserve this hallowed, lucrative media before all is lost.
The culprit? Writers. Dirty, filthy writers who have the nerve to demand more money when their shows or movies are released on DVDs or online, just because such things might be catching on a little. Imagine! Just because consumers will spend an estimated $16.4 billion on DVDs this year, and studios look to glean something like $158 million from selling movies and about $194 million from selling TV shows over the Web, suddenly everyone wants their “fair share.”
Well, let me remind these scribblers that thanks to the last royalty agreement crafted just two short decades ago, writers already receive a princely 4 cents on every $20 DVD of their work. Now they want more? The networks have already patiently explained how releasing shows online is merely promotional, so it would be like paying a writer royalties for a billboard advertising his show… if the billboard somehow displayed the entire show, uncut, with commercials.
Heedless of these economic realities, last night the Writers Guild met and decided to go on strike in the next few days. Last night, television went on hiatus.
Whedon, Dushku, and Minear together on TV again
Not Serenity-related in the least, but if you haven't heard you'll want to. Elisha Dushku will be starring in a new hour-long series, created by Joss Whedon, with Tim Minear jumping in. The premise, thunk up by Joss during a restaurant bathroom break:
Echo (Eliza Dushku) [is] a young woman who is literally everybody's fantasy. She is one of a group of men and women who can be imprinted with personality packages, including memories, skills, language—even muscle memory—for different assignments. The assignments can be romantic, adventurous, outlandish, uplifting, sexual and/or very illegal. When not imprinted with a personality package, Echo and the others are basically mind-wiped, living like children in a futuristic dorm/lab dubbed the Dollhouse, with no memory of their assignments—or of much else. The show revolves around the childlike Echo's burgeoning self-awareness, and her desire to know who she was before, a desire that begins to seep into her various imprinted personalities and puts her in danger both in the field and in the closely monitored confines of the Dollhouse.
Foe the latest news, links to interviews, and apparently half of the Internet making squeeing sounds, head to the Whedonesque thread about it.
