Marvle this morning released a teaser for a new event in the Marvel Universe. No creators, timing or content was released with the teaser. We’re going to guess that it maybe a part of the 2009 Dark Reign event spinning out of the end of Secret Invasion. It does not resemble the future Iron Men seen in last week’s New Warriors. Any guesses?
Total Drama Island is getting a spinoff as the Cartoon Network has announced the addition of Total Drama Action. According to Variety, the new series, debuting in 2009, will also satirize reality television and was created by Tom McGillis and Jennifer Pertsch of Canada’s Fresh TV.
TDI first debuted on the network July 8, 2007 and mocks the Survivor-style shows with contestants seen on a deserted island. They have to form teams and complete challenges to win prizes. Since its start, the 27 episodes have been the anchor for the channel’s "Har Har Tharsdays" comedy block.
In December, The Total Drama Island Season 1 Movie is expected on DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
Total Drama Action is actually the second season of the series from the producer’s point of view. This time, the contestants will be placed within an empty studio lot. Plans calling for Total Drama the Musical! in its third season followed by Total Drama Comedy. Cartoon Network has yet to pick up the last two seasons as yet.
Total Drama Island Interactive is an online game tied to the Flash-animated series, produced by Xenophile Media. Players can register for a free account and earn points by competing in events based on that week’s episode for marshmallows. The top 22 players will be placed in a drawing and the winner will have their TDII avatar added to the 27th and final episode of the series.
After poor reviews and worse ratings, CBS has given up on the Elizabeth Reaser-starring vehicle The Ex List. The Friday night dramedy, based on an Israeli television series, was a creative problem for the network. Show runner Diane Ruggiero left the series when it was clear she and CBS couldn’t agree on a direction. Rick Eid replaced her but his efforts hadn’t aired in time to change its fortunes.
The series averaging just 5.3 million viewers, according to Variety, driving viewers away after its more successful lead in, The Ghost Whisperer, and keeping people away from Numbers. As a result, the show has been removed from the schedule with a rerun of NCIS in its place this week.
With only four episodes aired but ten filmed, the network may bring the series back at a later time. This is the first hour-long dramatic series to be canceled after the failures of two reality series, Fox’s Hole in the Wall and ABC’s Opportunity Knocks. The first sitcom to go was Fox’s Do Not Disturb.
It is not a good season for the freshman series with most receiving tepid ratings and none being a clear breakout hit or pop culture sensation. Several such as 90210, The Mentalist, and Knight Rider have already received full season pick ups showing patience and faith on the part of the networks.
Warner Home Video is apparently readying the Plastic Man Comedy Adventure Hour for a DVD release. On Friday, Mark Evanier mentioned on his News from Me blog, “This afternoon, I had to go out to the Warner Brothers lot to be interviewed for little behind-the-scenes videos that will appear on two upcoming DVDs of cartoon shows. One is of the 1979 Saturday morning Plastic Man series, which I worked on for one season. The other is of the 1985 syndicated Jetsons revival, which I worked on for about an hour.”
TV Shows on DVD notes that when they surveyed people in 2007, the series topped their charts. When a Warner exec was asked during a chat earlier this year, hey replied, "We are looking at all of these, and hope to have news for you in 2009."
The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show ran from 1979 to 1981 on ABC. Produced by Ruby-Spears, it aired right after Super Friends and was either 90 minutes or two hours and was comprised of segments featuring Plastic Man (voiced by Michael Bell), Baby Plas, Plastic Family, Mighty Man & Yukk, Fangface and Fangpuss and Rickety Rocket.
On this series, Plastic Man had Penny as a girl friend who became his wife, voiced by Melendy Britt and their child, Baby Plas, had his own escapades. Woozy Winks was unfortunately replaced by Hula Hula, a Hawaiian sidekick.
Legend of the Seeker debuts on Saturday as a first-run syndicated series. To let people sample the series, an extended preview is available as a free download at Apple’s iTunes store. Legend of the Seeker: A First Look is actually the first 30 minutes of the two-hour first episode.
The series is from executive producers Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, who gained fame for their work on Hercules and Xena.
