Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Tales from the Darkside
.

“You promised you’d never tell!”

My favorite horror anthology movie.

Oh this is the TV series!

But the film is also excellent.

Frasier, S1

Once in a Bluemoon a sitcom comes along that requires no bedding in. Where the setting is perfect, and the cast chemistry instant. Where from the first episode, it feels like you’ve know the characters for years.

Frasier is exactly such a sitcom. And for me, it works because it’s predominantly skewering Frasier and Niles for the outright pomposity, without making them seem like Bad People.

Transformers Season 3 (1986)
aka The Post-Movie One
aka The Space One
aka The One No One Likes

The Transformers was a toy commercial, and a darn good one.

Until the Transformers Movie came and the heroes they'd sold to millions of kid were casually killed off to make room for next Christmas' toys. Season 3 was the aftermath and it is interesting...

Most of the series is set in SPACE with a lot of time spent on the machinations of the Quintissons (who are not nearly as interesting as they hope, and didn't even have toys to sell) and some funky alien races.

All in all it's like a half notch more mature than Transformers S1 and 2, but ultimately has to chicken out and bring back Optimus Prime to stop the angry letters from kids. But seeing the big guy back did make me smile.

Available for free on Tubi and Youtube.

https://tubitv.com/

Transformers Season 4 (1987)
aka The Once I Never Even Heard Of
aka Three Episodes is not a Season Guys!

So as the Transformer brand began to stall out things became more gimmicky, Head Masters (whose heads turn into littler robots), Target Masters (whose guns turn into littler robots), more combiners, you get the idea. Later Hasbro would just give up on the whole 'transforming' part of 'Transformers' and just make them Action Masters, who yeah, at least you could pose.

For the last season Hasbro for some reason decided that their 30 minute (22 minutes without commercials, 18 when you take out intros, outros and plot summaries) toy commercials were not worth continuing but also, for some reason, decided to do five final episodes. Which were then cut to three.

So you get a crapton of new characters shoved in your face, a whole new alien world, Spike and Daniel get to bond with transformers, and all that in 90 minutes, more like 54 minutes.

Nice they got a send off, with a new Golden Age of Cybertron and Optimus alive again, but it's not really something to hunt down.

After this there were several seasons just in Japan which sound completely bonkers, if I find them somewhere I may give them a look.

As with Season 3, available for free on Tubi and Youtube.

Be wary of the English dubs on the Japanese series.

Completely different voice cast, and nobody sounds even close. And they keep calling Cybertron Cyberton.

If you can get a subbed version I dare say they’re worth watching. But if you can only find the sub? Avoid, avoid, avoid.

With the upcoming release of Superman, there was a very appropriate episode of Rick and Morty last night where Rick invents a machine to get his favorite film series back on track (and kill off a character added to the series just to sell toys). Guest stars are James Gunn and Zack Snyder (playing themselves)

I recently finished Masters of the Universe: Revelation. I'll admit, the majority of my familiarity with Prince Adam and the adventures of his musclebound alter-ego comes from re-runs and pop culture osmosis. That said, I enjoyed this greatly — a nice bit of epic fantasy television.

The very relisten-able soundtrack by Bear McCreary lends the action appropriate grandeur and awe, especially while the heroes are farming aura, as the kids say nowadays.

Gave Nyaight of the Living Cat a shot last night. A bit disappointed to learn its a series, as I thought it was going to be a film and frankly, I can't see the premise lasting long. The core joke is solid, but I'm not sure how many variations of "cats clawing at the door to be let in" they can come up with. Worth watching the first episode at the least though.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
And didn't we find out in Matt Smith's finale that Galifrey is in fact totally fine and OK and everyone's alive? Just hidden somewhere in the multiverse.

Or was that resolved? I did miss a few seasons when the Wonder Twins were born.

They brought Gallifrey back, but then sealed it away in a bubble. But then during the Timeless Child storyline they're all killed off again.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Meanwhile, I was looking for something to watch, so have started in on the Defenders shows again, since the first seasons were a few years ago, now...

Just finished Daredevil season 1. Still excellent, although I was remembering from very early on how irritating the whole 'keeping things secret from Foggy and Karen' becomes. Overall the show has aged well, though, thanks in no small part to keeping everything real, and effects practical. Will be interesting to see if Born Again looks as good in 10 years time. I expect not.

The priest is still by far the best character in the show - and that's coming from someone who is very, very solidly not religious.

On to Jessica Jones, season 1...

 LunarSol wrote:
Gave Nyaight of the Living Cat a shot last night. A bit disappointed to learn its a series, as I thought it was going to be a film and frankly, I can't see the premise lasting long. The core joke is solid, but I'm not sure how many variations of "cats clawing at the door to be let in" they can come up with. Worth watching the first episode at the least though.

Yeah as much as I enjoyed the first episode, I'm not seeing how the concept stretches out over a whole series (I'm assuming the plot elements are most going to stem from the amnesiac main character finding out who he is).

I'm getting the same vibe from With you and the rain. Fun first episode, but the whole "That's obviously not a dog" thing is going to get old very quickly.

Overall, the new anime season has been kinda disappointing so far.

I'm mostly looking forward to some of what's coming for DanDaDan after it catches up with what they showed in theaters. A few of my favorite moments from the manga are just ahead.

