The Point Radio: Super Powers On The Family Plan
And be sure to stay on The Point via 
, RSS, MyPodcast.Comor Podbean!
Follow us now on 
and 
!
Don’t forget that you can now enjoy THE POINT 24 hours a Day – 7 Days a week!. Updates on all parts of pop culture, special programming by some of your favorite personalities and the biggest variety of contemporary music on the net – plus there is a great round of new programs on the air including classic radio each night at 12mid (Eastern) on RETRO RADIO COMICMIX’s Mark Wheatley hitting the FREQUENCY every Saturday at 9pm and even the Editor-In-Chief of COMICMIX, Mike Gold, with his daily WEIRD SCENES and two full hours of insanity every Sunday (7pm ET) with WEIRD SOUNDS!
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN LIVE FOR FREE or go to GetThePointRadio for more including a connection for mobile phones including iPhone & Blackberrys.
Transcript
Hello, it's Mike Raub. Welcome to The Point, where all parts of pop culture come together. From Green Lantern to Dawson's Creek, Greg Berlotti has a pretty interesting resume, and he's using it to create a new ABC superhero show. In the meantime, Neil Gaiman's gone through a transformation, well, that you're not gonna
believe. It's Friday, September 17, 2010. Let's get to The Point right now. This is The Point, The Point radio, get The Point radio. Greg Berlotti is no stranger to families or to superheroes.
Right now, of course, he's one of the names involved in bringing Green Lantern to the big screen. He partnered with comic superstar Mark Guggenheim to create Eli Stone and, well, for the family stuff about brothers and sisters, and, well, even a career that dates back to Everwood and Dawson's Creek.
With no ordinary family, he gets the best of both worlds, superpowers and a family, but there's a lot of emphasis on the family part. Yeah, I think it's harder and harder on network TV to do straight family drama, having been a part of a few of them. I think you need louder things to get the audience there.
You know, if you want a really smart family drama, you can just go to…there's everything on cable, so, you know, it can be as unique as it wants to be, and it doesn't have to maintain a large audience. So I love the notion that this had the capacity to be really mainstream and big and loud and get a lot of people, but we could still do really smart family drama with it.
And I was curious to see if we could blend those two things. I didn't know if it would totally work, you know, to do scenes that you might see on, you know, Brothers and Sisters or Everwood or once and again, you know, mixed with something that you might see, you know, in a feature film, an action set piece from a feature film. So that was intriguing to me.
One of the twists that Greg has here is that the superpowers are the thing that holds the family together. You know, when we first started talking about the show, we talked about how families, you know, everybody's on…you go home, but someone's texting, someone's on the computer, somebody's on whatever, and we're all living in the same house, but we're not connected.
And they finally all have something in common. They all have something incredible, the same weird, incredible thing happening to them. And so that means even if you're a, you know, 14-year-old boy or a 16-year-old girl or a 14-year-old dad, you've got…they all have something really unique to talk about and share with one another.
That's special that they're not sharing really with anybody else. And I think that that…hopefully that speaks to families. So how tough will it be to maintain the balance between the family stories and, well, the superpowers? I hope so.
I mean, I'm sure there'll be episodes where we don't do it as well as others. There always are. But my goal would be that we…that audiences want something that feels different, you know, like they like the fact that there's…that we're trying to do something that's a real hybrid of that.
And I think hybrid dramas are appearing more and more, and hopefully one thing elevates the other thing and doesn't detract from it. The center of the show, no doubt, will be Michael Chickless and how his character balances the superpowers he's received and the way it changes his own life. You know, Jim's midlife crisis of having sort of discovered something that he's amazing
at that really makes him feel good about himself happens to be putting himself in harm's way. And how that impacts his family, knowing that they've got a dad who's, in essence, you know, a super vigilante, if you will. And he will be engaged week to week in criminal activity in the city, some against people without powers and some with people as he comes to discover with powers.
