Tag: TV

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Bart as Impulse in 'Justice'With Bart Allen returning to Smallville tonight—alongside Cyborg, Green Arrow, and Aquaman—I find myself wondering about the best way to hang onto just a few episodes. Last night I went looking for my tape of “Run,” the first episode in which he appeared, and I couldn’t find it.

I have no interest in buying full seasons of Smallville, but I’d like to have copies of the two episodes with Bart (partly for character research, partly for completism). Warner Bros. has no reason to release individual episode DVDs, but downloadable episodes (as in iTunes) might be an option.

Another possibility: themed collections. There have been enough episodes guest-starring other DC heroes that WB could do something similar to Buffy‘s Slayer Collection, or The Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” set. A single disc featuring, let’s say, the Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman episodes (Green Arrow might need his own disc), followed by tonight’s big team-up, “Justice.”

Hey, I’d buy it.

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Start your own cable company like Jack and Jill* did!

Hello! We're Time Warner Cable! (With a picture of two children.)

This showed up in our latest cable bill. Time Warner is taking over from Comcast, and while their “Hello, my name is ____” campaign makes sense in a sort of cutesy way, I can’t figure out the logic of this one.

Though I imagine many people would agree that their cable company acts like it was run by eight-year-olds.

*I was trying to think of something to name the kids. My first thought was something like Wakko and Dot, but it didn’t fit the tone. Then I thought of Jack Warner, and Jill was obvious.

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DVD Box artI picked up the complete Flash TV series on DVD today. It’s been a long wait since it was announced last October, but an even longer wait since the show aired in 1990. I haven’t had time to watch any of it yet, but it turns out that Best Buy is selling an exclusive package with a bundled comic book.

That “exclusive” comic book isn’t anything totally new—it’s an abridged version of 2002’s DC First: Superman/The Flash featuring the first race between Superman and the original Flash, Jay Garrick. The original book is 38 pages, and it’s been cut down to 24 by removing a subplot involving the Pied Piper (which was essentially really early setup for “Rogue War”) and trimming a few pages from the main story in which two Flashes and Superman combat Abra Kadabra.

The funny thing is that the TV show features Barry Allen (more or less), but the comic they chose features the other two Flashes!* If it had been up to me, I would have chosen the Flash TV Special, which used the TV version of the characters, but I guess they wanted something closer to the current version of the character. The whole thing is printed small enough to fit inside the box.

Now if only they’d included the Smallville episode, “Run”, which guest-starred another version of the Flash, the set would really be complete. One of the Smallville DVD sets did include an episode of The Flash as an extra, for no apparent reason.

*There’ve been three Flashes: Jay Garrick from 1940-1951, Barry Allen from 1956-1986, and Wally West from 1986-2006. Rumor has it that Wally will be replaced after Infinite Crisis, with Barry’s grandson Bart Allen—who got to be the Flash in Smallville—the current front runner.

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CNET has an article on various websites related to Lost. Among them are official sites for Oceanic Airlines and The Hanso Foundation and fan sites for Mega Lotto Jackpot and Charile’s band, Drive Shaft.

I’d seen the Drive Shaft site last year (or at least a Drive Shaft site), though it seems to have exceeded its bandwidth for this month.

The official sites don’t have much detail, but they do have easter eggs…

Update (April 2010): Four and a half years later, as the show barrels toward its conclusion, only the Drive Shaft fan site is still around. Oceanic Air now redirects to ABC’s page for the show, the Hanso Foundation isn’t responding at all, and Mega Lotto Jackpot seems to have been picked up by a domain squatter.

Update (Feb 2017): In the years since I last checked, the Drive Shaft page was also taken over by a squatter, and has since gone offline.

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Finally, something light-hearted in the news: A bunch of people decked out as zombies crashed the American Idol auditions in Austin, Texas last week, groaning things like “Television rots your braaaaaains!”

Reportedly the contestants didn’t get it.

Ironically, the event organizers had read about the protest in advance on Craigslist, and quickly got the “zombies” to sign release forms to appear on the show.

(via Cognitive Dissonance)