A Scary Halloween Message

Happy Halloween!  Tomorrow begins NanoWriMo and as usual I will not be actually participating, though I could.  It's no big deal to me but I understand it helps to get other people going.  Anyway, I'm going to put the blog on cruise control through the end of the year. Scared yet?

November in honor of NanoWriMo, I'm going to have a little fun with some cover images I haven't used yet (maybe) and come up with a rough idea how I might use them.  And maybe you, Phantom Readers, can come up with an idea of your own, sort of as a prompt.

Here's one I may or may not get around to by now.  Or maybe later.  I still have to figure out exactly how to do it.  Basically there'd be one of those escape rooms a guy gets locked into and the clues would turn him into a girl or something.  Or maybe he's turned into a girl and has to find the clues to turn back?  Something like that.

The font is supposed to look like blood spelling the title.  Maybe I should move the name at the top to the left or something so it's on the floor too.  Like this:

December I did some stuff a long time ago.  It doesn't relate to the holidays at all.  Unless you consider Star Wars and Transformers to be part of the holidays for some reason.

And I have the A to Z Challenge for 2023 already written, though I sometimes keep adding to the entries.  So a lot of the blog is already on cruise control.

There, that's probably all scarier than Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees. 

The Final Comics I Read for the Year!

Wednesday I posted the final Stuff I Watched for the year and here's the final Comics I Read for the year!  Probably not much since I don't read a lot of comics usually.  Basically when I 'm bored and there's not much else to do in my games and I don't feel like writing.  It strangely doesn't happen that often.

Strange Adventures:  To this point, I have not read a Tom King story I haven't liked. The closest is some of his run on Batman, but especially the limited series I've read: Vision, Omega Men, Up in the Sky, Heroes in Crisis, Mr. Miracle, and now this, have all been great reads. The common thread is even when a character isn't human like Vision, Superman, or most of the Omega Men, King manages to bring out the human drama. I suppose a lot of comic book readers don't like his style because it's not all slugfests and "cool" team-ups and new powers and stuff. At the same time he doesn't work in more tawdry areas like Alan Moore, Frank Miller, or Mark Millar.

At the start you think this is going to be like Mr. Miracle with the relationship of Adam and Aleena similar to Scott Free and Big Barda. But then things start to take turns and it sort of becomes like the early seasons of House of Cards where they're scheming and manipulating people to get what they want while trying to avoid getting caught, in this case by Mr. Terrific, who is given the task of looking into Adam's story of "saving" the planet Raan.

Ultimately like House of Cards while the male lead character was supposed to be the central focus, it's his wife who ends up taking center stage. Aleena is a strong woman, a princess who isn't afraid to get her hands dirty and mix things up. She schemes and does bad things to protect herself and her husband while not knowing all the things her husband has been up to.

In the end the question is: how far would Adam Strange go to save his family and his adopted home of Raan? Would he sacrifice his original home to do it? Would he sacrifice the love of his wife?

These are things that I'm not sure any other comic book writer would have done to tackle an Adam Strange story. It's a great story. Another triumph for King.

The art is mostly good, but a couple times I was looking at a panel and not exactly sure what I was looking at. In the last couple of issues they tended to draw Mr. Terrific looking kind of chubby, like he had a double chin. Kind of odd. (4/5)

Rorschach:  Of course after I heap all that praise on King, then this.  The title turns out to be a bait-and-switch. This does not really involve Rorschach as in the one in Watchmen. Or I don't think the one in the Geoff Johns sequel Doomsday Clock, though I have yet to read that.

This I guess is supposed to be in the same universe as the HBO limited series as it's 2020 and Robert Redford has been president for 20 years and running for another term. There is a mention of Oklahoma and cops in masks but that's it; none of the characters of that show appear in this.  Redford's opponent Turley is nearly killed by an assassin dressed as a cowgirl and a guy dressed like Rorschach.

The format of the story is like Citizen Kane as the unnamed detective follows the clues to discover who did what. But there's a twist at the end that was pretty good.

Still, at the end of the day this is just a political thriller vaguely set in the Watchmen universe that just throws in some Rorschach branding to justify the title so DC fanboys will buy it. It doesn't feature the real Rorschach or offer any insights into his character. There is a mention that the assassin guy's fingerprints match the original Rorschach but that's just a red herring; original Rorschach is dead and stays dead.  It's too bad because Tom King could probably have written a really interesting story on the actual Rorschach instead of this cheap branding stunt.

Not that it's a bad book, but it's not King's best work. The art is fine.  Pretty typical stuff that I guess wasn't a lot different from the original Dave Gibbons art in Watchmen.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Comic book writer Frank Miller appears as himself, only in this world he wrote a pirate comic called The Dark Fife Returns. Heh.)

The Sandman Mystery Theatre Vol 1:  I guess because of the Sandman Netflix series they put this on Prime Reading, but it's not really connected to the Neil Gaiman reboot of Sandman in the 80s.  This 90s series was actually an update of the Golden Age (ie, 1930s-40s) original version of the Sandman, where he was a rich guy named Wesley Dodds who has a gas mask and gas gun that he uses to knock people out.  And there's a spunky daughter of the DA named Dian who frequently visits Wesley, though she doesn't know his secret and they don't screw or anything like that.  The structure is pretty true to Golden Age comics/pulp heroes but they updated it for the 90s with cursing, blood, sex, and rape.  I could have done without the child rape (the act is not depicted, just the aftermath) but that's just me.  The art is not great with various fairly crude styles that differ between the 4 separate 4-issue stories and sometimes even between issues of those stories.  But at least they didn't draw the Chinese characters the way they would have been drawn in the 30s-40s.  Mostly I enjoyed the stories as they are pretty good old-fashioned Golden Age-type stories despite the R-rated content. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  I had this in my library for 5 months before I finished it because I had some other stuff I read and sort of forgot about it for a while.)

The Sandman Volume 2:  The Doll's House:  This actually is the Sandman comic written by Neil Gaiman in the late 80s that is the basis for the Netflix series.  I don't know if they used this particular volume as part of the plot, though it has a lot of the characters they used like The Corinthian and Johanna Constantine.  The former has a bit more importance while the latter is just more of a cameo.  The main story is about a girl who is a "dream vortex" which means she can basically merge all the dreams around her, which causes people to die.  Before that can happen, Morpheus or Dream or whatever you want to call him has to stop her, which seemed pretty easy.  It really didn't seem like it needed to be 7 issues but there was a lot of other stuff about her grandma and kidnapped brother, who is nearly killed by the Corinthian.  And in the middle of it is an issue that didn't seem to advance the plot at all; it seemed like a standalone issue about Morpheus meeting up with some guy who refused to die every 100 years in a bar.  Sometimes the guy was up and sometimes down.  Sometimes he was a soldier or a merchant or a slave trader.  While interesting it didn't seem to have much relevance.  But otherwise it was good. (3.5/5) (Fun Fact:  I had this one 2 months longer than the other Sandman one before I finally read it and returned it to Amazon Prime Reading.)

Superman & The Authority:  There was some hubbub about this when author Grant Morrison took to Substack and said this was his last story for DC Comics, whom he first wrote for back in the late 80s with Arkham Asylum, Animal Man, and Doom Patrol before being one of their major writers in the late 90s-late 2000s on JLA, 52, and Batman.  On the Substack he said some not very kind and probably very true things about DC and the comic book industry in general.  That all being the case, I thought this would be a self-contained story.  Especially since it starts with Superman talking to Jack Kennedy in 1963, just a couple days before he was killed.  But then it turns out this is I guess a prelude to the whole "Future State" thing DC did that I haven't read.  There were issues that went farther and farther into the future until the end of time basically.  In the Superman ones, original Superman (ie Clark Kent or Kal-El) leaves Earth to free "Warworld" while his son Jon takes over being Superman.  And I don't really know what all happened after that except I think Superman took over the Warworld and freed the slaves there.

When this story begins in whatever the present is supposed to be, Superman is older (basically looking like the Kingdom Come version) and his powers are weaker.  So he starts recruiting a team, starting with Manchester Black, who's basically John Constantine with psychic powers instead of magic.  Then they recruit Steel's daughter, Midniter & Apollo, and Enchantress.  The latter is basically a whole issue to get her to reconnect her human half with her Enchantress half...and then she doesn't really do all that much.  Brainiac and Ultra-Humanite are out to take over the world and the team stops them...I guess.  After three issues of build-up it seemed like the bad guys were dealt with pretty easily.  And they have to recruit "Lightray" who was born on Mars in another universe and has...some kind of powers.  She doesn't really do anything in this, but maybe she did stuff in Future State?  Or whatever.  It was pretty disappointing that this was Morrison's "final" work--at least for now.  A lot of it just seems like a cut-rate version of Morrison's far better All-Star Superman, which was a self-contained work and 12 issues to this book's 4 so it definitely felt like a complete story while this just felt like a teaser.  The art was pretty typical for DC, which IMO is better than a lot of what Marvel uses these days.  (2/5)

Superman: Birthright:  This was written not long after Smallville began airing and so includes some Smallville elements like Luthor living in Smallville, only as a teenager, and being friends with Clark.  And Lana was a cheerleader Clark had a crush on, but she was dating the quarterback.  Also, Luthor found "meteors" aka Kryptonite that he uses later against Superman.  

