To help celebrate the 48th birthday of Doctor Who, below we’re featuring the trailer for the upcoming Christmas special!  It looks sooooo good!

I can’t wait for Christmas!  I’m so excited, I won’t be able to sleep a wink on Christmas Eve!

Click here if you are unable to view the embedded video above.

Recently Jon, Serv, Cary, Ed, and me got together and ran down, previewed, reviewed, and generally rambled about the most recent, yet to come, and future television season(s).  Check it out over on THE UNIQUE GEEK!

Now get listening!

Boy was I wrong!  The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is a truly great cartoon!

Right from the opening credits I was in love!  That theme song rocks!  “Fight As One” by Bad City – Google it, seriously.  Another neat feature of the opening credits is the group shot of the team at the end.  The team composition changes depending upon the team status in each episode.  Nice attention to detail!

The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes DVD vol 1 covers the first seven episodes of the series.  Essentially this introduces all the main characters and shows the formation of the team.  Each of the first five episodes spotlights a main character: Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Captain America, and Ant Man & Wasp.  This worked great on DVD, but I’m not so sure it would have worked for the once-a-week viewer on television.  For those viewers, they didn’t get to see the Avengers together as a team until they’d been watching the show for six weeks.  Regardless, it plays out really well on DVD and helps you understand each character better than expected.

No time was wasted detailing the origins of Iron Man or Hulk.  They assume the viewer is already familiar with these movie franchise icons.  The voice actor playing Tony Stark did a reasonable job mimicking Robert Downey Jr., while the Pepper Potts voice actress sounded exactly like Gwyneth Paltrow.  Additionally, Jarvis was dead-on from the Iron Man films.  I really enjoyed this interpretation of the Hulk.  He’s aggressive and simple, but not a mindless savage.

Most surprising to me was how exciting Thor and Captain America came across on-screen!  Personally, I’m not much of a Thor fan.  I’ve never enjoyed his monthly comic, with the exception of the stories by Walt Simonson and Warren Ellis.  Thor is a difficult character to make accessible to the average person and I wasn’t expecting to enjoy him in this cartoon.  Another surprise here — they did an excellent job conveying Thor’s back story and making Asgard an exciting place to explore!  Thor is an awesome character in this series and I look forward to seeing more of him!  Captain America is another challenging character to make interesting.  His out-of-time morality and relatively low power-level could have worked against him.  Instead they managed to create a compelling and inspirational hero that can hold his own with the Avengers!  With the upcoming theatrical releases of Thor and Captain America, these character’s popularity is going to skyrocket.

The Avengers team is finally formed in the two-part story that bridges episodes six and seven.  There is an astonishing battle with Graviton in those episodes that blew me away!  The action was non-stop!  This was the kind of epic superhero battle I’ve been longing to see on-screen.

The majority of the story elements in The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is based in the comic’s continuity.  For example, the team composition matches that of the original comic heroes, and the machinations of Loki are responsible for bringing the team together.  Other nods to the original comics include Hulk quitting the team during their second adventure and the discovery of a frozen Captain America.  I enjoyed the inclusion of the New Avengers comic plot point that the team banded together to hunt down a group of escaped supervillain inmates.

Through the course of these DVDs, we’re also introduced to characters such as Black Panther, Hawkeye, and Black Widow.  Nick Fury plays heavily in these adventures, his character coming across as an amalgamation of the movie version and the comic version.

The Avengers Earth’s Mightiest Heroes vol 2 DVD continues the team’s grand adventures.  In this volume we see: the team begins to gel and figure how they’ll function as a unit, Captain America makes his modern day debut, Wonder Man makes an appearance, and the DVD wraps up with a massive Gamma Monster brawl!  Both vol 1 and vol 2 offer a unique bonus feature with sneak peaks at season two of the series!  Nice featurettes that got me excited for further adventures!

I watched these DVDs with my eleven year old step-son and my five year old daughter.  I was interested in getting their opinion on the series.  Like me, they loved it!  Probably most surprising was my daughter’s intense interest in the show.  She’s very much a princess & pink kind of girl, so I didn’t expect her to latch onto this series as much as she did.  As we progressed through the episodes, this five year old child was spouting off bits of continuity from previous episodes that even I had forgotten about!  Understandably so, her favorite character was the Wasp.  I think Wasp might just be my favorite too.  So heroic and adorable!  Interestingly, both my kids noticed the immense amount of collateral damage and innocent bystanders in this series.  The superhero battles are big, bold and destructive.  I thought it was a very astute observation coming from children.

