The Point Radio: Joss Whedon Has A Tough Task and Joe Rogan Has A Question

This week, you get to reap the benefits of our Comic Con trip as we share comments from Brian Fuller on how intense the next season of HANNIBAL could be, C. Thomas Howell admits he doesn’t know who The Reverse Flash is – but he loves voicing him, and Josh Holloway assures us that his new series, INTELLIGENCE ,is totally believable. Plus Joss Whedon admits that it wasn’t as easy as you might think getting AGENTS OF SHIELD on the air, and SyFy allows Joe Rogan to QUESTION EVERYTHING. This summer, we are updating once a week – every Friday – but you don’t have to miss any pop culture news. THE POINT covers it 24/7! Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Transcript

Hello, it's Mike Raub. Welcome to The Point, where all parts of pop culture come together. Joe Rogan's looking for answers, and he's got a new show just for that on Sci-Fi. We talked to him about what to expect. In the meantime, direct from San Diego, we talked to Josh Holloway about intelligence,

Joss Whedon about the agents of SHIELD, and find out about Justice League Flashpoint and what's coming up on Hannibal. Let's get to The Point. This is The Point, The Point Radio, get The Point, Radio. It's four overfilled days of comics, television, movies, and so much more.

It's Comic Con, but more important, there's so much there that gives us things to, well, look forward to in the months to come. And some things to catch up on as well. You know, one of the big success stories in the past year was NBC's mid-season entry, Hannibal.

It's set for a second season, and we talked to showrunner Brian Fuller about that, and about how he handles the somewhat intense material on the show. It's sick, but it's also surreal, so I don't look at it as reality. Like I couldn't write it if it were about dramatizing like a serial killer of the week who's like raping and murdering women, and that's no fun for me.

What's fun for me is when it gets purple and gets so big that it's not about reality, it's about surrealism and storytelling and being inspired by such a pop culture phenomenon as Hannibal. Hannibal's back on NBC in the fall. Over on CBS, they've got a new mid-season show that we're looking forward to because

it brings back lost Josh Holloway to television. He's a man with a computer chip in his brain that allows him to tap into untold new avenues of communication. And Josh told me he doesn't think that idea is too far-fetched. So what's happening now is this question that we're having to answer, how do we connect?

How do we communicate? What's it going to do to us? Is it going to create a bunch of people who we only can connect with a device? Or is it going to go up in our face? Are they going to take over?

Is it a Terminator? I don't know. I think there are questions that they're definitely going to explore and continue to explore, but I think the show is about human relationships. The next big project for DC's direct to DVD line will be a Justice League movie based

on the Flashpoint story arc. Justice League Flashpoint adopts that story and brings on C. Thomas Howell as a voice of Professor Zoom, the reverse Flash. And that's a character that he comes to with, well, a blank slate. I knew nothing.

I knew absolutely nothing. I grew up on Super Friends and DC Comics, but as a child, I don't recall Zoom being involved. I've been told that it's the first time that he's been voiced in an animated project, so there was something really cool about that, just being sort of the originator.

But, you know, I really have been playing some villains lately, and I've really sort of grown to love playing a villain. And, you know, the better the villain, the better the good guy. So really, that was my responsibility in this piece, just to try to make the superheroes look as good as possible.

You don't have to wait long for this. You can get your hands on Justice League, the Flashpoint Paradox, in just a few days in regular DVD and a Blu-ray combo pack. Meanwhile, Marvel's big splash for the year will probably be on television, that with a series called Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

And you know you'd think that with the tie-in to Disney, getting a TV series about the Marvel universe on that network was a slam dunk, especially with a guy like Joss Whedon attached. However, Joss told me that getting the show to air wasn't quite as simple as you think. You know, there's no free ride. You know, we've gone through all the hoops to make this work, and, you know, the network

has dealt with us as they would with any show. The difference is, you know, they really did know what we were giving them and what they wanted, and so we had a lot of, you know, during the process we had a real feeling of support as opposed to a feeling of, huh? Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

premieres Tuesday, September 24th on ABC. And we've got lots more about your favorite shows, comics, and movies too, all coming up in the weeks ahead here on The Point. Let's get into the latest in pop culture. Here's some more details on those new titles Marvel has planned, including Wolverine origin

2 and one called Amazing X-Men. Carrie and Gillian will be handling origin 2 and will be drawn by Adam Kubert. Meanwhile, Amazing X-Men will feature the return of Nightcrawler to the Marvel universe. That series will spin out of the X-Men Battle of the Atoms story arc that begins in September in the X-Men titles.

