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Battlestar Galactica

The critically-acclaimed reenvisioning of the late 1970s space opera, newly laced with cultural commentary and soaked in philosophical brine.

The human homeworlds are destroyed; the population is down to a few tens of thousand refugees, shepherded through space by an aging hulk, the Galactica. At the end of the journey, a place of smoke and legend called Earth. Standing in the fleet’s way are the Cylons, former robot laborers that gained awareness and rebelled against their human masters.

The humans had fought the Cylons once before, to a standstill. Since then the Cylons have watched, waited, and evolved. In their efforts to climb the power chain, the Cylons have become close to indistinguishable from humans.

The Cylons are sleek and perfect. The humans are broken-down and flawed. Over four seasons the two sides struggle not just to survive but to learn how to live in this new universe.

Doctor Who

A man who looks human but isn’t travels through time and space in a ship that looks like a police phone box but isn’t. Along the way he continually stumbles into trouble that he feels obliged to set right.

A sort of a British institution, the show has been around since 1963 in some form or another. After a decade and a half off-air, the show was revived in 2005 with the numbering reset but continuity intact.

Torchwood

The second spin-off of British sci-fi adventure show Doctor Who aims for an older audience than its parent series, filling its first two seasons with blood and weird sex and its later seasons with complex high-concept scenarios.

Former Doctor Who companion Jack Harness (John Barrowman) leads a secret group of misfits to contain and investigate extraterrestrial threats. Although Torchwood is very old, its members are young and tend not to live very long. The group is also far from harmonious; most of the demons they battle are in their own heads. It comes down to new recruit Gwen (Eve Myles) to lend the self-absorbed group a social conscience.

The first two seasons are monster-of-the week shows in the mold of The X-Files and Buffy. From season three, Torchwood becomes a serial drama, using five to ten hours to tell a single story.

The Sarah Jane Adventures

The third spin-off of BBC sci-fi adventure staple Doctor Who, The Sarah Jane Adventures is basically a second draft of 1981′s K-9 and Company. Once again former Doctor Who companion Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) solves uncanny mysteries with the help of high technology and local schoolkids. This time K-9 is mostly in the background, and Sladen herself is often second to the teenage cast.

Whereas Doctor Who is produced as a family drama, SJA is aimed at the young set. Stories are simpler, less violent, and more Earth-based. Each story spans two 25-minute episodes; each season contains six stories.

The Sarah Jane Adventures also serves as a clearinghouse for characters, references, and plot points that the writers want to address without cluttering the parent series. Expect cameos and full guest appearances from other classic series companions (the Brigadier, Jo Grant), sequels to forty-year-old serials, solutions to ancient fan debates, background and follow-ups to current Doctor Who episodes, the odd visit from the Doctor himself.

Mystery Science Theater 3000

A man and two robots are forced to watch Z-grade movies as part of a deranged experiment. They retain their sanity by returning quips at the movies using their vast knowledge of pop culture. Over ten seasons and one major motion picture the entire cast may change, but the premise and the core writing team remain intact.

Due to rights issues the series is only available sporadically, rather than in full collected seasons. This should be only a minor problem for most viewers; although the last three seasons have a fair amount of continuity tying them together, overall the series is largely episodic.

DuckTales

For its first venture in syndicated TV animation, Disney chose to hark back to the vast creative resource of Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge comics. With a few minor changes, Scrooge’s pre-established world, friends, enemies, and adventures were ideal for a long-term animated project.

For about 20 years, Carl Barks developed Donald Duck as a character, gave him a home, family, and relationships, and sent him on epic adventures in all corners of the globe. Eventually Donald’s uncle Scrooge McDuck became the focus of Barks’ output. Whether protecting his fortune, squabbling with his rivals, or questing after ancient artifacts, Scrooge’s eccentric personality and prickly family dynamics made for dynamic reading.

The transition from book to screen isn’t totally seamless. Whereas Barks’ Donald is a real person with normal speech patterns and a nuanced personality, the animated Donald makes for a problematic dramatic or action lead. So in his place is original character Launchpad McQuack (and later, Fenton Crackshell). In the comics, villain Flintheart Glomgold is a Boer from South Africa; to sidestep any politics, he has become as Scottish as Scrooge.

DuckTales lasted for four seasons on-air, and was later capped off with a feature-length animated film. The show was successful enough to spawn a whole industry of syndicated Disney animation and at least one direct spin-off, Darkwing Duck.

Darkwing Duck

Building off the success of DuckTales and the recent popularity of Tim Burton’s Batman films, Disney’s TV animation arm crafted a spin-off about an inept superhero in a town just across the water from Duckburg.

