Watching Pokémon on DVD!

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. Last week was a pretty busy week, so I took the week off from the blog. Today though I'm here to talk about Pokémon. Specifically the original anime series, Indigo League, which originally began airing on September 8th, 1998 here in North America. I'm in the middle of watching the original series on DVD and I'm having a blast watching the show all the way through for the first time in 27 years. I'm not finished yet, in fact, I'm not even finished the first 26 episodes, but I still wanted to come on here and talk about it. So, let's get into it!

By now I don't think you need me to explain what Pokémon is to you, but for those three or four of you who don't know, Pokémon is a multi-media franchise that was created in Japan in the mid to late '90s that is based on the concept of traveling around the world, catching creatures called Pokémon, to then train and use in tournaments to win badges, and to study the Pokémon out in the wild, their natural habitat in this world. The franchise began as two video games created by Nintendo for the Game Boy, but expanded to include trading cards, the anime, tons of movies, spin-off games for various consoles, and toys among many other things.

 Pokémon aired on YTV here in Canada from 1998 to 2014, on Teletoon (known as Cartoon Network Canada since 2023) from 2014 to 2024, and then back on YTV as of 2025 (this year). Growing up though my siblings and I watched the show every day, Monday to Friday, on YTV. It never failed. We were always sitting in front of that TV ready for Pokémon, including "Who's that Pokémon?" and the Pokérap, which aired at the end of every episode. While I dropped off of Pokémon, the anime around the time that The Johto Journeys aired in late 2000, I still loved playing the video games, though, incidently, I also dropped off of those around the time that Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver came out here in North America in 2000. I was almost 14 years old when The Johto Journeys started and I lost interest in the anime similar to how I lost interest in Digimon after Tamers wrapped up in June, 2002 and lost interest in the then current run of Power Rangers after Dino Thunder finished airing in late 2004.

Lately though, due to my nostalgia for the '90s and early 2000s, and the fact that a few years ago I watched the first two episodes of Pokémon on iTunes, I started getting the urge to revisit the original season of the show, since I hadn't actually seen any of it, besides the first two episodes, since it transitioned into Pokémon: Adventures in the Orange Islands on December 4th, 1999, which just happened to be my 13th birthday. So I bought the Pokémon: Indigo League - The Complete Collection DVD set from Amazon. It's just the 2014 volume releases combined into one set, but I love the way the episodes are laid out on the discs. There's 8 to 9 episodes per disc and while it's like any other anime DVD or Blu-ray set, where it plays all the episodes whether you hit play all or go to any episode in the episode menu and hit play (it plays from whichever episode you selected). However, unlike other anime sets that I've experienced, the 9 episodes (or 8, depending on the disc) are separated into three episode blocks, so that the run time is 1 hour and 5 minutes per block, so I've been watching three episodes every night, except the nights when The VHS Club holds its weekly meetings on YouTube, or whatever night I'm watching a movie for the show. And it's working for me.

What threw me off about this DVD set though is that the Pokérap is the complete version and it's after the last episode on each of the first six discs, rather than split up into the Monday-Friday version that originally ran at the end of each episode before the closing credits. Which is fine, but there's no separate bonus features section to select the Pokérap from. It's still fun to watch it though.

I am really enjoying getting to watch Pokémon again after all these years. I'm not going to buy the other DVD sets to watch all 25 seasons that have Ash as the main protagonist, because I really don't have the space for them, but with Indigo League being the Pokémon series that I watched when I was in my tween years, it's fun going back and revisit the show that started the anime that still continues to this day through Pokémon: Horizons. 

Alright my friends, that's it for now. I'm gonna come back to Pokémon once I'm finished watching the DVD set, but I just wanted to talk about the set itself and my history with Pokémon and its various incarnations. I'll be back next week for more posts so until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Josh's Geek Cave's Halloween Special

 Hey everyone! Happy Halloween! I hope you all had a spooky night tonight. I decided to do a little Halloween special where I'll be talking about a TV show and a movie that I've watched over the last three days. It's been raining for the past two days so I stayed in and watched TV and a movie. Let's get into it!

