It’s Halloween and we have a special ‘cast for you featuring the RomZomCom Shaun of the Dead. Highlights: We note how we sometimes mistake co-workers for zombies, too, analzye Shaun and Ed’s zombie-fighting acumen, assure listeners that Bruce Campbell really doesn’t “bang” Xena, discuss the difference between horror movies and thrillers, hear Sean’s astounding ID of a caller’s “unknown anime with boobs that shoot to attack,” hate on Heavy Metal (the film, not the music), check out callers’ killer Halloween experiences and costumes, listen to Audra’s male strip club experience, and suffer through Chuck’s rambling connection between BYOB all-nude clubs and Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. No, really.
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It’s a wrap on the Back to the Future arc as we have a great time with the BttF III. Highlights: we all reminisce about seeing BttF III in the theater, note that Sean would immediately seek out the founder of Dr. Pepper in 1885, love that the first thing Doc does in 1885 is build a breakfast machine, discuss Doc’s sense of wonder and how it serves him well throughout time (and enjoy seeing him find his soulmate), hear Audra’s history of underwear (in lieu of a non-existant junk report), speculate that Doc may have made more than a few trips in the DeLorean during the end of the first movie, listen to a Manchester caller’s awesome theory of how the time train came to be, hear Chuck’s theory of multiple S-word family entertainment, and wish there was even more BttF. Join us next week for our Halloween Shaun of the Dead re-watch. Plus, if you have time, call in before noon Thursday and share your best Halloween costume story for inclusion in next week’s cast!
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This week we head Back to the Future, visiting 2015 Hill Valley. Highlights: We love Michaela’s latest GWC intro, notice the Rylos Star Car cameo, wonder where the hell our flying cars are in 2008, hear Audra’s BttF Junk Report(tm), speculate that all cops are stripper supermodels in the future, discuss future Biff’s final resting place, express our disappointment that after 30 years the society has yet to raise enough cash to save the clock tower, worry that Marty and Doc Brown are the ones who really screwed up the timeline, reminisce about Casio’s SK-1, and remind everyone not to miss Chuck, Heroes, and the new Life on Mars.
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Welcome to the Back to the Future arc! Highlights: We hear from a very lucky listener who saw the movie at a theater in the mall where Einstein made time travel history, note that Mayor Wilson totally failed in cleaning up the town, love the fact that you can “see some serious…” in an ’80s family movie, listen to Sean’s theory about George McFly, wonder how we’d fare traveling 30 years into our pasts, discover that Sean would indeed find his mother hot (assuming his mom was Lea Thompson), wonder exactly how high Nostradamus was when he wrote about the sky burning, hope we’ll see (the sadly sans-Dude) Tron 2 before flying cars arrive, and tell just how-boring-is-Kansas stories.
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If like me you get a big kick out of the music NBC’s selected to spice up the kick-ass show Chuck, you’ve probably looked around for a soundtrack. The bad news: there isn’t one, and there isn’t likely to be one any time soon. The good news: NBC (and some dedicated fans) have sussed out most of the relevant tracks.
So I took it upon myself to make my own Chuck soundtrack via Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 downloads. I’m not the world’s finest mix-tape maker — in fact, I pretty much suck at it — but I felt inspired, so I spent a bit of time selecting the tracks I thought would make a good soundtrack and organizing them for an entertaining listen.