"Fans have been clamoring to get a first look at the series and based on the early response from the clips released on the Legend of the Seeker website, we knew this would be a huge success with audiences," Janice Marinelli, President, Disney-ABC Domestic Television said in a release.
Craig Horner (Blue Water High) and Bridget Regan (The Black Donnellys) star in the series originally entitled Wizard’s First Rule. The 22 episodes are being shot in New Zealand. Horner is Richard Cypher, a simple woodsman who becomes the magical leader who partners with Kahlan to put an end to a tyrant’s reign.
The book series launched in 1994 and the complex story has played out through eleven novels and one novella. Each volume is largely self-contained but the threads continue from book to book. Confessor, out last year, is said to end the current story cycle but Goodkind intends to revisit the world in future works.
For times and channels in your area, consult the show’s website.
Neil Gaiman’s Coraline has been turned into an animated film by Henry Selick and the popular author spoke with Premiere about the film, which opens in February. Much of the material is familiar to connoisseurs of the man’s career but he did fill in some gaps.
He discussed how he had the book sent to the director 18 months prior to publication. “That’s true. I mean, Henry didn’t even get the final draft. But the moment I finished it, I gave it to my agent, the redoubtable Jon Levin at CAA, and I said… ‘Well, I want it with Henry Selick and I quite like it with Tim Burton, ’cause I love The Nightmare Before Christmas, and they were the two people who did that, and I think, if it’s gonna be a film, it should be something like that.’ And I don’t know if it ever made it through the ranks to actually land on Tim Burton’s desk and get read, [but] it was really a moot point, because by the end of the week, Henry had read it, said that he wanted to do it, and had put the mechanisms in place. You know, the contract negotiations had already started.”
Gaiman was very pleased with Selick’s fidelity to the source material but clearly things had to be modified between print and screen. “He wrote a first draft that was incredibly faithful,” Gaiman said. “And I think I actually wound up saying to him, ‘Look, I think it’s a bit too faithful,’ because it didn’t feel like a movie, it felt like you were just reading the book. And I sort of encouraged him to expand it into a film a bit more. And the next one he rather nervously added a character and added events, but now the script read like a movie script. And then it was just a matter of him having another six years to find a studio that would give him the money to make the ultimate stop-motion movie.”
He remained uninvolved in the production but remained curious. “I’d go about my life and then I’d sit up one day and think, You know I haven’t seen anything for three or four months now, and I’d phone Henry and I’d say, ‘Have you got anything for me to see?’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah, I’ll get you off a DVD.’ And I’d get a DVD with another 10 minutes of footage on it! [laughs] What’s actually been fun is, because they’re pretty much shooting it exactly in order, the DVDs have been getting scarier and scarier. They started off [and I thought], ‘Well this is rather sweet and rather friendly,’ and the last one that I got I could actually say, ‘No, this is scary, this is really scary.’
Gaiman also addressed the long-delayed film version of his Death: The High Cost of Living. “Well, I think the latest is that we’re all waiting to see what happens to New Line. Death is a very odd thing because, unlike Coraline or Anansi Boys, which I’m doing for Warners, or The Graveyard Book or any of those kinds of things, I don’t own and control the rights to Death. I’m attached to it, I’ve written a script for it, I’m meant to be directing it… but I don’t control it, and for reasons having to do with corporate relationships between DC Comics and Warner Brothers, it has to be done by a Warner Brothers company, and then you have to find a Warner Brothers studio within Warner Brothers that will be a good fit for that film, and of course New Line was a really good fit for that film, and it remains to be seen right now what New Line is when the dust is settled and whether there is a New Line or not.”
Marvel has issued a release indicating the final issue of Secret Invasion will now be in store the first week of December, a week later than anticipated.
“The additional pages in #8 did both Leinil and the schedule in,” explained Executive Editor Tom Brevoort in a press release. “Anybody who pored over the artwork from #7 a week ago can easily see how he and Mark Morales have been putting their all (and then some) into every page and every panel, and that effort has finally caught up with us. Hopefully, retailers and fans will forgive us these extra two weeks as we make sure that everything is in the shape it should be in for the extra-sized climax—and from there, it’ll be smooth sailing straight into Dark Reign.”