This is mostly another story about Clark's early days as Superman in Metropolis, which was done better than Man of Steel.  It introduces the familiar characters like Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Perry White while updating it for the 2000s.  In the end, Luthor uses a plan not much different than Ozymandias's in Watchmen, only for more selfish motivations. The end was nice as Superman gets to use a wormhole to communicate with his real parents.  While it's not really an important or even memorable story, it's not bad either. (3/5)

Justice Society of America by Geoff Johns, Vol 1:  I guess with the Black Adam movie coming out they put this on Amazon Prime Reading.  This was essentially a soft reboot of the Justice Society in the late 90s.  Years after "Zero Hour" had made most of the JSA old and/or killed them, they reform with some second-generation members as well as original Flash Jay Garrick, original Green Lantern Alan Scott (aka Sentinel), and original Wildcat.  The first few issues have them find a baby who is the reborn Dr. Fate.  A couple of issues have Black Adam fight the JSA and then the last arc they have to save the universe from Extant, the former Hawk, who is trying to alter all of time.  It's OK though the problem with volumes like this is they throw a lot at you.  Instead of 5-6 issue story arcs like most comics use these days to fit into one trade paperback, most of these are 2-3 issue arcs.  Overall it was decent and while it probably doesn't factor that much into Black Adam, some of it did factor into the Stargirl TV show.  (3/5)  (Fun Facts:  Ironically while it says "by Geoff Johns," Johns doesn't actually take over the writing until a few issues in.  The first issue begins with Wesley Dodds, the original Sandman referenced above only now an old man, killing himself rather than letting a villain take important information from him.  His kid sidekick, now grown up, becomes the leader of the JSA for a time.) 

Halloween is a scary post that explains what is going to happen with the blog in November...

The Final Stuff I Watched For the Year!

This entry will probably be shorter because it's only been not quite 2 months since the last one.  But with the holidays and such I probably won't do another one until next year--hooray!  Have at thee then!

Thor Love & Thunder:  As someone who did not like Thor Ragnarok (not for "woke" reasons but because it was just stupid) I didn't expect to like this.  And I didn't!  I didn't hate it as much as I thought I might either.  Mostly it was just meh.  In typical Marvel fashion Thor went with the Guardians of the Galaxy at the end of Endgame, so now we have to dispose of them quickly because we can't afford to have Chris Pratt and company in the whole movie.  So they're soon gone and Thor is off to find the "God Butcher" who's Christian Bale looking like Sybok's henchman in Star Trek V, only paler.  He has a sword that lets him kill gods and Asgardians are next, so he kidnaps a bunch of kids in "New Asgard" to lure Thor out.  But then there's another Thor who's his old girlfriend, Natalie Portman--and not just previous footage of her like last time.  And some trite bullshit about her battle with cancer, which is why she has Thor's old hammer that somehow reassembled itself.  And Russell Crowe embarrasses himself by looking chubby and doing a bad Italian accent for a Greek god.  And there's a lot of Guns n Roses which to this point I actually enjoyed.  Blah, blah, blah, shit happens.  Maybe someone can explain to me why Christian Bale deserves a happy-ish ending after he murdered tons of people and kidnapped a bunch of kids.  But on the plus side it was nice to see Idris Elba in the final cookie scene.  In the first cookie scene the guy they got as Hercules only has one line and it sucked, so please maybe work on that, Marvel?  I hope the fact this faded from the box office pretty quick will persuade them they don't need to jam another sequel into their busy schedule.  Or that they need to ruin any more of their decent comic book stories with shitty, half-assed adaptations. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  This was the first Thor movie not to feature Loki, just Matt Damon again playing him in a play.)

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent:  I rented this for $3 when it was on sale during Amazon Prime Day II since I don't think it had been streaming "free" anywhere.  Anyway, Nic Cage stars as Nick Cage in this movie.  He's invited to a birthday party in Spain and since he needs money, he goes.  The guy throwing the party, Javi, (Pedro Pascal) is a huge fan and wants Nick to do a screenplay he wrote.  Meanwhile, a president's daughter has been kidnapped and the CIA thinks Javi did it, so they recruit Nick to help them find the girl.  Mayhem ensues!  It's kind of like Birdman meets Last Action Hero and Hot Fuzz as by the end Nick is basically parodying his own movies.  The beginning is kind of slow but the end is better as things get up to full speed.  I think it was a little disappointing in that while we know it's not the real Nic Cage, they didn't really lean into how we think of Nic Cage as the crazy dude who married Lisa Marie Presley and burned through millions of dollars on stupid shit.  The wife and kid thing is faker than the shootouts and stuff.  I mean there's only so much suspension of disbelief.  (2.5/5) 

The Outfit:  I'm pretty sure one of Donald Westlake's Parker novels had this title, but this is not that.  This is about an English tailor (Mark Rylance) who comes to Chicago in the 1950s and almost immediately his shop becomes a drop for one of the local mobs.  It's kind of similar then to The Drop with James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy, only not in modern day or in New York.  The head gangster's son is screwing the tailor's receptionist and then comes to the shop.  There's a tape (something pretty new at the time) that becomes like the McGuffin along with the son himself and people die.  Then there are twists and turns.  I thought maybe a couple more twists than were necessary, but the last couple help to explain why a simple tailor can do what he does.  Since everything takes place in the tailor's shop (or slightly outside) this really has the feel of a play more than a film, so you're not missing much if you didn't see it the week or so it might have been in theaters.  Still, it was tense and well-acted, and with the twists you never quite knew what was coming.  I watched it on Prime Video, but by now it might not be "free" there, though I'm sure it's streaming to rent other places.  (4/5) (Fun Fact:  in movies especially there's this "rule" about if you show a gun early you have to use it later.  When they early on talked about the tailor's shears, I knew they would be of use later--and they were.  So call them Chekhov's Shears.)

Ambulance:  Also on Prime Video, this long, long, loooooooong and very dull movie by Michael Bay.  It's like a very, very pale imitation of Speed and Heat and probably a few other movies.  Black Manta from Aquaman and Jake Gyllenhaal (two guys with names I hate trying to spell!) are brothers Will and Danny.  Will joined the Army and got married and had a kid and now his wife has cancer and needs surgery the insurance won't cover.  So he goes to Danny, who robs banks, and just happens to right then have a job he could use help for.  But then things go wrong and they wind up hijacking an ambulance with a female paramedic and a rookie cop who's dying from a gunshot wound.  Then they drive around LA while trying to keep the cop alive, because if he dies they'll go to jail for life...as if the bank robbery, assault, kidnapping, grand theft auto, fleeing the cops, etc wouldn't already land them in prison for a very, very long time.  It's 137 minutes but it felt more like 317 minutes.  Can a movie that's 2/3 a car chase get boring?  Yes.  Yes, it can.  And it does. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  Quoting one of your previous movies--The Rock--in your current movie is not meta; it's just narcissism.  It's not even a well-known quote or anything.)

Werewolf By Night:  This Marvel "TV Special" on Disney+ clocks in at a brisk 55 minutes.  Somewhere the Bloodstone family uses the aptly named Bloodstone to fight monsters.  The patriarch of the family has died and his daughter disappeared many years ago, so hunters are called from all over the world to participate in a ceremonial monster hunt to determine who will be the next wielder of the Bloodstone.  Except the prodigal daughter returns and one hunter is not what he seems.  The thing is mostly in black-and-white (except for the Bloodstone) and the werewolf is the traditional 30s-40s kind instead of wolfier ones made with CGI.  It was a fun little movie, especially the relationship between one hunter and "Ted" who has another name in Marvel Comics.  While it says "The End" at the end and there are no cookie scenes, I hope they might have some kind of sequel for next Halloween.  I do wish they had made this more of a movie and built on the characters and stuff a little more to pad it out to 90 minutes, but oh well. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  The film was directed by Michael Giacchino, who does the music as well.  To this point he's mostly been a composer for movies like Wonder Woman, The Batman, and other movies where they couldn't get Hans Zimmer.)

Memory:  Liam Neeson is a hitman with Alzheimer's and Guy Pearce is an FBI agent in El Paso looking into trafficking...or something.  And their paths cross and I wasn't really interested at all.  I kinda lost track of who was dying and why, but there's a pretty high body count.  It wasn't necessarily a bad movie but both stars and director Martin Campbell have done much better work and mostly it makes me sad they're doing cheap straight-to-streaming stuff. (2/5)

Gold:  This is a 2021 movie starring Zac Efron as "Man 1."  In the not-too-distant future, things are kinda like Mad Max--and this was filmed in Australia.  Man 1 hires a grizzled old guy (the director, who's known as "Man 2") to drive him to some camp.  But the truck breaks down and while resting, Zac Efron finds a huge nugget of gold pretty much just sitting on the ground.  Then while Man 2 goes to get something to dig the gold up, Zac Efron stays in the desert to guard the gold.  He has to fight dehydration, a sandstorm, and wild dogs.  It's a pretty slow and depressing movie.  Not really as exciting as a Mad Max movie but probably more realistic.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  One of the many producers was Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, but this really doesn't seem like their kind of thing.  Maybe they figured after you watched this you'd go buy a Chicken Soup book.)

The Pizzagate Massacre:  This is a low-budget movie that's not a mockumentary really though it does have a fake news host at the beginning and end.  Basically there's a Fox "News" type who starts talking about Lizard People in the basement of a pizzeria in Austin.  A young black woman who was briefly an intern on the show recruits a militiaman to help her get to Austin to investigate.  And mayhem ensues!  Obviously it's not a Hollywood A-list cast but not a super low-rent Rifftrax-worthy production either.  I thought it'd be funny but it's really not that much.  Kind of sad people do actually think there are Lizard People and Democrats hiding kids in basements of pizza places.  (3/5)

Grand Theft Parsons:  I watched this on the Movie House app and was surprised to find it was actually a real indie movie from 2003 with people I'd actually heard of like Johnny Knoxville, Michael Shannon, Christina Applegate, and Robert Forster.  Based very loosely on a true story it's about how musician Gram Parsons dies and his road manager (Knoxville) recruits a goofy hippie (Shannon) to steal the body and put it in the hippie's yellow hearse.  Then they take it to Joshua Tree National Park to "set his soul free" by burning the body.  But besides just the cops looking for them there's also Parsons's ex-wife (Applegate) who wants to get his money and Parsons's father (Forster) who wants to take his son to New Orleans for a real funeral.  It was mostly fun and somewhat poignant at the end. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  According to IMDB, the real life road manager Phil Kaufman gave Knoxville the denim vest he actually wore when Parsons was cremated to wear in the movie.  Kaufman appears at the very end of the movie being arrested for the crime.  In the text that pops up at the end, Kaufman and his accomplice were not convicted of stealing the body because the body had no intrinsic value, but they were fined for stealing the coffin.  So apparently it's OK to steal dead bodies--but not coffins.  Something to keep in mind for Halloween.)

3 Days With Dad:  I also watched this on The Movie House app.  It's kind of a poignant dramedy about a family in Maryland dealing with their ailing father (Brian Dennehy) and his subsequent death--which isn't a spoiler since it starts at the funeral.  I think anyone who's gone through a similar situation with a relative would understand this.  The problem is while you have some well-known actors like Dennehy, Tom Arnold, and JK Simmons, most of the focus is on writer/director Larry Clarke as one of the sons who has to deal with some issues.  It probably would have been a better movie with a better actor in that role. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  While JK Simmons is listed first since this was after his Oscar win, he's only in the movie for about 10 minutes as a funeral home employee.)

Taking Liberty:  I also watched this "mockumentary" on the Movie House.  This really is a Rifftrax-worthy thing with a lot of bad actors taking turns shrieking and/or stammering at the camera.  Some dufus who should probably have just stuck to being a nonspeaking extra in a Sopranos episode plans to steal the Statue of Liberty because he thinks it's overpriced.  This was just mind-numbingly awful.  A real chore to even get through it. (1/5)

Lazer-Us:  I watched this "sci-fi" movie on the Movie House in a few bits and pieces.  I put the beginning on a few times but it took a few tries before I actually watched the whole thing.  It's a weird Canadian movie about a guy (who sorta looks like young Brendan Fraser, but not) going by the name Jimmy Lazer who gets a cursed guitar in exchange for fame and fortune by promising the demon his first-born.  He figured, "I'll just not have kids.  Sucker!"  Except he already had a kid that he didn't know about.  So he never uses the guitar and just kinda disappeared but never ages.  Many years later, his daughter is almost the same age and he goes on a quest to save her from demonic forces.  Or something.  There are a lot of "chapters" and comic book-type graphics and stuff like that but the actual plot doesn't make a ton of sense to me.  Near the middle one guy in Jimmy's old band says he'll only join if they take the hyphen out of the "Lazer-Us" name and only then did I realize that the title is a bastardization of Lazarus.  But what Lazarus really has to do with this, I don't really know.  The end was kind of nice though and it was pretty much professionally made, so that's something.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The movie was shot on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls mostly and I'm pretty sure one place they show was the setting used for the store in the short-lived Fox series Wonderfalls.)

Archer Season 13:  This was the first season without Jessica Walter as Mallory Archer since she died last year and was written out at the end of the previous season.  Predictably the show does not take picking up the pieces after her departure too seriously.  The first episode was decent as Sterling Archer and Lana compete in sort of a Spy Olympics to try to impress their new boss.  The second episode though felt like a bad fanfic a la The Last Jedi as everyone acted really dumb.  Why would you take a secretary, HR person, lab scientist, and accountant on a dangerous mission to infiltrate some rebel compound or whatever?  I mean it was like they'd completely forgotten how to do spy stuff.  Fortunately there was a bounce-back episode involving Archer and Lana's daughter.  And then a few more decent episodes before a season finale that actually didn't suck as it didn't put anyone into a coma or have them screw up a mission.  Lana taking over for Mallory was actually referenced a couple of times in early seasons.  The only thing I wondered later:  what happened to Lana and Archer's daughter?  She was with them when they were going to South America but then she wasn't in the last episode, so did they drop her off somewhere?  I don't think they even mentioned it.  Weird.  (3/5)

Lower Decks, Season 3:  While the first episode was funny, it kind of annoyed me that the cliffhanger was resolved offscreen.  I get that the point is they aren't the big heroes and all that, but it still felt like Ocean's Twelve when there was all this stuff and then at the end they tell you they'd actually done the heist a long time ago.  But with that disposed of it got back to normal and then starts to introduce some plot/character developments.  The DS9 episode was brilliant as not only did they use the theme song to great comedic effect but it brought back Kira and Quark and was pretty consistent with their characterization.  I didn't think they needed a whole episode about a rogue ExoComp, but the episode about a holodeck movie was pretty awesome in mocking the Abrams movies, Star Trek V, and Generations.  And it had a cameo from Sulu, which was neat.  The twist of the penultimate(?) episode was pretty good and somewhat poignant as while everyone thought Mariner was the dumbass, she turns out to be the only one who wasn't.  A good season overall. (4/5)

Andor:  The first (and only?) season isn't probably over yet, but it did not start out great.  I heard all these rave reviews and watched the first two episodes--and was almost bored to tears.  It starts out all right with Andor looking for his sister who maybe was a stripper somewhere and then he kills a couple of nosy cops.  After that it just hits the brakes and introduces a bunch of characters who we probably don't need to care about before the end of the third episode that's kind of a soft reboot as Andor is drafted by Stellan Skarsgard but then the next episode slows things down again as he's thrust into some kind of caper.  I guess since this is twice the number of episodes as Obi-Wan Kenobi or Book of Boba Fett they figured they had a lot more time to mess around and get into all this stuff that doesn't probably matter like Imperial Security Bureau politics and Mon Mothma's marriage.  But maybe it'll get better.  At this point it's like Rebels without Jedi, Mandalorians, Twi'leks, funny droids, big funny purple dudes, the camaraderie that developed between all of them, or even a cool ship...so basically everything that made Rebels great. (2/5)

AP Bio, Season 4:  When I got a "Smart" TV, I found out eventually that I had Peacock Premium free as an XFinity customer.  So then I could finally watch the final season of AP Bio.  Like The Orville this was a show that had promise but they never fixed anything to make it better, so not surprisingly it petered out.  And like Letterkenny a big problem is we have to spend 2/3 of every episode with really unfunny characters.  Main character Jack Griffin and his students are usually pretty funny, especially when they would come up with some scheme to take revenge on Jack's enemies.  Then we have the principal and his secretary and the teachers who almost always have some awful bit going on to distract from the good story.  It was especially annoying in the episode when Jack's father (played by Bruce Campbell) shows up and Jack is showing rare vulnerability in trying to derail his father's wedding to a "witch" as in a practitioner of Wicca.  But just as things are getting good we have to waste a bunch of time with the other characters and their unfunny crap. The first episode was pretty funny as most of it involves the AP Bio students concocting fan fiction involving the teachers; a lot of it "shipped" Jack and the principal.  That episode unfortunately also got rid of the cute redhead in the accounting department who had been Jack's girlfriend the previous two seasons.  Then he goes out with some black substitute for two episodes before the series was over, so what was the point of changing?  I suppose this show was another hindered by its premise in that it was hard for them to focus on the kids, who are funny, because they were paying the principal and teachers (who were not funny) and had them in the credits, so they had to actually do something. They should do a movie on Peacock though where they can let the kids graduate and stuff.  Kind of put a bow on it.  But why would they bother, right?  (2/5)