On Wednesday and yesterday, I watched seven episodes of Sabrina the Teenage Witch on DVD. All six Halloween episodes, and then the episode of the 7th season that would've been a Halloween episode (season 7, episode 6), but wasn't for some reason. Seasons 4 and 7 are the only two seasons of the show that I'd never seen any episodes from before yesterday. While I'd watched seasons 1-3 on TGIF when they were on, I'd managed to catch a few episodes from seasons 5 and 6 when I was up at the cottage in the early 2000s. My grandparents had satellite TV up there in the late '90s, the 2000s, and the early 2010s. So, they were able to pick up the nearest broadcast of The WB in the U.S. Which means I got to watch a few shows that I either didn't get on channels available to me at home, or watch shows I did get on their original American channel. Which was cool.

Watching these seven episodes reminded me of how much fun it is to watch Sabrina. It was my favourite TGIF show of the ones I watched in the late '90s. I think it's because it never got as heavy, or as preachy, as Boy Meets World tended to do, and it lasted longer than any other TGIF show that aired between 1997 and 2000. 

Sabrina herself, played by the lovely Melissa Joan Hart, is so sarcastic, witty, and the kind of girl I wanted to be friends with at the time I watched the show originally. same with Sabrina's friend, Valerie, played by Lindsay Sloane, who was introduced in season 2. Jenny was okay in season 1, but I liked Valerie better. And of course I wished that both Aunt Hilda and Aunt Zelda were my aunts because they were also lots of fun. I don't think I'd want Salem as a pet though. He's too sarcastic. 

The Complete Series boxset is interesting because like all DVD boxsets released by Paramount Home Entertainment in 2006 and later, the modern CBS Television logo is at the end of every episode instead of the original Viacom Productions logo, so the episodes from seasons 1-3 weren't exactly how I remembered them, but they were still fun. DVDs and Blu-rays are a fun way to watch your favourite shows from the past. Particularly the cartoons us '90s kids grew up with like Batman: The Animated Series and Rugrats. They're also a great way to revisit your favourite TGIF shows like Sabrina. I'm definitely gonna do a full watch through of the show in the very near future.

  

Tonight for Halloween proper, I watched Casper on VHS. I talked about this movie in my recent post on movies we '90s kids watched growing up, but I wanted to go a bit deeper here because I didn't talk about my memories of watching it on VHS back in the '90s. 

I was probably 10 or 11 when I finally saw this movie. I think we'd already moved to the house we lived in in Greely before we moved to this house when I saw Casper for the first time. I definitely remember watching it in that particular family room, rather than in the play area that my siblings and I had at the log house, or in the basement or the family room at the house on Greely's main road. So it had to have been in our third house in Greely that I saw this movie in. So it was 1997 or 1998 when I saw it. 

We didn't always rent or buy a movie as soon as it was released on VHS. Sometimes we waited a couple of years before doing so. Especially once we moved out to Greely and the nearest video store was 30 minutes away. And it'd take a while for the local gas station or convenience store to get a copy of the movie in. Moreso with the VHS releases, but as DVDs became the dominant home video format, the gas station became faster at getting brand new releases in for rental.

My favourite scene in this movie is the end when Casper had been turned into Devon Sawa so that he and Kat, played by Christina Ricci, could dance at the Halloween party, and Dr. Harvey (Bill Pullman's character) got to see his deceased wife, Amelia one last time, ending his quest to find her ghost form. Not only are Kat and Casper dancing to "Remember Me this Way" by Jordan Hill, but all the characters got what they wanted. Casper and Kat got friends, Harvey got to see Amelia, and the Ghostly Trio got rid of Carrigan and Dibs, who are the only characters in the movie who DON'T get everything they wanted. 

I still love this movie. I said in the review I did five years ago on the Review Basement blog that this wasn't a good movie and that it's stupid kids movie, which I loved anyway. However, watching it tonight, it's the perfect Halloween movie for those of us who don't like Horror movies. And just remembering seeing the movie on VHS in either 1997 or 1998, put me back into the '90s for a night of ghostly fun. I am in love with this movie, and it's absolutely on my list of movies to not only watch on Halloween every year, but to watch all year round, because of how much fun it is.

And that my friends, concludes this year's Halloween Special. I have no idea what my next blog post is gonna be on, but it'll be something fun for sure. I got a busy week coming up next week though, so it might not be until Wednesday or Friday that I'll be back here. But, until then, have a great rest of your night, a great weekend, and I will talk to you all later. Take care! 

