Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing well on this sunny and cold Thursday morning. I'm back for another edition of My Geek Life, the weekly segment where I talk about geeky topics that interest me from over the course of the week. I've got lots to talk about today, so let's get right into it.
It's not included in the title of this post, but we got some news from the Star Trek Universe two days ago. Star Trek: Discovery has been renewed for a fifth season, Star Trek: Prodigy has been renewed for a second season, and Star Trek: Lower Decks has been renewed for a fourth season. However the biggest news is that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will premiere on May 5th, 2022. Yes, Captain Pike, Mr. Spock, Number One and the crew of the Enterprise will be coming to our TV screens/computer screens/phone screens/tablet screens on Revenge of the Fifth, the day after May the 4th, a.k.a. Star Wars Day. I am actually excited now to see the new show despite the fact that I still have my reservations about it simply because it's the first season of a new Star Trek series, and Star Trek shows have a bad habit of having rough first seasons. I also don't trust Akiva Goldsman to keep his promise of making the show be more episodic than most TV shows are these days and returning to Star Trek's roots. They made the same promise with Discovery back in 2017 and that ended up not happening. But, like I said, despite those reservations, I am excited to see the show.
The big geek news of the week is that the trailer for Moon Knight dropped on Tuesday. I am not interested in this series at all. I watched the trailer of course, because I want things that don't interest me to change my mind. The trailer didn't. I just don't have any interest in the character. The trailer was really good though and people were extremely excited after they saw the trailer. I don't know if people are excited because they're fans of Moon Knight or if they're excited because it's another Marvel Disney+ series. Because I saw the exact same reactions for Hawkeye when that trailer dropped and many people were disappointed with the show. I'll be talking about this a little later on, but one of the things that Moon Knight might have a problem with is that it's going to be six episodes, just like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Hawkeye were. Which, in my opinion, severly hampers the storytelling capabilities of these shows.
I've talked about this in a previous post, but six episodes just isn't enough to tell the kinds of stories Marvel Studios seems to want to tell with these shows. Especially when each episode is a different length rather than all 40 to 50 minutes like most shows given an hour time slot on traditional TV have when you cut out the commercials. I get that there aren't as many Marvel movies coming out per year like there was pre-Infinity War, but it's only been a year since WandaVision came out and we've already had five Marvel shows, with the sixth one, Moon Knight, upcoming. While Star Wars Disney+ shows hav been following the same format as the Marvel ones, there have fewer Star Wars shows than Marvel. The Book of Boba Fett is only the third one following The Mandalorian and The Bad Batch. And while the smaller number of episodes doesn't seem to be working for Star Wars either, at least not since season 1 of The Mandalorian, they aren't trying to cram as many Star Wars shows into a single year as they are with Marvel.
So yeah, the trailer for Moon Knight looks good, I just don't have any interest in the show or that character in general. I may be a comic book fan, but that doesn't mean I have to watch EVERY comic book based TV show and movie that comes out.
Speaking of comic book based shows, I have a concern about season 2 of Superman & Lois and it doesn't have anything to do with my usual gripes about the quality of writing and character progression on CW shows either. For those of you who don't know, they're doing Doomsday as this season's big bad. Because apparently Superman shows and movies can't seem to do any other villains except for Lex Luthor, General Zod, and Doomsday. However, that also isn't the concern I have with this season. The concern I have with season 2 of Superman & Lois is they're doing Doomsday/the Death of Superman because the show won't be renewed for a third season. It got renewed for a second season with only two episodes having aired. We're now at that point in season 2, and it hasn't been renewed yet. I don't think it has to do with the potential sale of The CW to Nexstar Media Group, which, as of this writing, hasn't been finalized yet. There are so many factors that could play into the cancellation of the show.
One of them is the fact that potential Superman movies are in development at Warner Bros. as well as an HBO Max limited series starring Val-Zod a.k.a. an alternate version of Superman from Earth-Two, who was created for the New 52 almost a decade ago. And apparently there can't be two Superman properties in different mediums at the same time. Which is why Tyler Hoechlin's Superman disappeared from Supergirl when Justice League came out in 2017. And why Superman & Lois magically went on hiatus just before Zack Snyder's Justice League came out last year. So I guess we'll find out in the near future. It's just concerning to me because this is the first Superman TV series since Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman ended in 1997. And no, Smallville doesn't count as a Superman show since Clark didn't actually become Superman until the last three minutes of the series finale.
The next thing I want to talk about is a brand new DC Comics based show on The CW called Naomi, which is based on a six issue comic book series created by Brian Michael Bendis in 2019 for DC Universe. Nobody's talking about it, The CW hasn't done much marketing for it, aside from announcing it's development and apparently a trailer dropped at some point, which nobody talked about, and apparently the first episode aired last week, on the same day as the premiere of season 2 of Superman & Lois. Again, nobody talked about it online. None of the geeky channels that I follow on YouTube did videos on it, and there was no discussion about it on Twitter or Facebook. I only found out that it was on because a YouTube channel I was watching, but don't follow, casually mentioned it in passing because the show's ratings are even lower than the rest of the DC Comics CW shows. It's not airing on TV here in Canada, but it's on iTunes. However, I will not be watching it. According to Wikipedia it's doing that Meta thing where she's a fan of the Arrowverse, specifically Superman, and then when she gets powers, she finds out that the Arrowverse actually exists. That's getting old REALLY fast. It probably won't last very long because nobody is watching it.