And again, both Amazing X-Men number one and Wolverine origin 2 number one will both ship in November. FX is announced when Sons of Anarchy returns in September. It'll be with a 90 minute episode. Peter Weller will join the cast for a story arc by the way, and that first episode is

set to air on Tuesday, September the 10th on FX. Don't call it Rocky 7, but it is a sequel of sorts. It's a movie that'll take place in the future and involve the grandson of Rocky Balboa's biggest nemesis, Apollo Creed. It's to be called Creed and yes, Sylvester Stallone is set to have a role in this as

Rocky, but don't get too happy or upset. It's still in the development stages. It's being written and will be directed by Ryan Coogler who did Fruitville Station. Former WWE superstar and Hall of Famer Mick Foley is getting back in the publishing business. This time of the comic side with paper cuts to do two new comic series that will be collected

as graphic novels down the line. The first is an action adventure series based on the WWE superstars and some of their exploits. And then there'll be a second version of that that'll be available and aimed at a younger audience. Both will begin before the end of the year as comics and be collected in graphic novel

form in the spring of next year. Stand up comedy reality MMA fighting Joe Rogan has done it all. And along the way, apparently he's come up with some things he still needs to know. So a new series called Joe Rogan questions everything now on Sci-Fi. And I asked Joe why this type of show.

I'm a dork. I've always had these questions about all these different obscure, weird subjects like Bigfoot and aliens and UFOs, all these strange fringe, silly things for an adult to concentrate on. And I always thought it would be really cool if I could do some sort of a show that answered

the questions that I wanted answered because all the shows that I ever saw were either debunking shows or they immediately dismissed everything and went at it to dismiss things. Or there were these shows that sort of embraced every ridiculous possibility, you know, as who knows it is a mystery. You know, you know, I thought there's got to be a way to bring both camps together to

bring all the cuckoo heads and all the scientists and get some real answers and also do it with comedians and make it entertaining because these are ridiculous ideas. These are, I mean, there's a reason why Bigfoot is something that if you bring up in a legitimate conversation, people like push their chair away and excuse themselves. They're dumb subjects.

And so I wanted to, I wanted to treat it with a sense of humor and I wanted to also treat it with a completely open mind and talk to legitimate scientists if they're available in all these various fields and all the various subjects and see if we could sort of come up with some answers and make entertaining show along the way. So there's no shortage of ghost hunting type programs out there.

What makes this one different? But what we're doing is we're just approaching every single subject completely open minded, even the ones that I didn't believe in. The ones that I, the subjects that I thought were completely stupid. I sat down with these people that were, you know, quote unquote experts or believers and

I gave them the time of day. I gave them a shot. I gave all of them an opportunity to explain themselves and I asked them objective questions. I tried to respectfully poke holes in their arguments. So every time I approached the subject, I approached it as open minded as possible.

Any investigations? Was there anything that actually changed his mind about the legitimacy of the topic? There's actually a couple. Yeah. I don't want to get into specific detail, but actually the second episode kind of tweaked

me a little bit. It's about HARP. HARP is the High Frequency Active or Rural Research Program. It's this array of antennas that they have that's up in Alaska that they shoot radio waves to heat up the ionosphere.

And the official explanation is that it aids in communication because when they manipulate the ionosphere, they make it so, I don't know if you're aware of this, but sometimes during certain storms, you can pick up radio stations from really far away. And the reason for that is the shifting of the ionosphere and the HARP array, the official explanation is that it was designed to do that.

But along the way, we talked to a bunch of just scientists and really intelligent people who said that, no, it's possible to do a lot more and it's actually possible to manipulate weather and they thought that it may even be responsible for super storms. And then it may be possible to target storms. These were really intelligent people that were telling me this, so that was pretty shocking.

