Between its debut in 1963 and its initial cancellation in 1989, 695 individual episodes of Doctor Who were produced, and one of the great scandals of television history is that of those 695 episodes over a hundred of them (all from the show’s 1960s black-and-white era) were summarily erased by the BBC in the mid-1970s […]
Author Archive
Two long-lost Doctor Who episodes rediscovered!
Posted: 11th December 2011 by Brian in Doctor Who, Television0
R.I.P. Anne McCaffrey (1926-2011)
Posted: 22nd November 2011 by Brian in Literature, News, Obituaries, Science FictionTags: Anne McCaffrey, Dragonriders of Pern
Anne McCaffrey, the veteran SF author most famous for her Dragonriders of Pern series, has died of a massive stroke at age 85, at “Dragonhold-Underhill”, her self-designed home in County Wicklow, Ireland. She was a groundbreaking pioneer in the genre – the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction (1968), the first woman to win a Nebula Award (1969), the […]
Breaking News: The Avengers Probably Won’t Suck.
Posted: 19th November 2011 by Brian in Comic Books, FilmTags: Black Widow, Brian Michael Bendis, Captain America, Hawkeye, Iron Man, Joss Whedon, Marvel, Nick Fury, Spider-Man, The Avengers, The Incredible Hulk, Thor
By now everyone who cares knows that comic book über-geek (and, oh yeah, hugely successful TV and film writer/director) Joss Whedon is helming the forthcoming team-up extravaganza The Avengers, the culmination of all Marvel’s film efforts for the last few years. As a fan of Whedon, Marvel superheroes in general, and the Avengers in particular, […]
Looks like Pixar’s got another winner…
Posted: 16th November 2011 by Brian in NewsTags: Animation, Brave, Disney, Pixar, Trailer
Just got my first gander at the trailer for next year’s Pixar film, Brave, and it looks like another grand slam from Lasseter & Co. With the exception of the two Cars movies, Pixar is batting a thousand as far as I’m concerned, and even though this girl-power riff looks like it might suffer a bit […]
They’re off to outer space (again)
Posted: 16th November 2011 by Brian in TelevisionTags: Anime, Space Battleship Yamato, Space Battleship Yamato 2199, Star Blazers
To a reasonably intelligent eight-year-old in the first flowering of his burgeoning nerdhood, whose brain still bore the deeply-creased impressions left by Star Wars, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, the summer of 1980 brought one of the greatest treasures of all when Star Blazers exploded onto my big ol’ cathode-ray TV […]