Annoying – I find yet ANOTHER great animated series, only to determine that it’s already been CANCELLED – argh! So just finished watching the last episode of Sym-Bionic Titan, made by one of my fave animators – Genndy Tartakovsky, you may know him for Samurai Jack, Dexter’s Laboratory or even one of the early Clone Wars animated series.

So apparently this series came out a few years ago but was ultimately cancelled after its first year of 20 episodes in part because there were no TOYS associated with it? Sometimes I really think Cartoon Network has its head up its collective TV set on this stuff?!?

This series is really well-done – it has the always incredible art and design by Scott Wills (also of Samurai Jack fame among others); it has engaging stories that while in some cases a wee bit repetitive (they do generally fight one monster a show) still move a multistory plot along in the background and have the characters actually *develop* along the way. Astute viewers will notice sly visual pop culture references hidden in most episodes or in some cases, dialogue, but ths show doesn’t go out of its way to be ‘hip’ in that respect, which is nice.

One thing that’s very different about this show vs. say, Samurai Jack, is that the violence is definitely more pronounced, definitely more anime-inspired. While in watching some extras about Samurai Jack, they talked about how they could never actually kill a ‘person’ onscreen in that show – so they slice and dice robots and robot kaiju all over the place instead – here, they definitely left that rule behind, sometimes in a big way (the large battles of the ‘Escape from Galaluna’ episode especially).

But like happened to TRON:Uprising – I guess hollywood can’t appreciate (and RENEW for another season!) quality when they see it. Hopefully Mr. Tartakovsky will keep up the great work and using the same animators and art team – amazing stuff, this was…..

Other voices:
Metacritic

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Some time ago I found a page that went into exquisite, delicious detail in ripping on Challenge of the Superfriends episodes. I mean, this would put even Roger Ebert to shame in its level of detail. Having been a huge fan of StompTokyo.com for years now, it’s the same thing – take (largely kids) shows that are starving for lampoon, and send them up by simply using logic and plain observations of what actually happens in the plot. And THEN throw in the frequent slam, comparison or grammar analysis that further pummels the show into the dust. 🙂

So as per usual, a random memory came into my head of reading these (whenever it was in the past) and looked them up again – it turns out there are actually 3 sites devoted to this, and they are all hilarious! Of course it helps if you are 40+ and spent way too many saturdays watching the original cartoons on TV in the mid-late 70s. If you aren’t, or didn’t (or simply didn’t watch ENOUGH of them) – you can catch many on YouTube now (of course).

here are the sites:

Seanbaby.com – The Superfriends

Jabootu – Challenge of the Superfriends

Roger Wilcox – The Challenge of the Superfriends

and here’s my fave quote so far from the first one (talking about Grodd, the evil-super gorilla from the Legion of Doom):

“….He comes from a secret invisible village of talking gorillas, but that’s not that big a deal. I describe my hometown of Baker City, Oregon exactly the same way. At least the people in my town all had rifles. Grodd doesn’t even have pants. But to be honest, even a non-talking gorilla is tougher than most of the people on the Legion of Doom….”

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Buzz Aldrin’s FIST is smiling… 🙂

Another Great Way to Prove Moon Hoax Conspiracy Theorists Wrong

Proof We Landed on the Moon is in the Dust

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It doesn’t get much nerdier than this….but I think I spotted an actual mistake! On the front of the suit at the end when they are talking, it says ‘Dallas’ on the front plate. But he says at the start of the video he was building the suit that Kane wore (John Hurt) – Kane was the character that has the alien burst out of his chest after getting back from the alien wreck. But Dallas was Tom Skerritt, the captain of the ship? Zing!

Anyway, pretty incredible work by any measure….

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Given yesterday’s post, I can’t help believing this is true – although SOME people weren’t laughing (me! 🙂 )

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As I’ve continually maintained, being a child of the ’70s means that you automatically use that decade as a baseline cue for style, sensibility and your world perspective. Setting aside many abnormal (if not outright offensive – but then again, hawaii shirts and golf-anything are still with us, so you can’t *only* blame the 70s) fashion trends, what still most often resonates is 70s music.

In this case, however, you have a cut-rate sci-fi film – Starship Invasions – that has a typical plot (alien race needs to colonize and overrun Earth because their home planet is about to die, unseen guardian aliens already reside here and would stop them but they are all but wiped out by the invaders until a UFO expert and math whiz human pair are enlisted to help, then things work out) with B list actors (Robert Vaughn who plays it fairly boring, Christopher Lee as the more interesting archvillian, the rest of the actors are no-names.