Accompanied by sidekick Launchpad McQuack and adopted daughter Gosalyn, Drake Mallard fights crime in the problematic city of St. Canard, with the aid of his custom-designed vanity gear, secret hideout, and dual identity. Although the Batman parallels are obvious, Darkwing draws more heavily from early 20th century radio adventure serials and comics such as The Shadow and The Green Hornet.

Both the action and the overt comedy are more prominent than in the parent show. As Darkwing is aimed at a slightly older audience than DuckTales, the crossovers are kept to a minimum and all on Darkwing‘s end. DuckTales supporting character Launchpad is lifted for Darkwing’s sidekick, and his replacement Fenton Crackshell/Gizmoduck makes the odd appearance as a fellow superhero.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

A degenerate 21st-century spin on familiar 20th-century sitcoms. Dennis and Deandra Reynolds (Glenn Howerton and Kaitlin Olson), their father Frank (Danny DeVito), and friends Mac and Charlie (Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day) manage a perpetually empty dive bar in downtown Philly. To fill their meaningless lives, our heroes follow any given idea, however depraved or irrational, to its logical conclusion. The bizarre humor undermines sitcom convention, and the absence of a laugh track forces the viewer to confront the humor on its own terms.

Arrested Development

The Bluths were once a wealthy family, that made do in its insular little bubble. When patriarch George (Jeffrey Tambor) is locked up for embezzlement, semi-estranged son Michael (Jason Bateman) is forced to involve himself, both to run the family’s architectural firm and to hold together a now penniless group of eccentrics with no concept of the real world. All the while, Michael struggles with raising his own son without the pitfalls of his own upbringing.

In its brief time on-air, Arrested Development won just about every award it could lay its hands on. The writing is rapid-fire and complex, often with several levels of humor layered on top of obscure continuity and secret foreshadowing. The series is shot with a single-camera setup and no laugh track, to allow the comedy to breathe at its own pace. For the TV obsessive, there’s even a visit from Law & Order‘s Detective John Munch.

Spaced

The precursor to Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s “Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy” (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End), Spaced portrays Pegg as an out-of-luck cartoonist in sudden desperate need of housing. While moping in a local cafe, Pegg meets a fellow apartment hunter (Jessica Hynes) and strikes up a strange friendship. The two find an ideal flat, and to abide with the landlady’s requirements they agree to pose as a couple.

In another story, this would all be setup for romantic tension. In Spaced, it’s setup for twelve episodes of surreal domestic adventures with new neighbors, old friends, and two very neurotic creative people in an enclosed space. Beyond Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright’s direction here also lays the foundation for his later work on Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

The Orange Box

A 2007 compilation of 3 of Valve’s new releases, all too small to publish individually, each perhaps easily overshadowed by bigger releases. When teamed together, they all balance each other off to provide a rounded package of some of the most progressive game design to hit the mainstream in ages.

Puzzle adventure game Portal takes a simple, if heady, idea — magic doors that can connect two points — and extrapolates it to its logical extremes. Team Fortress 2 boils down online competitive games to their raw forms, then rebuilds from there. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 continues the epilogue to Valve’s modern masterpiece, with a few engine enhancements and improved design over the previous Episode.

Then to provide context for Episode 2 and to make the whole package feel meatier, Valve also tossed in the original Half-Life 2 and Episode 1. So in total there are five games — the original Half-Life 2, two games that build on that game’s narrative, one game that builds on its aggressive action elements, and one that builds on its contemplative problem-solving elements; three games that balance the male and female aspects, one that explores the macho, and one laced with the feminine.

At the time, a themed compilation like this was more or less unprecedented. In the years since, several more compilations have shown up in downloadable form (often over Valve’s Steam service). Yet The Orange Box still stands more or less alone as a testament to Valve’s lateral sense of design.

(January 12th, 2011 @ 1:14pm)

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Duckter Who

In chatting with Shaper just now, I realized that there are a lot of parallels to be made between Uncle Scrooge and Doctor Who — in particular, the First Doctor. They go on similar types of serial pulp adventures, often with a historical or scientific basis, assisted by a gaggle of companions. Though Scrooge or the Doctor might be much older and more knowledgable and generally more capable, it’s his assistants who often provide perspective and insight, or simply the needed muscle. Very similar dynamics, generally speaking. There’s even a decent parallel to be made between the TARDIS and the Money Bin, though the latter doesn’t (usually) travel.

Also, seems that Dark Horse has changed its policy for sound effects — just in time for my first work with them!