Four Halloween Movies We Watched in the '90s and Early 2000s

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing okay. It's the week of Halloween and I thought I'd come on here and talk about four Halloween movies that '90s kids watched in the '90s and early 2000s. I've personally seen all four of these movies, but I only saw two of them when I was growing up in the '90s. As you know I'm not a fan of horror movies, so this is the closest thing you're going to get from me during spooky season. Also, these movies aren't in any particular order, they're just random. Let's get into it.

First up is Hocus Pocus. I only saw this movie when I did my review of it two or three years ago. Oddly enough this movie wasn't very popular when it first came out in 1993. As I stated in my review, there could've been any number of reasons for that. I think part of it is because it came out in July, and despite kids being off school for the summer, the movie had some very stiff competition as Jurassic Park would've still been in theaters, and Free Willy came out the same day, and kids weren't interested in a Halloween movie in the middle of summer. While it has a cult following now, it didn't happen until the movie came out on DVD in 2002, despite being on home video starting in 1994. It's a fun movie though and I quite enjoyed it.

Next up is Casper from 1995. This movie stars Christina Ricci as Kat and Devon Sawa as the titular character in his human form at the end of the movie. It was successful at the box office, but critics were mixed on it. It used '90s CGI to portray Casper and the Ghostly Trio. We all remember the dance scene between Casper and Kat. Of course for some people Devon Sawa and Christina Ricci were their first celebrity crushes, so seeing them in a movie together was probably the most amazing thing ever. I own it on VHS, because, why not watch this '90s gem on VHS, even after 30 years?

Then we have Ernest Scared Stupid. Ernest P. Worell is a stupid, but beloved character, who had a series of barely successful films in the late '80s and early '90s. This one came out in 1991, in October. It didn't do well at the box office, nor was it popular with critics. But I suppose it could be considered a cult classic, but I think it's just popular for those of us who don't like super scary/full on horror films because Ernest is so innocent and, well, earnest. I never saw this growing up, but I did watch it for the first time last year when Katie from the VHS Club Podcast, sent me a 3-film DVD set of Ernest Goes to Camp, Ernest Scared Stupid, and Ernest Goes to Jail. I really enjoyed it and I'm definitely going to be watching it again this week.

Finally, we have The Addams Family, also from 1991, and also starring Christina Ricci. I remember watching this one on VHS at my grandparents's place when I was pretty young. Also, I feel that this movie is the reason we are still in love with Gomez, Morticia, Fester, Wednesday, Pugsley, Thing, Grandmama, Lurch, and Cousin Itt to this very day. Mainly because the comic strip was long over by the time the movie came out, and the original TV show had been over for over 20 years, leaving only a cartoon series in the '70s, which also wasn't airing in reruns by 1991, so I feel that audiences might not have been aware of the original 1964 television series, or the 1973 cartoon or even the comic strip had this movie not come out. And we certainly wouldn't've had Wednesday or any of the other shows and movies that have come out thanks to the success of this movie.

Alright my friends, that's it for me for tonight. I'll be back soon with more blog posts. I just thought I'd get this post up since it's Halloween on Friday, because, again, I don't do horror movies. Until next time, have a great night and I will talk to you all again very soon. Take care.

How Fandom Has Changed since the '90s

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I wanted to come on here and talk about something that's been on my mind since I watched a documentary on the Smallville: The Complete Sixth Season DVD set, that talked about the fans of Smallville and how they showed their fandom in the 2000s. And that's how fandom has changed since the '90s, and how it's stayed the same. I'm going to stick to movies and TV shows for this just because being a fan of certain TV shows and movies inevitably spins-off into the other branches of fandom, like reading comic books and playing video games. Let's get into it.

When I was a kid in the '90s being a fan of a show like Star Trek: The Next Generation or Mighty Morphin Power Rangers or a movie like Batman Forever or Clueless meant more than watching the show every week (or every day in the case of TNG and MMPR) on TV or going to see the movie in theaters. It meant watching the VHS releases, whether you owned them or rented them from whatever your video rental store of choice was, or you taped episodes off the TV. It meant reading the novels and comics, playing with the toys, listening to the soundtracks on either audiocassette or CD (or both), playing the video games, and collecting the trading cards. Oh and talking to friends and family members who were also fans of the show or movie.

If you were a teenage fan or an adult fan of these shows and movies, it also meant interacting with other fans on the internet message boards that started to pop up before the official websites for Star Trek and Star Wars became a thing. Same with going to fan conventions either locally or internationally, and writing fan letters to the casts themselves, or to fan magazines.