David Gabriel, Marvel’s Senior Vice President of Sales, said in the release, “In speaking with retailers, Marvel decided it was more important to preserve the creative integrity of the series, rather than rush out the final issue. This not only creates a stronger product for our loyal readers, but also for our retailer partners, whose support helped make Secret Invasion a huge success.”
A mammoth event like this shipping late is no surprise and keeps the creative team intact as opposed to DC’s Final Crisis that recently announced the final issue will be illustred by Doug Mahnke and not J.G. Jones.
First it was Rob Roy. Then William Wallace. Now, it’s William the Conqueror’s turn in a new film to be written for Killer Films and GC Corp. by screenwriters Brian Edgar and Derek Wallbank.
Wallbank was a film editor in the 1970s with Hamlet and Devices and Desires to his credit while Edgar is a newcomer to film. Their script, according to Variety, will tell of “the rise of the illegitimate son of the Duke of Normandy to the English crown in 1066 following the Battle of Hastings.”
Killer has previously produced films including Boys Don’t Cry, Far From Heaven and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Producer John Wells funds the outfit and will receive an Executive Producer credit. GC Corp. is a venture capital fund that specializes in entertainment-related portfolios and is capitalized at $100 million.
"This is a big-budget studio movie. For many years we’ve been interested in a bigger canvas. It was just a matter of finding the right project," Killer Films’ Pamela Koffler told the trade.
The Weinstein Company has, according to Slash Film, moved Fanboys from November to open February 6, 2009, another delay. The studio picked up Fanboy for release some time back and the utterly charming tale of friends trying to get their dying friend to see The Phantom Menace has been hung up ever since.
Clearly they have little faith in the film given it will now open opposite Push, Pink Panther 2, and the Jennifer Aniston’s He’s Just Not That Into You.
When they picked up the movie, it was essentially complete and ready for release but instead, the Weinsteins wanted to tinker with it and the creators and fans were horrified at the notion that the charm might be replaced with something different. They decided to reedit the film their way then test screen both versions before deciding which one to release.
Weinstein decided the cancer subplot was too downbeat and put up $2 million to have four scenes created, under producer Shauna Robertson (The 40 Year Old Virgin) and director Steve Brill (Drillbit Taylor) that changed the story. The Hollywood Reporter noted that the non-cancer version of the film narrowly edged out the original version but well within the margin of error. After much public hemming and hawing, the studio opted to retain the original cut.
Fanboys was conceived in 2003 by Kevin Mann, who produced the love letter fellow geeks with Kyle Newman. The script was from Ernie Cline and it made the Blacklist, the top unproduced scripts circulating in Hollywood. It stars Jay Baruchel (Just Buried), Kristen Bell (Heroes), Seth Rogen (Knocked Up), and Dan Fogler (Good Luck Chuck) and has been eagerly anticipated since footage was shown at various conventions. Release dates of August 17, 2007 and January 18, 2008 came and went without a movie.
Both edited versions are expected to be available on the eventual DVD.
Bryan Fuller has been making it clear he wants a crack at the 23rd Century. In several recent interviews, promoting his ABC series Pushing Daisies, he’s also expressed his desire to make a new Star Trek television series.
Most recently, he told MTV, “I would love to do another Star Trek series,” Fuller said. “One where you could go back to the spirit and color of the original Star Trek, because somehow, it got cold over the years. I love Next Generation, but it’s a little cooler and calmer than the ones from the 60s, which were so dynamic and passionate.”
Fuller is no stranger to Gene Roddenberry’s creation, beginning his media career by writing for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. “Deep Space Nine was the best of the modern ones,” Fuller told the site, “because it was so emotionally complicated. Enterprise was the most sterile of all of them, when it should have been the most fun.”
His idea is to create a new crew for another starship set during Captain Kirk’s era, feeling the most familiar characters should remain in the films, starting again with J.J. Abram’s reimagined feature due out May 2.
“Star Trek has to recreate itself,” Fuller said. “Otherwise, all the characters start to feel the same. You always have a captain, a doctor, a security officer, and you have the same arguments based on those perspectives. It starts to feel too familiar. So all those paradigms where it takes place on a starship have to be shaken up.”
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