February 9, 2025

Jake & Leon #630> Tarnished Silver

Can we please get these people away from my childhood? They’ve been doing this since Voltron.

Here’s the preview via ICv2 if you’re curious. You know, I’m not going to balk at Hotwing being dropped in early and we all know why, but that leaves Flashback, Condor, and…wow, I forgot the kid with the cyclone making body was named Moon Striker. Probably because that’s a dumb name for a SilverHawk. Anyway, why not just send the full team? I could see waiting on Condor given his backstory and ties to Stargazer (like a comic that race swapped all the Bedlamians  with humans and shoving pre-Hawk Jonathan Quick among them cares about matching the show) but if you’re going to introduce one early, just grab the other two and complete the team now. Or are they going to get shoved to the side like the second group of ThunderCats so often are. I have a friend actually following reviews and what he tells me about their comic isn’t worth even his time. He’s the same guy just happy to get a Thundarr The Barbarian comic even after hearing what they’ve done to the ThunderCats, Voltron, and even Captain Planet. Did Captain Planet NEED facial hair?

I guess they have access to all the Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Maybe if Warner Brothers actually owned a comic book company or something they could do it. Oh wait….THEY DO!!!! At least Disney owned Marvel is doing something with Disney owned Star Wars, even if they are licensing the kids stuff out to other publishers. I really don’t understand what’s going on with these publishers. The lack of sense continues to astound at Warner Brothers Discovery and modern Disney.

Nevermind. Over at The Clutter Reports this week, I learned about some software that might get me one step closer to finally doing that let’s play series.

Still no new episode of DC Heroes United so I hope there are plenty of things to discuss this week. The only article series I have left right now is the continuing Chapter By Chapter review of Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image, with a short and long chapter to smush together. Outside of the usual comic reviews and fun bonus videos that’s pretty much it otherwise. Hopefully I can do a full week and not need a nap too close to post time. Have a great week, everyone!

Posted by on February 9, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, Comic Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged , , , , , , , .

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February 8, 2025

Saturday Night Showcase> LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild The Galaxy

LEGO seems to do better with Star Wars than Disney, and they make parodies.

LEGO opted to create their own shows, but they also made parodies along the lines of “what if Batman lived in a LEGO world”. While the theatrical films seem to be going for stories kids would make while playing, the TV, home video, and streaming shows went for a world created by LEGO. Star Wars really makes use of this thanks to the Force. The Freemaker Adventures started original stories and created the idea of “Force builders”, who can manipulate LEGO to create new things.

On the official Star Wars Kids YouTube channel and working with their usual partners at Atomic Cartoons, we get one of those elsewhere in the galaxy stories. Rebuild The Galaxy plays with some of the odd additions of DisneyFilm by extending the rules of the universe that allow for time travel. Unnecessary, but they seem to be making an interesting story out of it. Two brothers, one of which can use the Force but just wants to live his normal life and the other seeking adventure, end up accidentally rewriting the Star Wars timeline when they find a crystal in a temple. Only one of the brothers remembers the way it was because while he doesn’t want to have adventures he does love hearing about and talking about them. (So me.) Now Sig and his power droid (I don’t care what other people call it, I’ll always know it as the name Kenner gave it) Servo must restore the cornerstone of the galaxy and fix the universe. In a way it’s an allegory of what’s going on with Star Wars canon but I don’t know if that’s intentional. Enjoy the playlist of the four episode miniseries.

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Posted by on February 8, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, Movie Spotlight, web series and tagged , , , .

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February 8, 2025

BW’s Saturday Article Link> Are Games Too Big Now?

I don’t mean popularity. I mean the AAA titles wanted to be so large in scope that they’ve become stagnant as a medium. At least that’s the theory by Bioshock creator Ken Levine according to this article from Bounding Into Comics. He has a point. Wanting the biggest story in the biggest world, which is also hurting comics and many sci-fi/fantasy franchises, is causing a problem when you want to connect to these people. When huge is your rule rather than your exception you tend to run out of ideas far faster. Maybe they’re becoming too big NOT to fail?

Posted by on February 8, 2025 in Video Game Spotlight and tagged , , , , , .

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February 7, 2025

It’s Another Smurfs Movie…Because They Never Smurfing Learn!

I was worried about how bad my Smurfette was. Then I saw the live-action movie trailer.

And then I saw the 2025 version. I’m not sure my Smurfette is any worse, but you be the judge.