Puppet Master 1, 2, 4, & 5:  I've watched the Rifftrax of Retro Puppet Master a bunch of times but I never watched the original movie series that started in 1989 from the studio that brought you other great movies like Oblivion, Oblivion 2, Tourist Trap, Shrunken Heads, and Demonic Toys.  Not surprisingly, Retro Puppet Master, which is supposed to be a prequel does not line up with this at all.  And even the movies of this series don't line up with each other despite that the stories are all pretty much conceived and produced by Charles Band.  Case in point, in the original movie, puppet master Andre Toulon kills himself to avoid capture by Nazis in 1939 in California.  But Retro Puppet Master starts in 1944 near the Swiss border and Toulon is alive and well.  Toulon and the puppets like a Godzilla or Gamera movie alternate between good and evil in different movies.  In the original Toulon is fairly good and so are the puppets until they're corrupted by a jerk in 1989.  But in the second one Toulon's corpse is reanimated and goes around looking like The Invisible Man, commanding the puppets to murder people and steal parts of their brains so he can create a new body for himself and his dead wife.  I couldn't watch the third one, which I guess was a prequel about how Toulon's wife died.  In the fourth and fifth entries, Toulon is good and so are the puppets as they help a dorky guy battle the evil mini-minions of the Egyptian god Sutek.  In Retro Puppet Master the puppets have the spirits of people murdered by Sutek in them to avenge themselves in extremely awkward fashion, so I guess there was a little consistency by then.  The inconsistent stories and tone as well as mediocre actors and effects make this not really a great horror movie series. (2/5) 

Demonic Toys:  So after the relative "success" of the first Puppet Master movies, Charles Band and company thought, "What other small items can we bring to life to murder people?"  The answer is of course:  toys!  And then there's a convoluted story about the toys trying to capture a pregnant cop so the devil's spirit can enter her and be born on Earth.  It's basically the same shtick, which is probably why there were only two of these--and later a crossover with Puppet Master.  Sadly (not) I can't watch the second one for "free" on Freevee or Prime Video. Somehow I will have to live with the disappointment. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  the movie was written by David S Goyer who went on to work in better movies like the Blade ones and the Nolan Batman movies.  By comparison this obviously isn't his best work.)

Dollman:  So after Puppet Master and Demonic Toys, Charles Band and company at Full Moon Entertainment thought, "What else can we do with tiny-sized things against regular-sized people?"  So someone had the idea for this movie.  Basically a hard-boiled cop from an alien planet crashes on Earth only to find he's 1/6 the size of the average inhabitant.  Which if you think of movies like Honey I Shrunk the Kids or Ant-Man could have worked.  Buuuut, those movies had the advantage of Disney money and effects.  This had not even 1/6 of that.  And it was in 1991.  So they really couldn't pull it off in anything like a convincing fashion.  Besides Tim Thomerson as the titular character, you have Jackie Earle Haley as a bad guy terrorizing some low-cost location masquerading as the Bronx.  Meanwhile a bad guy the Dollman chased to Earth teams up with Jackie Earle Haley to use some kind of fusion bomb and blah, blah, blah, very shitty-looking mayhem ensues.  With a Disney-sized budget and better actors maybe it could have worked as passable entertainment, but without anything at all, it's pretty awful.  I mean, imagine a movie where the main characters really can't interact with each other because there's no practical way to put them on the screen at the same time?  Yeah, pretty lame.  (1/5)

Dollman vs. Demonic Toys:  Before Alien vs. Predator, Freddy vs. Jason, or Batman v Superman, there was this bad attempt at a crossover.  For...reasons the demonic toys are reanimated and the cop from that movie teams with the Dollman to stop them.  The Dollman brings along his girlfriend, Nurse Ginger, who was shrunk by an alien in the movie Bad Channels to make her almost the same size as him. It's a real cinematic universe!  Only worse than even DC and Sony's fumbling attempts.  At only an hour, maybe 50 minutes of which is actually original footage, this barely even qualifies as a movie. But since most of it involves Dollman and the toys, who are on the same scale, it looks better than the Dollman movie.  (1.5/5)  (Fun Fact:  Legendary voice actor Frank Welker does the voice of the evil Oopsie-Daisy doll and probably some others too.)

Toxic Fandom Has Become A F**king Embarrassment

 Back in spring when Obi-Wan Kenobi aired on Disney+, there was a "controversy" because of a black woman playing an Inquisitor.  It got to the point where star/producer Ewan McGregor had to record a message chastising the so-called "fans."  And I wanted to do a face palm, not for his message, but that a message needed to be recorded in the first place.

I mean, do these so-called "fans" not realize that there was a black guy voicing Darth Vader from literally the first scene of the first movie?  And another black guy on screen in the next two movies?  It's almost as bad as the toxic "fans" who whine about Star Trek being "woke."  Um, yeah, it has been since pretty much Day 1.  They literally had a black woman and Asian guy on the bridge and (at least according to the Adam Sandler song) two Jewish guys as main characters.  Do you idiots even watch the stuff you claim to love so much?

And then soon after Amazon's Ring of Power series premieres, we get this:

Again, it's embarrassing for me as a "fan" that actors, producers, and big corporations have to keep chastising us like children and stating the obvious:  your property is not--and likely never has been--all white.

Adding to the embarrassment is if you read the comments like on that Facebook post you still have a lot of toxic "fans" saying dumb shit like Elves and whoever were White and other races might have had dark skin but they didn't mix.  I know Facebook posts aren't verbal, but you people ever bother to listen to yourselves and realize how you sound?  Reading the comments feels like listening to a fucking Klan rally.  I mean, you're basically talking about "racial purity," which is pretty much Page 1 of the Klan handbook.

And the tactics of these "fans" are very similar to those of the Ku Klux Klan, only updated for the 21st Century.  Instead of burning a cross on someone's yard, you send an email.  Instead of tarring and feathering someone, you send a Tweet.  Instead of lynching someone...let's hope it doesn't get to that point.  The idea was to intimidate people of color so they would stay in "their place" and the tactics of these toxic "fans" are meant to do the same.  The Klan rationalized its behavior as "protecting" the "purity" of the white race in the same way "fans" rationalize that they're "protecting" the "purity" of their favorite property.

Not only was the Klan dangerous (and still is), but for a white person like me it's also really embarrassing that I share anything common with these fucking degenerate morons.  In the same way, it's really embarrassing that I have to share my love of certain IPs with these fucking degenerate morons.  Though I'm not a huge, huge fan of anything to the point of dressing up and going to conventions or putting stickers on my car or anything, I do really like Star Wars, Star Trek, and other things--Middle Earth not as much.  Thanks to these toxic idiots, now I have to worry if people find out I like those things, they might think I'm one of those people sending death threats to actors and stupid shit like that.  Especially because I fit the profile of being white and not sociable and everything.  And if people think that, what can I say:  I have black friends?  I have queer friends?  And so on?  You know how well that plays.

I'm being a little facetious here, but could these racist idiots think about me, the non-racist white fan?  I really don't want to be lumped in with you asshats.  And I really hate that actors, producers, writers, and so on have to take time out of their day to record messages telling you asshats to grow the fuck up.  I don't want Ewan McGregor thinking we're all like that.  In the unlikely event I ever ran into him, I wouldn't want him thinking, "Oh shit, one of those people" and calling his personal security to tase me or something.

So, come on, stop being toxic embarrassments.  If not because it's the right thing then do it for me and all the other non-toxic fans who just want to watch our shows and movies and enjoy them without a lot of offscreen drama.  Thank you.

Game Inflation Makes Games Only Fun for Those Who Can Afford It

When I first got a Kindle Fire in 2013, one of the first games I loaded on it was Deer Hunter.  It was a hunting game where you shot deer, bear, wolves, and even African animals like lions, elephants, or antelope.  It was fun--for a while.  But it's one of those games where the prices keep getting higher and higher until they're ridiculous.

I mean when you first start you buy an ordinary shotgun for like 100 "hunter bucks," the currency used in-game.  But after you're up to level 50 or so, you have to buy guns for like 3 BILLION hunter bucks.  It's like, shit, I could buy an F-35 for that much and drop smart bombs on these freaking animals.  

I mean the choices at that point are either to be stuck on a level until you organically accumulate enough wealth, or pay real money to buy what you need.  Except the real money you need to pay keeps going up while the utility of the item keeps going down because the next level, guess what?  Yeah, you need another new gun because the one on the last level doesn't have enough power or range or some stupid made-up bullshit thing.  So eventually I stopped playing because it was just so ridiculously overpriced.

