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Click to embiggen. It looks spectacular.

This boxset is going to have all 14 episodes, all of the special features from the Special Edition boxset that was released in the UK in 2005, and also:

• New exclusive commentary with director Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson) and guests Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Bill Hader, Matt Stone, Patton Oswalt and Diablo Cody.
• Exclusive Spaced On Stage reunion Q&A recorded at the National Film Theatre, London in October 2007.

Exciting or what, eh campers? Fun Fact: This will be the third time I’ve bought a “complete” Spaced Boxset. I bought the UK edition twice - I got it when Amy and I broke up, but she then asked to “borrow” it and decided to keep it instead.

Wal-Mart, the huge American supermarket chain who you might recognise as the owners of ASDA, have an ad on television at the moment which I find most confusing. The advert exudes pride and warmth at the fact that the company now have more employees working at night, the apparent benefit being that this frees up more people to help customers during the day. Personally though, if it were me, I wouldn’t boast about the fact that my company had more employees doing more work at night. Wal-Mart now seem like a bunch of wankers to me, although to be fair they seemed pretty wankerific before then.

What makes this ad even more ridiculous is that the employees are all incredibly cheerful, remarkably attractive people in their early 20s who apparently enjoy working at stupid o’ clock in the morning. They’re smiling and working and changing the cash in the tills, all to the accompaniment of what I can only assume is a cover of King Harvest’s Dancing in the Moonlight.

Who is this advert for, exactly? Who are they targeting? Because besides the song - which is a cracking good tune, incidentally - there’s nothing about this ad which seems at all positive to me. Again, it just puts forward the message, “We are Wal-Mart, we are dicks. Come shop with us!”

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again - American TV advertising makes no bloody sense.

When people watch The Simpsons these days, poised over their computer to type the immortal words “Worst… episode… ever!” on their blogs or forums of choice, they tend to focus on the quality of the writing rather than the quality of the animation. I’ve been of the opinion that the animation has become very stale - it’s flat, lifeless, soulless, and lacks all of the charm and character that the show had during the early-to-mid 90s. In fact I put forward the supposition that if you took a classic sequence from vintage Simpsons and got the current team to reanimate it, it would look horrible.

When The Simpsons Game came out and my Dad picked me up a copy as an early Yule present, my “Crap animation” hypothesis was finally realised and proven to be solid theory. Fans of the show may recall the “land of chocolate” sequence from the season 3 episode “Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk”, later seen in season 4’s “So It’s Come to This: A Simpsons Clip Show”. Now unfortunately I can’t find a clip of the original version from the show, but below is a clip from the same sequence re-animated by the current animation team.

What you are about to see… may shock you.

Isn’t that just terrible? I mean, really, really bad. If anyone finds a clip of the original version of this sequence, please let me know. I’d love to see a side-by-side comparison.

You already know I was disappointed by the film, but if you fancy a spoiler-laden review of the film, you need only read on. I’ve kept the majority of this post hidden from the front page, for rather obvious reasons.

The review contains spoilers for both Futurama: Bender’s Big Score and, rather oddly, a mild spoiler for the Doctor Who Series 3 finale. If you’ve not seen either yet, I suggest you leave this review alone for now.

Read the rest of this entry »

Doesn’t seem like much to ask for, does it? They have my support.

Have a look out of your window right now. If you can see rain, chances are you’re somewhere in the UK. During most of the year, in England at least, it appears to be constantly raining. It seems to be evenly split between heavy rain and that very fine misty not-quite-real-rain that seems to happen a lot during, say, January. And March. And April. Also February, May, September, August, December, July… you get the general idea.

Apparently in LA, this very fine misty not-quite-real-rain is headline news. The opening item on the 11 o’ clock news tonight was a so-called “Storm Watch” reporting this light rain. There was advice to be careful on the roads, and the reporter expressed concern that people outside might get wet. I shit you not. I mean, Storm Watch? How does this sort of rain even qualify as a “storm”? They had a weatherman named, almost appropriately enough, Dallas Rains, tracking this apparently minuscule cloud on its journey across the State as it lets loose its torrential downpour of slight moisture upon an unsuspecting population.

