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 Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Kring and Oka on the DVD Bonuses
Posted by maggie
I just came across an Aug. 9 interview at IGN Entertainment that provides some background on the Heroes DVDs -- especially the HD version (which is not what I'm watching). Both Tim Kring and Masi Oka discuss the bonus material on the DVDs. Kring says they started planning the DVDs from the very beginning -- which makes it even less explicable why the commentaries are handled the way they are. Raising a question that was also raised recently on this blog, the interviewer asks, "Are the commentaries the same as the ones that were available online during the season?" Kring replies, "No ... There may be a few that are the same, but also a lot of different ones."
9/4/2007 5:08:49 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
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Son Stephen's Song of the Day
Posted by maggie
A few readers of Beautiful Balloons are aware that my son, Stephen, is a music producer for National Public Radio. A few of those are aware that he watches over the "Song of the Day" feature on the home page of NPR. Just thought I'd alert you to that, in case you were yearning for tips on what's fun on the new-pop-music scene. And today, "Song of the Day" actually features a review by Stephen, with the headline "The Bright Side of the World's Annihilation." Check it out.
9/4/2007 10:58:56 AM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
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Doctor Who Will Skip a Season
Posted by maggie
Argh! My enternal recommendations for the BBC SF series Doctor Who notwithstanding, it's been announced that, after David Tennant's third season as The Doctor, the series will go on hiatus. From an assortment of recent reports: 1. His third season will be broadcast (in the UK, at least) in spring 2008 for a 13-week run, but the following season will wait for release until 2010 (which, at least, does confirm that the series will return). 2. 2009 will feature three Doctor Who specials, each written by Russell T Davies. 3. There's no confirmation regarding whether Tennant will continue to play the role. 4. Tennant's third season (the fourth for the revived series) went into production in July, featuring Catherine Tate as Donna (who appeared in the 2006 Christmas special), a new Companion. 5. But Freema Agyeman (the most recent season's Companion) will return, too. 6. David Tennant won the Best Actor Award and Doctor Who won Best-Loved Drama at the TV Choice and TV Quick Awards. The Torchwood DW spinoff won Best New Drama. And Doctor Who recently won Best Program (well, then, Programme) at the Edinburgh TV Festival. 7. Felicity Kendal will be one of the guest stars in Tennant's third season. She played Barbara Good in the 1970s series called The Good Life in England and Good Neighbors in America. Another guest will be Tim McInnerny (best-known in America for his roles in Blackadder). Fenella Woolgar (recently in Jekyll) will play Agatha Christie in an episode. And Grammy Award winner Kylie Minogue will appear in the 2007 Christmas special, involving the Titanic.
9/4/2007 9:36:46 AM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
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 Monday, September 03, 2007
Heroes Commentaries on Episode 15
Posted by maggie
OK, I'm clearly not going to get through all of the DVD set this Labor Day Weekend, so let's wrap up Monday night with a quick evaluation of "Run!"
Again, there's a switch-out. Commentary starts with Greg Grunberg (Matt Parkman) and Kevin Chamberlin (Aron Malsky), who work well together and are logical voice-over choices, since much of the story focuses on their adventure together and they comment well together. Nice moment: "Wow!" says Malsky, "I was actually the lead-out shot!" Malsky comments, too, that he is The King of Failed Pilots, having appeared in eight.
26 minutes in, Grunberg is gone ("Greg was called back to the set"), replaced by the episode's co-writers, Adam Armus and Kay Foster. At least, everyone's identity is clear from the outset, for once, and it's a nice commentary, all in all, though the switch means that an anecdote about a Ramones shirt worn by Zane Taylor and Sylar is told twice.
Time to re-watch Episode 16, "Unexpected," but the commentary will wait till tomorrow.
9/3/2007 7:29:16 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
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Heroes Commentaries on Chapter 14
Posted by maggie
The title of the episode is "Distractions" -- and how appropriate that is for the commentary track of this excellent chapter!
