The Mandalorian
3 episodes in and I feel it’s the best Star Wars story that’s come out since Disney bought out George Lucas. It certainly feels like it takes place within the outer rim that universe.
It feels like a deeply railroaded D&D adventure, though. You’re playing a murder-hobo for hire, there is no respect for the lives or property of others, and every episode leads you to another quest that has to be resolved before you can continue. I’m sure we’ll get to a storyline soon enough, but for now it’s a bit 2D. The main character is pretty much invulnerable, seems able to recover from almost any kind of damage, and his shots always hit.
Jon Favreau has a lot of connections and it is going to look really great all the time, but the story is weak.
Itty-bitty-Yoda-thingie is the most adorable little puppet ever!
I’m hearing it’s good. I liked the write-up I saw that the Stormtroopers in a few scenes have been changed slightly so they look like the leftovers of the Empire they’re supposed to be: Mismatched, poorly-maintained gear, even looking thinner and less disciplined.
I won’t watch it until probably December-ish. Purely due to time.
I also want to watch the Disney+ Imagineering show. But then people who have met me and my wife know we’re those weird Adult, Childless, Disney fans.
We watched the first episode of the Imagineering show and it was really good.
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I like the slower roll out of the story - there’s no need to rush to plot points and I get to soak up the atmosphere in the meantime. Episode 3 was released this morning and it started to pick up some steam plot-wise with this episode. I’ll admit that my use of the word “story” was a poor choice on my part and that this series really excels at having that Star Wars feel for myself.
Sidebar: Have you ever done the Keys to the Kingdom tour at WDW? It was probably my favorite experience there. Very techy, bits of stagecraft explained, got to see some of the background stuff. $$$, but as another DINK couple, we splurged.
No: KttK is a little above our price range as much for the time commitment as anything else. I wouldn’t mind doing it, though. Paying for a 4+ day trip every few years is about our limit.
We did do the “Marceline to Magic” tour a few years ago. It’s shorted (a morning, essentially) and just in the Magic Kingdom. The tour guides walk everyone around the MK before it’s busy and you get ‘guided’ tours of a few attractions. For us it was:
- Haunted Mansion
- Winnie the Pooh
- Carousel of Progress
The Haunted Mansion part included a brief ‘backstage’ part, as we got to see how the ‘ballroom’ scene looks from under the ride path. There’s a line that the guides clearly announce “do not cross or you’re kicked out/we’re fired” as you’d cross into the area people could see into.
Pooh is kind of an oddball as it’s the only ‘modern’ ride we did, and part of that is explaining the history including pointing out the ‘easter egg’ that an early display has a painting of Mr. Toad signing over the property to Pooh.
Carousel of Progress during the tour was the only time my wife has ridden it and my only time as an adult… And I think we’re both OK with that. It’s a classic ride, deserving of attention. But not too much attention, as it’s also really, really boring and slow. It’s better with the guide adding in commentary.
Tours are great. The guides are excellent and it definitely makes you feel like a VIP. For us they didn’t really ‘skip the line’ at all, but did sneak us through FP lines as a group. It was a tour, not paying for improved access.
We definitely enjoyed it. One tour we’ve considered is there’s one that goes through some of the costuming/prop shops I know my wife would love to see. I can’t remember the name, though.
Late to the party but started watching Carnivale last night. Didn’t make it through an episode before I fell asleep but I liked what I saw
Wife and I got caught up on Superstore last night. I think the writers are getting tired, because there is a lot more stupid being manufactured to draw out the stories. And Cheyenne may have actually gotten dumber somehow, though between her and Bo, she’s still the less dumb one.
We then watched another episode of SG1. I’m so glad my wife likes it, though if the episode gets slow or they start going into sci-fi techy stuff that doesn’t translate well, she does tend to get sleepy (or pickup her phone). Which, of course, often leads to missing something that becomes important later on, so I have to pause and explain it. But that’s worth it for her enjoying the show overall. 
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Caught up on Dragon Prince (S3) on Netflix, which is my current favorite fantasy series (that happens to be written for 7yo children). Still finishing up S4 of She-Ra.
Binge watching the second season of “The Sinner”. Good show. Crime drama, one crime per season. Trying to work my way through my Netflix list. So many movies and shows…
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I didn’t get a subscription to Rooster Teeth, but I did get the first season of gen:LOCK on DVD. It is a very interesting take on a MechWarrior-type series. There are 'mechs called Striders that have pilots sitting inside them and there’s aircraft that use directional fans to allow for stop on a dime maneuvers or to go perpendicular to how you were traveling. Must be some kind of tech in there to keep the pilot from being squished.
