Hopefully the laziest comic of the year, but I make no promises after last year. Even this week’s Clutter Report goes over how little I accomplished on my 2024 decluttering goals.
Well, looks like DC Heroes United took a longer break than I did. Makes forcing a Sunday post to keep caught up was a waste of time. Thanks a lot, Genvid! We still have the final section of the writer’s guide for the penultimate (if not final) installment of Star Trek: Pitch & Guide and the Chapter By Chapter review of Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image plus whatever other discussion topics come to mind. I should have a chance to be late to the party on the trailer for Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man but I think I at least have an angle that will keep it interesting and worth checking out. As for the other two days, we’ll find out soon enough.
Have a great week and a Happy New Year, everyone! Let’s hope 2025 is better than 2024. Not that we’re off to a good start.
I haven’t done a fan work in a while. Let’s do something about that tonight.
I haven’t really been drawn to a lot of new Transformers content from official channels. I found EarthSpark kind of boring and the celebrated Skybound comics too brutal, after coming off the uninteresting IDW run as it fell apart. The storyline for the next collectors toyline is both curious and disappointing at the same time, but Age Of The Primes and it’s use of the 13 Primes, the first Cybertronian robots to attain lifeform status, hasn’t been on full display yet. I don’t even know whose doing that one, while all we know about the upcoming kids line, Cyberworld, is that it will exist and replace EarthSpark. There’s not even word on a TV show or who will air it, given the failures of Cartoon Network and later Paramount to treat the franchise properly. Paramount keeps trying to ease back into Bayverse formulas when their only success, Bumblebee, is the only praised live-action offering. Meanwhile, Transformers Onehad it’s own issues, one of them being how Paramount marketed it. I’d say go back to Discovery but right now they’re still sorting out their nonsense when it comes to animation and their networks…plus either way I can’t watch it since we’re part of the cord cutting generation and none of the Netflix or Paramount+ shows are available outside of paid subscriptions.
Transformers: Dawn Of War is a computer animated series coming from the team of Randal NG and Dr. Smoov, two animators who have mostly done Transformers comedy in the past, but are now trying their hand at a more serious series. Tonight’s video is a combination of the first two episodes, but while rather exposition heavy, sets up their take on the Robots In Disguise. They also have to drop…”that line“. While a new continuity and featuring humans dying, it’s not brutal and violent like the Skybound stories while still keeping the dramatic impact. They seem to be going with my preferred origin of Optimus Prime and Elita-One, from the episode “War Dawn“, rather than the record keeper turned warrior that Simon Furman forced into being. I’m happy about that. Enjoy.
There is an episode of Captain N: The Game Master where Kevin Keene refers to the N-Team, the collection of video game heroes he joins to fight a collaboration of game villains, as his “family”. That was my first exposure to the “found family”, a bunch of friends who act like a family. Actually you could make the case that was the Fantastic Four but between marriage and blood relations it’s not the same thing. I found the idea silly. My friends are my friends but no matter how close they are, they aren’t my family. Then again we live in a time where the traditional family in stories are rare and usually don’t seem to even like each other, nevermind love each other.
Author Caroline Furlong, using the Star Wars expanded universe (the part that was tossed into “Legends” by Disney in favor of their own continuity), discusses how even the found family is suffering the same issues as the biological family it tried to shove aside.
Banking a bunch of Finally Watched reviews was helpful before, so why not do a few more? This time I have the advantage of access to free streaming sites with a large on demand library. I can put up with a few commercials.
When you think of a Wonder Woman movie, you probably go to the Snyderverse adjacent ones because Diana has had so few appearances outside of Justice League related shows. There was her excellent 1970s series with Linda Carter, Super Friends, the various Justice League and DC Super Hero Girls cartoons, a failed pilot or two, and that time she time traveled with the Brady Kids. Yes, that was an actual episode of the Brady Bunch animated spin-off. She’s also the only DC hero to show up on the Ruby-Spears Superman outside of the Man Of Steel himself. (Who also showed up on The Brady Kids…as did The Lone Ranger and Tonto–it was a weird show).
And yet we’re told that she’s too important to screw up in adapting to a live-action movie…before giving us Wonder Woman 1984 and totally screwing it up. The first movie, a previous Finally Watched, had to be set in World War I rather than World War II in order to avoid comparisons with Captain America: The First Avenger (which I don’t seem to have a review for but I know I saw it) because apparently nobody can tell the casual viewer about comic history or the first season of Linda Carter’s series…where she fought Nazis in World War II.
Back when DC Entertainment made animated movies based on the comics and not some director’s fever dreams, There were two Wonder Woman solo films, and as I write this I just finished the first of those. It’s been a long time coming, but was it worth doing?
RELEASE DATE: 2009
RELEASED BY: Warner Brothers Animation and DC Entertainment
RUNTIME: 1 hour 14 minutes
RATING: PG-13
VIEWING SOURCE FOR THIS REVIEW: Tubi
STARRING: Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Alfred Molina, and and Vickie Lewis
SCREENWRITERS: Gail Simone and Michael Jelenic, with a creator credit to William Moulton Marson
DIRECTOR: Lauren Montgomery
BOX OFFICE: inapplicable as this was a direct-to-video movie
ESTIMATED BUDGET: $3,500,000 according to IMDB
A yearly subscription for this comic, including shipping, is less than any comic currently on shelves. That just makes me sad. Then I remember that my subscription to The Transformers wasn’t $1.50 for a year either.
So, last issue seemed decent enough, let’s see what this issue brings us. I have a lot to read and very little time to do it, so let’s get started.
Let me note at the start that this is not a Versus article. It’s a difference of opinion, not necessarily a disagreement on facts, save for one detail that leads to our difference of opinion. I’m mostly using this article by author and commentator Brian Niemeier on his Kairos blog as a discussion point, not calling him out. There’s a difference in approaches, and while I’ve used his commentaries in the past as Saturday Article Link fodder I have done a Versus on people I usually agree with before. That’s just not the case here.
For those of you who didn’t go to read the article, Niemeier–who I’m just going to go by his first name so I don’t have to keep double-checking the spelling of his last name–tries to make the point that switching from animation cels to drawing on the computer, which is still 2D art, has been a bad move for Japanese animation studios to do, hurting the visual side of the product. Now today’s Daily Video makes more sense. While that video was from an American animation studio, the process is the same. It’s also long, tedious, and costs more. Animating on the computer, even with drawing every image, takes less time though I don’t know if it takes less people. Does the animator have time to also be the colorist? My guess is no. They’ll also still need the in-betweener, the ones who do frames between the important ones to keep the process going. It rarely takes less than two people animating even a TV show.
So what’s Brian’s case for going back to cel animation, “cel” being short for celluloid, and why don’t I think that’s the problem? Let’s start seeing his case so I can make mine.
BW’s Saturday Article Link> The Found Family Folly
There is an episode of Captain N: The Game Master where Kevin Keene refers to the N-Team, the collection of video game heroes he joins to fight a collaboration of game villains, as his “family”. That was my first exposure to the “found family”, a bunch of friends who act like a family. Actually you could make the case that was the Fantastic Four but between marriage and blood relations it’s not the same thing. I found the idea silly. My friends are my friends but no matter how close they are, they aren’t my family. Then again we live in a time where the traditional family in stories are rare and usually don’t seem to even like each other, nevermind love each other.
Author Caroline Furlong, using the Star Wars expanded universe (the part that was tossed into “Legends” by Disney in favor of their own continuity), discusses how even the found family is suffering the same issues as the biological family it tried to shove aside.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on January 4, 2025 in Uncategorized and tagged commentary.
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