I know I cite Doctor Who from time to time as an example worthy of attention and imitation -- and that's certainly true in this case. There are, obviously, several ways to put commentary tracks together, even ignoring the extreme of creating a new entertainment (as was done with the magnificent Spinal Tap DVD). In the case of the Doctor Who material, there are "making of" videos put together for release following each episode (not seen in the U.S. till condensations are appended to the DVDs). And, apparently at the conclusion of the season, commentary tracks are made with carefully considered participants. So, if special effects are vital in an episode, one of the featured actors might be chosen to discuss the acting and a special-effects worker chosen to discuss what was done to produce the work.
This can produce especially appealing commentaries. Billie Piper, for example, hadn't seen the final cut of "Father's Day," and her spontaneous shrieks at some of the footage added to the enjoyment of the episode, while her remarks about having a cold making it easier in the weepy scenes were illuminating behind-the-scenes details.
To top it off, the DVD set of the first Tennant season had one episode per disc with a picture-in-picture commentary, which worked wonderfully. (Best moment: when Tennant didn't notice that co-star Sophia Myles was brushing away tears.)
How to confuse the viewer: Do the commentaries on the fly with people who are not clearly identified. How to confuse the viewer more: Change the speakers in the midst of the episode and mumble who they are.
I think the commentators for "Distractions" were as follows:
The first 20 minutes: Milo Ventimiglia (Peter Petrelli) and Zachary Quinto (Sylar).
Then, the comment is made, "Milo is working," and Greg Grunberg (Matt Parkman, who isn't in the episode) joins in.
But 27 minutes in, "Zach had to go to work," and Jack Coleman (HRG-Bennet) and episode director Jeannot Szwarc are on board. Szwarc gets to make a comment about using a Kurosawa style on the Japanese scenes, and then ...
36 minutes in, Ventimiglia is back with Michael Green, who wrote the episode.
Folks, this really is appropriate for "Distractions" in a strange and twisted way -- but not a boon as far as commentaries go. They were being recorded as the show was still in production (The commentary for Episode 13 was made while they were filming Episode 17.), and I'm sure there was pressure to put the package together in a timely fashion for an on-sale date preceding the start of Season Two. But wow.
[By the way, Quinto comments at one point, "Tim Sale is like an extra cast member -- seriously." Huzzah for recognition for outstanding work!]
9/3/2007 11:20:12 AM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
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A Convention a Month in 2008?
Posted by maggie
Looking ahead to 2008, I began to construct a schedule for the first few months of the year, and it seems to me I'm already penciling in an average of one convention a month, starting in February.
For example:
February 22-24 is both MegaCon in Orlando, Florida -- and Wondercon in San Francisco, California!
March travel is, admittedly, of a more personal level, with granddaughter Grace's 4th birthday and grandson Devon's 5th birthday, not to mention Easter on March 23. But then:
April 18-20 is New York Comic-Con.
May 16-18 is Motor City Comic-Con in Novi, Michigan -- and the SF convention WisCon 32 is May 23-36 in Madison, Wisconsin. (Even the Madison show tends to have a comics connection of some sort.) (And, of course, May 3 is Free Comic Book Day!)
June 26-29 is Wizard World Chicago.
And life in Iola is disrupted by the Iola Old Cars Show July 10-13, which brings something like 110,000 people to our town of 1,500. But more disruptive for us is departing not long after to attend Comic-Con International: San Diego, which runs July 23-27.
Of course, that's not all such events in the first part of the year. Luckily, there's a convention supplement in the issue of Comics Buyer's Guide that will go on sale shortly. Check it out.
9/3/2007 9:36:13 AM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
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Glanzman Art to Support Willi Franz
Posted by maggie
I tend to assume visitors to this blog do what I do and link to the other blogs I check every day: blogs linked to on this site. But I don't necessarily do that with other folks' blogs, so let me call your attention to Mark Evanier's posting regarding a current eBay sale.
Artist Sam Glanzman is selling the original art from four complete stories he drew that Willi Franz wrote. And the goal is to provide money for Willi Franz, who produced the Charlton series "The Lonely War of Capt. Willy Schultz" with Glanzman.