When I bought a new phone last year, I realized it came with this silly game called "Dice Dreams."  You roll dice to get the in-game currency to build whatever buildings are in the "set" for that level.  Like one has buildings from New York and another Paris and another is like Santa's village and so on.  But like the hunting game, the prices keep going up and up and up.  So again, you're either stuck or you pay real money.

I know why they do this:  so you'll have to pay real money to get stuff to keep playing the game.  But I usually don't because it's just a silly game and I don't want to invest a bunch of money in it.  But some people will.  It's another example of the junk mail philosophy:  we keep raising prices and sure some people will quit or not buy stuff, but some will and if enough do that, we'll be making money! It makes the game less fun because unless you're going to spend a lot of money, it'll take forever to move up to the next level.  And there's only so long I really want to be stuck on one level.  Either I pay or I quit--probably the latter since this wasn't even a game I wanted; it's just something pre-loaded on the phone.

Even games like Empires & Puzzles where you don't need a lot of money to play have stuff like this.  Like when they added the "Soul Exchange" where you can exchange 10, 15, or 20 extremely rare 5-star characters for one ultra-rare 5-star character.  When I complained that the cost is ridiculous (and to buy one 5-star was $20) someone pointed out stuff like that is strictly for the "whales" who spend a lot of money on the game and thus have a lot more extra 5-star characters.  Which is true.  In a game like that you don't need to spend a lot of money, but if you do spend a lot of money you'll have a much better team and be able to do a lot more.  For some people that's a big deal.  For me, it's far less.  I mean I have a pretty good team or two now so I don't feel like I need to spend hundreds of dollars a day to upgrade.  I'm sure games like World of Warcraft and such are the same where the top players are probably those who can afford all the upgrades and stuff.

Back in the old days of the 80s and 90s I guess it was better when you just paid upfront for the games for your Atari 2600, NES, Playstation, or PC.  It might cost you $60 or so, but once you paid, you were done with it forever.  No in-app purchases or rising costs for stuff that make it harder and harder to do anything.  At most you might spend $20 for a clue book or strategy manual or something like that.  Maybe call a tip line like they do in The Wizard.  Whereas these games today, you can literally spend thousands of dollars every single day!

And really, the problem with these games that operate like those I mentioned above is it makes the game into a bit of class warfare.  It makes it so only those with plenty of money to waste on stupid shit can actually advance and have the most fun.  Us poors are stuck on the lower levels, kind of like the immigrants stuck in steerage on the Titanic.  And like those immigrants we try to have fun in our own way, but it sucks we won't get to dine in the fancy restaurants or get the best views from the top decks. 

Sometimes books feel this way, especially those by popular authors so the publisher charges like $15 for an ebook.  Then only people who have money to burn can read those books until the price comes down--or they can get a copy from the library.  A recent example is author Elizabeth McCracken, whom I follow on Twitter, has a new book out.  I checked on Amazon and the Kindle is $14!  For 181 pages!  That's 8 cents per page!  Which is part of why people steal books, though not the only reason, because people even steal free books for some stupid reason.

And yes, I know publishers and authors and game designers need money.  But do they have to exploit us to such an extent that many of us can't fully enjoy the product? 

What do you think?

Gargoyles Was Disney's Batman The Animated Series--Only Less Successful

 A month or so ago I watched Disney's series Gargoyles from 1994-97ish.  I did not watch it when it originally aired because I think it was on in the middle of the day and I was in high school/college, usually with a part-time job, so I was a bit busy.  And there was no way I could have gotten anyone to tape it for me even if I had wanted to watch it back then.  I think I watched a Toy Galaxy or some other YouTube show about it a couple years ago and it sounded interesting, so when I saw it on Disney+ and didn't really have anything better to watch, I said what the hell.

Jalapeno!

As the title of my entry says, the series seems like Disney's response to Batman the Animated Series, which had premiered over a year earlier.  BTAS was a cartoon but not really a kids show as it was kinda dark and gritty and had more adult issues.  It wasn't the campy POW! BAM! BOOF! stuff of Batman 66 or Superfriends.  In the same way, Gargoyles is dark and gritty and gets really too complicated for kids, despite that unlike BTAS, I don't think they ever aired it in prime-time on a major network.  I don't think Disney owned Marvel at this point, so to compete with BTAS, they had to make their own series about weird avengers of the night.  Weird avengers of the night who have bat-like wings that when they're not flying fold up into something like a cape.

The first five episodes basically make up the pilot, introducing us to the characters and situations.  In 994 (or 1000 years from the present of 1994) in Scotland there were a bunch of gargoyles who were statues by day but at night turned into fearsome monsters who protected a particular castle.  But then some Vikings attack and, aided by help within the castle, kill a lot of the gargoyles while they're stone.  Only 6 of them remain:  two who were outside the castle and four who were down in a basement as a punishment.  A spell gets put on them that they'll turn to stone until the castle rises above the clouds.

Fast-forward 1000 years and they suddenly awaken in the castle--which has been moved and rebuilt atop a New York skyscraper by the evil businessman David Xanatos.  With the castle above the clouds the spell was broken--loophole!  Xanatos tricks the gargoyles into helping him steal information from a rival company, which kind of seems like overkill.  I mean, couldn't he have just hired some regular, human mercenaries, instead of moving a whole freaking castle to wake up a bunch of monsters?  But he probably also figured he could use them for jobs after that, except the gargoyles realized they're being used and revolt.  Along with the help of the sexy Detective Elisa Maza, they get Xanatos put in jail--for a few months.  I mean, we've seen recently that there's a different system of "justice" for the rich and powerful.

The remaining 8 episodes or so of the first season, the gargoyles do battle with some foes, many of whom are recurring villains like the rogue female gargoyle Demona; an old warrior named MacBeth, who is based on the Shakespeare character; and "The Pack," who are a group of super-powered heroes-turned-villains.  At the end of the season, the gargoyles are forced to move from the castle into a clock tower that's conveniently atop Elisa's precinct house and more conveniently, no one else apparently ever visits.  They vow to protect Manhattan from evil--so I guess the rest of New York is shit outta luck.  Get yer own gargoyles!

Season 2 brings in a lot of new complications.  And a lot of Shakespeare references.  There's a multi-part episode about MacBeth that probably reenacts a lot of the play; I haven't read or watched it so I don't really know.  In the end, MacBeth and Demona are linked by the three "weird sisters" so that they can't die unless they kill each other.  Cue Queen's "Who Wants to Live Forever...?" from Highlander.  In another multi-part episode, Demona steals a mirror to summon the evil sprite Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream, who turns all humans into gargoyles and the gargoyles into humans.  In the end, he gives Demona the "gift" that instead turning to stone in the daytime, she turns into a human, which to her is more of a curse.

The "weird sisters" return later when we switch from Shakespeare to Arthurian legends.  Elisa and a couple of gargoyles go to Avalon, the island where Arthur went to in the end.  That's also where the survivors of the old castle in 994 went, along with a clutch of gargoyle eggs, that have since hatched--including Angela, the daughter of head gargoyle Goliath and Demona.  Which then begs the question of what gargoyle sex is like; I would guess it's wild and very painful.  In doing battle with Demona, MacBeth, and the weird sisters, they wake Arthur, though he doesn't have Excalibur so he's basically a normal dude.

Then there's this whole odyssey after that as Goliath, Elisa, and Angela are taken from place-to-place by a magic boat from Avalon.  They go to Loch Ness, western Canada, Paris, Prague, London, Egypt, Nigeria, Australia, Easter Island, South America, Japan, Arizona, and Norway to stop various bad guys from doing stuff.  This brings in mythology from other cultures like Odin, Anubis, and Anansi.  Meanwhile the other gargoyles are trying to hold down the fort in New York, not knowing if their leader and friends are ever going to return.

So, yeah, with all the Shakespeare, mythology, and Arthurian legends and time travel and stuff it's not really a show for kids.  There's a possible future episode that's sort of a "Days of Future Past" thing where Xanatos has taken over New York.  A couple of gargoyles die in the episode, which makes it definitely not a kid-friendly episode.  A later episode killed Goliath's evil clone Thailog and his other cloned gargoyles.  At the same time it's never really more than PG-13 or by today's standards maybe just PG.  I mean there's violence but not really blood or gore or cursing or sex; this was a Disney show after all.

The second season ends with Xanatos and the gargoyles coming to peace when the gargoyles save his newborn son from Oberon, the lord of Avalon, not the idiot I used to know on Writers.net.  The clock tower is destroyed, so the gargoyles move back to Xanatos's castle.  Meanwhile, footage of the gargoyles flying over the city airs and now humans know of their existence!

The third season adds the subtitle "The Goliath Chronicles" but doesn't really change much except the end credits have a different background/more of a Celtic version of the theme song and Goliath does a little narration at the beginning.  I'm not really sure what the deal was with that.  But mostly in the final season they have to deal with  humans who hate and fear them.  You know, like those Marvel heroes?

