Our own Mr. Lister, Sir — great forum name, BTW — discovered today that Hulu added the complete Robotech: Macross Saga to their full-episode lineup. That’s great news for any of you who (like me) haven’t seen all of it and don’t have the cash to go out and buy all the DVDs.
I first saw Macross Saga when it aired in spurts on the local PBS channel about the time I was in early high school. Since the episodes didn’t air in order — and I was unlikely to catch ‘em in order even when they did — my initial Macross experience felt like jumping into a deep lake to learn to swim. Each episode brought new characters, new story, and new cultural differences I completely failed to get.
You’d think I’d hate it, right? Wrong! There’s something truly magic about struggling to understand, reaching into whatever well you’ve got of sci-fi history and culture to get a grip on what you’re watching. I loved it right from the start — even though I still don’t grasp the whole story. Macross also represented one of the few opportunities available in those pre-zillion-cable-channel (and most importantly pre-internet) days to see something culturally different.
We’ve been waiting for it. We’ve marked our calendars and counted the months for the Battlestar Galactica tele-movie, The Plan. Sometime in June SyFy president Dave Howe mentioned it would air in November. However, now the network says The Plan will not air in 2009.
This should come as no surprise.
The 2009 Creative Arts Emmy winners were announced Saturday, September twelfth in Los Angeles.
Please join in congratulating a few old friends in their Emmy win! So say we all!
For Outstanding Sound Editing in a Series
Battlestar Galactica • Daybreak (Part 2) • Syfy • R&D TV in association with Universal Cable Productions
Daniel Colman, Supervising Sound Editor / Sound Designer
Jack Levy, Supervising Sound Editor
Vince Balunas, Dialogue/ADR Editor
Sam Lewis, Sound Effects Editor
Michael Baber, Music Editor
Doug Maddik, Foley Artist
Rick Partlow, Foley Artist
Complete List of Creative Arts Emmys Noms and Winners
The sci-fi film/television production community is surprisingly close knit. Everyone seems to know everyone else, and it would be difficult to come up with two movies or shows that couldn’t be connected “six degrees of separation”-style. With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that a lot of sci-fi contains nods to other works in the genre. One of my favorite things to do when rewatching sci-fi is to keep my eyes peeled for robots/ships/props/etc. from other TV shows or movies to make cameo appearances. And believe it or not, it’s actually pretty common. Allow me to be your guide as we take a look at sci-fi past and present to explore some of the coolest — and some of the most well hidden – of these appearances.
Kaywinnit Lee Frye, a.k.a. Kaylee. Beloved mechanic for the ship Serenity. Mal’s girl Friday with an attitude. I think we all love Kaylee in our own way — but is she a good role model? One definition of the term is “a person whose behavior in a particular role is imitated by others.” Do parents want their daughters to behave like Kaylee? Should young adults imitate her? A more in-depth look at Kaylee should answer this question.
If you happened to miss Virtuality‘s premiere on FOX, it wouldn’t surprise me. If not for the GWC hivemind, I would have. In my opinion, it wasn’t promoted very well. Far be it for me to question the marketing decisions of a highly successful network — but they dropped the ball.
Created by Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor, Virtuality is set aboard the Phaeton on a ten-year journey to explore the nearby star system Epsilon Eridani. A corporation known as the Consortium partially funds the project via a Reality TV show called Edge of Never: Life on the Phaeton which chronicles the experiences of the 12-person crew. Months after leaving Earth they are informed that their planet will become inhospitable within the next 100 years, thus changing the priorities of the mission from exploration to the survival of the human race.
Renaming the SCI FI channel to Syfy is proof positive that the management of the network are a bunch of booger-picking morons who wouldn’t know a phaser from a frisbee.
…at least, that is what I thought until about five minutes ago.
Continue reading »
Push didn’t promote itself well. Released almost a year to the day after the similarly-themed and poorly-received Jumper and featuring a synopsis that sounds like a repeat episode of Heroes — or worse, X-Men Lite — the movie doesn’t first present itself as something you have to see. So most people didn’t, including me. Fortunately, I just caught some friends watching it, and now that I’ve checked it out, I’ll happily do the heavy lifting for the movie’s marketers and explain why it’s worth watching.
Many of us here at GWC are women. I would also say many of us like sci-fi not only because it’s cool as hell, but because many times growing up, sci-fi was the only place we saw strong, capable women we could look up to. It’s not always easy being a fan of a genre that the greater world sees as dominated not only by males, but by teen-aged males. Let me assure you, we women are here and we love every minute of it.
Eric Bana’s latest movie The Time Traveler’s Wife is sci-fi romance — a genre we haven’t seen often since the days of Han and Leia or George and Lorraine. Bana’s Henry DeTamble is a handsome librarian who travels through time; Rachel McAdams is Clare Abshire, the artist who falls in love with him.
Interesting trivia: according to IMDB, Bana shaved his head for his role as Nero in Star Trek just after finishing filming for The Time Traveler’s Wife. However, TTTW required some reshoots and they had to push back the release date almost a year while Bana’s hair grew back. Hello, people? Get a wig! No one’s going to be looking at Bana’s head anyway… because he apparently spends a good amount of the new movie in the nude. (The Terminator franchise firmly established that nudity in muscular men is necessary for time travel.)
It turns out Purefold isn’t the only sci-fi project coming down the pipe for famed director/producer Ridley Scott. Late last night, Variety confirmed that the original Alien helmer will direct the upcoming Alien prequel. If we didn’t know better, we’d think this had been timed to perfectly coincide with our crüe’s Alien arc!
Many GWCers will likely agree that one of the greatest qualities of Battlestar Galactica has been its storytelling — its ability to reach toward its viewers and connect with them on an emotional and intellectual level. A perfect example is the gut-check we all felt at the end of Season 4.0 when the fleet arrived at Erf, the so-called promised land, only to find it a charred nuclear wasteland. But despite the excellent storytelling, this would all be somewhat lacking in emotion without the soundtrack to back it up. Fortunately, Bear McCreary was at the musical helm once again to make the show’s finale soundtrack the most powerful yet.
GWCers on Flickr
Recent Blog Comments
on #42: Juan Chooses a Tablet { Looking forward to the reasoning behind the Ipad, in a similar position but so far I can't justify the price + data contract despite a... } – May 09, 4:26 PM
on #321: Avengers Pt. 4, Thor { First off - it is great to be back. I have been away for a couple years. I was listening during the original run of... } – Apr 24, 7:23 PM
on #28: Nyan Nyan Nyan Nyan Nyan (Cat) { I would like at least one episode where Audra doesn't try to "beat" along with the intro. It gets old. Thanks. } – Apr 21, 12:50 PM
on #31: Sight Unseen { The episode commentaries seem to becoming less about the show and more about everything else. You guys get off track easy, and tend to stay... } – Apr 04, 11:19 PM
on #37: Draw Something/360 Cloud Sync Fail { I was sick too! You and I might be carrying around each others germs. } – Mar 29, 6:39 AM