(August 6th, 2006 @ 5:00pm)

21 responses

Regarding that futuristic Looney Tunes thing:

For what it’s worth, the original characters and
cartoons were a product of their time. In most cases they’re not as
out-of-their-element as, say, Betty Boop; that doesn’t mean they’re
timeless. They were never made to be. They were made to amuse their
creators, at the time. When they were made, their creators had
something of a progressive, sophisticated sense of humor. As the
decades have gone by, much that was once novel in that humor has become
commonplace; many things that were outrageous have become formulaic and
tired. Humor has evolved somewhat, as it always does, as it always
must.

A person can still put himself into the mindset to appreciate the cartoons. Our context isn’t all that
removed, as yet. Still. The age is apparent, and it becomes more so as
the years go by. It’s a strange product of our current model of
culture, wth our huge corporations and our “intellectual property” that
we’re still being fed these old cartoons, made under a different
context, for a different audience with different expectations, instead
of them being constantly adapted to say something new, or else waiting
around in a vault for people with a yen for history — as with, say,
most of Max Fleischer’s work.

I mean, hell. Not that there’s anything wrong with a little history.
Look how long Shakespeare’s been going on. It’s just, imagine if movies
from the same period (the ’40s to the ’50s, mostly) were constantly
being rerun as contemporary entertainment, without any real context for
why they were made in the first place. Without the acknowledgement that
they reflected a different time, just expecting people would take them
at face value. And imagine if no one really made any more movies in the
decades since then; if they did, they were cautious to mostly use the
same characters in the same way, without questioning why the movies
were made the way they were to start with. (I guess, kind of like James
Bond.)

Although you need history for context, there’s a problem with
too much reverence. Mostly, it’s a distraction. Something seems a
little ill to me about holding onto icons made for someone else, in
some other circumstance, without really questioning why and without
really adapting them to make them your own. We all have our own
problems, we all have our own lives; why not, steadied with our
information about what has come before, make something that comes out
of our own situation? That’s custom-tailored to our own lives? Why does
Mickey Mouse still fucking exist
if he hasn’t been used creatively in sixty years? Why should we care?
For that matter, why does Disney exist if it isn’t doing animation
anymore?

I do not mean to suggest that the new cartoon is not a fucking
stupid idea. It kind of is. Although I must say I have a certain morbid
curiosity about it. It’s just, if you get around how dumb it is,
there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. On a level, it makes more
sense than making a new cartoon series with the old characters. The
characters that were designed to speak to our grandparents. Unless, of
course, it were made with that in mind.

Don Rosa, for instance, sets all of his Uncle Scrooge stories in
the mid-1950s. As far as he is concerned, Scrooge McDuck died in 1967.
The reason is, the stories that inspire him — those of Carl Barks –
were mostly made during that period. The ’50s was really his creative
peak. All of the details that define the characters and their world
(from Scrooge’s earlier days in the Klondike to the kind of car Donald
has to just the nature of Duckburg society) are intrinsic to the ’50s.
So Rosa sees no reason in pretending that the characters, the stories
are in any way contemporary; he works within the old framework, to
rather excellent effect.

You could always go another (postmodern) step and use the characters
within their time period to say something more meaningful about the
divide — kind of in the way that Watchmen picks apart superhero
comics. Roger Rabbit almost does this, though it doesn’t do anything
smart or very interesting with it.

IN CONCLUSION SINCE I DON’T REMEMBER WHERE I WAS GOING WITH THIS:

I want to see a return of animated shorts in the theater. I’ve seen
all of the animation festivals, and there are people trying to do
interesting work with the format. Then there are the Pixars, who are
content to recite the old gags, using the same old props and
archetypes, who think the old material is still funny just because all
of the cues are intact.

I mean, honestly. What is the meaning of using farm animals for
characters, these days? Sixty years ago, maybe it made some sense. A
lot of the animators grew up on farms, and so they looked to animals
for personality traits they could use in a satirical way, often to say
things that would be unsafe to say otherwise. It’s a natural thing;
we’ve done it for thousands of years. How many of us grow up on farms
today? How many of us grow up around animals, outside of house pets
(and gods, I beg, no more animated cats and dogs; the possibilities
have been expended)? And how much is really so unsafe for us to say, in
our current culture, that we have to hide behind familiar archetypes to
get away with it?

TO CONCLUDE MY CONCLUSION:

Everything annoys me.

(March 19th, 2005 @ 2:52pm)

49 responses

Geneology

After the establishment of Rosa, the Duck annals have begun to resemble Tolkien. A prurient quote from Rosa:

What Dell licensed from the Disney corporation was the name Donald Duck. [At that time,] Donald was [...] actually like an actor. He was a different character in each cartoon. A comic book has to be based on an actual character with a history. So Carl Barks took the name Donald Duck and created a… well, a character, that didn’t even look exactly like the Disney Donald Duck. [...] But, he created an entire history around this duck; a family, Uncle $crooge, Duckburg, Gladstone Gander, etc. These were all creations of Carl Barks. This is the universe that all the other duck writers and artists based their stories on.

