Detritus of the Mind

I wanted to put the old Toonami "Watch This Space" screen here, but Google has both failed me and insulted me with a bunch of Adult Swim crap. To say I do not like Adult Swim is an understatement. Anyway... You may have noticed that I haven't done squat here. I had plans, but here's what happened to them: - There are better nostalgia comic reviewers out there, the books I had planned either have gaps I can't fill or low interest rates, and frankly, lately the whole field of nostalgia comic reviewers attract people from a campaign that think having a character come out as gay is "character assassination". So between respect for people doing it better over more interesting titles and not wanting to have my comments filled with Comics Dudes, those aren't getting done. - The Legion essay and some of the points therein was permanently dropped, thanks to DC Comics devoting itself to wasting all of its best ideas, doubling down on its worst ones, and ...

So once again, real life has been kicking me repeatedly in the butt.  But I still want to keep this going.  I plan to finish the Bierbaum Legionnaires this year (friggin' finally! ), but after that, I have a list of possible subjects to address.  The only thing I wanted to review that I've put on the back-burner is X-Men 2099 , and that is entirely because the Great 2099 Creator Walk-Off still can't be verified/refuted/what-have-you.  If it's true, it's important to address; if not, I don't want to keep repeating it as fact.  When it's a comic rumor and Brian Cronin can't help you verify or deny it, you're in trouble. So here's a list of potential projects to review: - Several comic series are on the proverbial docket.  I have a couple that are either notoriously bad or have hidden potential buried in layers of badness - namely, Marvel's Mutant X  for the former and DC's Son of Vulcan  mini for the latter.  I wanted to do a review tha...

So, in case you wanted some supplemental links and side opinions to go with the Pilot Program, I've created this endnotes page.  It's a little sparse - for some reason, even the internet doesn't care about 80s failed toy-derived cartoons even as its wallows in nostalgia for them - but what I can share is pretty entertaining. For anyone interested in watching the Pilot Program subjects,  I've compiled a YouTube playlist in order of the write-ups.   The only multi-part subject is Poochie , but the rest are the full shows.  Enjoy and then let me know your impressions of the subjects, if you feel like it. In what may be a case of "something in the water", this past month has seen two of my favorite video game related places cover the last two subjects on their respective platforms. First, we have  the Retronauts podcast and a career review of Rare , starting with their ZX Spectrum days as Ultimate Play the Game. As someone who knows little about British...

The Pilot Program is a look at various merchandise-centric cartoons that were released as specials in the 80s & 90s; while they were clearly set up to go to series, they never did.  Every entry will look at a new show, who made it, what it was selling, and whether it would’ve made a good series. BUBSY (1993) SUMMARY: Bubsy is a great hero – just ask him, and he’ll tell you at length.   After inviting his twin niece & nephew over for their birthday gift of tormenting his designated sidekick Arnold the Armadillo, he sees a news story interviewing a scientist who invented a virtual reality helmet that can wish anything its wearer wants into existence.   He wants to test it because the call goes out for someone brave/crazy to try it, but a woman named Allie Cassandra wants the helmet to wish herself up some more swag.   She sends her minions Buzz & Sid to steal the helmet and kidnap the twins as a snack for themselves.   After much wackines...

The last couple of seasons of Precure have been... rough.   Doki Doki  was a carnival of wasted ideas that were thrown out throughout the series (Cure Sword's world having a standing army of Precures to defend it, the existence of Cure Empress & her unnamed teammates spring most readily to mind), and it chose to focus on a main character in Mana who was dully infallible.  And while Happiness Charge started strong & has addressed many of the character problems with The Mana Show (along with giving fandom a gift on a silver platter as far as creating new fan Cures), one character & said character's impending story arc has more than soured me on watching the rest.  But then I encountered  this translated interview  and one quote in particular: ...Speaking of which, Pretty Cure is separated into three periods by which producer is doing the show.  First is the  Washio era,  starting from Futari wa to Yes! 5 GoGo. Second is the...