I'm pretty amazed that people aren't enjoying The Book of Boba Fett. Mainly because everyone was absolutely excited for it to come out. The fourth episode was better than the first three, but really it's not the greatest show, even by Star Wars standards. The Bad Batch was good, I just didn't have any interest in it. This show though, is bad because it suffers from having only seven episodes and way too much story to be told in that short amount of time and the story just isn't working, particularly with the way they chose to do the flashbacks. Which, by the way, aren't all that interesting to me. I prefer the present day storyline. But Star Wars has this need to chronicle EVERY single detail of the Star Wars Universe, which isn't necessary. Star Trek's started doing that lately too, it's just not as bad as Star Wars is about it.
And that brings me to my next topic, Hype in Geekdom. When I was a kid, I didn't have access to the AOL message boards for various franchises, so whenever a new Star Trek show was announced, a new Star Trek or Star Wars movie came out, or next comic book storyline happened, I had no way of knowing how other fans reacted to them. Like, I didn't know that Star Wars fans hated the Prequel Trilogy, or that Voyager and Enterprise weren't that well liked by Trekkies. All I knew was how I felt about them, and how my family, and the few friends I had who were into them, felt about them. So hype in geekdom wasn't a thing for me until I got online and started using social media and spending way too much time on Wikipedia and the respective Wikis for Star Trek and Star Wars that I found out about the animosity felt towards the Prequels as well as towards Voyager and Enterprise.
Nowadays I have access to social media so I know exactly how fans feel about certain franchises at this point in time. For example, when the Hawkeye trailer dropped in September everyone loved the trailer. But when the show started at the end of November, I saw people getting disappointed after the first episode and more and more disappointed with each subsequent episode. The same thing has been happening with The Book of Boba Fett and could happen with Moon Knight as well. And I think it's because, as fans, we set our expectations way too high for these shows and movies.
The reason we have the marketing campaigns that we do for these movies and shows is to get the audience excited to watch them. Especially in franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's how they have viewers, even ones who aren't the big fans like us. The first timers basically. But, because we're fans of these things, Star Trek and Star Wars for me primarily, not so much the MCU as an entire entity, I think we put these shows and movies on pedestals that don't make any sense. Especially because all of them are made by human beings such as you and I (unless you're a Klingon, a Rodian, or Groot) and while every producer, writer, actor, costume designer, set designer, cinematographer, and director does their very best, they can't always make big hit shows or movies. Sometimes an episode (or a season) doesn't work as well in execution as it did on paper. Sometimes an actor doesn't put in their best performance. But they all still try and while the MCU has had one hit after another since 2008, with the exception of The Incredible Hulk, that was out of sheer luck because about half those movies could have not worked just as easily as they did work.
Personally, I only get excited to a certain point. Unlike many other fans, I take a show or movie for what it is, rather than compare it to the previous show or movie. Like, I understand that Hawkeye and The Book of Boba Fett aren't the same as Loki or WandaVision and The Mandalorian and they aren't meant to be. So I know that the storytelling and character arcs are going to be very different on these shows than they are on those shows. But that doesn't mean they're bad. It's just, like I said earlier, the shorter episode count is harming shows like Hawkeye and The Book of Boba Fett because the writers are trying to cram so much story into those six or seven episodes, but it's story that was really meant for sixteen to twenty episodes. The second season of The Mandalorian had that same problem.
And that's why I'm a bit nervous about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds when it debuts in May. People have this certain expectation that it's going to be exactly like TOS. But I think that's an unrealistic expectation because it can't 100% be TOS. It can feel like the original '60s show, but it's never going to be the original '60s show. TOS worked for the time it was made in. Strange New Worlds or SNW as fans are referring to it as, is being produced in the 2020s for a 2020s audience. So returning characters like Spock, Uhura, and Christine Chapel aren't going to be exactly the same characters that Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, and Majel Barrett made iconic in the late '60s when TOS was on. Pike and Commander Reilly (Number One) won't be exactly the same Pike and Number One that Jeffrey Hunter and Majel Barrett played in the original TOS pilot, "The Cage" in 1964/1965. It's just not going to happen that way and I hope there aren't any Trekkies who think otherwise, because they'll be in for one hell of a disappointment, to paraphrase Doctor McCoy in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I'm excited for it, but I know to have more realistic expectations. Basically my expectation is that it's good. It doesn't have to be great, but it has to be good.
The last thing I want to talk about is a book I just started reading a few days ago. It's called Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street. Even though that title is no longer accurate because the book was published in 2008, it's now 2022 and Sesame Street continues to air, it was accurate for the time the book was published in. Because, unfortunately the book had to be published in 2008 and couldn't wait until whatever year Sesame Street actually goes off the air (I don't think that will ever happen, at least not in my lifetime).
I gave this book to my grandfather back in 2008. My mom and I found it at Chapters one day when we were there when I was on summer break. It was a weekday when my siblings and dad weren't home and Brad and I hadn't started going out and doing stuff yet (we started doing that later that summer). I bought it for my grandfather for his birthday. He always loved Sesame Street and we called him Grandpa Grouch because his favourite character was Oscar the Grouch, so I bought it for him for his birthday that year.
Sadly my grandfather passed away almost two years ago and while I immediately went for DVDs and VHS tapes at his and Nana's house, I was too afraid, at the time, to ask about the book. I didn't actually know if Grandpa still had it. My parents were at Nana's house on the weekend and I guess Nana found it because my parents brought it home for me. I started it that night at bedtime. It's good so far. Very detailed on the biographies of the key players of the creation of the series, which I think is the longest running children's television program ever. I can't seem to find anything to dispute that claim, so I think it's correct.
I think that's going to be it for me for tonight. I'll be back tomorrow for the next part in my look at the movies I saw in theatres, which will focus on the 2000s. And I think I'm going to try to get a movie review in on Saturday because I'm planning on watching The Land Before Time (1988) on VHS tomorrow night. So until then have a wonderful night, stay safe, and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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