Here’s my Chuck Season One Soundtrack:
- Cobrastyle Featuring Mad Cobra (Album Version)
by The Teddybears (3:00)
- The Missionary
by Brothers Martin (2:03)
- Sugar Assault Me Now
by Pop Levi (3:02)
- Don’t You Evah
by Spoon (3:34)
- Don’t Make Me a Target
by Spoon (3:56)
- Fall Into Place
by Apartment (3:24)
- A Comet Appears (Album)
(Album) by The Shins (3:49)
- Santa Maria (Del Buen Ayre)
by Gotan Project (5:58)
- Titoli (For A Fistful Of Dollars)
by Ennio Morricone (3:03)
- Toxic
by Britney Spears (3:19)
- Pimp Juice
by Nelly (4:52)
- It Takes Two
by The Hit Crew (4:22)
- Don’t Look Back In Anger
by Oasis (4:48)
- Dice (Album Version)
by Finley Quaye & William Orbit (4:15)
- Lust For Life
by Iggy Pop (5:14)
- Cellphone’s Dead
by Beck (4:46)
- Into Your Dream
by Foreign Born (2:37)
- Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is (Album Version)
by Jet (2:37)
- Gone Daddy Gone/I Just Want To Make Love To You (Album Version)
by Gnarls Barkley (2:28)
- Short Skirt/Long Jacket (Album Version)
by Cake (3:24)
Total: 74:31, $19.70
A few ID3-tagging tricks to complete the process: once you’ve purchased (or located in your own collection) all the tunes, you can replace the individual album art with your own (or mine above if you like it), replace the ablum name with “Chuck: Season One Soundtrack,” set the track numbers to the correct order above, and (the big trick if you want it to show up right in iTunes) set the “Album Artist, “Sort Album Artist,” and “Sort Artist” to wherever you keep soundtracks (I use “Various Artists”). This results in retaining the artist name for each tune, but showing the soundtrack together as an album — and iTunes plays the album in track order.
Also, you should know that the above links are encoded with GWC’s amazon associates code, so the tiny commission Amazon pays if you buy the tunes will go to help operate GWC. (Of course you’re welcome to grab the tunes without the links above, or buy them anywhere you like. We’ll totally live.)
Even if you’re not willing to pony up for the whole album, I’d absolutely recommend checking out some of the previews. I ended up getting into a couple of the bands on the list and snagged whole albums from ‘em. Great stuff, and yet another reason that Chuck (the show) rocks so hard.
Anime can be a tough nut to crack. Tightly clung to favorites are defended to a degree that can make newcomers both confused and more than a little turned off by the level of zest fanatics of a particular series will engage newbie’s with. Harsh criticism is also abundant and quick to be heaped upon anything not resembling a particular person’s cadre of favorite works. Keeping that in mind I can say that Appleseed Ex Machina will change the way modern anime is done and turn traditionalists off at the same time. No joke.
Traditional Japanese cell animation is what many anime fans have come to expect in a serious film style piece. However the newest Appleseed blows right by it with some of the most stunning and inventive uses for 3D I’ve witnessed yet. The heavy use of Toon Shading – which is just a form of non-photorealistic rendering designed to make CGI look like hand drawings – gives the universe and characters a great deal of life they wouldn’t normally have. Coupled with the superior textures and beautiful movement it’s hard to fathom other producers not opting for the style in the coming years.
Shinji Aramaki who is responsible for the look of top line anime like Wolf’s Rain, and Robotech and John Woo who has some of the best slow-mo and fight style in the movie business make an odd but very potent team. You can see Woo’s influence in some of the “stunts” and camera angles and the very Woo signature-like bullet casings hitting the ground. And of course Aramaki is largely considered the father of modern mecha so the giant robots are nothing short of spectacularly detailed.
Ex Machina also sports a first rate story and the entire film (yes I’m calling it that) has a flavor and vibe all its own that will grab you from the word go. It takes a second or two to adjust to how much is really going down on the screen but what you see when looking at this work is the future of anime. Even if you don’t like it – one day the pages of artistic history will mark it as significant.
Oh yeah I almost forgot, check it out if you get the chance.
This week we enjoy the Sarah Connor Chronicles pilot episode. Highlights: we love the new Summer Glau model, get a kick out of the show’s excellent casting, agree that naked Cameron kickin’ ass is so hot that it’s not even cancelled out by standing naked by one’s naked mom, wonder if canon/continuity even exist in time travel shows, hear Chuck’s pleas for help in obtaining a DeLorean, comment on the Iron Man release and our watch party, laugh at taking so long to get into Chuck (the show, not The Chuck), and discover that Flea is indeed the Universal Bad Guy(tm). Up next: the Back to the Future arc!