While the plot varies between boring (the attempts at transition scenes to show character development fall fairly flat), predictable (the invaders being successful and then being thwarted), and unconventional (Ramses’ visit to the pleasure center at the guardian alien base, which is populated, of course, by scantily clad alien women – Capt. Kirk, eat your heart out) – what carries the movie is the soundtrack, really. It goes between ’70s action scene’ upbeat jazz to piano interludes and stuff that wouldn’t otherwise be out of place in The Six Million Dollar Man or similar – definitely not your typical overblown orchestral fake grandeur by any means.

The spaceship effects are fine given the obviously low budget, despite the androids on the base looking like paper mache halloween costumes painted silver and every guardian alien having a huge, white bald egg-shaped head. And the fact that they were able to repair (well, temporarily) the saucer when they were on the run by raiding a downtown Toronto computer company – impressive…

As I saw this movie back in the day, it was nice to revisit, but it’s not going to win any Oscars anytime soon. Still, the soundtrack was very cool, i’ll have to look for other movies by the composer to see if they measure up.

Other voices:
Rotten Tomatoes
IMDB

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Privateers race to capture forgotten NASA space probe using crowdsourced cash

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I didn’t know about him until today, but sad to see another giant of the American Space Program pass away….RIP.

NASA: Engineer vital to moon landing success dies

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Saw Europa Report this evening – interesting movie. While the plot itself isn’t original – if you have read the book version of a certain sequel to a certain other VERY famous sci fi movie, you essentially know what happens here – but I will leave the clues to the reader.

The acting is good, the effects are well done and straightforward. The movie isn’t Gravity – and isn’t trying to be. Rather, I would put this on the level of Cloverfield or approaching District 9 (even sharing one of the main actors from District 9 as I discovered after reviewing the cast) – the effects serve the story, not the other way around (yeah michael bay and joseph kosinzki – I’m talking to YOU). I like the attention to detail and realism here too – you get the sense of how a real spaceship might look for a mission like this.

Like Gravity, there are some obvious visual influences too, but i’ll leave that to the reader/viewer to discover. And like all the movies I see, I’ve got some nits to pick – meaning spoilers, if you care about such things 🙂

1) No doctor on the ship? I realize Dr. McCoy was quite often just along for the ride until Kirk and Spock got themselves into trouble or hurt, but he served a purpose and barring a two-man spacecraft, I can’t see a mission of this size and ambition not having at least ONE person on the ship trained in medical stuff? They don’t mention it at all. Yet I think they spent a year in space minimum?

2) ‘decisions by committee’ – at one key plot point, the commander doesn’t get to make the final call, they in effect override him and vote. Maybe it’s 18th century of me to expect otherwise, but I think this aspect of movie plots is increasingly tiresome. I can’t remember an actual ship (military or otherwise, in space or on water) that allows ‘democratice decisionmaking’ when there’s a real crisis – that’s actually WHY they have a captain in the first place? That person is expected to make the decisions, and the others obey them?! Here, all of the crew are pretty young excepting the chief engineer, and the captain seems youngest of all but still, why have a ‘commander’ if you aren’t going to have him/her ‘command’? This is simply a mistake in the movie.

3) Spacewalk backup/contingency planning. In at least two situations, there are major problems (to me, anyway) with how they treat risk(s) inherent in spacewalks/EVA and then endure the consequences of same – there seems to be too much ‘cowboy’ and not enough ‘astronaut’ in how they do things. At least in 2001, you had a computer trying to kill people, and you had much more careful planning/control over the EVA than you see here – I think it was handled a bit slipshod. It’s not even clear that the rest of the crew CAN handle an EVA, although I guess it’s assumed.

4) The Prometheus problem. Nowhere near to the stupid degree seen in Prometheus, but the characters here display a somewhat disconcerting detachment when confronted with an apparent obvious danger, and allow themselves to keep moving forward instead of being conservative and SAFE by choosing a move obvious and safer route (like NASA would?).

All in all, I liked the movie, despite the nearly identical plot mentioned above (I really wonder whether the writers had read it or not?) and that it doesn’t overreach, despite the nits just mentioned. Well done!

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