The seller opens the benefit auction, "I represent Sam Glanzman for original art sales. Sam called me a few weeks ago and told me his good friend and former collaborator, writer Willi Franz, was in bad health and broke (Sam's exact words)." The four stories on sale separately each came from Glanzman's collection. One of the stories was even pencilled by Franz.
Check out the listings. The sale ends Sept. 9.
9/3/2007 7:40:01 AM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
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 Sunday, September 02, 2007
Heroes Commentaries on Chapter 13
Posted by maggie
It's titled "The Fix," and, again, uncredited commentaries. Just so's you needn't wonder, then:
Commenting through the entire episode is Greg Grunberg (Matt Parkman). Co-commentator for the first 16 minutes is Hayden Panettiere (Claire Bennet). Co-commentator for the rest of the episode is writer and co-executive producer Natalie Chaidez (who does introduce herself at the beginning of her remarks; thanks).
Details from the show: Mr. Muggles has a stand-in for the episode. (The "real" MM is named Lestat. Or is it LeStat?) And, according to the commentary, Milo Ventimiglia (Peter Petrelli) disliked the floppy hair as much as the snarky folks at televisionwithoutpity.com. Hee.
Grunberg provides a constant stream of gags. Much fun.
9/2/2007 7:44:38 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
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Nearly Halfway through Heroes DVDs
Posted by maggie
The 12th episode of 23 ("Godsend") has a commentary track, and it demonstrates once again the way in which the Doctor Who DVDs Get It Right -- and others don't, quite. At least in the Target special edition, there's no clear information regarding the commentary, when one could have easily been provided onscreen. And there are three people talking. And they're all men. But who are they? The writer? The director? Special effects guys?
Oh, maybe they're the characters with special talents. So you can go to epguides.com, find the ongoing characters, and try to deduce them from the ongoing remarks. But golly. Maybe the information is hiding somewhere, but I'll just note it here for everyone's convenience. The conversation participants are Sendhil Ramamurthy (Mohinder Suresh), Jack Coleman (Horned Rim Glasses, aka Mr. Bennet), and Leonard Roberts (D.L. Hawkins).
And the commentary is fun, clearly being recorded before the shooting has wrapped for the season. They discuss uncertainty over pronunciation of Ted Sprague's last name, the quality of Adrian Pasdar's haircut and tailoring, whether people actually think grammatically, and whether Bennet and Suresh might actually be on the list of those with special talents -- and hoping not.
They add that some of the moments when Hiro Nakamura stops time are done in a low-tech fashion: People just stand very still, while Hiro moves. Ramamurthy comments that the scene on the subway train in which Peter Petrelli meets Future Hiro was uncomfortable, as the scene went on and on and he had to keep his eyes wide open without blinking.
So, yes, the episodes are great and the "Godsend" comments are delightful -- but holding the identification of the commentators till the last voice-overs in the episode: not as much fun as identifying them from the start would have been.
9/2/2007 5:32:54 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
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Found: A 1949 View of Comic Books
Posted by maggie
"I am annoyed. Many of the items in Pile 'A' do not belong there but instead belong in places 'B,' 'C,' 'D,' and so on.
"So I start to move things about. Items from Pile 'A' which belong in Place 'B' are taken to Place 'B' where I discover Pile 'B' which contains items which have strayed from other places."
Those are the captions from two panels from Brian Bolland's "Moving Things About" full-page essay, which ends, "Our time on this planet is but brief, hardly more than a blip. For me, much of that time is spent … moving things about."
So on this Sunday of Labor Day Weekend, I was Moving Things About in the upstairs "study," so-called out of deference to what it used to be. I was actually not looking for anything. It was, rather, an attempt to clear a spot in which I could dump stuff.