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Since the launch of GWC’s Geek Deathmatch forum we’ve seen some crazycool matchups. And with voting coming to a close on some, I thought I’d share some results.
First up we have a group of sci-fi classics:
- Unicron > Galactus
- Twiki > Muffit
- LeeLoo > River
- Viper > X-Wing
- Starscream > Cobra Commander
- Kaylee Frye > Chewbacca (Mechanic)
- Chewbacca > Nien Nunb
- The White Star > USS Defiant
- Starbuck > Sarah Connor
- Old Ewok Song > New Ewok Song
- Muppet Yoda > CGI Yoda
- Adama > Roslin (Better Leader)
- Firefly Chinese > Terminator One-Liners
- Spike (Buffy) > Spike Spiegel (Cowboy Bebop)
So GWCers prefer clasic Star Wars (for the most part). We also apparently love Chewbacca but harbor some concerns about his ability to patch together the Millenium Falcon on his own. Viper over X-Wing, though? How can FTL lose to no FTL?
- Family Guy’s Blue Harvest > Robot Chicken’s Star Wars Special
…though Peter’s take on the Holy Trilogy grabs us a bit more than Seth Green’s. Though there’s much love for Seth around these parts.
- Malcolm Reynolds > Han Solo
- Indiana Jones > Mal Reynolds
GWC’s badass pecking order: Jones, Mal, Han. I suspect that while we’re all Han fans, we worry about his ability to get the job done when it comes to nastiness. He’s just too nice a guy to be a true badass.
- Anakin > Luke (Whine Off!)
Anakin, on the other hand, can whine like no one’s business. I suspect voters in this match took into account Luke’s vast foray into the expanded universe, in which he’s much, much less whiney than in the movies. Also key in Anakin’s “victory:” GWCers fought an excellent battle over the definition of “Anakin,” eventually deciding that Anakin ceased to be Anakin once he became Vader.
- Darth Vader > Alfred Bester
…though black armor seems to trump psi-core.
- Professor Xavier = Magneto
- Patrick Stewart > Ian McKellen
After a difficult match, wheelchair and helmet fought to a surprising draw. This is quite telling: in hindsight I believe these two are almost identical, pushing to a single end via different means. Note that stripped of their characters, Stewart had no problem crushing McKellen.
- Tolkein > Asimov
- Ewoks = Hobbits
Clearly we have more than a few fantasy buffs in the GWC community! Thankfully we’ve been expanding that way; look for more fantasy (and comic) coverage in the podcasts soon.
- Cylons > Borg
- Zombies > Cylons
We see the Cylons’ conniving nature as more effective than collect(ive)ing, but the brain-eaters triumph. Interesting!
- HTML > WYSIWYG
- New Twitter = Old Twitter
No Geek Deathmatch would be complete without battles like these, though it seems the GWC community is more meh than others when it comes to Twitter’s new look.
- Yang > Yiin
- Ninjas > Pirates
- Black Spy > White Spy (Spy vs. Spy)
- James Bond > George Smiley
I wonder how Pirates would’ve fared if the match hadn’t closed before Talk Like A Pirate Day? And the most infamous GDM to date:
- Gold > Poo
If you’re unhappy with any of these outcomes, feel free to create your own re-match in the GDM Forum. Remember the rules: re-matches should have a catchy name. And don’t forget to vote on the matches currently open. My fave: Sarah Connor vs. Ellen Ripley. Wow!
The votes are in, and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash has won the day…erm, month. So put down the remote, step away from the computer and pickup your copy of Snow Crash. You can join in the conversation here in the GWC Forum. We’d like to thank all the voters for contributing, and we’re already engaged in lobbying for next month’s book of the month candidates. We can’t wait for the voting cage match (Chuck Cage match? Only time will tell).
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