And now Rosa, with his nerdlike extrapolative tendencies, has become the new standard. And it’s getting a little insane. (In the best way.)

I really need to read those last dozen or so Rosa stories. I’ve not seen any of his work since toward the end of the second Gladstone era. I tried to subscribe to Gemstone’s new Scrooge book. Their site rejected my propositions, however. I will try again later.

(August 27th, 2004 @ 9:58pm)

3 responses

Don’t Fear the Leaches

Gemstone indeed seems to be rather smarter than Gladstone was — at least, toward the end of its second run.

Beyond the format and title reorganization (with the two premiere comics — $crooge and WDC&S — for the fans, the two standard titles — Mouse and Duck — for the casual newsstand audience, and the digest — DDA — for the impulse, give-to-the-kid-to-shut-him-up-for-a-few-hours market), they seem to acknowledge how to organize the material itself.

I tried to find a few Gemstone books for Free Comic Book Day. Hard task. They don’t seem to have all that great a distribution, as yet. Although, oddly, I kept finding posters with the classic cover to Barks’s one Mouse title, “The Riddle of the Red Hat”. Offhand, that seemed a strange choice. Even stranger if Gemstone’s comics aren’t actually available. The best I could find was the DDA digest — which, when surreptitiously removed from its folded-over comic bag, revealed itself to contain nothing but throwaway Italian Duck fare. I think the highest-grade was the likes of Scarpa. Basically filler. Kind of disappointing, as I was expecting some really long adventure tales (as the title, and the history of its use, would tend to suggest).

The Virgin Megastore, however, yielded a special Gemstone promotional issue, designed specifically for Free Comic Book Day. On the one side, Mouse. On the other, $crooge. Inside, a subscription card. Curious.

Further research reveals that the contents include the first (of only three) Barks encounters between $crooge and Glomgold and, indeed, “The Riddle of the Red Hat”. Although initially disappointing, as I was on a hunt for Rosa — or at least Van Horn — and I already have the entire Carl Barks Library in both hardbound and album form (trading cards included) — I began to realize that this was probably intentional.

In the Gemstone books I have read thus far, I have seen not a single Barks story — strange, in a sense, as even with the multiple full printings of his run, Gladstone had a tendency to reprint his work at every opportunity (to the point that it began to drive me nuts). Then again, Gemstone has a lot of Rosa and Van Horn to catch up on — as well as Jippes and some other B-plus-level writers and artists.

It’s more than that, though. As I prove on my hunt, new Rosa and Van Horn work is book-pushing material. This is the headliner stuff. On one level, Gemstone isn’t going to blow it on a promo issue, when they can use it to sell some of their major titles. On the other hand, Barks has been done to death. There is no need for him in the major titles except in a severe content draught. For a promo, though? Well. The rules are different.

I get the impression that this issue has a much wider distribution than the normal comics. Gemstone wants to pull in readers; to get out the message that they are around, and that Disney comics are being published. What better way to do this than with a two-way issue, including both the Mouse — which people associate with Disney, even if his comic life has been mostly uneventful save some refitted Godfredson serials — and $crooge, who is really the star of Disney comics, to anyone who knows a thing about them. Draw them in with the icon, and get them reading the real material.

Further, what better introduction to $crooge than Barks? And what better Barks story than an eventful one, such as his first meeting with his arch-nemesis, Glomgold? It’s also a rather poignant story. There is also the possible nostalgia factor, where old readers might be attracted by a new glimpse of “The Good Duck Artist”, from years ago. The only question now is what halfway-interesting Mouse material is available? There really isn’t much, again, unless you care to reprint a Phantom Blot serial — which would both look sloppy and be way too long. Unless, perhaps, you remember that one short Mouse tale that Barks did. It’s something of a rarity. You really only see it turn up once every decade, if that. Not a bad opportunity, this, to drag it out again.

So if Barks is promotional material, and Rosa and Van Horn are headline material, then what’s with all of the mediocre material in the DDA books? Simple: It’s a place to put it. No real use putting high-interest content in a digest, which you generally put by the toilet or throw in the back of a car. This is not high-concentration material. These books exist to fill time. So, in a sense, they are just asking for filler. The comparative junk that, in previous eras, would have cluttered the main books and caused nasty letters, is perfect fare here.

Gemstone is starting to remind me of Playmore.

I see this as a good thing.

(July 3rd, 2004 @ 12:26pm)

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Gloaming Crackle

Keeping the Dendrites Dry

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