When I was a teenager in the early to mid 2000s, none of that changed. Except, instead of watching the show on VHS, you could watch your favourite show on DVD, as the latest DVD season set would come out between seasons of the show, ensuring you could refresh your memory before the next season started airing in the fall, or ensuring that you could still watch the show on the weeks where there wasn't a new episode airing on FOX, ABC, NBC, CBS, The WB, or UPN. Or whatever channel you were watching the show on in whatever country you're from. 

By then you also had MSN Messenger and AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), so you could talk to your friends about your favourite shows on one of those platforms. It also became easier to post your fan fiction online in the 2000s as well. Before the advent of the internet, fans would send their fan fiction to fanzines, which were fan owned magazines not authorized by the networks and studios making these shows.

Nowadays the only differences in the way we show our fandom, is the introduction of social media and video sharing sites such as YouTube. That and specific fan conventions outside of the authorized ones like Star Trek Las Vegas, Star Wars Celebration, and Power Morphicon no longer exist. Broader pop culture conventions such as San Diego Comic-Con, New York City Comic-Con, Fan Expo Canada, and Ottawa Comiccon (to name a few) have become the preferred conventions for fans to interact with one another. We also don't have MSN Messenger or AIM anymore, but Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram, and other social media sites all have messenger features that do pretty much everything that those Messenger sites did in the late '90s and early 2000s.

We don't even have most of our fandom magazines anymore either. Star Wars Insider and Doctor Who Magazine are pretty much the only ones left now. Aside from Star Trek Magazine and Star Trek Explorer the rest of them, like Disney Adventures, Wizard Magazine, Starlog, Cinemafantastique, Fantasmagoria, MAD Magazine, and Nintendo Power all ended in either the late 2000s or the early 2010s.

So I guess Fandom hasn't changed, we've just had new avenues in which we could share our fandom with other people, and new options for how to access our favourite shows from yesteryear, as well as our favourite shows from today. Using my first two examples, both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers have toys and comics being made for them. MMPR doesn't have novels anymore, but TNG does. They also both still have DVD releases for them coming out, though they are re-releases of their Complete Series DVD boxsets that first came out over a decade ago. TNG is also on Blu-ray.

I find it fascinating the different ways fans of a TV show or a movie or an entire multimedia franchise like Star Trek and Star Wars express their fandom. I'm especially fascinated by how fandom has developed over the decades. Just because a lot of it is the same, but some of it is different nowadays than it was 20 to 50 years ago. The internet has given us ways to share our fandom with other like-minded people. Which is pretty cool.

I think that's gonna be it for me for today. I just wanted to come on here and talk about fandom for a bit because that documentary on the Smallville sixth season DVD boxset got me thinking about fandom in the 2000s, particularly in that 2005-2006 period, where we had the internet, but social media, including YouTube, was still a year or two away from becoming a thing. 

I'll be back soon with more blog posts. Next week is the season finale of the fifth season of Only Murders in the Building, so I might come on here and talk about that for a bit. Mainly because I think it's the final season of the show, but I can't find anything on whether it actually is or not. It's certainly been feeling like a final season. Anyways, I might come on here and talk about that on Wednesday next week. Until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Snow White (2025) Movie Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. It's been a busy week here in the Geek Cave, so I haven't had a chance to come on here and do any blog posts this week. However, since The VHS Club Podcast aired this week's episode a night early, I went on Disney+ to watch the live-action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs last night. So that gave me something to write about this week. There will be some minor spoilers, but nothing super major since it's a relatively new movie. Let's get into it!

My history with Disney's live-action remakes of their classic animated features has been mixed. While I enjoyed Beauty and the Beast (2017), Christopher Robin (2018), and Aladdin (2019), I'm too much of a fanboy of the 1967 animated original to have enjoyed The Jungle Book (2016), and I saw no point in watching the other ones, though I did try to watch both Mulan (2020) and Cruella (2021), but didn't finish either one. However, even though I didn't want to go to see it in theaters, I did have an interest in seeing Snow White just because the original animated version is so old and dated (I still enjoy it though), that I was intrigued to see what a live-action remake could be, being that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the first animated feature film produced by Walt Disney in the 1930s.

