Hal Jordan (the Green Lantern) and Barry Allen (the Flash) are best buddies. It makes sense that they would be, because they’ve got a whole lot in common. For example, they each destroyed the universe.
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To somebody used to the grim and brooding modern Batman, Golden Age stories involving the Caped Crusader are fairly weird. From Batman’s occasional habit of gunning criminals down to the appearance of aliens and monsters every few issues, it’s safe to say that the Dark Knight took a few years to find his footing. Case in point: Batman #1 from 1940, which introduced the character of Catwoman, known then merely as the Cat.
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The 1962 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera is everything the 1943 film was but more so. It has strong acting (with the Phantom played by Herbert Lom), plays up the disfigurement of the title character, and has the unfortunate tendency to overemphasize the Phantom as a charming and sympathetic character. It matches what the 1943 film did well (save for the extra spoke in the love triangle), but keeps from being the ideal adaptation by repeating the previous film’s flaw of making the Phantom too much of a good guy.
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Consider the Mushroom Kingdom, the most common setting of the Super Mario Brothers franchise. Set aside the fact that its main populace consists of anthropomorphic mushrooms and focus instead on the downright bizarre social and political implications presented by Nintendo’s flagship franchise. Now consider how much weirder things get when you expand outward to games like Mario Party and Mario Kart.
This is a kingdom in a state of constant political upheaval, and yet there is no succession plan should the ruler be deposed. It lacks any sort of organized military despite being under constant assault by a literal fire-breathing dragon. The inhabitants show very little prejudice, and yet the social system is filled with incredible amounts of systemic bias.
Clearly, this strange kingdom bears a more thorough investigation.
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Following the catastrophe that was Highlander II: The Quickening, no one wanted to see another Highlander movie. The franchise got killed the moment someone decided that the immortals were really aliens from planet Zeist. But Davis-Panzer Productions wanted to continue the franchise somehow, probably because it was the only property they owned that had moneymaking potential. Movies were a dead end for the franchise (at least until later in the 1990s), so the production company had to out its hope into a TV series.
A TV show allowed for more episodic adventures with different immortals, drawing from the rich tapestry of experiences of immortal Connor MacLeod. After all, Connor was about 500 years old, and the movies had only scratched the surface about his past. There was only one major problem: Christopher Lambert, the actor who had brought Connor to life, didn’t want to do TV.
Continue reading “A Kind of Magic: Highlander The Series, season one”
What do Claude Rains, Lon Chaney, and Michael Crawford all have in common? They each starred as the titular antagonist in adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera which, while excellent on their own, missed key pieces of the puzzle that keep me from considering them to be on the same level as the original novel.
The 1943 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera goes one step further in that, while solid on its own, I believe that it actually did some long-term damage to the franchise that carried over into subsequent adaptations. Yet, at the same time, it gave the story some interesting twists that you can’t find anywhere else.
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The approaching full release of Baldur’s Gate III has a lot of gamers very hyped, and for good reason. It’s a high-end video game utilizing the ever-popular Dungeons & Dragons system…and it feels like it’s been forever. While fans got an expansion to an old classic with Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear in 2016, there hasn’t been an actual proper stand-alone D&D cRPG since Sword Coast Legends in 2015…and you have to go all the way back to Neverwinter Nights 2 to find one that was well-received.
Why the long layoff in titles and the difficulty in creating a solid game bearing the D&D trademark? With excellent cRPGS like Dragon Age and Pillars of Eternity out there, why can’t the grandparent of all role-playing games follow suit? The answer, in my opinion, boils down to resources, creative restrictions forced by the property, and good old-fashioned corporate politics.
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A physical marvel, a mental wonder, SUPERMAN is destined to reshape the destiny of a world!
It is very unlikely that even Superman’s creators Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster expected those words from Action Comics #1 to come true. While not the first comic book hero with super powers, Superman is the character who defined what a superhero was. He had incredible powers, a flashy costume, a secret identity, and adventures that got weirder and weirder as time went on.
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Over the past 25 years, Pokémon has gone from a fad to a multimedia juggernaut. Dozens of video games, movies, TV seasons, comics, and more have sprang into existence around the cute little monsters.
These different properties have varied in some respects, but all have helped to apply at least a veneer of continuity on the imaginary world where pocket monsters roam the wild. And, in many ways…what these things show is pretty weird.
I’m not talking about weird as in the obvious, with bizarre creatures that live in tiny Pokéballs. I mean that the world we see in the different franchises, particularly the videogames, has some fascinatingly odd worldbuilding implications. Here are just a few of the things you’d have to contend with if you lived in the world of Pokémon.
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In the modern comics industry, you can’t go a single month without an issue that claims it “changes everything” and that “nothing will ever be the same.” It’s been a long time since those claims were true. Way back in 1940, though, there really was a Superman story that changed everything: “The K-Metal from Krypton.”
Superman #8 is notable for several reasons. It introduced K-Metal, a mineral from Krypton which rendered Superman powerless and which predates kryptonite. It made the groundbreaking decision to have Superman reveal his identity to Lois Lane. Finally, it was a rare issue written by Superman creator Jerry Siegel that DC chose never to publish.
That’s right – this daring, groundbreaking story that would have changed the Superman mythos forever never saw the light of day. It remained forgotten in the DC archives until Mark Waid came across the original script and story outline in 1988, almost half a century after it was supposed to be published.
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Babbling Brooks 