That was just one. There's been a few actually. There's a guy named Dr. Jeff Meldrum that's on Wednesday's episode. A very intelligent guy and when we were talking to him, my friend Duncan, who's on a show with me, he, like before that, didn't think there was a possibility at all that Bigfoot

existed. But after talking to Dr. Meldrum, he was convinced that it was real. Of course, Joe's got his favorite monster. Bigfoot's always been my favorite. I don't know why.

I've been fascinated by primates. Since I was a little kid, I've always been, like when I go to the zoo, I immediately go to see the monkeys. I immediately go and check out the chimpanzees. I think that primates other than ourselves are incredibly fascinating because if they

didn't exist, there would be the stuff of movies. You know, if a gorilla didn't exist and you saw one for the first time, it would be utterly fascinating. This human-like thing that lives in the jungle and chimp hands the same way. And the idea of Bigfoot, when I was a little boy, I thought it was incredibly fascinating.

And then as I got older and I listened to people like Jane Goodall say that she believes that Sasquatch is a real animal. Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist. And then when you find out that there used to be an animal called Gigantopithecus, which was a huge eight to ten foot tall bipedal hominid.

So it stood up straight on two legs like us and it was as tall as ten feet tall. And it lived alongside human beings as recently as 100,000 years ago. They found bones of these things. We didn't even know about them until the 1920s. And the way humans found out about it was in an apothecary shop.

A guy was searching around for bones and found this primate tooth that he knew was not a gorilla, was not a chimpanzee, was way too large for the human beings. And from there they started asking people to shop where they got this from and they got other bones and they realized, oh my God, we have a species we didn't know about. And then they also determined from those bones, because of the shape of the jaw, that this

was a bipedal animal, some sort of gorilla type animal that walked on two legs and it was huge. So essentially it was a Sasquatch. It used to be a real animal. So that to me is the big one.

Something new to investigate every week on Joe Rogan Questions Everything with new episodes every Wednesday on Sci-Fi and see more at Sci-Fi.com. Get the point, radio, guess what's cool. Some traditional summertime comic book fun and a couple of oddball things in the stores for you when you hit them this week.

Starts out at Dark Horse with a new series based on the classic character Captain Midnight. There's been some build up to this over the past couple of months and now the first issue is out from Dark Horse. Summertime means annuals of course and there's a bunch from DC this week, Animal Man Annual number two.

The second Batman Annual, Detective Comics Annual, Flash Annual and Superman Annual as well. Also speaking of Animal Man, there's an Animal Man omnibus this week, about 75 bucks but it collects some great work there for you. And over at IDW, still a tie in back to DC with a collection of Superman Silver Age newspaper

dailies from 1958 to 1961. Another beautiful package from IDW for just under 50 bucks. Cool comics this week over at Image include a new issue of Morning Glories at number 29. Fifth issue of Sex is out this week as well there. At Marvel Black Bolt, Something Inhuman This Way Comes helps set up some of the changes

on the way for the inhumans in the Marvel universe. This is a collection of some classic stories including work by Roy Thomas. It's a beautiful art by Neil Adams. Comic Ass 3, number one gets a second printing just in time for the release of the movie not far from right now.

There's a bunch of those including some variants you may want to check with your retailer about. And the oddball title of the week, Wolverine in Flesh. It features a team up of Wolverine and Reality Chef Chris Constantino. Yeah, that's what I said. Check that out as well when you head into the comic stores this week.

Find the stores in your area with the comic book locator service. Find an 888 comic book with a free app that's available in the iTunes app store or you can check out a website called FindMyComicShop.com. That does it for the podcast but you know you don't have to go too far away to get the latest in pop culture.

We do it 24-7 at GetThePointRadio.com. Listen free right there on your desktop. Take us along on your iPhone or your iPad with the free app that's available in the iTunes app store under pop culture on The Point. Or on your droid or your blackberry you can do the same with an app called TuneIn.

It's free as well. The podcast is produced twice every week by Malcom10 Media. It's on websites like ComicMix.com and MichaelDavisWorld.com. And you can follow us on social media too as well under The Point on Twitter and Facebook. And subscribe to the podcast in the iTunes podcast directory.

We love that. Talk to you right back here in a few days. GetThePointRadio.com.