It's overall a LOT of returning shows this season and a lot of them are on my good, not great list like Kaiju 8 and Dress-Up. Rascal is odd having been so hard to access for so long. I also can't tell if Gachiakuta is actually any good or just another Solo Leveling hype farm.

Kolchak, The Night Stalker

A series I know frighteningly little about, other than it being an influence on much that was to come, such as X-Files.

It’s very 70’s, but quite good with the supernatural shenanigans and a man never quite being able to believe what he sees.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Kolchak, The Night Stalker

A series I know frighteningly little about, other than it being an influence on much that was to come, such as X-Files.

It’s very 70’s, but quite good with the supernatural shenanigans and a man never quite being able to believe what he sees.

Do yourself a favor and skip the remake. No es bueno.

...

Just started Season 3 of Star Trek Voyager.

Was there no competition for their time slot? How did this show last for 7 seasons? Why is the show so bad? Did we have no sense of quality back then? Why does no one remember anything from a previous episode? Why does every bad thing that happens quickly forgotten about? Why can't I stop watching?
Why is the Doctor the only likeable character on the show? Who repaints the ship every episode? Are warp cores easy to manufacture, 'cause "eject the warp core!" seems to be their go-to response!

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Just started Season 3 of Star Trek Voyager.

Was there no competition for their time slot? How did this show last for 7 seasons? Why is the show so bad? Did we have no sense of quality back then? Why does no one remember anything from a previous episode? Why does every bad thing that happens quickly forgotten about? Why can't I stop watching?
Why is the Doctor the only likeable character on the show? Who repaints the ship every episode? Are warp cores easy to manufacture, 'cause "eject the warp core!" seems to be their go-to response!

On the quality issue, keep in mind this show was made in an era where shows quite often took a few seasons to get up to speed. Nobody expected the first three seasons to be amazing.

Everyone forgets about previous episodes (except where relevant to future plots) because the show's producers insisted on the story of the week format in an era where season-long story lines were not yet as popular, and they got away with it because that's what everyone still expected from a Star Trek show - DS9 was something of an outlier, and even they still featured a lot of stand alone stories. These days, everyone pretty much agrees that Voyager would have benefited greatly from a proper ongoing narrative.

The likeability of the various characters is largely down to the whims of the writers for any given episode, and managed to be more inconsistent than most other Trek. But yes, the Doctor is consistently the best character in the show.

 insaniak wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Just started Season 3 of Star Trek Voyager.

Was there no competition for their time slot? How did this show last for 7 seasons? Why is the show so bad? Did we have no sense of quality back then? Why does no one remember anything from a previous episode? Why does every bad thing that happens quickly forgotten about? Why can't I stop watching?
Why is the Doctor the only likeable character on the show? Who repaints the ship every episode? Are warp cores easy to manufacture, 'cause "eject the warp core!" seems to be their go-to response!

On the quality issue, keep in mind this show was made in an era where shows quite often took a few seasons to get up to speed. Nobody expected the first three seasons to be amazing.

Everyone forgets about previous episodes (except where relevant to future plots) because the show's producers insisted on the story of the week format in an era where season-long story lines were not yet as popular, and they got away with it because that's what everyone still expected from a Star Trek show - DS9 was something of an outlier, and even they still featured a lot of stand alone stories. These days, everyone pretty much agrees that Voyager would have benefited greatly from a proper ongoing narrative.

The likeability of the various characters is largely down to the whims of the writers for any given episode, and managed to be more inconsistent than most other Trek. But yes, the Doctor is consistently the best character in the show.

Voyager aired on UPN, i.e., the United Paramount Network. They were making their own TV series instead of buying TV series from another production company.

Voyager was an attempt to move away from DS9 and back to the perhaps mid-season TNG style of Startrek. Going back to "alien of the week" events rather than a stronger story narrative that DS9 ended with. It had its own slew of issues and problems, but honestly it was still a solid series of Startrek that upheld most of the values and styles that ST had.

It was more an attempt at classic-trek of its day than an attempt to evolve with the changes DS9 presented.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Kolchak, The Night Stalker

A series I know frighteningly little about, other than it being an influence on much that was to come, such as X-Files.

It’s very 70’s, but quite good with the supernatural shenanigans and a man never quite being able to believe what he sees.

Do yourself a favor and skip the remake. No es bueno.

...

Just started Season 3 of Star Trek Voyager.

Was there no competition for their time slot? How did this show last for 7 seasons? Why is the show so bad? Did we have no sense of quality back then? Why does no one remember anything from a previous episode? Why does every bad thing that happens quickly forgotten about? Why can't I stop watching?
Why is the Doctor the only likeable character on the show? Who repaints the ship every episode? Are warp cores easy to manufacture, 'cause "eject the warp core!" seems to be their go-to response!

It gets a bit better after S3. It's still not fantastic, just better.

Kolchak had a remake?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Kolchak had a remake?

Yes. It lasted for six episodes in 2005 (ten finished episodes eventually aired a year later in 2006 on the Sci-Fi Channel} and featured Stuart Townsend as Carl Kolchak.

Got caught up on Rick & Morty yesterday. New season is solid. Nothing really as high concept as what made the original stand out, but there's a lot of loveable nonsense and nothing that's a real dud except probably the weird "Superman comes out this week" episode I watched after watching Superman.