Despite my interest though, I was still skeptical. Afterall this was the same studio that did a CG animated remake of The Lion King, and then dared to call it "live-action", even though it's a photorealistically animated movie. I was pleasantly surprised though to find that I found myself enjoying the movie to the point where I was smiling and singing along to the classic songs that appear in the movie, such as "Heigh-Ho", "Whistle While You Work" and "The Silly Song (Dwarfs's Yodel Song)". I couldn't help myself, because two of those songs have been part of my childhood since before I ever saw the 1937/1938 animated movie on VHS after 1994 (it didn't come out on home video until 1994), as I had the Disney Sing-Along Songs: Heigh-Ho VHS tape when I was a kid, and both "Heigh-Ho" and "The Silly Song" are both on there.

The cast was interesting. Gal Gadot was the only member of the cast I've seen in other movies...namely three (out of the four) of the DCEU films she appeared in as Wonder Woman. I enjoyed Rachel Zegler's performance as the titular character, and Andrew Burnap as Jonathan, the stand-in for the Prince Charming character from the original movie. I also enjoyed the performances of the actors who voiced the Dwarfs. Including Dopey. Which was weird to me, because Dopey was always this mute character, but it made sense that they'd change that since the Dwarfs aren't as comedic in this movie as they are in the original animated one. 

One thing that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me is how the Queen knew where Snow White was before she disguised herself as an elderly woman to give Snow White the poison apple. In the original animated movie, the Magic Mirror told her where Snow White was staying, but in this version, it didn't. And being that none of the Queen's soldiers knew where she ended up being after their fight with Jonathan and his Loyalists (they fight the Queen's men in the name of the King, Snow White's father), I don't know how she could've known where Snow White was. Maybe it's in one of the deleted scenes that are on the movie's Blu-ray release? Who knows.

I do appreciate that they expanded the story so that we meet Snow White as a little girl and see what her parents were like before her mother died, and her father married the Evil Queen, so that we see what happened after Jonathan (Prince Charming in the original) kissed her to break the sleeping death spell the Queen had placed on her through the poison apple. It also meant that the Queen's death can happen after that, instead of by chance after the Dwarfs had been chasing her, like in the animated movie. Even the original story by the Brothers Grimm had more in it than the original animated movie did.

In a way, the movie felt like what the animated movie would've been had Disney made it in the '90s, during the Disney Renaissance era (1989-1999), instead of the '30s. It had some of the same story beats as Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994) did. Maybe that's why I enjoyed it so much. It felt familiar and interesting in a way that the other Disney live-action remakes haven't been before. This doesn't mean I'm going to go back and watch all of the other Disney live-action remakes, even the ones I've seen before, but I enjoyed the movie.

Overall, I really enjoyed the movie. It was fun, hopeful, interesting and the songs were great. Between this and Superman (2025), I'm beginning to feel hopeful that Hollywood is starting to inject hope and fun back into the movies, while sending very good messages through the power of cinema, because it really hasn't felt that way to me for a very long time. While the movie didn't do very well at the box office, it has found its audience on Disney+, so I recommend giving it a watch, even if you're not a fan of the Disney live-action remakes.

That's gonna be it for me for today. I might be back tomorrow to do a review of The Hobbit, as I'm almost finished re-reading it (for the hundredth time), and I did review The Lord of the Rings early last year or late the year before. In the meantime have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care. 

Iron Man (2008) Movie Memories

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well for a Friday night. It's Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada this weekend and I have absolutely no plans. I was supposed to be playing D&D with the family this weekend, but those plans changed, which is fine. Tonight I'm here to talk about Iron Man. The movie that launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe back in 2008. But, this isn't a movie review, and I didn't watch the movie before coming on here. On this night, 17 years ago, I sat in my living room with a friend in my program in college and we watched the movie together as neither of us had seen it yet (I hadn't started going to the theaters with Brad on a semi-regular basis yet when Iron Man was released). So let's talk about the night of Friday, October 10th, 2008.

Released on May 2nd, 2008, Iron Man started what is now known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe and made $585.8 million at the box office. At the time superhero movies hadn't become as popular as they were in the 2010s. Marvel had done well with the X-Men movies at 20th Century Fox and the Spider-Man movies at Sony Pictures, but both franchises had started to lose steam with X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006 and Spider-Man 3 in 2007. Other Marvel movies such as Daredevil in 2003 and Fantastic Four in 2005 hadn't done very well, and none of the movies based on DC Comics characters besides Batman Begins (2005) had done very well either in the 2000s. 

