I’m picking up geeking out over the new Doctor Whos -- the ones that debuted in the U.S. last night on the Sci Fi Channel -- over at my movie (and sometimes TV) reviewing HQ. Start here.
And here are some Whovian YouTube treats for your amusement:
When fandom goes too far:
John Barrowman -- aka Captain Jack Harkness -- is a huge Doctor Who geek:
(Technorati tags: Doctor Who, fandom, John Barrowman, Captain Jack Harkness)
Something about Rodney McKay on last night’s episode of Stargate Atlantis, “The Tao of Rodney,” made me think of LOLcats, which I can waste hours surfing and snorting Diet Dr Pepper out my nose at. It might be because Rodney is kinda like a cat himself, so adorably arrogant. Or just because I know David Hewlett is a big ol’ dork, too, and might think LOL Rodney is a funny mashup.
So I give you LOL Rodney:
(Screencaps from Gateworld.)
(Technorati tags: Stargate Atlantis, Rodney McKay, David Hewlett, LOLcats, LOL Rodney)
You may have seen my two-part interview with Jamie Bamber at last weekend's I-Con over at Film.com. (Okay, it was me and a couple other entertainment journalists at the interview -- I don't want to suggest I had him all to myself, however much I would like that to have been the case.) Here's a snippet of video from the roundtable I shot with my digital camera:
I like the little beard. Very cute.
Geeks are so clever...
(Technorati tags: Doctor Who, Dalek, Monty Python)
Speaking of stuff I started but never finished -- in this case, my reactions to the new Doctor Who -- here's a fun explanation of why Christopher Eccleston decided to leave after only one season:
(And I will finish up the Ecclestons and get on to the Tennants as soon as possible...)
(Technorati tags: Doctor Who, Christopher Eccleston)
Cool! A reader pointed this out: it’s a clip from a charity thing from British TV that introduces the new Doctor, David Tennant, bridging the final Christopher Eccleston episode with the Christmas special, “The Christmas Invasion,” that was Tennant’s first official appearance. It’s a quickie seven-minute “episode”...
Awesome. Now, that’s the way a companion should react to a regeneration: by freaking out.
I like Tennant already. He’s funny. Funny is good.
(Technorati tags: Doctor Who, David Tennant, Children in Need)
A commenter to my most recent Doctor Who blogging, a newcomer to the show, asked for recommendations of classic episodes to check out, of those that are available on DVD. Rather than letting my recommendations get lost in the comments thread, I figured I’d throw ‘em up as a post. So here ya go:
I am not, frankly, much of a fan of the first two Doctors, played by William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton -- nothing against the actors, it’s just that their stories tend to be simplistic, slow-moving, and far more juvenile than those of the later Doctors. The show didn’t begin to move even a little beyond its roots as a kiddie show till the third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, came along. So while some of Hartnell’s and Troughton’s episodes are available on DVD, I can’t wholeheartedly endorse them. But if you want a taste of what their Doctors were like, check out “The Three Doctors” (all links go to the episode’s Amazon.com page), the series’ tenth anniversary show, which finagled the spacetime continuum in order to get all three incarnations of the Doctor to that point into one story.
(scroll all the way down for links to discussion of other episodes)
see my brief overview of the DVD set at FlickFilosopher.com
Doctor Who lands on DVD in the U.S. tomorrow. I've had mine for a while now (one lovely benefit of being a critic), and while I can't honestly say that I'm tired of it -- that could never happen -- I am getting very ansty to see the new David Tennant episodes, which are just about to finish airing in Britain (the last one in the latest series airs on Saturday), especially because I'm getting readers emailing me from across the pond to say how freakin' awesome Tennant is. (See the official BBC Doctor Who if you want to torture yourself.)
And so I did a very frivolous and fannish thing: I ordered the first two installments of the Tennant Doctor Whos from Amazon.co.uk. I figured it was about time to put that region-free DVD player I got for Christmas two Christmases ago to good use. So very soon -- yippee! -- I'll have in my grubby little fangirl hands Doctor Who: Series 2 - Volume 1
I will, of course, report on them ASAP.
Volume 3 -- featuring Cybermen! -- will be released in the U.K. on July 10:
I might just die.
Anyway, back to Eccleston, and "The Long Game" and "Father's Day."
Today, Comedy Central announced that Matt Groening’s other cartoon, ‘Futurama’ will return to television in 2008 with a minimum of 13 new episodes.
I’ve been deeply missing Futurama, and can’t wait for some new episodes.
And the bad news? JumpTheShark.com has jumped the shark: one of the coolest and geekiest TV sites is now owned by TV Guide’s parent corp, Gemstar. Oh, the inanity:
As part of the Gemstar deal, Jon Hein, founder of Jump the Shark Inc., will show up on TVGuide.com, TV Guide magazine and the TV Guide Channel."We believe Jump the Shark will be a valuable addition to our repertoire of entertainment content," Gemstar-TV Guide Senior VP Sanjay Reddy said in a statement. Hein did him one better with: "Gemstar-TV Guide was a natural fit for Jump the Shark and I'm excited to expand and enhance the brand with the leader on all things television."
I hope Hein got a good price for his soul.
(Technorati tags: Futurama, Jump the Shark)
It’s bad enough that I feel like people see me as Patty and/or Selma half the time anyway, and that they turned my passion for MacGyver into something dirty, but then they have to go and have Richard Dean Anderson on as a guest voice, as an object of lust for Patty and Selma, and in the process making me fall even more madly in love with RDA. Damn them, anyway, those Simpsons producers. Damn them.
See, what happened was I accidentally stumbled across, this past Sunday evening, a rerun of this season’s Simpsons episode “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore,” in which -- among many other unlikely events -- Patty and Selma kidnap RDA from a Stargate convention and tie him up in their apartment. And don’t think I haven’t had that fantasy. But the salient point is: in the course of this episode, I discovered that RDA is even cooler than I had previously imagined. Not only is Mac like the neatest science dork ever -- even if he has that mark against him for being so embarrassed to be named Angus that he never told anyone his name... Not only was his neo-Western series Legend totally geeky and as much about goofing around with new technology as it was about making fun of pop culture... Not only is (I suspect) RDA an agnostic or at least an atheist, based upon some of the content of Stargate SG-1, of which he is not only a star but also a producer, meaning he’s influencing said content... But now, thanks to The Simpsons, I discover that he really has a fantastic sense of humor about himself. Because not only did he appear on the show in a story that completely makes fun of him as an actor, but he also does a funny voice that makes fun of him as an actor. He doesn’t even sound like himself -- I was convinced it wasn’t, in fact, him. But it was. And unless you’re a geeky girl, I’m not sure I can make you adequately appreciate how very, very attractive this is, that a guy who looks like this:
