There’s more with Broadway’s newest star, The Toxic Avenger plus which Troma star might make it on the stage next? Plus there’s a few causalities in comics and on television – we’ve got the latest list on who’s coming & going. 
PRESS THE BUTTON to Get The Point!
And be sure to stay on The Point via 
, RSS, MyPodcast.Com or Podbean
It’s gonna be another knock-down drag out fight! Tonight, on Friday Night Fights, we have a full card for your blood lust… er… pleasure! Tonight it’s the long debated nerd battle to end all battles. Tonight we open the arena to answer the age old question… with no holds barred, and the time stream wide open, we bring you the fracas between Man and Machine! Will the Artificial Intelligence beat Homo-Sapiens back to the stone age? Will the human rebellion crush the bots under there beer fueled boots of glory? Will you consider buying a tee shirt at the concession stand so we can pay for the mess you all made at last weeks battle?!
Round One: The Manly Battle for All Time!
In our first bout, we pit two time traveling tusslers against one another. If you’ll move your attention to the entrance ramp, our first combatant is riding to the ring! Weighing in a solid 185 pounds… standing at 6 ft and ½ inches tall (in current time, of course)… wearing the gloomy military fatigues, carrying an M-4 Carbine with a look of determination on his grizzled face… He sent his own father back in time to conceive himself (The Novikov self-consistency principle, duh)… He’s known as the Rebellion Rabble-Rouser! The Clobberin’ Commando! The Terminator Trasher himself… John Connor!
And his opponent, making his way to the ring in the glowing time sphere… Wearing the snazzy red and green Time Suit, and sporting a mighty thick time-beard… He’s gone back in time to save his own father from the future, and in turn saved 52 parallel universes (ok, not 52 exactly, but who’s counting?)! He’s known throughout the land as the Linear Linebaker… the Fightin’ Forgotten Hero… the Zero-Hour-Man-of-Power… Introducing the Time Master himself… Rip Hunter!
This battle will be a clean fight, with free reign to use any time altering technology available to each combatant. Come out, shake hands, and let the battle begin! Oh… it seems they both went back in time before I started this introduction… Well, I’ll shut up now and let them continue pummeling each other.
Round Two… our main event: The Megabyte Dog-Fight!
Lowering from the sky comes our first combatant. Being represented by it’s army of Gubernatorial T-800’s, Liquidous T-1000’s, and Needlessly Sexxy T-X’s…It’s known the world round as the Self-Aware Super Computer bent on the destruction of you, our viewing audience! Please put your hands together, and quickly line up for obliteration for Skynet!
Coming in from the other corner of the sky comes Skynet’s opponent. Created by a wealthy orphan, fueled with hate by a low-level psychic, and represented by an army of it’s own viral-laden nanotech super soldiers. With the big-red-eye of doom, and a plethora of mohawks, please get out of the killing lines of Skynet, and in an orderly fashion get into it’s line for re-vaccination for Brother Eye!
If any of you survive this massive battle of awesome alloys, we’d sincerely appreciate if you leap off a cliff vote below for the winners of each bout. Bonus points for those who avoid capture.
Life’s tough when you’re a teenage girl – sometimes, it’s even almost as tough as those teenage girls think it is. This week, three “normal girls” with gigantic eyes try to get through their massive problems…most of which, as you might have guessed, have to do with boys.
Orange Planet
, Vol. 1
By Haruka Fukushima
Del Rey Manga, April 2009, $10.99
People in manga quite often have very odd living arrangements. Let’s take Rui, the heroine of Orange Planet, as an example: her parents died six years ago, so she moved in with her aunt then. But now – at the age of maybe fourteen – that aunt has gotten married, so Rui lives all by herself in an apartment and has an early-morning paper route…to pay her rent? for spending money? just because? And, after that paper route, she has the habit of climbing into bed (purely for warmth) with the “adorable boy next door,” Taro, who also seems to be her ex-boyfriend. And then, just a few pages into this book, a strange older man – whose name we and Rui don’t learn for a while – moves in with her because his crazy ex-girlfriend (one of many) burned his house down. And then, of course, he turns out to be the new teaching intern, Eisuke.
Luckily, Kaoru, the boy that Rui’s interested in – she’s writes her first love note ever to him on page eleven – doesn’t live next to her. But, of course, the old-friend-who’s-known-her-since-childhood, Taro, has discovered that he’s in love with her, but he can’t tell her, or the story would end suddenly. So we’ve got the usual shojo love triangle (with a girl at the vertex), with the optional advisor living (semi-secretly) with the girl – call it Shojo Plot # 7B.
Fukushima tells that story in a clean, modern shojo style – yes, everyone has gigantic eyes and no noses to speak of, but the backgrounds and page layouts aren’t cluttered and flowery like the height of ‘80s shojo frippery, and her thin, elongated bodies are exaggerated but clearly reminiscent of the real coltishness of fast-growing early teens. Orange Planet is a standard story done professionally and with a real love for the material, which goes pretty far. But I still don’t have any clue what the title means.
Think of it as the Absolute version for the screen.
