Smashing Magazine has a run down of 50 Stunning Asian Movie Posters. My favourite, just in terms of outlandishness, has to be:
As a play on the name Superman goes SuperManchu has got to be one of the stranger. A Chinese film subtitled “Cooler than Bond! Quicker than Fly! – Deadlier than Shaft!” sounds too good to be true. After all, nobody is cooler than Bond…
I usually don’t mind Amazon’s “other people who have bought what you bought” e-mails as I buy a lot of stuff from them, in fact I rarely go anywhere else just because I trust Amazon and have already paid for their Prime service. The advertising system works by matching patterns between something you’ve bought and something that other people who have also bought that item have bought. For instance, it might notice that you’ve bought a new printer. It will know on average that people who bought that same printer have also bought ink and paper. Therefore it will offer to sell you the same ink and paper. There isn’t much artificial intelligence behind it – more just basic pattern matching. However, sometimes it fails spectacularly.
It began simply enough when I received the following e-mail:
It starts:
We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Justice League Unlimited – Season One (DC Comics Classic Collection) or other films in the Cartoon Network > General AAS category…
“Fine,” I think, “I have indeed bought JLU Season One from them”. So I read on.
…have also purchased CandyGirl Video: Sugar Rush.
At which point alarm bells should have been ringing. However, my brain wasn’t quite expecting to associate an adult entertainment video with Justice League Unlimited so I was left trying to remember if CandyGirl is some sort of The Life and Times of Juniper Lee Cartoon Network show or if its some part of the DC Comics’s MINX line I haven’t heard of. I’ll save you the details of what Candy Girl: Sugar Rush video actually is (you can Google them as well as anybody else), but its the automated computer logic that equates purchasing Justice League Unlimited to purchasing an adult film that I find interesting.
I blogged about JLU’s audience demographic a few years ago and its no secret that JLU skewed towards an older demographic than The Batman or Brave and the Bold. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Amazon’s computer brain makes the association. But I’m still undecided whether this is an epic fail on Amazon’s part or a deeply damning psychological assessment of adults who still watch cartoons.
January sees a Faces of Evil theme linking a good fraction of DC’s covers. I haven’t seen any promo for the event itself, but I’d bet good money that Alex Ross was involved. Back around 1999-2000 Ross proposed an art book to DC called Portraits of Villainy (the sketches for it turn up in Alex Ross galleries and interviews from time to time). Faces of Evil, as well as following the loose idea of Portraits of Villainy, also follows the cover style that Ross has been using on Justice Society of America – that of a single painted portrait against a black background. Each of January’s covers will thus feature portraits of DC’s big villains.
There are also a selection of one shots to feature particular bad guys that don’t fit into particular ongoing series, but are important for future plotlines. Of interest to JLA readers will be Faces of Evil: Prometheus #1 which, unsurprisingly, features the return of Prometheus and is a setup for James Robinson’s new Justice League spin off series. Those of you with long memories will recall that Prometheus actually appeared first in a very similar issue called New Years Evil: Prometheus #1. New Years Evil was another January event, a skip week in that case, which featured a series of villain centric oneshots. To bring this full circle: the first version of Gog appeared in New Years Evil: Gog #1. That was Mark Waid’s version which has recently been superseeded by Geoff Johns’s version of Alex Ross’s version.
The solicitations for the above issues, including spoilers, follow the break:
| Writer | Director | Music | Voice Director |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stan Berkowitz | Butch Lukic | Kristopher Carter | Andrea Romano |
| Main Cast | Guest Cast | ||
| Maria Canals | Hawkgirl | James Remar | Lead Manhunter |
| Phil LaMarr | Green Lantern | Kurtwood Smith | Prosecutor |
| Carl Lumbly | J’onn J’onzz | Rene Auberjonis | Kanjar-Ro |
| George Newbern | Superman | Garrett Morris | Al McGee |
| Michael Rosenbaum | Flash | Peter Renaday | Graz |
| Brian George | Forian | ||
| Rickey D’Shon Collins | Kid | ||
| Animation Timing Director | Storyboard | Character/Prop Design | Animation Services |
|
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Koko Enterprise Co. Ltd. |
| Animation Directors | |||
|
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| Series Story Editors | Series Directors | Producers | Associate Producers |
|
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|
Shaun McLaughlin |
| Executive Producers | |||
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| Theme: Lolita Ritmanis, Main Title Design: Bruce Timm, Main Title Animation: Cantina Pictures Visual Effects | |||
On the alien world of Ajuris 5 an outlandish crowd of sentients is called to order by the leader of the High Tribunal. The Tribunal is a a trio of alien judges who appear as disembodied heads on a view screen inside a vast, stadium-like, court room. They state that never before has such a heinous crime brought together so many beings in grief and revulsion. The lead judge then tells the Prosecutor to bring forth the accused, but he is informed that the accused is still at large. Upon hearing this the lead judge calls forward the Manhunters, a corps of android soldiers whose mantra is “No Man Escapes the Manhunters.” The Manhunters are then informed that their target is the Green Lantern of Earth.
