Continuing my look through my favorite entries to the recently concluded Friday Night Fights. Click here for part 1. So far I’ve looked at the first two tournaments I took part in. Everybody had their own reasons for choosing the fights they did. I liked to look for the unusual ones, sometimes fights that didn’t feature the usual fists and lasers. And I avoided ones that led to one character dying as well as ones that made the heroes look heroic and the villains look like chumps who at least offered a challenge. They could be silly or serious but I tried for as fun a fight as I could given the theme. And with that let’s see the next wave of fights I thought were the best I offered up to the Spacebooger brackets.
Alan Napier as Alfred in the Batman TV series. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Or at least we’re seeing Bruce become Batman, so it’s time they try to get even less Batman by going even further back in a new series for Epix that will explore the past of Alfred Pennyworth and his relationship (no, not that kind…as far as I know) with Thomas Wayne. I grant you that Alfred post-Crisis became a former British agent and has slowly evolved into a badass (compared to his early years as just the Wayne family butler because apparently that wasn’t enough…granted I do like what they did with Alfred), but this is DC’s non-comics/video game/cartoon problem…they keep giving superhero properties to people who don’t care about superheroes. This is a storyline, not a series.
I’m not saying it won’t be good or interesting, but at some point you have to ask “does this have to be an Alfred Pennyworth TV series?” and maybe let the idea be about an original characters, so we do get something like Smallville where they seem to veer away from it’s prequel status into something completely different, or Gotham where all of Batman’s villains seem to be pre-dating Batman even when some had Batman in their origin story.
Giant robots have been hanging around the Marvel Universe for a long time. From the Shogun Warriors tie-in to Red Ronin in the Marvel version of Godzilla (which in a rarity for licensed properties is STILL considered canon) to the two versions of Transformers, not to mention Marvel’s own Dreadnoughts and Sentinels, big bots are a regular occurrence. So it’s no surprise that the guy who’s dealt with Ultimo on multiple occasions would want to build his own giant robots to fight these potential threats.
Plus in the toy realm giant transforming robots were making a comeback in the early 2000s plus the rise in anime, which often includes “mecha”, giant robotic vehicles, so it’s not surprising that Toy Biz, at the time owned by Marvel, would get into the game. 2005’s Mega Morphs featured giant toys allegedly powered by the Marvel superheroes’ own superpowers, plus had the ability to transform into vehicles. There were a couple of problems. The toys were super huge, and thus rather pricey since they came in one size and price point, and the other….
They were kind of ugly-looking. Captain America’s Mega Morph is a helicopter with feet! I’m not sure what kind of tank Hulk’s is supposed to be but it’s kind of lame. Wolverine’s is just the robot lying down to call itself a jet fighter. Spider-Man’s is kind of cool and having Ghost Rider’s turn into a motorcycle seems rather obvious. The Thing had one too, but apparently not a minicomic and the only villain of the line (since you never know what side Venom is one from one week to the next) was Doctor Octopus.
The toyline was promoted with a four issue miniseries on store shelves, which I’ll get to eventually in the Tuesday Marvel reviews (we’re still in the late 1990s as of posting time) but before that was a six-issue mini-comic miniseries release with Captain America, Doctor Octopus, Hulk, Spider-Man, Ghost Rider, and Wolverine’s toys. I never got the toys. I prefer my transforming robot toys at average Transformer size although I didn’t get many of the Marvel Transformers Crossovers line that came out a few years later from Hasbro. Lucky for me Marvel collected all six mini-comics and all four regular comics in a digest…but I’ve had conflicting reports on the order for the mini-comics. Plus it seems to be an ongoing storyline like the Drakes comics, meaning you’d otherwise have to buy all the toys to get the full story. So I’ll just review the whole story tonight.
The digest covers do not have the logos and stuff.
Mega Morphs #1-6 minicomics
as collected in the Mega Morphs digest
PUBLISHED BY: Marvel Comics/Toy Biz (2005)
WRITER: Sean McKeever
PENCILERS: Lou Kang with Logan Lubera
INKERS: Pat Davidson, Wayne Faucher, & Craig Yeung
COLORING: Hi-Fi & Sotocolor
LETTERER: Dave Sharpe
CONSULTING EDITOR: Ralph Macchio
EDITOR: John Barber
I should note that some of these credits might be for the full-sized miniseries. Many of them worked on both versions, but the mini-comics appear to lead into the miniseries.
Mr. Freeze as depicted in Batman: The Animated Series. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
While Batman: Mask Of The Phantasm is finally starting to earn it’s overdue status as a good theatrical Batman movie, the direct-to-video movies have longer to go. DC just posted the first 10 minutes of Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero, the final Mr. Freeze story before the transfer to Kids WB, and the movie some say should have been the one the character went out on. Personally I didn’t mind the direction he went in The New Batman/Superman Adventures but if this had been his last appearance until his Batman Beyond showing I wouldn’t have minded.
The Hotel Roosevelt has long sat on Hollywood Boulevard near Hollywood High School and Grauman’s Chinese Theater. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This really shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point. I’ve certainly brought you plenty of videos and article links about Hollywood’s failure to understand how anything outside of their little bubble works. It turns out a bunch of rich or well-off people don’t understand how poor people operate…which is odd given how many “struggling writers” there are in Hollywood. This old video from the Cracked series Reckless Disagreement goes into detail, but be warned that there is some sexual suggestioning near the end where it talks about the show Shameless.
It’s too bad Cracked dropped their video content because they made some good videos.