That's a real drive to his character. And it's from his character outward that we kind of sort of, you know, move out. And then, with Stephanie, there is a link that I can tee up, you know, between where they work and what happened to them, where she works and what happened to them. So her workplace becomes infused with importance as she sort of starts to see that there can
be answers there. You may be wondering, Greg comes to all this, as well as the Green Lantern movie, with a pretty healthy comic book reading history. I fell in love with DC around the time of Crisis of Infinite Earth, and so that's sort of what led me out to all the different guys.
In Marvel, I was kind of into Iron Man. I was definitely an Iron Man. I wasn't as much an X-Men as everybody else was. I saw my first X-Factor coming. So, X-Factor came out when I was like 15.
I think around there. But no, I was a PC guy. The Ordinary Family knew every week on ABC. Catch up on episodes at ABC.com. It's Friday, September 17, 2010.
Here's what's going on in pop culture. In case you haven't heard the details on Mark Bilar's new movie, well, low budget seems to be the way to go. It's done with a handheld camera, not too much unlike paranormal activity or maybe even Cloverfield.
But it is a superhero tale. Bilar calls it X-Men meets Trainspotting. It's about a group of animal rights activists who break into a low-level research lab to find a mile-long underground base owned and facilitated by the U.S. government. A couple of stills are all that's out there so far, but you can probably look for a teaser
trailer for Bilar sometime in January. Not quite The Simpsons, but Neil Gaiman plans to get animated on the PBS show Arthur. It will air in an episode that takes place in a comic book store. In fact, there's two that are put together that are involving comics. In the Gaiman episode, Neil is represented as himself, Neil Gaiman, except he's a little
more feline than he is in real life. And it involves one of the characters trying their hand at writing and illustrating a graphic novel. Again, this episode of Arthur with Neil Gaiman is set to air on PBS stations in the U.S. on October 25.
Some changes already in the new science fiction series Terra Nova that's on the way from Fox. David Fury has left the job of showrunner, but now it looks like actor Steven Lang from Avatar is in talks to join the series as a major character. Jason O'Mara and Allison Miller are already on the cast of the series that Fox plans to
launch with an episode in May and then as a regular series beginning in fall of 2011. Quick note on Russell Crowe who apparently now has joined the cast of the Kung Fu flick The Man with the Iron Fist. No one's sure exactly what Crowe will be playing in the film which begins shooting in Shanghai this December.
James Cameron is working with 20th Century Fox to shop around a television adaptation of his hit movie True Lies. There's been speculation for a long time that the film would actually get a big screen sequel, but right now it looks like it could be headed to television. Should be a pretty easy sell in theaters.
The film made $378 million worldwide. After a pretty big first week in the box office Resident Evil After Life looks like it's going to spawn some more afterlife in the form of another movie. Right now producers are saying they do want to definitely go back to the well for yet another Resident Evil movie that would make a total of five in the series so far.
Right now the producers are saying they're looking for ideas from the fans and they're serious about it. You'd like to let them know what you think you can do so on Facebook, search for Resident Evil movie there. Let them know what you think.
The online application Graphically now apparently is giving you the chance to read and enjoy Marvel Comics not only online, but also when you're not on the computer and the ability to transfer those comics from one device to the other. Graphically, which by this way is spelled graphic dot ly, announced they're bringing Marvel Comics to their desktop application which is a major change for the way Marvel
has been online for the past few months. In the past Marvel Comics have only been available via subscription and accessible by computers that were online that will continue, but now Graphically will provide access to the same library of titles via downloadable purchases of single issues. Read the entire story about the changes right now on Graphically's website which is ifanboy.com.
It's one of the best legends of the comic book industry and for 1970s fans one of those great memories as well. Atlas Seaboard Comics, in the mid 1970s they published 23 different comics and five magazine titles, none of which made any real big splash, but now they're coming back with a revived company who in part is headed by Brendan Dineen, a former executive for Scott Rudin
and Harvey Weinstein and with comic veteran J.M. Damatius as editor in chief. Right now the first two titles to be revived are Phoenix and the Grim Ghost, but you can look for more on the way. Official word will come at New York Comic Con in just a couple of weeks.