As serious comicbook fans we wince at the BAM and KAPOW jibes used whenever a bored mainstream journalist tries to write about comics, but their presence just underlines the cultural impact of the 1960s Batmania craze. Despite all its vainglorious hype the 1960s Batman TV has genuinely made an impression on popular culture. Even in the 1980s school kids would sing “dinner dinner dinner dinner Batman!” as they charged around the playground with their school coat tied around their neck in an approximation of Batman’s cape (not that I’d ever have done that you understand, cough, cough). The theme tune was a quintessential part of the unreformed Batman experience and its author has now passed on to the great bat-orchestra in the sky.
Neal Hefti was a big band musician during the middle of the twentieth century, but it was as an arranger of music for the legendary Count Basie and Frank Sinatra that he received his widest recognition. Hefti also wrote music for television and that included the theme for the 1960s Adam West & Burt Ward Batman TV show. On writing the score he once commented that:
“I tore up a lot of paper. It did not come easy to me. I just sweated over that thing, more so than any other single piece of music I ever wrote. I was never satisfied with it. I was almost going to call them and say, I can’t do it. But I never walk out on projects, so I sort of forced myself to finish.”
Neal Hefti was 85 when he died and had been retired since the 1970s. [Via the LA Times]
The Tim Burton Batman movie and later sequels have done a lot to reform Batman in the public’s mind, but the shear gloriousness of the 1960s Batmania can never be erased. Hefti’s theme was front and centre in that and will never be forgotten by the legions of former children who once believed that they could have been the caped crusader.
And, just for old times sake:
I started buying Justice League comics during the famous 1980s Giffen & DeMatteis era so those comics hold fond memories for me. Apparently I’m not the only one, recently J.M. DeMatteis has been remembering how he came to be involved the the project and what it was like working with Keith Giffen.
I didn’t want to do it. Really. It was late 1986 and I’d just completed the four-part “End of the Justice League of America”—wrapping up the infamous Justice League Detroit era and clearing the path for a JLA reboot—and I was anxious to move on to More Important Personal Projects. But Andy Helfer—one of the best editors I’ve ever worked with (which makes sense since he grew up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood I did)—kept saying, “Yeah, well, I might need you to dialogue the new Justice League book.” “But Andy,” I said, “I don’t want to dialogue the new Justice League book.” Andy nodded, puffed out a stream of cigarette smoke and smiled.
[Via JK Larkin @ Newsarama's Blog]
US borders are porous. You could take that to be a comment about the influx of people across Mexican border, but it isn’t. I’m talking about stuff going in the opposite direction. Anything that happens in the US media – promotions for films, upcoming seasons for TV shows, news stories, political rallies – leaks out across your borders. It’s like a mass media form of background radiation. A constant chatter of White House press conferences, celebrity legal action, and conspiracy theories that leaks into the media of every other country on Earth. Most of the time is just background noise, but come election time it gets out of hand. The increased news coverage that the campaigning generates on CNN, NBC, Fox News, turns the leak into a torrent. Here in Europe we get updates on the US election with every single news broadcast and we it’s an election we can’t even vote in!
That background radiation also influences Internet sharing. A film or TV show that is promoted in the USA is by definition promoted worldwide. However, the item itself usually won’t be available in other countries for months depending on licensing, release deals, or even just language translation. That leads to simple supply and demand. The networks/studios drive a demand that they can’t supply so people go looking to other suppliers (legal or illegal) who can fulfil their demand. Admittedly this also goes in the opposite direction – I’ve noticed certain high profile US bloggers who have been blogging about new episodes of Doctor Who when I know full well that those episodes haven’t been transmitted over there yet.
I just wish that there was a single legal international service that we could all get new TV shows from at the same time. I’d be more than happy for non-Brits to have access to an advertising supported version of the BBC Iplayer in exchange for me being able to watch CSI, Smallville, and Mythbusters on the day US viewers get to see them. Although it’s not always about the timing of shows. CSI gets shown in the UK by Channel Five, but the mandated pattern of commercial breaks in UK television is different to that in US television. So that nice three act structure gets ignored and with different ad breaks added between, or even during, random scenes. The overall amount of advertising is the same, but the pattern is different.
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