Category Archives: Television
Carl Cuts Loose in a Walking Dead Bad Lip Reading!
Check it. Zombies make for good back-up vocals! You can even buy that song on iTunes, they’re telling me. I’m a big fan of Bad Lip Reading. It’s just funny. And why else do we exist but to experience funny things? The Walking Dead premiers sometime next month, and I’m excited. I like the show, even if some critics don’t. It’s engaging and entertaining…just like Carl’s song!
Review: Gotham: “Pilot”
I’m going to go out on a limb and assume some meddling studio executive was the one who insisted on all of the name-dropping in the first episode of Gotham. Surely no sane creator with a vision for a Batman-themed TV show would insist on such silly pandering. Surely some executive was nervous about mainstream audiences picking up on the source material and insisted that Edward Nygma show up for 5 seconds to crack riddles, or that several different characters would tell Oswald Cobblepot that he looks like a penguin.
Because otherwise, Gotham doesn’t have much faith in its audience to not be idiots.
TV Rating: 6/10 – Pretty Good.
I’m going to try not to focus too much on the random character cameos because that’s what everybody is talking about (and Dorkly did it best). Suffice to say, I don’t think they make or break the show. I think they’re the byproduct of somebody higher up desperately trying to push the Batman elements of a show that can stand without them. They’re training wheels for a kid who can pedal just fine on his own.
The sort of people who are going to watch Gotham understand what it’s about, and we’re capable of being patient. We don’t need to be reminded every 5 minutes of another Batman character. I sincerely hope this was just an affliction of the pilot, and that future episodes will behave themselves.
Nobody likes a name-dropper.
I liked the first episode of Gotham, but I also think it was a very unpolished episode. A show like Gotham should crack with the energy and efficiency of an episode of Law and Order. It should establish itself as a cop show first and foremost, and then prove it’s the most interesting cop show with its characters and world. But in the first episode, Gotham seems a little bloated with clunky dialogue, bad efforts at campy humor and an all-around sense of trying desperately to live up to its own expectations for itself. It wants to be this awesome combination of cop show and superhero show, but it’s not quite sure how to achieve that.
Fortunately, being the pilot, a little shoddiness is excusable. Gotham has a whole season to tighten the plotting, the dialogue and the character development.
And I will definitely be around for the whole season.
Join me after the jump or my full review.
A Live Action Captain Boomerang Will Be a Thing
Someone somewhere has decided that a man whose claim to fame is throwing boomerangs will pose much more of a challenge to a man who shoots arrows instead of a man with super speed. In other words, Captain Boomerang will appear on Arrow in Season 3 instead of The Flash.
He’ll also be played by Nick Tarabay, of Spartacus, according to Entertainment Weekly.
At least one of them is Australian
Though according to the article, he’ll be part of the two show crossover coming up this fall, so maybe that’s something.
I watched Spartacus, and it was really good. Tarabay played the jackass, so I bet he’d make a good villain. He seems like he has the cocky smarm to play someone like Captain Boomerang. Also according to the article, the Cap’n will be a former ARGUS operative who’s possibly gone rogue. New Suicide Squad member, perhaps?
I only hope the boomerang effects are as good as the bow and arrow effects.
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6 of My Fictional Mary Sues
I make no bones about my life as a young fan fiction writer. I am actually quite proud of the work that Young Sean churned out at such a young age – even if I can rarely bring myself to go back and read the stories I wrote. You can check them out at FanFiction.net. Those stories laid the groundwork for the Sean you know today.
And one of the things I loved more than anything else was creating my own Mary Sue characters in popular fiction. Though back then, I had no idea what a ‘Mary Sue’ even was.
Nope, that’s Mary Jane
According to TVtropes.com, Mary Sue is the derogative term for an original fan fiction character inserted by the author into an already popular series, usually to serve as some kind of wish fulfillment. Mary Sues typically have dramatic backstories, awesome names, unique looks, and more often than not, upstage the main characters. For example, say you wrote a Harry Potter fan fic and inserted your own original Hufflepuff wizard, and the story was all about how your wizard fell in love with Draco Malfoy and turned him into a good guy with the power of love. It’s that sort of idealized character inserted into pre-existing stories.
I don’t think I was ever that bad, but I loved creating my own original characters for all my favorite cartoons and movies. Join me after the jump to take a look at just a few of them, and feel free to share some of your own in the comments! No judgement.
Also, as Google has revealed, I was not the only person in the world to come up with these exact same ideas. But I was young, and the Internet wasn’t a thing yet, so forgive me if some of these ideas aren’t 100% unique or original. They were to me at the time.
A Teen Titans TV Show? That Would Never Work!
As a personal rule, I don’t believe 95% of all rumored live action superhero shows or movies. I do not think Guillermo del Toro’s Justice League Dark movie is ever going to happen. Let alone Lobo or the Metal Men. But I would have said the same thing back when the Rock was first rumored to be playing Black Adam several years ago – and now that’s a guarantee.
This fall, we’re going to get TV shows for Batman, Flash and Constantine. The Green Arrow show is probably my favorite drama on TV right now. We’re living in a world that Young Sean never thought possible.
Which brings us to today’s new rumor of a live action Teen Titans show, starring Dick Grayson as Nightwing. Apparnetly TNT is nearing a pilot consideration.
Crossover potential?
I don’t know how I feel about this possibility.
On the one hand, I don’t believe it. I believe that TNT would love to have a show as successful as Arrow, and jumping on the DC superhero bandwagon is an easy way to do just that these days. I don’t doubt that someone at TNT would love to make this show.
I just…heck, I would love to make this show. I need to stop being a cynic. If this show became a reality, I would watch the Hell out of a live action Teen Titans show. I love Arrow, I put up with the whole season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and I’m definitely going to watch Constantine, Gotham and The Flash, even though I hated the pilot for that last one (more on that in the future).
I love both Teen Titans cartoons. I mostly loved Young Justice, especially the first season. And I love the idea of a Dick Grayson TV show so much that I’ve been sitting on my own series pitch that I was going to make someday to the King of Hollywood.
I should tell you henchies about that pitch one of these days…
Something like this
There is so much drama, especially teen drama, that could be wrung out of a Teen Titans TV show. Comedy too. How many teen angst shows feature a romance between a hunky circus acrobat orphan and his fiery, orange-skinned alien power princess girlfriend?
Don’t think they’d take it that far? All of the new DC superhero shows are comics accurate, even The Flash! I would imagine this new Titans would be just as comics accurate.
There are probably a lot of people in the world who are getting sick of all the superhero movies and TV shows. I am not one of them. I may not have much faith in them getting made, but that could just be Young Sean talking. He lived in a very different world from our own.
He wouldn’t understand.
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What do you henchies think of a Teen Titans live action show? Or a Nightwing series? What about that Supergirl TV show rumor that’s floating around? Sound off in the comments!
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Henchman-4-Hire 