Starring Robert Downey Jr. as the titular character, the movie was hugely popular, despite the character of Tony Stark/Iron Man not being a hugely popular comic book character, despite having an animated series in the '90s. However, the crazy thing is is that while Kevin Feige and Jon Favreau hoped to launch a shared cinematic universe, something that hadn't really been done since the Universal Monster movies of the '30s and '40s had stopped coming out, they knew it wouldn't happen overnight and made the movie so it stood alone incase it didn't do well enough to fit with The Incredible Hulk, which Universal was releasing basically a month after Iron Man came out.

During this time I was in college. I had just bombed in the Radio Broadcasting program at Algonquin College, and was licking my academic wounds in the special winter semester track of the General Arts and Sciences program where students who either flunked out of other programs or hadn't been able to start in the fall semester of the school year could still take classes even if they didn't know what they wanted to do next. So I was really busy with schoolwork and wasn't paying too much attention to the news coming out about the movie at the time. I may have seen the trailer on YouTube or had seen a TV spot for the movie during episodes of How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014) and The Big Bang Theory (2007-2019). But, being that I'm not a fan of Marvel in general, and at the time, knew very little about Marvel Comics outside of three Spider-Man comics I'd gotten when I was a kid, and the X-Men and Spider-Man movies, as well as having seen everything else besides the Punisher movies up to that point. I didn't really know who Iron Man was or anything like that. And, while the movie looked cool, I personally just didn't care.

Fast forward to October, 2008, I was fully integrated into the media stream of the General Arts and Sciences (GAS) program at Algonquin, having recovered enough academically to not completely wash out of college. By this point Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk had finished their theatrical runs, with Iron Man faring much better at the box office than The Incredible Hulk (which only made $265.6 million against Iron Man's $585.8 million) did. It also fared much better with critics and the audience than The Incredible Hulk did, and Iron Man had just come out on home video formats (this was before streaming kids), with The Incredible Hulk joining it later in October.

I'd made a friend in my new college program. Her name was Jackie, and we got along pretty well. I'd explained to her that it would be difficult for me to stay at the college after classes to hang out, but, I invited her over for a movie night, complete with pizza. She accepted and we made plans to hang out at my place on a Friday night in early October. This was the semester that we had Political Studies class on Fridays at like 5 pm and were usually out by 6:30, even though the class was supposed to be two hours long, ending at 7 pm. We even had a test that day, so we were out of class even earlier. While I was in class, I'd asked my mom to stop at the gas station and see what she could find in the way of movies to rent for us. I think I'd asked her for something specific, but I don't remember what it was. I just remember she couldn't find whatever movie it was, so picked up Iron Man instead.

Jackie had agreed to drive me home since she was coming over after class anyway, so we stopped at Little Caesar's in Manotick and got ourselves a pizza on our way back to my place. Jackie was the first friend from college I ever had over at my place. The first of two. The other being Andrew, whom I've talked about on the blog during my movies I saw in theaters in the 2000s post a few years ago. Jackie had a boyfriend, so I knew this was just a fun one on one friend hangout rather than the potential for something romantic to start. 

Of course, by 2008 VHS had gone the way of the Dinosaurs, so the only format available at the gas station was DVD, it was also the only format we could watch since my parents hadn't bought a Blu-ray player, with Blu-ray still being relatively new at the time (just a little over two years old at the time). So my mom had rented Iron Man on DVD for us. We ate our pizza first, because I had dogs at the time and had we tried to eat our pizza in front of the TV, they would've tried to steal the entire pizza from us. And then we put on the movie.

I remember liking the movie, but, being that I wasn't a Marvel fan, I had no idea what it meant when Samuel L. Jackson showed up in the post-credits scene as Nick Fury, since I had no idea who Nick Fury even was. I just didn't know that having Fury showing up to recruit Tony for the Avengers Initiative meant something big if the movie did well and Marvel Studios was allowed to start the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

I had fun hanging out, watching the movie, and eating pizza with Jackie that night, but that was kind of where my Marvel movie watching journey ended. The next Marvel movie I saw ended up being X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009. That movie was the first Marvel movie I ever saw in theaters. I'd missed The Incredible Hulk entirely, and the next time Marvel Studios released anything that was part of the MCU was Iron Man 2 in 2010, so I think that two year gap between The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2 kinda quelled the Marvel hype for a while. I don't know for sure because I wasn't locked in on the online geek scene at the time, being that I only watched YouTube for music videos at the time, wasn't part of any Facebook groups, didn't have any other social media accounts (Instagram wasn't even a thing yet, and wouldn't be until October, 2010), and didn't participate in any online forums, except for one Star Trek forum. All I had were the friends I hung out with, and I don't really remember if Brad and I even talked about anything Marvel was putting out aside from going to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009 and then Iron Man 2 in 2010. I just remember him being surprised the day we went to see The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012, when I told him I hadn't seen Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger (both having come out in 2011), or The Avengers, even though I'd also enjoyed Iron Man 2.