But what should I find, sitting under a box top containing a miscellany of tiny junk, but a small stack of papers and three photo albums. The papers included my parents' mimeographed publication
The Cricket #1 ("a periodical of culture and reefinement") complete with epigraph "You plays cricket, drinks tea, an' lifs the pinky when you holds the cup ..." [by Walt Kelly] dated June 1949, when I was 6. Within that issue was an essay by Mom that began:
BEST SELLERS
So many friends have asked me in grim or pathetic tones, "Do you approve of comic books?" that I feel I must make some public statement which I can hand out to such gals and run for cover while they are reading it. The question, of course, makes about as much sense as "Do you approve of books?" but it is hard to say this without being thought impertinent or irrelevant by the questioners.
Later in the issue is an essay on "Periodical Browsing" that includes the conclusion:
The largest number of periodicals in our household seems, in spite of culture and reefinement, to be made up of comic books. Most of our collection are really intended to be comic -- that is, funny. Most of them are published by the Dell Publishing Company and portray the doings of urban children (Little Lulu, Henry) or urban animal child-substitutes (Walter Lantz, Merrie Melodies, Walt Disney, Tom and Jerry, etc.). The cream of the crop were, in the recent past, Our Gang, Raggedy Ann, and Fairy Tale Parade (still Dell) with the excellent drawing, interesting stories and amusing dialogue of Walt Kelly, Dan Noonan, and Morris Gollub; but these three gentlemen seem to be deserting the comic book business and two of the publications are no longer in existence. The least painful comics still on the market other than the ones I have just mentioned seem to be the Disney ones. I should recommend a recent special, still on the stands in Canton[, New York] -- "Donald Duck in the Treasure of the Andes" [the now-classic Dell Four Color #223 "Lost in the Andes" by Carl Barks, anonymous at the time] -- as the best of the recent dime publications for the four-to-eight year old. We do seem to have accumulated a number of Superboy, Wonder Woman, and Bat Man [sic] opera, but these do not hold the attention of our six-year-old for more than five or six readings. Even Raggedy Ann can beat that.
In the midst of conjecture about early fanzines with comics references, I offer the fact that there were amateur magazines in the 1940s that provided adult critiques of comics in addition to the SF fanzines that focused on such material as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Those fanzines were not the match flame that ignited the field of comics collecting that continues today, but they were certainly published.
9/2/2007 10:47:15 AM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
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Neil Gaiman Gloats
Posted by maggie
I trust you do as I do and routinely check in on Neil Gaiman's blog.
But, in case you don't, I'm delighted to point out that he's gloating about being correct in his prediction that the Doctor Who episode "The Girl in the Fireplace" would win a Hugo Award. (Link there is to the report from the perpetual winner in the "Semiprozine" category: Locus.)
Huzzah for his precognition -- and for the wider acknowledgement of script-writer Steven Moffat's excellence.
(By the way, the next DW episode on the SciFi channel is "The Family of Blood," scheduled to air Sept. 7, but I note that Moffat's episode "Blink" -- based on a story he wrote in for a DW annual -- is the one to follow that: Sept. 14.)
9/2/2007 10:27:57 AM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
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 Saturday, September 01, 2007
DVD Sales
Posted by maggie
For quite some time now, I have pretty much compulsively wandered through the DVD section of stores that have one -- even when my mission to the store might be to, say, buy gloves or storage bins.
Yesterday, in the course of a trip to the recordable DVD shelf of Best Buy to buy a bunch of 8x DVD+R discs (because my aging RCA DRC8040 DVD recorder won't recognize blank discs of 16x or above, so, when I can no longer find 8x discs, its use as a recorder will be gone) ... Oh, let's start a new sentence. On the course of a Best Buy trip, I stumbled over the second season of The Greatest American Hero, labeled at $32.99, for $14.99. I hadn't even known it was available, much less available for $15.
Then, in the midst of walking through Target, I found the fifth season of Smallville (list at about $60, ordinary Target price something like $24) for $19.99.
And at the moment, I'm in the midst of the Heroes DVDs, having just finished the sixth episode. And that's not to mention the Collector's Edition of Serenity, the culmination of one of my favorite TV series that has no true connection with comics. I could spend the entire Labor Day Weekend without cleaning my house.
But I won't. I won't.
9/1/2007 8:57:38 AM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
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