August 9, 2007
Teaser for the new Legion of Superheroes, season 2:
Strange – looks like there are now two types of Supermen. Maybe one is the goody two shoes Silver Age, and one is a more modern or futuristic version.
Also, a relatively content-free teaser for the “New Frontier” cartoon with the DC superheroes:
June 17, 2007
By now most Sopranos fans have seen the series finale and have reacted to the mysterious ending. David Chase talks about the ending but offers no clues other than “It’s all there.”
“I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there,” he says of the final scene.
“No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God,” he adds. “We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people’s minds, or thinking, ‘Wow, this’ll (tick) them off.’ People get the impression that you’re trying to (mess) with them and it’s not true. You’re trying to entertain them.”
Come on – only a fool would think that fans wouldn’t be disappointed by such an ambiguous ending.
Therein lies the problem with the show – it’s now obvious that the showrunners had no end game in mind. Plot lines were set up but never concluded, nothing built up, and there was no satisfying wrap up. It seems to be the norm these days to tease the audience with endless mystery, but a series finale should serve as the grand finale and at least wrap up the major plotlines of the show.
The first season finale ended well. Tony’s hidden rage against his mother boiled into a near-suicidal hospital attack, and concluded with a combination of his two “families.” With all the dream episodes, Johnny Sack misadventures, and Steve Buscemi diversions of the past few seasons, I almost forgot that the show was originally about a mob boss trying to balanace his personal family (Carmela and the kids) with his mob family (Paulie, Silvio, and the other ne’er do wells), while trying to keep the overlapping family (Junior and Livia) from taking him out.
Hard to believe that a show that came in with a bang would go out with such a whimper. However, at least it resulted in this hilarious mashup of Battlestar Galactica finale as directed by David Chase.
June 3, 2007
Heroes has ended, more with a whimper than a bang. After building all season to a major showdown between the villainous Sylar and the multi-powered Heroes of the title, Sylar was dispatched with a quick 10 minute finale that wrapped up all the plot threads in a pretty unsatisfying manner.
But I had lowered my expectations before the finale aired, so I wasn’t too underwhelmed.
It happened during the “grand” finale of the episode set in the future – where Hiro Nakamura (the hero who can travel in time) traveled to a future where the explosion wiped out most of New York and caused a slightly dystopian future. The future episode ended with a showdown between Sylar and Peter (the ultimate hero of the show, if there is one).
The last scene of the show had several heroes barricaded inside a room, with Sylar trying to break in. Peter shows up and challenges Sylar. Sylar taunts Peter and ignites his fists in blue flame, and Peter responds by producing red fireballs around his hands. They stride towards each other – and the camera cuts back inside the room, where the heroes inside talk while blue and red flashes begin pounding behind the metal barricade.
And at that moment I set my expectations for Heroes lower, because I saw that the showrunners needed to create a visual that accommodated the show’s budget rather than one that would impress the viewer.
Sure enough, the finale of Heroes should have been a half hour epic showdown between the multiple powers that had been showcased throughout the season, but was instead a standard television fight that involved the superpowered Peter punching the superpowered Sylar punching each other in the face. These guys can throw people around with telekenisis – aren’t they way too advanced for a fistfight?
So, Heroes was a bit of a letdown. You only get the chance to tease the audience once – I doubt people will be as fanatic about Heroes Season 2 as they were in the first season, which built the story up to an ultimately unsatisfying conclusion.
March 9, 2007
Awesome – the classic children’s television show The Electric Company is now on iTunes!
What’s next – Today’s Special? Tranzor Z? Starblazers?
This opens up whole new possibilities for iTunes – selling classic TV for nostalgic Gen X’ers and beyond. Relive the Saturday Mornings of your childhood, at only $2 a download.
October 20, 2006
I’ve always liked to read spoilers – short synopses of movies and books that reveal the twist ending and explain what all the mystery is about. Some people think I’m weird, but I think that there’s so much media out there that I don’t have time to watch a 2 hour movie or read a whole book just to see what happened.
Over the summer, the producers of the TV show Lost developed an Alternate Reality Game called “The Lost Experience” that slowly released clues about the show – about the Hanso Foundation, the Numbers, etc. The only issue was that the clues were so scattered that you had to spend a lot fo time hunting them down, assembling them, and keeping on top of the game. I’m a fan of Lost, but not enough of a fan to spend 24 hours tracking down the backstory of some minor character.
Imagine my joy at finding http://www.lostpedia.com/, which answers every major mystery on Lost. Fans who played the Lost Experience and combed the Internet for clues assembled them all into a coherent, well-developed story that explains away a ton of the larger mysteries on the show.
I won’t spoil the mysteries here, but Lostpedia includes the following pieces of information:
The only (minor) issue to having everything explained is that the only thing I have to look forward to is more backstory on the main characters of the TV show, and that’s probably my least favorite part of the show. How much more can I found out about Jack’s divorce, or Sun and Jin‘s marital troubles, or why Sawyer and Kate might make a good couple? Most of my interest was in finding out answers to the larger mysteries, and now that I have the answers there’s not much more to find out.
This seems like wiki culture at its finest – using a group of unrelated, geographically distant researchers to assemble and the information and present it in a coherent way. The YouTube clips (see example) with transcripts alone are amazing – I wish all my company’s media was tagged this well!
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I’ll keep watching the show for now, but I hope the pace picks up soon. If not, I’ll just skip the watching and read all the answers on www.lostpedia.com.