The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes vol. 1 & 2 on DVD went on sale last week.  Here are the details:

Volume 1 Episodes:
1. Iron Man Is Born!
2. Thor The Mighty
3. Hulk Versus The World
4. Meet Captain America
5. The Man in the Ant Hill
6. Breakout: Part 1
7. Breakout: Part 2
BONUS FEATURE: New Looks, New Heroes

Volume 2 Episodes:
8. Some Assembly Required
9. Living Legend
10. Everything Is Wonderful
11. Panther’s Quest
12. Gamma World: Part1
13. Gamma World: Part 2
BONUS FEATURE: New Stories, New Threats

I feel the quality of the stories, animation, and characters in this series are reminiscent of DC’s Justice League Unlimited animated series.  Make no mistake, that’s high praise coming from me!  While I enjoy many superhero cartoons, I don’t typically watch them a second time.  I feel confident saying that I’ll be re-watching these cartoons again in the near future.  If you’re a fan of superheroes or comic books, these DVDs are for you!  Buy them today!

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My thanks to Walt Disney Studios for sending me copies of these DVDs for review.

I’ve been an avid collector of Avengers comic books since the early 1990s.  I love this team and I love these characters.  The animated series really has an interesting take on these fan-favorite heroes.  I haven’t seen every episode of this series yet, so I’m looking forward to watching the entire run on DVD.  Pick up your own copies today and watch for my review of the series here in the near future!

It ran on ABC for two seasons and is now available on DVD and Netflix Instant.  It’s technically a sitcom, but the writing is extremely sharp and clever, the actors are fantastic, and the production values are high.  It has lots of office humor, mixed with a little mad science. It’s about the product development department for a stereotypical major corporation (meaning moneygrubbing and evil).  Veridian Dynamics motto is “Money Before People”, however, they publish it in Latin so it sounds fancy.  Each episode of the show features a Veridian commercial.  Here is a Veridian commercial and a two minutes teaser for the first episode…

If you can’t view the embedded video above, please click here.

It’s got lots of humor, fun characters, and some geeky science stuff.  Imagine combining The Office, Arrested Development, and Muppet Labs. That description probably isn’t spot-on, but it’s the best I could do.

Each episode is only 30 minutes, so giving it a try isn’t a huge investment.  Even my wife is hooked on the show! I highly recommend it for geeks!

Y’know, it’s a pretty sad state of affairs when the future predicted in Back to the Future Part II was more creative than the real future we live in nowadays.  Ugh.

My thanks to Dug from THE UNIQUE GEEK for directing me to this comic on COMIXED.com.

BBC America ran a special Doctor Who teaser recently just for us folks here in the United States!  Check it out below!

Yee-haw!  And if you missed the complete trailer for next season, check it out below.

It looks soooo good!  I can’t wait for next season!  Geronimo!

Oh yeah, Happy New Year too!

Matt Smith recently appeared on the Craig Ferguson show.  Below you’ll find the unaired musical number that was produced for the episode.  It’s funny, bizarre, and a fairly accurate description of Doctor Who.  This made the rounds on the interwebs a couple weeks ago, but I’m just now getting around to posting it here.

If you’re unable to view the embedded video above, please click here.  This was sent to me by about a dozen people. My thanks to all of you!  You know who you are.

Today marks the 47th anniversary of the airing of the very first Doctor Who episode. It was Saturday, November 23, 1963 at 5:15pm GMT when an unheard of children’s program appeared on BBC television. It featured two school teachers, an oddball student, and a grumpy old man. Humble beginnings!

It’s surprising to me how popular the show is nowadays. The show originally ran from 1963–1989. There was an American-made TV movie in 1996 which didn’t perform well. Then Doctor Who returned to the airwaves as a weekly TV series in 2005. Go back in time six years to 2004 and Doctor Who was still remembered as a joke by most people. Now it’s one of the most popular television shows in the world with two spin-offs. Just crazy!

We’re going to celebrate Doctor Who’s birthday today by watching the trailer to this year’s Christmas special – A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Happy birthday to that lonely old Timelord meandering around the universe in that rickety old Police Box!

My thanks to Ed for directing me to the new trailer!