Saturday Night Showcase returns next week. Tonight as this goes live is Veterans Day, the other day honoring soldiers who fought so we could remain free. While Memorial Day honors those who made the ultimate sacrifice, Veteran’s Day honors those who came home alive, many with scars both external and internal. I have family, friends, and former co-workers who served in the military and it makes me happy to see my father, who served at home because the Sullivan rule kept him from going to Thailand, get thanked for his service.
Tonight’s video comes from YouTube channel Drive Thru History. In this special episode, host Dave Stotts gives us a touring history of the various branches of the US military: Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines, Air Force, and even an explanation of the newest branch, the US Space Force (which I still think should have been called Starcom but I just remember the toyline and tie-in TV show). May it give you a better understanding of the history and mission of each branch of our armed forces.
“Mickey, did you leave the water running in the tub?”
The Blue Beetle #33
Fox Features Publication (August, 1944)
Let’s see. The first issue back at Fox was a bust but the second one was mostly good. I wonder what this issue has in store? On the downside the O’Brine Twins are still here but the rest of the stories with more than one page is either Blue Beetle or Joan Mason, so at least most of the comic knows who they’re supposed to be focusing on, namely Dan Garret and friends.
Continuing to go through the season one story bible for Transformers: Beast Machines. Last time we finished looking at the Maximals and today we begin the Predacons’ replacement, the Vehicons.
A hero needs good villains to battle. Sometimes that villain isn’t a living creature but nature or just their own inner demons. Since the Transformers franchise is a war between good and evil those villains have to represent a serious threat to the good bots. Megatron in Beast Wars was a planner, who played the long game and his own troops as often as the Maximals. He was only stopped because Optimus Primal ended up with a good team and they managed to overcome Megatron’s schemes sometimes by luck.
I will give the show credit. A gag at the end with Megatron tied to the Autobot shuttle used to escape back to their present day Cybertron, presumably because Megatron’s dragon body was too big to be put inside and safely secured, to explain how Megatron ended up on Cybertron before the Maximals and take over was actually a good move. There’s still the question of where old Megs got his virus from, but the harder part was parts of Megatron’s eccentricities were missing. No bathtime with rubber ducky, no brushing his dino’s teeth that formed his robot mode hand, no exclamations of “yeeesss” when discussing his plans. Maybe the guide will explain his change in character. We’ll also see how many Vehicons we can fit in before I hit my self-imposed general word limit, so let’s get started.
Transformers: The Movie is an interesting footnote in media history. A TV show getting a movie while the series was still on the air and ties in to the TV continuity? That doesn’t happen very often, and I don’t remember an example of one before this. There were movies based on finished shows, some of which continue the TV show rather than being a reboot but there weren’t too many. A toyline getting a movie? This is the first one I can think of. When I saw the above ad on TV I was really looking forward to going, and for various reasons I was never able to. For me personally it was also the first comic adaptation I picked up, although it wasn’t the first ever made. Between this and the novelization for ET The Extra-Terrestrial I started to see the differences between format as well as movie adaptations not always matching the movie 100%. I would learn years later why that happened.
Adaptations are based on the latest available version of the movie script so that they can come out the same time. Enjoy the movie? In the days before home video was cheap this was your only way to see it again between the final screen date and appearing on TV, this also being the first time it was edited into episodes of the show. The He-Man & She-Ra movie was the opposite, episodes of the show re-edited into a theatrical movie to capitalize on Transformers’ success…if you ignore the fact that the movie was not a major success until home video and nostalgia boosted viewership. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I finally got to see it on the big screen during the movie’s anniversary, but by then I had two versions of the movie on home video–a VHS tape I had to get from Canada and a recent DVD release, seen it on television multiple times in both movie and episode editing, and have two different comic adaptations, one from the 80s by Marvel and a redo with the final script by IDW. It didn’t hold the same excitement, but it was still cool to finally do.
The advertisements announced that Transformers: The Movie was “two years in the making”, but what happened during those two years? Chris McFeely of Transformers: The Basicson YouTube has gathered together information dropped over the years and has all we know thus far about the making of this milestone in animation and the Transformers. This includes visualisations of early drafts, which I’ll be reviewing based on what Chris summarizes in the video.
BW Media Spotlight 