Being that he was the only friend I was seeing movies with in 2011-2012, and I hadn't made plans with him, or either of my siblings, to see those three movies, I really don't get why he was surprised that I hadn't seen them. Especially since I didn't have friends over very often to watch movies with, video stores had started closing, and gas stations were close to getting rid of their movie rental sections by that point (Netflix was a thing by then too). 

Alright my friends, I think that's it for me for tonight. I just wanted to come on here and talk about my memories of seeing Iron Man for the first time being that it was 17 years ago, to the day, that I first saw the movie. I had seen it in my memories on Facebook on Wednesday, as I'd been excited to have Jackie over on the Friday, and I think we'd just finalized our plans for that day. 

I think that's it for me for this week as well. I'll be back next week for sure though. So until then have a great night (or whenever you're reading this blog post) and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Empire Records (1995) Movie Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I just finished watching Empire Records with the gang from The VHS Club Podcast, and this week is already pretty crazy, so I decided to write my review while the movie was fresh in my mind. I may include minor spoilers, but, as usual, I'm not going to go through every plotpoint or anything crazy like that. Let's get into it!

Released on September 22nd, 1995, Empire Records takes place in a record store of the same name, over the course of one day. It stars Anthony LaPaglia, Liv Tyler, Renee Zellweger, Ethan Embry, Debi Mazar, and Robin Tunney, among others. 

So tonight was my very first time seeing this movie. With it having come out in late 1995, it wasn't a movie I would've gotten to see as I was 8 years old, going on 9, when it came out. Knowing this is one of Katie and Nat's favourite movies, I was excited to see it. I really wasn't sure what to expect going into the movie. I really enjoyed it though. It did get heavy at times, talking about mental health in a way that most '90s movies shied away from. However, I think it did a great job of handling it.

The cast is spectacular. Liv Tyler and Renee Zellweger's characters, Corey and Gina, were my favourite characters, as well as Ethan Embry's character, Mark. There was just something about them specifically that I really grabbed onto. Mark was just this goofy kid, who worked at the store, and both Liv and Renee played the meltdowns of Corey and Gina during their big fight really well. It was raw and emotional, and very well done.

Robin Tunney's character, Deb, also caught my attention. She very much reminds me of people who have been part of my life. One very close friend in particular, who is still part of my life today. Thankfully. Deb explaining that she wanted to die because she felt invisible hit me deep because of that friend, and another friend who hasn't been with us in 18 years (as of July). I'm not familiar with Robin's work, but she did a wonderful job playing Deb.

The moment that really endeared the movie to me was at the very beginning where Lucas (played by Rory Cochrane), A.J. (played by Johnny Whitworth) walk to the store, entering the one next to it, and you see a Super Nintendo in the store's window. Reminding myself that this movie came out in 1995, and was most likely filmed in 1994, it still surprised me to see it since the Sega Genesis would've still been the SNES's competitor at the time (the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation hadn't come out yet when the movie was filmed). So it was cool to see it in a store window in a movie set in the '90s that was also made in the '90s.

The music in this movie is fantastic. The only songs I actually recognized in the movie were "Romeo and Juliet" by Dire Straits, as it appeared in at least one episode of The Goldbergs during its ten year run, and "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles. All the way back in 2007, when YouTube was first starting I looked up the music video, knowing it was the first music video that aired on MTV in the U.S. back in 1981, which my Communications Technology (Commtech) teacher told me at some point during my last two years of high school. So, even though I wasn't around in 1981, I still have fond memories attached to that song and its music video. The rest of the soundtrack was great. Particularly when Gina sings "Sugar High" by Coyote Shivers, who also plays the character, Berko, in the movie, who sings the song with her.

It sucks that Empire Records bombed when it originally came out, but, like so many movies do, it found its audience on home video, starting in 1996 when it was originally released on VHS. 