It was a cold hard fact for a hot summer when sales in August for comics in stores took another dip. For the first time since March of 2009 no comic title sold more than 100,000 copies during the month. In July, X-Men number one it sold 140,000 copies but issued two in August did pretty
much less than half of that which is a pretty big drop for any issue. 17 titles in the top 25 sold fewer copies than the issues they had previously and only six titles showed increases in sales during the month of August. Again this is for sales in comic book stores, by the way we'll give you the entire rundown of the top comic sales and graphic novels too coming up in just a little bit right here.
This is my cold. They say politics makes strange bedfellows. They most certainly were not kidding. Lady Gaga of whom you've heard and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have become Twitter pals.
They've been tweeting up a storm. Not that Reid's wife should be concerned. Gaga's been on this kick to get Don't Ask Don't Tell repealed. You may recall last Sunday she took a group of airmen and soldiers who were discharged for being gay as her dates to the MTV Video Music Awards.
So getting Senator Reid's support was just a logical next step. Reid responded directly to Lady Gaga tweeting, Anyone qualified to serve this country should be allowed to do so. And he informed her the Senate vote had already been scheduled for next week. Gaga replied,
God bless and thank you from all of us, like you, who believe in equality and the dream of this country. Those are great sentiments Gaga and your desire to turn your celebrity into a force for good is very very much appreciated. This is Mike Gold on the Pop Culture Channel.
GetThePointRadio.com. Comic and graphic novel sales took a big dip during the month of August. Comics were down 17% and graphic novels went down 21%. And as we told you earlier here on The Point, there was not a single comic that even came close to selling 100,000 copies during the month of August.
However all that being said, let's check out your top sales. Here's your top 20 comics for the month of August in comic stores. Starting at number 20 with the Sonnagee X-Men number 35, Thor number 613 at number 19, Captain America with a couple of titles at number 18, number 608 Captain America Falls there and number 17 Captain America number 609.
At number 16 X-Men Legacy number 239 again Marvel dominates all the way to number 15 with all the comics Avengers 3 number 1. Avengers Prime number 2 is at number 14 then DC enters the list with Justice League of America number 48 at number 13. At number 12 Amazing Spider-Man 639 number 11, Green Lantern Corps number 51.
Then into the top 10 for a DC first issue, Green Lantern Emerald Warriors number 1 hits there. Number 9 on Candy X-Men 527 at number 8 X-Men number 2 which sold less than half of what the first issue did when it was out in July. At number 7 Batman number 702 at number 6 Amazing Spider-Man 640 number 5 Secret Avengers
number 4. Into the top 4 for Avengers New Avengers that is number 3 at the number 4 slot. And then Avengers number 4 at the number 3 slot for the comic sales for the month of August. Top 2 best selling titles for the month Brightest Day number 8 at number 2 and Brightest Day
number 7 at number 1. Best selling comic for the month of August from DC. That puts a cap on our week but get some rest you're going to need it. The big TV season begins in just a few days and there's a lot of decisions to make. We'll help you along with our exclusive look at the revival of one of the most beloved
shows of the 70's. Orsi and Kurtzman talk to us exclusively about their way of reinventing Hawaii Five-O right here on Monday. In the meantime catch more pop culture 24-7 on the Point Radio. Anytime you want to listen it takes a couple of clicks and it's free on your computer or
your mobile device at GetThePointRadio.com. In the meantime this podcast is produced twice every week for great websites at ComicMix.com, MichaelDavisWorld.com and iNetRadio.com. Get us in the podcast directory of the iTunes store under the Point Radio and get in touch anytime and listen at GetThePointRadio.com.
Have a great weekend. Warm up that DVR. You're going to need it right back here on Monday.
