With its fifth and final season, Fringe has entered a new dimension. Or is that descriptor inadvisable, lest the senses of the word be confused? The series has, of course, built much of its mythology on travel to a parallel Earth: Over There, a.k.a. the Other Side, home to doppelgangers of our heroes and villains. Instead, Fringe’s future lies in the actual — well, the fictional actual — future, as viewers had already been made aware through advance promotion and was seen on Friday night in the Season Five opener...
I’ll get back to the future shortly. First I want to welcome any new readers by way of giving these writeups (and their names) some context.
The downside to not sharing my entries in hashtag games here within a day or so of them being a thing on Twitter is that anyone interested in heading over there to see the full range of contributions will turn up zilch.
Maybe a hashtag comes back into fashion or someone joins in late or a totally different group of people hit on the same idea, maybe, but those earlier entries are gone. Twits seem to leave Twitter’s institutional memory pretty quickly, unless there are tricks to its search function I don’t know about (which is very, very possible). You can at least head to my own Favorites on Twitter, scroll down a bit, and see a heaping handful of others’ offerings that I found amusing enough to save. It’s not at all the same, though, as being in the thick of it — and this one, #unpromisingsequels, was a good one.
And so, in roughly the order they were posted, it’s time for my...
Top Twenty-Five Unpromising Sequels
25. The Day After the Day After
24. Hastily-Dressed Lunch
23. Monday in the Park without George
22. Acquaintances on a Train
21. Love in the Time of Cholera Vaccines
20. The Executive Producers
19. Fiddler at the Window
18. Evaporation Man
17. The Well-Scrubbed Dozen
I dreamt the other night that someone who’d offered to subsidize my blog to the
tune of about $20,000 wanted to back out.
My blog in the dream wasn’t quite this blog; it focused more heavily on analysis of TV series the way I’d actually like to but don’t have time for, episode by episode, as Nikki Stafford has done most notably with Lost. This benefactor was upset that I wasn’t covering an obscure-to-me British show — I want to say Time Bandits, had there been
a spinoff of the movie, although it might have been something similar that really exists and which only my subconscious remembers. I countered that what I was covering, Fringe and stuff, was the sort of thing, as with Lost and X-Files and Star Trek in past years, that people seriously glommed onto and discussed. We fought a bit, physically, and I told him that I was happy to return his money.
Just then, naturally, Johanna Draper Carlson approached me on behalf of a group of her friends who, based on a movie they’d seen, needed to acquire both a longsword and a dagger hidden far away. She knew that I could fly in my dreams and she wanted me
to fly her to the dagger. I obliged.
Related: HIVE-Minded • Dream a Little Dream of Meep;
or, The Subconscious and the Frog • Of Was and When
This post is currently down for maintenance.
Last Friday the title of the 2013 sequel to J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek movie was announced. The site at the preceding link and other news outlets report it as Star Trek Into Darkness [sic].
Um... Okay.
I hope that, if the title sticks, someone at Bad Robot or Paramount realizes that it
either has to be Star Trek: Into Darkness or Star Trek into Darkness, with the preposition uncapitalized.
In early August, Miss Violet DeVille asked for suggestions on Twitter for the title of a burlesque show based on the work of Neil Gaiman.
Naturally, I threw out a few ideas. They all riffed on Gaiman book titles; at least one of them was redundant to someone quicker on the draw.
While I’ve been thinking about running them on the blog as a Top X list, there are just five — and that’s counting the one that I came up with belatedly for the title of this post. So I decided to monkey with the covers to the books in question to spice things up visually. Comme ça:
You’re not gonna get these if you aren’t familiar with the original books, of course.
Art from cover to Joe Kubert Presents #1 © 2012 DC Comics.
Joe Kubert died three weeks ago yesterday, on Aug. 12th, at the age of 85.
Anyone who follows comics knows this already, thanks to news sites, social networks, etc., and has almost surely seen a fuller portrait of the man than I can provide. I’ve been wanting to put up at least a brief post about him, though, for the benefit of readers who come here mostly for the non-comics stuff I muse upon yet still have some curiosity about this strange demimonde that’s begun spawning billion-dollar movies. Jack Kirby, discussed the other day, may have been the King of Comics — to mix metaphors, perhaps part of American comics’ Holy Trinity, with Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman, in terms of establishing its visual language — but Kubert was at least a Great Duke. Joe Kubert art is, to his eternal credit, as unmistakable as it is beautiful.
I’ll get to the Jack Kirby of it all in a moment.
Splash panel of The Black Racer from The New Gods #3 © 1971
DC Comics. Script, Pencils: Jack Kirby. Inks: Vince Colletta.
Letters: John Costanza. Colors: Unknown.
Decades before The Late Show was the title of David Letterman’s CBS alternative to
Jay Leno, it was the rather generic name of wee-hours broadcasts of old movies on local TV stations. The phrase also came to be used, with morbid punnery, for the Oscars’ familiar montage of industry folks who’d passed away in the previous year.