But the 'mechs the title refers to involve a direct interface between mind and machine where it becomes your body. It’s technology intended for other, more beneficial purposes that had to be weaponized due to a war that’s been going on for years between the Polity and Union forces.
gen:LOCK’s the story of five recruits selected by the Polity for the program: a pilot from their military, a 17-year-old Scottish hacker, a transfer from the Japan military with discipline problems, an Iranian pilot that defected from the Union and a former Russian covert agent. They have distrust of each other and distrust of the tech to work through, learning how to be a team and learning how to turn the tide against the Union forces, which has a very powerful and flexible weapon.
Season 1 did very well in setting up the world and expanding on the threats this team will have to face and what they have to lose, both personally and militarily. There’s eight episodes, and Rooster Teeth did something very nice when assembling the DVD. There’s no title sequence and two credit sequences, one at the end of the first episode and one for the series as a whole, so you don’t have to hit the next chapter button on the remote to skip past them once you’ve seen them the first time. It’s almost like one 3-hour movie with each episode separated by a few seconds of a black screen. It makes it easy to watch the entire season in one night like I did and I left the end credits running, so I didn’t miss the post-credits scene.
The special features includes lead actor Michael B. Jordan and series creator Gray G. Haddock talking about the series and what anime they enjoy. You also get the four Character Reveal Teasers, which take place during a four-year gap in the events of the first episode.
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This next part’s a completely separate issue that has nothing to do with gen:LOCK, but it’s something that’s bugging me. All home video releases have copyright and anti-piracy warnings. We see them so often we tune them out, except for when the DVD or Blu-ray layer locks out the buttons that you’d use to skip them. (Pro tip: fast forward usually still works.)
There’s one from INTERPOL dated 1977 where they express “concern” about “motion picture and sound recording policy to all of its member national police forces.” That seems to be it. It’s not an actual “don’t pirate this movie” message. Apparently you’re supposed to look up the details of whatever resolution was passed in Stockholm, Sweden back then.
What is bugging me about this is gen:LOCK is a completely CGI series. Nice, crisp animation. No generation loss in the image quality when transferred onto physical media. So why does the INTERPOL message look like it was copied from a 1977 VHS tape?
Now that I see the disparity between how images on disc look today and how that message looks, I know I’ve seen that same low-quality message on other videos. Has no one taken the type to re-type the message in the past forty years? Did INTERPOL say “you’re required to show this every time” and then forget about it?
Come on guys, really. Take a few minutes with a video editing program and make a new version to distribute to companies that doesn’t look so glaringly outdated and antiquated.
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Wow. Thanks. I just watched the first episode of gen:LOCK and I love it already.
Voices by Michael B. Jordan, Maisie Williams, Dakota Fanning and David Tennant.
I have the first two seasons of Red vs Blue on DVD, and RoosterTeeth did the same thing with them where there is a brief black screen between episodes, rather than a full credit sequence. It was very welcome, since they’re very short episodes.
We finished The Good Place over the weekend. Very much worth watching. Still trying to decide if one minor joke is a reference to Dead Like Me from the early 2000s.
I’ve been watching a few episodes of DreamWorks’ Dragons, the TV show that continues on from the first How to Train Your Dragon movie and fills in the world leading up to the second movie. The title changes about every season.
Usually right after it is a show called Mighty Mike. It’s one that I might not normally watch but have been. The show has a lot of slapstick humor and seems to be intended for an under-10 audience.
Mike is a pug that lives in the suburbs and is in love with Iris, a neighbor dog. He does whatever he can to impress her, such as putting a record on the turntable and lip-syncing into a microphone. Getting in the way of romance is Fluffy, the kitten that lives with Mike, three turtles named Athos, Portos and Aramis who turn the house into a personal sports field, and two raccoons name Freddy and Mercury who will purloin whatever they can, even if it’s the entire refrigerator.
All of the animals behave in human ways and exhibit human-level problem solving. There’s a couple of humans that occasionally have lines, but for the majority of the time, it’s just the animals and none of them speak a human language. This makes the show a very strong example of purely visual storytelling.
From a technical standpoint, the show’s done with CGI at a “hyper-real” level that brings it very close to looking like it was a live action TV show. For more technical information about how the show is created, Cartoon Brew has an article on their website.
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We watched up until S4 or so I think and really enjoyed it until I think the start of S4, and then we sorta stopped watching for reasons unknown.
Is it worth picking up again?
It’s “done” and the finale does pay off a lot of stuff. I enjoyed it.
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We just started Justified which is the missing link in Timothy Oliphant’s transformation from “Dramatic Gunslinger” to “Doofus husband” from Deadwood to Santa Clarita Diet.
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