There's a new villain for season 3:  the Quarrymen, who have Cobra Commander hoods and Thor lightning hammers to kill gargoyles.  While the second season was 52 episodes, this one was only 13.  There was a lot less Shakespeare and mythology and it seemed a lot fewer notable guest stars.  Even the animation didn't seem quite as good, as if they were cutting costs.

The final episode wraps up the Quarrymen story and tries to put a bow on things, but really there was a lot left unresolved.  Demona is still out there and still not really reconciled with the gargoyles.  Some other bad guys like Jackal & Hyena of The Pack were I think still out there.  So it definitely felt a little incomplete.

There is some decent characterization.  The gargoyles all fit a basic role:

• Goliath:  strong, noble leader who is somewhat naïve about the modern world
• Hudson:  wise old soldier who used to lead the gargoyles before naming Goliath the leader
• Brooklyn:  the hotheaded daredevil who becomes second-in-command
• Lexington:  the runt who's inexplicably good with computers and technology
• Broadway:  the dumb fat one who's a fan of noir movies

But then they all go beyond that as each gets a spotlight episode here-and-there, though obviously Goliath gets the most as the leader.  In one episode, the illiterate Hudson and Broadway decide they're going to learn to read--and a few episodes later we see they've made some progress.

Even the main villains are not really one-note characters.  There are some occasions where Xanatos works with the gargoyles--when it suits his interests--and ultimately he comes to an understanding with them.  Demona is basically a Magneto-type character in that she blames humans for most of her kind dying and so endeavors to destroy all humans.  And MacBeth hates the gargoyles--especially Demona--but he also has a sense of honor.  Other bad guys like the Pack or mad scientist Dr. Sevarius are more one-note, but it's still better than a lot of shows.

I think I noted in my entry on BTAS that there were a lot of voice actors who also worked in various Star Trek shows/movies and the same is true here.  Jonathan Frakes (Riker) voices Xanatos and Marina Sirtis (Troi) voices Demona.  Michael Dorn (Worf) guests as the cyborg gargoyle Coldstone--which makes me want some ice cream--and in another episode as Taurus, a Minotaur cop.  Brent Spiner (Data) guested as Puck--who turns out to also be Xanatos's assistant Owen, which didn't really make sense when you work through it backwards.  Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) guested as Elisa's mother.  Kate Mulgrew (Janeway) guested as Xanatos's mother-in-law and Titania--who turn out to be the same character.  Colm Meaney (O'Brien) played an Irish guy--real stretch.  Avery Brooks (Sisko) played an alien.  LeVar Burton (LaForge) guested as a spider god.  So you had all the series at the time represented.  Then you have actors like David Warner who were in Trek episodes/movies and also in this.  

Besides that there are famous names like Ed Asner, Jim Belushi, Tim Curry, and Tony Shalhoub.  And legendary voice actors Frank Welker and Michael Bell.  There's probably more, but the stupid Disney+ app always minimizes the window right when it gets to the voice credits, so I can't easily pause to see who was in each episode.  If you've watched the show--or visited the IMDB page--you can drop some more names in the comments.

But my favorite is Keith David as Goliath.  Like James Earl Jones, he has a really distinctive voice, though less bass; you've probably heard him in commercials for the Navy if nothing else.  Pretty much after this series ended, he voiced another weird hero of the night:  Spawn in the pretty decent HBO animated series.  And he's been in movies like They Live and shows like Community.

Another fun fact is that Elisa seems a lot like Detective Lottie Donovan in the Scarlet Knight books.  They're both hard-nosed, loner female detectives with a pretty similar fashion sense--only Donovan's jacket was black, not red.  I hadn't watched this series when I wrote the books, so I guess it's a coincidence.  Or some kind of osmosis?  Whatever.  Bonus fun fact:  in a Halloween episode, Elisa dresses up as Belle with Goliath as her Beast.  You know, like that extremely popular Disney movie?  Nowadays people would complain about the "wokeness" that her parents are Native American and Nigerian.

The relationship between Elisa and Goliath was often kind of complicated.  They care for each other and hug a few times and I can't help thinking if it weren't a Disney show in the mid-90s they might have hooked up.  In one episode, the evil clone Thailog actually puts Elisa's DNA in a clone of Demona so that was definitely skirting the line.

After personalities of the cyborg gargoyle Coldstone hijack their bodies, Broadway and Angela become a couple, much to the chagrin of Brooklyn, who hoped to have Angela too.  But other than some hand holding and stuff like that not a lot happens with their relationship.  Again, if it weren't a Disney show they might have been able to do more.

Another fun fact is in one episode the gargoyles try jalapeno peppers and none--not even Goliath--can handle them.  After that "Jalapeno" becomes the "frak" of the series or the swear word that's not really a swear word.

Another fun fact!  In an episode where Goliath is wrongfully arrested for robbing a jewelry store, his public defender is named Amy Schumer.  This is of course years before the comedian of the same name came onto the scene.

Anyway, for the most part I really liked the series.  It's action-packed without being stupid and you might even learn something about Shakespeare or Arthurian legends and so forth.  The animation is pretty typical for the time period, especially for Disney; it's not as crude as a lot of kid's shows today.  If you have Disney+ it's definitely worth a look.  And probably worth a reboot or revival or something like that. Except for Ed Asner and Nichelle Nichols, I think the original voice actors are still alive.

Amazon's New KDP Reports Suck

 It was 3 or 4 years ago when Amazon first unveiled the "beta" of their KDP reports.  And they were...meh.  Predictably when the "beta" finally went online, it was not really changed much.  Which stinks, because those reports are not really all that useful.  The main problem is that these new reports lump all of your "orders" together, instead of separating free and paid.  Which if you have no free books (or paid books) is fine, but if you have a mix, then it's not helpful.   In the picture below, it says 15 units ordered, but almost all of those units are free, not paid.  So it's really misleading about how much I would actually get paid.

And the royalties box there includes Kindle Unlimited stuff, so who even knows how accurate that is?  Not even Amazon really understands how that's calculated, so that number is just a vague estimate, thus not very helpful.

And the retro interface makes it almost impossible to use the reports on a phone or tablet.  To see how many paid orders I have, I need to use those filter boxes at the top of the screen.  On a PC it's pretty easy, but on a phone or tablet, it is really annoying.

For a while they still let you use the old-style reports if you want.  Those are better in that you can see at a glance how many actual paid sales you have and how many free.  The only good thing about the new reports is it shows you the titles.  Still, I'd rather use the old ones and see at a glance how much money I'm getting than have to dick around with filters. 

There's really no excuse to take 3-4 years and then come out with something that was basically outdated in 2002.  In the year 2022, you'd think making your reports easy to use with phones and tablets (including Amazon Fire tablets) would be a priority.  But nah.  That it's been so long with so little improvement is a problem with Amazon in general.  They don't have competent people and they don't listen to users.

I know other writers besides myself hate this new format, but Amazon doesn't care.  Like with most bureaucracies, some bloated committee came up with this and that's what they're going to stick with.  Users will just get used to it, like all those bad Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on updates that almost never actually improve anything.

You don't like it, whaddaya gonna do about it, tough guy?  Yeah, didn't think so. 

Choose Your Lion

 After talking about the 2011 soft reboot of Voltron called Voltron Force, I started to wonder:  which lion would I choose if I could choose one?

You have:

• Black, the center lion of air/space that forms the Blazing Sword
• Red, the right arm of fire that in the center forms Magma Pistols
• Green, the left arm of life that in the center forms a Boomerang Shield
• Blue, the right leg of water that in the center forms a Trident with freezing powers
• Yellow, the yellow leg of ground that in the center forms Rock Maces and has chain saws on the back

Obviously Black is the most popular choice because it's the center and the lead lion.  And yet at least in that series the other lions all have some neat powers too.  Huge, old-timey pistols that shoot magma are pretty sweet.  The green center form looks like a ninja with a Captain America shield studded with spikes.  Yellow has maces and chain saws!  And blue is OK too.

I think I'd have to choose between red and green.  I like the pistols and the ninja form.  And I'd hate the responsibility of being the full-time leader.  Green is my favorite color, and while the Magma Pistols are cool, the Boomerang Shield is useful as defense and offense.

So, I'd vote for Green first.

Followed by:

1. Red
2. Black
3. Yellow
4. Blue

What would you choose?

Voltron Force, The Forgotten Series, Surpassed My Low Expectations

Like Beast Machines originally I was just going to throw a review in a catch-all entry with other TV series back in September, but then I decided I might as well make it an entire entry no one will care about.  Hooray?

I don't remember when I read there had been an entire Voltron revival series in 2011 or so that I had never heard about before, but maybe it was a couple of years ago when I was doing some research for my Voltron-themed gender swap book.  I had watched the original series in the 80s and the CGI sequel in the 90s and most of the Netflix reboot from 2016-2018 but I had never seen this series or even really thought about it.  Then it showed up on Tubi as recommended after I watched Transformers Prime, so I thought, why not watch it?

