Monthly Archive: December 2008

Slash Film is reporting that Disney continues to toy with the name for their sequel to Tron.  For months now, the project has been known not as Tron 2 or Tron 2.0 but as Tr2n.  Now, defying all reason, it may be altered to TRZ.

The news comes from Production Weekly although the studio has yet to officially name the project or provide a release date despite teaser images being made available since the summer.

The industry newsletter has the following synopsis “After being transported into the surreal landscape of a mainframe computer to destroy an intruder, a programmer finds himself allied with the leader of a rebellion against a corrupt cyber-entity.”

Jeff Bridges reprises his role as a programmer named Flynn with Karl Urban and John Hurt also said to be part of the cast. The new film has been written by Adam Horowitz (Lost) and Edward Kitsis (Lost) with Joseph Kosinski making his directorial debut. A 2011 release date is anticipated given the effects-heavy work required.

The Los Angeles Science Fiction Society voted writer/director Joss Whedon the 2008 recipient of the Forry Award.  The prize is given to people for “Service to the Science Fiction Community.”

According to LASFS’ minutes, “At the meeting of October 2, Joss Whedon was chosen as the recipient of this year’s Forry Award. Now all we have to do is figure out how to actually give him the award.”

The award is named after Forest J. Ackerman, who turned 92 on November 24 and is considered the West Coast’s first official science fiction fan and a member of First Fandom. Ackerman had a health crisis in November but has rallied and is still holding court at his Ackermansion.

Tommy Lee Wallace (Halloween III) will direct Helliversity according to The Hollywood Reporter. Wallace and Steve Langford (Family Matters) cowrote the screenplay. The film marks the first film from the partnership of FarCor Studios and Indusa Global, dedicated to restoring luster to the low budget independent features.

The trade says the film is about “a group of American exchange students is terrorized by a vengeful spirit while locked inside a high-security foreign university.”

The film remains uncast but will roll cameras for six weeks beginning in March with shooting scheduled for Los Angeles.
 

Aaron McGruder emerged as a fresh voice in cartooning with his racially-tinged Boondocks comic strip, which debuted in 1999 and lasted until 2006.  The comic strip about two young boys living in urban Chicago also made it to television as an animated series on the Cartoon Network after Black Entertainment Television refused McGruder’s offer to adapt it themselves.  The artist and BET feuded for some time as a result. Despite that, he and former BET exec Reginald Hudlin cowrote Birth of a Nation: A Comic Novel, which was illustrated by Kyle Baker in 2004.

A second season of the animated series remains in production but has been delayed.  In the meantime, he also works on the The Super Rumble Mix Show. The 34-year-old creator also just launched BoondocksBootleg, described as the "Official Unofficial YouTube channel of Aaron McGruder".
 

The New York Times named their 100 notable books of the year today and the genre, as one might expect, was likely under-represented. Graphic novels were entirely ignored and just four works of fiction could be considered within out genre and they are:

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf. By Victor Pelevin. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. (Viking, $25.95.) A supernatural call girl narrates Pelevin’s satirical allegory of post-Soviet, post-9/11 Russia.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation. By Simon Armitage. (Norton, $25.95.) One of the eerie, exuberant joys of Middle English poetry, in an alliterative rendering that captures the original’s drive, dialect and landscape.

2666. By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cloth and paper, $30.) The five autonomous sections of this posthumously published novel interlock to form an astonishing whole, a supreme capstone to Bolaño’s vaulting ambition.

The Widows of Eastwick. By John Updike. (Knopf, $24.95.) In this ingenious sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, the three title characters, old ladies now, renew their sisterhood, return to their old hometown and contrive to atone for past crimes.

No non-fiction about the genre made the list.

UDON Entertainment, the Canadian-based creative studio, has announced a Manga for Kids Website setting the stage for the April release of Tomomi Mizuna’s The Big Adventures of Majoko and Shunshin Maeda’s Ninja Baseball Kyuma.

ICv2 reports these are the first two volumes announced for the new line, to be followed in May by Mera Hakamada’s Fairy Idol Kanon followed by the first volume of Lun Lun Yamamoto’s Swans in Space in June. 

UDON intends to promote its new juvenile Manga line at conferences for the American Library Association, the American Association of School Libraries, and the International Reading Association. 

The four titles are coming to North America from publisher Poplar, a leading kodomo (kids’ manga) publisher.

The Big Adventures of Majoko (Itazura Majoko no Daibouken) is a five-volume series that debuted in 2004 while Ninja Baseball Kyuma (Kyuuma!) is just a three-volume sports manga that also premiered in 2004 as did the four-volume fantasy Manga Fairy Idol Kanon.  The three-volume Swans in Space (Uchuu no Hakuchou) debuted in 2006.

We told you a month back that 20th Century Fox has been quietly developing a remake to Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.  Today, CHUD reports that the project, dubbed Genesis: Ape,  may have some impetus to movce towards the head of the production line.

Fox President Tom Rothman told audiences watching the original five Apes movies on Fox Movie Channel over the weekend, “We are very close at Fox on a new Apes script — this one a kind of prequel story before the first story, with a return to the social thematics that mark the first one, but with an entirely contemporary setting – Earth 2009.:”

Genesis: Ape has been written by the team of Rick Jaffa (The Relic) and Amanda Silver (Eye for an Eye).

CHUD writes, “In this version Caesar is the result of a genetic scientist fooling around with the nature of things. When the baby monkey exhibits intelligence and the ability to talk, he takes the cuddly thing home to his wife, who is unable to bear children. Things go surprisingly well for a number of years until Caesar grows up and sees mommy getting attacked. The dutiful son steps in and accidentally kills the attacker.

“Here’s where it takes off. In a scene paralleling Charlton Heston in the cage in the original Planet of the Apes, Caesar ends up in custody at an Ape Conservatory where he and the other apes are abused mercilessly. Caesar finds himself a primate without a world – he’s as smart as humans but will never be one of them (and is in fact tortured by them) and he’s initially rejected by his monkey brethren.”