Ah, 2013.  It was another year of pointless stress but what do you expect for adulthood?  It was the year I got back into anime, the year I finally figured out how the hell Tumblr works, the year I belatedly got hooked on Pokemon.  Everything outside of pop culture was trying extra, extra hard to make this a bad year, but the balance was otherwise such that I managed to stay sane. Like last year, I have decided to break this down into two parts, and since this is the year I made the choice to try & be more positive, I’m going to get any negativity out of the way in this first entry.  So here’s my disappointments & one bafflement for 2013. (Please note that video games are not on this list.  There weren’t a lot of new games that came out that interested me – so that will be the Disappointment for 2013 for gaming – and the ones that did interest me were on the 3DS, which I just got for Christmas (whoo-hoo!).  So games are benched for this year, a...

Everyone who's a pop culture nerd should at least know of TV Tropes by now, right?  How they've created a handy-dandy guide to different archetypes, stock plots, and storytelling devices that is both informative and entertaining?  As a would-be writer, sometimes reviewing it can help with a story point or character beat that you're having a hard time defining, or it can help you avoid a potentially awful turn.  But not every trope has a name.  In fact, several of my personal pet peeves go nameless when they occur a lot and really need to be called on the floor for how awful they are.  So here is my first Bottom Five, unofficial tropes that drive me absolutely nuts. 5. All Aliens Are Invaders:  In every single movie or TV show built around aliens on right now, they are usually faceless, personality-free, unknowable destroyers & invaders.  Even when they try to give them a motive, it's usually no more than "they're taking our jobs stuff".  I...

The best description of nostalgia I've ever heard (no idea where) is the sweetest poison you'll ever taste.  That's pretty accurate.  I was recently hit with a wave of nostalgia for the very hit-or-miss output of one French animation studio, Marathon.  First, there was the announcement of the horribly named but otherwise promising new series Lolirock,  followed by a rumor making its way through the Toonzone forums that their flagship series Totally Spies is due to return to CN in the fall.  I would dismiss the latter but (a) it was confirmed by one of Marathon's main execs and (b) Jenn Hale's interview on Talkin' Toons confirmed that she was indeed recording new episodes sometime last year.  So that one may get a... fifth or sixth chance.  I lost count. I won't pretend Marathon's works were fine art - in fact, they were anything but.  But they had a very appealing pseudo-anime aesthetic, and the general tone of their series even at their worst ...

So apparently NBC is yet again trying to reinvigorate their late night shows by swapping out Leno on The Tonight Show again. Mark my words, even with a good lead-in, this will play out just like the Leno/Conan switch did. And I don't think Jimmy Fallon has the cult following that Coco does to go with him if he too is forced to leave. In fact, if he does badly, NBC may be forced to give real thought to canceling The Tonight Show altogether. It won't be Fallon's fault, though -it will be the fault of a zombie TV genre. I am actually hard-pressed to find people my age who think the traditional monologue-music-and-guests late night format isn't tedious. I'm not the only one who DVRs Conan to breeze through the interviews or bands I don't care about, and the same goes for Craig Ferguson's show (who I personally find most interesting when he just decides to "get real" with his viewers). The big two late night shows are either nonentities (Leno...

A few recent events have gotten me to thinking: When does a network know it's time to throw in the towel on a failed show?  How do they decide to keep pushing something audiences aren't watching versus taking it off the air? First, there's the whole DC Nation debacle.  For those that don't know, the DC Nation block was abruptly dropped last weekend from Cartoon Network's schedule - so abruptly that CN's own Facebook page was telling people to look for new episodes that day.  They quickly responded to the upset fans by letting everyone know that the block is off the air until January, no reasons given.  A few have been bandied around (retooling, rights issues, etc.), but I noticed that they've replaced its main run on Saturdays with the How to Train Your Dragon show, which they've also been hyping for more prime time runs as well.  I haven't heard ANY feedback, good or bad, on this show; when I caught some of it, it struck me as well animated but a...

I think I've said it before, but here it is again - if you're a fan of the magical girl genre and live in North America, you are largely screwed.  The good stuff rarely ever comes here, when it does it's either online only or hyper-overpriced if you like to watch TV shows on an actual TV (*coughMadokacough*), or only experienced via illegal, malware laden avenues.  And what you usually get is... not that good.  The leading example of this problem is the Italian-made genre entry, Winx Club . I've watched this show every season it's come out.  I like it, like so many other series, for the potential to be much better than it actually is that its owners are more than happy to leave unfulfilled.  4Kids brought it over, and while it was okay, it was never a stand-out.  People tried to blame their notorious editing practices on the plot-hole-tastic nature of the final season they aired (the third one).  But then Nick picked it up after a few years in limbo,...