At first I was a bit skeptical.  The animation is kind of off-putting because it uses two styles that both don't look great.  The people are all done in pretty cartoonish traditional animation that probably corresponded to other things on Nickelodeon at the time.  Voltron, the Robeasts, and some buildings were done in low-res CGI or cel-shading or something like that.  It reminded me of the corny Rifftrax movie Attack of the Supermonsters which was 4 episodes of an old Japanese series called Dinosaur War Izenborg that combined really old anime animation with that Power Rangers-type rubber suits and obvious miniatures for the monsters and good guy vehicles.

So my expectations were pretty low, especially after listening to the awful hip-hop theme song, but I think this is the type of show where if you can get a few episodes in, it starts to gel a bit.  Not that it ever rises to greatness, but at least to the level of "not bad" if you're a fan of the old series.

Like the 90s series I watched an episode of on YouTube--which seems the only place you can watch it these days because it doesn't seem like they even put out DVDs, just VHS tapes--it's not a full reboot, more of a soft reboot that like Superman Returns is a sequel where everything looks different.  Five years or so after the evil Lotor was defeated, the Voltron lions have been decommissioned and the pilots scattered.  A Galaxy Alliance cadet named Daniel and his new friend Vince meet Lance, an instructor at the academy, who then enlists their help to steal the Voltron keys from the evil Sky Marshal Wade while they're cleaning his bathroom as a punishment.

Meanwhile, Keith is on the run but is finally able to get to the black lion.  Eventually everyone meets up at the Castle of Lions on the planet Arus where Princess Allura can give them diplomatic immunity.  Their reunion is just in time as Lotor has been revived by a mad scientist with a new element called "Haggarium" after the witch Haggar.

And then of course there's a Robeast and they have to form Voltron to stop it.  Daniel and Vince remain with the team to slowly start learning its secrets.  A third cadet, Princess Allura's niece Larmina, also joins them, though she's more interested in fighting than piloting a lion.  My immediate question on this was:  when did Princess Allura have a brother or sister?  Did he/she die?  I mean if she has a sibling, why isn't he/she running the kingdom of Arus so Allura can focus on the Voltron Force? 

Anyway, not surprisingly the show introduces a few gimmicks into the mix.  First is that everyone has a "Voltcom," which is a bracelet that is a communicator, computer, and general Swiss Army knife that also can summon armor and has a weapon specialized for each wearer.  Keith has mini-Blazing Swords, Lance has pistols, Hunk has a hammer, Pidge has throwing stars, Allura has a bow, Daniel has lion claws that also give him speed, Larmina has a stick/num-chucks, and Vince has sort of tentacles that let him hack computers.  Vince also has some kind of magic that after a few episodes lets Voltron change the center lion from black to red, yellow, blue, or green.  (Which is really implausible because the black lion is bigger, but, you know, it's magic, so shut up nerds.)  Each change gives Voltron access to a new weapon:  magma pistols for red, maces for yellow, a trident for blue, and a Boomerang Shield for green.  Also, Daniel can plug into Voltron to give him super-speed like his Voltcom and Larmina can plug in to give Voltron kung-fu fighting and a katana.  While the Netflix reboot series didn't use these gimmicks, they did make it so the different lions could summon a different weapon, which was sort of similar.  In the last episode of the season, the castle is able to transform and take flight, something that the Netflix show also used.

Daniel's speed power can also be used to let Voltron "flash form" or form more quickly.  The episode introducing this was pretty funny as there's a new Robeast that keeps Voltron from forming.  Daniel says, "You can't expect the enemy to always wait for you to form Voltron, right?" And the original team just stares blankly.  I mean, yeah, why the hell do the Robeasts always just wait around for Voltron to form?

Something that was underused was an evil Voltron team the bad guys create.  There's a minotaur center with a snake, rhino, and a couple other things that make a "Predator Robeast" powered by Hagarium.  It kicks Voltron's ass until Lotor calls it back suddenly.  Then it's like 15 episodes before we see it again.

Unlike the original series, which was mostly episodic, there is more of a serial format, though not as much as the Netflix series.  But things carry over from one episode into others, like their feud with Wade, who at one point shoots Voltron with a special bullet that damages the "nexus" letting the lions combine.  The "nexus" thing becomes a recurring element as the team has to explore the origins of Voltron in order to repair it.

The last few episodes cleared the board of villains as Wade, Lotor, and Lotor's mad scientist are all finally dealt with.  And Allura retires to be the queen, Pidge retires to run the castle defenses, and Keith retires to be the king.  Which means he and Allura are getting married?  Um...it's not really said.  Larmina takes over the blue lion, Vince the green, and Daniel the black.  But in the last episode after Daniel's first real attempt at leading the Force is a disaster, Keith has to take over again.  Unfortunately the show ends on a cliffhanger as Daniel turns the black lion on the other lions.  Presumably then he would have been a villain in a second season, which did not happen.  If you ignore the last two minutes or so then it would have ended in a decent place.

While the characterization might not be as good as the Netflix series, it's better than the original.  There's some justice for Hunk in that he's not just the funny fat guy; he's not really fat but just sort of big and really smart at fixing machines and has his own "secret" junkyard on Arus called the "Hunkyard."  The episode introducing this has the cadets each making their own vehicle from the junk that they then somehow manage to form into a robot called Awesometron or something that's later destroyed.

Since this was ostensibly a sequel, Pidge is still a boy but he's also from a planet of science ninjas!  How cool would that be?  There's some justice for him in that he's not just an annoying dork with glasses but a badass hacker who has his own Deadmau5-type act with holographic bandmates.  

Lance is still a hothead who gets the least characterization of any of them.  That's a little disappointing because he was my favorite in the original series.  Keith is still the noble leader who usually has a stick up his ass, but in one episode he finds out the secret origin of his family, one that would let him become king.  There are often references that both are carrying a torch for Allura, who wears blue instead of pink until she retires and is a strong, wise advocate for peace who can still kick butt when needed.  Her father's ghost hangs around the basement of the castle to dispense advice as needed until he crosses over or whatever in one of the late episodes.

Larmina is a hothead who likes to fight, Vince is a tech nerd who becomes a magic man, and Daniel is the overeager kid who's not good at taking orders.  In one episode Daniel and Vince take Larmina to Earth to introduce her to things like pizza.  Then they run afoul of a Voltron collector who has replicas of the original Voltron and original costumes and stuff for some neat Easter eggs.

There's also an episode featuring Sven, the original blue lion pilot, who has an infant son now with someone not shown or really even mentioned.  At the end of that episode, his baby is given to the nanny who helped to raise Allura.

While none of the episodes are overly serious, most are not too silly, though there are a few like "Gary," which features a digital monster that looks like a Minion crossed with Pikachu that creates havoc like Tribbles and overall made me think of the awful "Kremzeek" episode of Transformers.  I think it wound up being the second-best Voltron series as while it's not as gritty as the Netflix reboot, it's not as silly as the 80s series and usually doesn't just follow that formula of some vamping-monster shows up-lions fight it-monster becomes giant Robeast-they form Voltron-use Blazing Sword to kill it.  And while the dual animation styles is kind of weird sometimes, it's not as creepy as the 90s series with the CGI people who seem like living mannequins.

If it's still on Tubi, you can check it out for free (with commercials).  Perhaps the best part is it has a "Skip Intro" button so you can usually skip over the awful theme song with the press of a button.

(Fun Fact:  Garry Chalk, who voiced Optimus Primal in Beast Wars/Machines and Optimus Prime in Armada/Energon/Cybertron voices the evil Sky Marshal Wade.  The added fun fact is that in the original Voltron, the original Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen, voiced the castle caretaker Coran.  That's just Prime.)

Sound Moderation

 A few months ago when I had to rent a car, it had Sirius XM in it that worked.  I have it in my previous Focus and current one but I never use it because it's really not much better than regular radio.  Anyway, when using the Sirius XM, I settled on mostly listening to the 80s station.  Why?  It had the most stuff I could actually tolerate without wanting to change the channel.

With their decades channels they play a wide variety of stuff so like the 80s channel you might hear Springsteen, Michael Jackson, New Kids on the Block, Poison, and Flock of Seagulls all in one stretch.  It's the same with the 70s, 90s, and 2000s channels where they play a broad spectrum.  What I decided was the 80s spectrum was the most tolerable for me.  With the 90s it would play a couple of good songs and then some hip-hop or rap or country.  The same for the 2000s.  And the 70s would play some crappy disco or something.  Ugh.

A few weeks after that I did a survey for WLLZ, the local "classic" rock station.  I hadn't really listened to regular radio much because there weren't any stations I really liked after the adult alternative station in Windsor changed formats to something more kid-friendly.  Mostly I just listened to books on my Kindle and MP3 CDs of albums I bought.  The survey I took had me listen to a lot of different samples of music and rate them.  There were a lot, but I got paid $4, so I guess it was OK for like a half-hour or so.  Listening to all the samples, I liked a lot more than I didn't.