In an attempt to appeal to PlayStation 3 owners, Warner Bros. is releasing a special version of Watchmen
bundling the Director’s Cut of the movie on Blu-ray disc with the full version of the video game, Watchmen: the End is Nigh.
Part one of the game was released for Xbox Live, Windows PCs and the PlayStation Network in March.
Like we haven’t had enough science fiction shows from the 80’s remade lately… here’s the trailer from ABC’s upfronts for V:
Yes, that’s Elizabeth Mitchell from Lost and Morena Baccarin from Firefly with the butch haircut.
Interestingly, some people are finding current political metaphor in it, such as David Sirota in Salon:
Am I crazy or does this preview make the show seem like a
not-so-subtle fringe-right-wing criticism of Obama and Obama followers?In questioning Obama’s citizenship and heritage, conservatives
have always portrayed Obama as an alien visitor. They’ve also
constantly implied that behind Obama’s friendly veneer are sinister
motives – and they seem to believe that while most of the public are
gullible fools believing in Obama as a savior, they and their tea-party
protestors see the “real truth” of those motives.Now, didn’t I basically just describe that preview?
And James Poniewozik from Time:
Remake of the classic alien-invasion miniseries plays in the trailer,
weirdly, like an allegory of the Obama election: aliens come to Earth,
promise “hope” and “change” (words actually used), inspire cult-like
devotion, but have creepy intent and are secretly lizards. Maybe I’m
reading too much into it. But it has potential to be Glenn Beck’s new
favorite show.
The original metaphor was the Aliens were based on the Nazis. Now it’s Obama? Terrific.
On the heels of the broadcast network’s fall announcements
comes the never-ending trickle of cable commitments. As is their wont, many of
these shows will debut in the summer months (like, June) when broadcast network
series are on hiatus.
TNT will be showing us a hospital series starring Jada
Pinkett Smith called Hawthorne, Jerry
Bruckheimer’s got a cop show called Dark
Blue that stars Dylan McDermott, Mark Burnett’s got a new reality series
called Wedding Day, and this December
a series with an impressive pedigree called Men
of a Certain Age starring Ray Romano, Andre Braugher and Scott Bakula.
truTV has a bunch of “reality” shows that fit square into
their format: a behind the scenes show called NFL Full Contact– the sort we used to call a “documentary,” Conspiracy Theory with Governor Jesse
Ventura, U.S. Special Ops: Declassified
– a program that outs our nation’s terrorist hunters, and Full Throttle, another behind the scenes look at Ballard’s Full
Throttle Saloon biker bar in Sturgis, South Dakota.
TBS has some inexpensive stuff lined up: a talk show
starring George Lopez, an animated
sitcom about suburbanites who used to live “down below” called Neighbors from Hell, and, of course, they’ve
picked up Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns
and The Bill Engvall Show.
MTV has a new series ripped from today’s political
headlines called 16 & Pregnant.
There hasn’t been a teevee series with a more self-descriptive title since The Jack Paar Program.
Boy, is Chris Claremont going to be unhappy…
The last of the broadcast nets revealed themselves this
morning, and in a fit of original thought they’re giving us a lot more of the
same.
Angelenos, The Beautiful Life, and The Vampire Diaries are being added. They’re about pretty but dangerous residents of Los Angeles, struggling fashion models, and a family of vampire brothers, respectively. Oh, and they’re bringing Melrose Place back. Holy 90210, Bat-brain!
The Gossip Girl spin-off got spiked, as did the CW’s entire attempt to
program Sundays. The night is being returned to the individual affiliates.
On a personal note, the only sitcom I’ve actually enjoyed
(non-animated) all century, Everybody Loves Chris, played its last, last Friday. Just like the show’s creator Chris Rock, the titular Chris dropped out of school when forced to take the 10th grade over. He may or may not have passed his GED; the show ended with a wonderful send-up of The Sopranos finale. It went out in style.
Smallville will be back. Now that he’s flying, please give him the big red S. C’mon. The movie sucked. Kal-El’s Superman without the cape, and the “red-blue-blur” is just stupid.
Here’s what CBS is adding:
Mondays: Accidentally
On Purpose (Jenna Elfman sitcom, surrounded by the usual sitcoms)
Tuesdays: NCIS: Los
Angeles, (following NCIS and
starring LL Cool J), The Good Wife.
Wednesdays: Same old stuff – The New Adventures of Old Christine, Gary Unmarried, Criminal Minds and CSI: NY.
Thursdays: More of the same – Survivor, CSI and The
Mentalist.
Fridays: Medium
(picking up what NBC no longer wants) will be between Ghost Whisperer and Numb3rs.
Saturdays: Nothing new here.
Sundays: Three
Rivers (organ transplant donors).
Here’s the list of network shows that will disappear into
the black hole of broadcast oblivion. It’s possible that, like Medium, one or more of these shows might
get picked up by other broadcast or cable nets.
* UPDATE: The Unit has already been picked up for the broadcast syndication marketplace by Twentieth Television for Fall 2010. The series has already been sold in all top 15 markets and cleared in 56% of the country. Stations acquiring the program are primarily FOX Television Stations with a smattering of stations from CBS Station Group and some independent players.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
January 20, 2023
The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
February 24, 2022