Yes, kids, they’re doing another Smurfs movie because they never learn from their mistakes. Two live-action Smurf movies becoming a joke and the one animated one leading to a Nickelodeon series, a set of direct-to-video movies, and nobody complaining about the all girl Smurf village living apart from the guys now adding more female characters to Peyo’s blue Belgium sausage fest and still Paramount refuses to learn “maybe doing another Smurfs enter our world story is not needed”.

Well, we have a trailer with just that, and other rather odd ideas. I have no problem with a Smurfette focused movie, folks. That’s the least of this trailer’s problems, and it is listed as a trailer, not a teaser. So they really think this plot, these character models, Paris, and Rhianna are going to make you want to finally see the Smurfs in the human world…not counting all the humans that exist in their world since they were originally going to be one-story characters in the Johan & Peewit comics before being popular enough to get their own comic, often used by Peyo to comment on the world. This led to the Hanna-Barbera series that brought the three apple high characters to the US and the English speaking world, and now there’s a 24/7 streaming channel just to watch Smurfs in Spanish…for some reason perfectly okay with HB’s new owners at Warner Brothers Discovery while you still have to get MeTV Toons to watch them in English or Nickelodeon to watch the new cartoon. So what’s wrong with this one? Let’s see.

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Posted by on February 7, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, Comic Spotlight, Movie Spotlight and tagged , , .

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February 7, 2025

“Yesterday’s” Comic> Blue Ribbon Comics #1

“It’s not my fault he finds you delicious!”

Blue Ribbon Comics #1

M.L.J. Magazines, Inc. (November, 1939)

Hey, a new comic anthology series. MLJ will someday pull a National/DC Comics and grab a name from their most popular comic. In their case it’s the Archie series, but that’s not for awhile yet and I’m pretty sure they still own the trademarks on the old Archie comics, which won’t be in public domain for some time yet.

Okay, let’s see what these guys opened their trip into comic books with. Like other magazine publishers of the time, they were probably seeing the presses not running after they were done with their existing monthly magazines and opted to make comics. The only name I recognize off of the cover is Little Nemo, which I thought had a publisher for those strips, but if so I didn’t review it. There’s an intro section stating that none of the comics are reprints of comic strips; they’re all original stories and done-in-one adventures. No serials…except for the serials we will be seeing, so that’s a lie. It boasts 64 pages but on Comic Book Plus, linked to below so as usual you can read along, it lists 68. That covers the cover, inside cover, back inside cover, and back outside cover, but will it count the advertisements? Let’s see.

[Read along with me here]

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Posted by on February 7, 2025 in Yesterday's Comics and tagged , , , , , , .

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February 7, 2025

BW’s Daily Video> Proof That Bluey Isn’t Just For Kids

Catch more from Entertain The Elk on YouTube

Posted by on February 7, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged , .

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February 6, 2025

Trope Shark: The Many Forms Of Amnesia

Let’s see, what was tonight’s topic…oh, right.

Amnesia is one of those things writers have never understood, like computers or the hueh-mans. I’m pretty sure any doctor will tell you that the solution for losing your memory after being bonked on the head is not to do a second time, accidental or otherwise. I don’t know a lot about actual amnesia so I don’t know what causes it or how you actually cure it, if ever. In Hollywood, that’s the typical cure. I decided to look up “amnesia” on Tropopedia, Fandom’s wiki for tropes. It led me to a collection of “memory tropes“, which listed among all the tropes over twenty types of amnesia types, not counting faking it.

So what I’m going to is just list all of these types of tropes with a short summary and link to their full articles on the subject, then go over some examples of how this can and can’t work. I may end up grouping things together so this isn’t a superlong list, but I’m writing this before going in blind just to see what I get out of this. I didn’t think there were that many types of uses for amnesia in stories, but I bet the cure in stories is not the right cure. It can be an amnesia episode of a story, or the plot of the movie/game/series concept. I’ve seen it done to explore the inner goodness or evil of a character, to cause a trip down memory lane for clip shows and the like, to flip the good/evil switch, and even meeting the character as an amnesiac either to set-up a mystery or to forget they set-up a mystery and just make it part of their personality.

Since “Trope Shark” is about simplifying the pile o’ trope names I’ll group things together where I can. The goal is not to overwhelm but give a basic overview of how amnesia is used in fiction. Basically, I looked it up so you don’t have to and bring you the cliff notes on this one. Even then, you can scroll to the divider if you get bored and just want to get to the point. I fell down this rabbit hole and while you get the jetpack, you’re still coming on this ride. At least this short-ish version will be easier to absorb. This is one trope with a lot of divisions.

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Posted by on February 6, 2025 in Book Spotlight, Comic Spotlight, Movie Spotlight, Television Spotlight, Trope Shark, Video Game Spotlight and tagged , .

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