What the Hell is that all about? It’s not like California is soluble in water, is it? Why the commotion? It rains in LA at roughly the same time of year every year. They get the exact same type of rain. The city slows to a crawl. There’s panic on the streets, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria. This weather is somehow surprising to the people, and the news is deemed important enough to report at the start of the news ahead of things such as, say, murder trials and the latest on that thing going on in Iraq (I hear there’s some sort of war going on or something, but apparently both this rain and Britney Spears’ latest transgressions against humanity are more important).

I have a mind, and it is boggled.

Just watched this week’s Doctor Who.

HOLY SHIT.

I just watched “Father’s Day” again, and I found myself welling up during the last five-to-ten minutes. Brilliant episode, that. One of the finest episodes of the first series.

Still, I wasn’t blubbing for long. I came down to check my email before I cracked on with this Jump Leads script I’m working on (incidentally I’m still looking for an artist, or an animator… any takers?) to discover that I’ve been emailed by a chap named Stuart, who made the Worms-themed birthday cake that was recently featured on Kotaku, and he’s offering be more photos of the cake to put up on Dream17. Is that fantastic or what?

…would not have been quite a catchy title for Larry David’s Curb your Enthusiasm, so it’s a good thing I’m not paid to come up with these things.

I picked up the first season of Curb for two reasons. Firstly, I’d seen snippets of it on MoreFour (and, previously, BBC Four) and it was rather amusing but for some reason I never sat through an entire episode. Secondly, I love improvisational stuff - I’m a huge fan of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Annually Retentive (the latter was at least partially inspired by Curb). Thirdly (I can add more reasons if I like, who says I can’t?) I’ve seen Larry David in interviews on television - he was interviewed by Ricky Gervais for More4 some time during the last 18 months - and he’s a genuinely funny guy. Funnier than Gervais, at the least.

Finally (this being the fourth of the two reasons), it was on sale for £15. I later found it for £11, and I do believe I screamed with primal rage at the discovery.

I won’t write a lengthy review - odds are you know what Curb is and if you don’t then you need to do some research - but I will say that I wasn’t enjoying it at first. As I watched each subsequent episode and I started to get into the rhythm of the show, I began to enjoy it more. There is a Basil Fawlty / David Brent style mentality behind the version of Larry David portrayed in Curb that I find compelling to watch, and the improvisational nature of the show makes things seem that bit more real. That someone could behave like that in real life is rather chilling. A lot of Curb features “I can’t watch” moments that you… just… can’t… look… away… from. I wish I had the sufficient vocabulary and linguistic dexterity to sufficiently define the show, but I don’t. It’s improv with a plot, it’s the most British humour I’ve ever seen come out of American television.

And I love it.

Honestly, I didn’t think I would enjoy it when I picked it up. I thought I’d be disappointed because I can’t relate to the characters, who are all over their 30s. It seemed very much to be a show geared at an “older” audience, although this was just the impression I had sitting in my head at the time. I was very, very wrong.

I’m going to stop typing now because I am tired.

Last night I sat down and watched Ghost Light. I still only the vaguest of ideas what was going on and I expect I will have to re-watch it at some point in the near future. Old memories were stirred when the opening titles played, and even during the closing titles. I’m fairly sure that I used to watch Doctor Who when I was much younger, and as the show finished in 1989 - three years after I was born - this is entirely possible. I’m sure if anyone knows the answer to that one it’d be my Dad, who I probably used to watch the show with.