So when I got a "new" used car that didn't have any stations set, I turned WLLZ on and like the 80s channel on Sirius it doesn't always play stuff I love, but it plays more that I can tolerate than other stations.  I suppose it helps that "classic" rock is basically through the 2000s now.  And since they hired most of the WRIF DJs from 15 years ago it's pretty much like when I moved to Metro Detroit in the early 2000s and started listening to that station.  Kind of like having a time machine.

Though really an app like Pandora is still better because you can customize it better.  But I let my Pandora lapse because I don't have it in the car and I can't use it at work or anything anymore.  If my car had that installed, I would probably sign back up for it.

Anyway, I'm just saying sometimes you have to pick your poison and maybe you won't like everything, but if there's enough that you do like then it's probably the best you can do.  I'm sure there's some way to relate that to books.  Or life in general.

Beast Machines Was Hindered By Its Own Premise--And Toys

 A couple months ago I posted about Star Wars cartoons The Bad Batch and Resistance that they were largely hindered by their own premise.  Meaning that the show does not work because of something in its very concept.  An earlier example of this is Transformers Beast Machines from 1999-2000.

A little background:  by 1991, the original Transformers line was on its last legs.  A couple years later came Generation 2 which featured reissued 80s toys and then some originals.  There was a not-very-good comic that lasted 12 issues and by 1995 that line too was dead.

Along came Beast Wars in 1995.  Instead of cars, planes, and so on the Transformers become real-ish animals.  The heroic Maximals largely turn into mammals while the evil Predacons mostly turn into insects and dinosaurs.  The computer animated TV series from Canadian outfit Mainframe premiered in 1996 and like what Pixar was doing with Toy Story it made stories that were suited for kids and adults, which was good since many original fans (like me) were entering adulthood and would not have really wanted to watch a show as silly as the original TV show in the 80s.

The first 26-episode season of that show was really well done and thankfully free of a lot of stupid gimmicks.  New characters were periodically added, but the writers managed to never make it seem too forced or like in the original series, just have new characters show up in the background.  This is because computer animation was expensive and time-consuming, so they had to keep the cast small.

The next season began unraveling things by introducing stupid gimmicks like "Transmetals" that were animals covered by metal (basically undoing the whole premise) and "Fuzors" that were two animals spliced together like Silverbolt, who was a wolf/eagle, and Quickstrike, who was a scorpion with a snake head for its stinger.  And then season 3 brought more gimmicks and an end to the series as the Maximals defeat Megatron and tie him to their ship as they blast off to Cybertron.

When the new Beast Machines series began, it jumped from syndication to Fox Kids but kept the same design studio and most of the voice actors.  In the first episode, Optimus Primal, Rattrap, Cheetor, and BlackArachnia are all back to their original Beast Wars design but can't transform.  No one remembers how they got to Cybertron and while scratchy/screechy techno music plays in the background, they're chased by a herd of "Vehicons," or tanks/motorcycles/planes that are basically like original Transformers.  

Eventually they find the "Oracle" at the center of Cybertron and "reformat" into weird "technorganic" forms similar to the ugly Transmetal 2 designs at the end of the Beast Wars run.  You can see what the toys look like on this Wiki page. With the toys and packaging it was obvious Cheetor was supposed to be the centerpiece, though he was only a protégé of Optimus Primal in the show and the one before it.  This is just one of several problems.

(You can see on those boxes it's Cheetor featured prominently, not Optimus or Megatron or even the character himself.)

Cheetor's toy was pretty lame.  There were two different sizes, both pretty large and also very spindly and hard to stand.  And not really with any cool weapons.  This is what the "Supreme" size looked like:

Meanwhile, the first Optimus Primal toy was a smaller deluxe size and didn't really look like the show:

By the time they made a better Optimus, the show was already canceled and the toyline just about dead.  A third, larger one with a lot of bells and whistles (almost literally) was released in a later toyline.

As ugly as those ones were, then there was Rattrap, who was also delayed, but not as much as the second Optimus Primal one.  It has the TV show's Segway mode and regular legs but is still pretty freaking hideous:

According to the Wiki page, the show was originally supposed to be called Beast Hunters--a title later used for the third season of Transformers Prime--and have a mostly different premise.  Hasbro, Mainframe, and the writers all had different ideas that got tossed into a blender and what was poured out wasn't very good.  Especially since they just throw you into it with the first episode being almost entirely the Maximals running around being shot at by Vehicons while awful "music" plays.  It's not really until the second episode that they can even transform into robots and then they're just weird looking in both modes.

There were a lot of other problems too.  The main villain is again Megatron but he's almost entirely in a metal cocoon thing in the first season.  They made a toy to sort of replicate that, which seems kind of silly.  I mean if you're playing Transformers, what are you supposed to do with that?

Then for some reason Megatron makes Vehicon "generals" out of the sparks of Rhinox, Silverbolt, and Waspinator.  He literally had billions of sparks to choose from and chose two former Maximals and the hapless Waspinator?  And holy cow was Jetstorm so annoying.  Just one bad joke/pun after another, with the idea seeming to be that if he said it really loud it'd be funny--it wasn't.  Ever.  But the "Ultra" size toy of him was one of the better-looking ones.  It has sort of a Robotech look to it:

And then in season 2 you have "Savage Noble" who's like a werewolf that turns into a dragon for...reasons.  

They also added Silverbolt, Obsidian, and Strika, but the toys they made were little and crappy-looking; the Silverbolt one looks worse than a Happy Meal toy:

Watching the show I wasn't sure if he was supposed to be a turkey or vulture or turkey vulture, but actually I guess that's supposed to be a condor.  Um...sure.

Then I guess even though they weren't making a toy for it, some Hasbro genius thought it'd be a good idea to include a "Plantformer," ie a plant that turns into a robot.  So in season 2 they introduce "Botanica," who crashed on a planet of sentient plants or something and so could turn into some kind of plant.  Like Swamp Thing, she derives power from "the green" of Cybertron and weakens if disconnected from that.  Even as a nearly-45-year-old man I couldn't help thinking just how lame that was; I can imagine how kids would feel about that.

(Fun Fact:  In Transformers #100 or Regeneration One #20, there's a Beast Machines/Botanica reference in the last panels when Rodimus Prime dies and Plantformers begin to rise!)

As I mentioned too the toys seemed to put a lot of emphasis on Cheetor for some reason.  The show rightfully focuses a lot on Optimus Primal because of course through just about every iteration of the show, it's always about Optimus Prime(al) vs. Megatron.  When they try to get away from that, like in the 1986 movie and the TV season afterwards, it doesn't work.  Optimus and Megatron are your Batman and Joker or Superman and Lex Luthor or Spider-Man and Green Goblin or Thor and Loki; you have one then eventually you have to have the other or it won't work.  Hasbro should have realized this but they didn't so they focused on the wrong character and the toys they made of it weren't even that great.

And Phantom Readers might snort and say, "Like you could do any better."  Maybe I can.  I was of course thinking of how I might approach a sequel to Beast Wars.  It's kind of a take on the Headmasters/Targetmasters episodes of the G1 show with some Captain Planet thrown in for an environmental message.

The idea is that similar to Beast Machines, Megatron escapes in transit and the Maximal ship crashes on a planet, only not Cybertron.  It's some alien world that's dominated by two factions.  There's one faction ruled by an evil asshole who wants to pave over everything and strip mine the planet for some important mineral, like some kind of energon-type thing.  A damaged, weakened Megatron is brought before this asshole and in exchange for a new body, he agrees to help the asshole destroy the other faction.  Being Megatron, he convinces the asshole to create a Vehicon army for him that of course later he'll use to take over everything for himself.

The Maximals of course meet this other faction who live in the jungles or forests and want to save the trees and animals and stuff and have been resisting the evil asshole's attempts to pave paradise and put up a parking lot.  For whatever bullshit reason the Maximals have to take on "technorganic" bodies that would hopefully be less ugly and stupid.

And because Hasbro loves gimmicks, the aliens should be able to transform into weapons or accessories for the Maximals and Vehicons.  Maybe they could even be some kind of plant!  Then there are various battles and so forth to save the environment and precious resources and all that stuff.

I thought of calling it Wild Beasts or something since they'd be like in the wild of the planet and they're beasts.  So there you go.  It would never happen but maybe I can go write some goofy fanfic of it and post it on the old Transformers message boards.

Anyway, if you want a writing message, I think it would be the basic:  fail to plan, plan to fail.  There was a lot of half-assed "planning" in this line and show and it never really came together.

 (Fun Facts:  At least one writer, Stephen Melching, would later work on the far better Transformers Prime computer animated series.  Comic book writer Marv Wolfman writes a couple episodes of this and also worked on previous series and I think GI Joe and other 80s stuff like that.)