I’ve also started to read Nostradamus Ate My Hamster, which is turning out to be rather enjoyable. Robert Rankin (the author, on the off-chance you didn’t know) has been compared to Terry Pratchett. And I really like Pratchett. Certainly Rankin is a writer, he writes fantasy-comedy novels, and he makes me laugh (or at least he has done so far). I would say that the similarities end there, as their writing styles are markedly different. I’ve not got far enough into the book for any sort of plot to occur - I started reading it at 2 o’ clock in the morning by which time I was quite tired, so I’m only up to Chapter 2 - but what I have read has been thoroughly enjoyable.

Also, something else has happened, something I had not expected to happen quite so soon but nevertheless it has happened and balls are rolling. I don’t know if I can talk about it yet, though. I shall let you know if/when I can.

I’d been aware of “Scream of the Shalka” for a while but I never really had the time to sit down and watch it properly. Now, out of boredom while Dream17 files are uploaded to the new server, I decided to sit down and watch it.

It’s good. Very good. It’s split into six 15-minute episodes, but I sat and watched them back to back. Ignoring a bug in the “Play all” mode for episode one (each episode is split into four parts) it was a fairly enjoyable hour and a half. Richard E. Grant does a good enough job as the Doctor too, and you can see the general shape and direction that BBCi were aiming for when they made it, what was effectively a pilot for an ongoing online series of Doctor Who adventures. But then BBC announced a new series, with a different Ninth Doctor, and Grant’s portrayal (sometimes referred to as the “Shalka Doctor” according to the Wikipedia) was all but buried. A shame really, as I’d love to have seen where it went.

My sister and I popped into town to buy some Serious Things. I had intended to buy socks, and also a birthday present for Amber (Em and Craig’s daughter, who has a birthday in February… of every year. What’s the deal with that?). Instead I bought a birthday present for Amber, and two rather lovely little gems: a GameBoy Advance game for myself (which, in my defence, was WarioLand 4 and was on offer at the most ridiculous sale price I’ve ever seen for a Game Boy game) and… well, here’s the story.

My sister and I are in HMV. I had originally planned on buying Worms 3D as they have it on the Sold Out label for only £4, which is a whole pound cheaper than everywhere else. I changed my mind though, and instead started looking at the DVDs with absolutely no intention of buying. As usual I looked at the Doctor Who DVDs - the classic stuff mainly, although they were selling the 2005 series for an obscene £70, a whole £25 more than, well, pretty much everywhere else - and I spotted a DVD that looked amiss on the shelf. It had a different spine design, for one. Just silver, with “DOCTOR WHO” written at the top in a black font, followed by…

…No, surely not.

THE FIVE DOCTORS. The Five smegging Doctors, on an actual DVD, in the HMV I happen to be standing in. It was only £10, too. £10 for what was the BBC’s first Doctor Who DVD, £10 for a DVD that I’ve not seen anywhere, ever. £10 for an admittedly disappointing Doctor Who adventure but otherwise, fantastic! Teri mentioned that she’d never seen it. I’d already warned her that I’d be educating her regarding WarioLand (the only Wario games she’s played have all included the word “Ware” in the title) and now I had the chance to edumucate her regarding our good Doctor.

Y’see, even though the plot has more holes than a pair of socks purchased from Peacocks, even though the acting is as wooden as a mahogany toilet seat and the dialogue as stale as a Sainsburys baguette, it’s still a classic story. It’s part homage to the Fifth Doctor’s predecessors, part everything else I said before this sentence, and it has one of the most misleading titles I’ve ever seen given to a Doctor Who adventure - the Fifth Doctor appears only briefly via unused footage from an incomplete serial, as Tom Baker didn’t want to reprise his role so soon after he had departed, and the First Doctor isn’t even being played by the same person. It’s the Three Doctors, really. Four at a stretch. The Fifth Doctor doesn’t even appear all that much until about two thirds of the way in so really, if we’re being picky, it’s the Two Doctors. And they can’t call it that because there’s a Sixth DOctor adventure with the same name.

Confusing, eh?

Regardless of just how pants The Five Doctors is,  it’s still a good watch. I’m glad I picked it up.