I really enjoyed the movie. You couldn't get away with making it today the way they made it back in the '90s, but that's what makes it so interesting and so much fun to watch. It's a time capsule of 1995. It also reminds me of going to places like HMV (defunct Canadian mall music store chain), Sunrise Records (its successor), and Odds & Sods (a smaller, independent, local, media store). Just because of how the Empire Records store looks. Honestly, if you've never seen it, I definitely recommend giving Empire Records a watch. It's currently streaming on Disney+ here in Canada, and is available on VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray. 

Alright my friends, I think that's going to be it for me for tonight. I've got a pretty busy day tomorrow, so I don't think I'll have another blog post out tomorrow. But, there's one I'd really like to do on Friday. I won't say what it is now, but it's going to be a good one. Until then, have a great night and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Superman (2025) Movie Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. Today I'm talking about the 2025 Superman movie, which I picked up on Blu-ray and watched for the first time last night. There might be some spoilers, but I won't be talking about every plotpoint or character in the movie. So, let's get into it.

After the decade of broken promises, constant change in direction, lack of interest from the people at the top, and the absolute mismanagement that plagued the DC Extended Universe, I was extremely skeptical when it was announced that James Gunn and Peter Safran were chosen to be the heads of the DC Studios (formerly DC Films). I'd never heard of Peter Safran before, and I wasn't a fan of James Gunn's work. I liked the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but the second one left me unimpressed, and Gunn is a director I haven't generally been interested in going back and watching the back catalogue of. Also, knowing how badly Warner Bros. managed the DCEU, between rushing through a Superman movie to doing a Batman vs. Superman movie, with Wonder Woman and Doomsday killing Superman immediately, and then going right into a Justice League movie, I did not have high hopes for this new Superman movie or Gunn's plans for the new DC Universe movies.

Superman is a great movie. Unlike Man of Steel (2013), this movie understands who Superman is and what he, as a character, embodies, not just for the DC comic book Universe, but for everybody who has ever picked up a Superman comic or seen any of the previous movies and TV shows. This is the case, not just because the people at the top, in this case, James Gunn and Peter Safran, are fans and understand the character, but because everyone else who worked on the movie, from the cast to the visual effects studio, to the music composer, is a fan as well. Even if their fandom comes from watching the original movie made by Richard Donner, which came out in 1978, or watching Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-1997) and Superman: The Animated Series (1996-2000) in the '90s and Smallville (2001-2011) in the 2000s (as I did). Which really does make for a better movie when everyone involved is a fan of the character they're making a movie about, but also isn't so attached to a certain previous version of the character that the movie ends up being an homage to that version, like Superman Returns (2006) ended up being.

David Corenswet is not just a great Superman, but also an amazing Clark Kent. One of my biggest criticisms of Henry Cavill's version of the character in Man of Steel (2013), Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), and Justice League (2017/2021) is that we never got to meet Clark Kent. Even in BvS, where we got the most of Clark Kent. It always felt like he was Superman and Clark Kent was just a facade that he played when in public. Corenswet, even though we didn't get a whole lot of him as Clark Kent, always made Superman and Clark Kent feel like one person, a singular character that we see throughout the movie, which is how I feel that Tyler Hoechlin portrayed the character on Superman & Lois (2021-2024). To paraphrase Batman in Batman Forever (1995), "I'm Superman and Clark Kent. Not because I have to be, but because I want to be".

I love Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane. Having been spoiled by a great Lois Lane on TV with Elizabeth Tulloch's version first in the Arrowverse with the Elseworlds and Crisis on Infinite Earths crossovers on Arrow (2012-2020), The Flash (2014-2023), Supergirl (2015-2021), DC's Legends of Tomorrow (2016-2022), and Batwoman (2019-2022), I was relieved to see that Rachel's version was as close to the comic book version of Lois as Elizabeth's portrayal was, but also stayed away from just homaging what Margot Kidder did in Superman (1978), Superman II (1981), Superman III (1983), and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), and staying away from the version played by Amy Adams in the DCEU.

Lois needs to have chemistry with both Superman and Clark Kent, whether she knows they're the same person or not. Which means that whoever is playing Lois Lane has to have chemistry with whoever is cast to play Superman/Clark Kent. Which David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan have in abundance in this movie, and Henry Cavill and Amy Adams did not in the DCEU. It almost felt like the Corenswet/Brosnahan versions could easily meld right into the Hoechlin/Tulloch versions on Superman & Lois because each version is at different ends of the lives of Superman/Clark Kent and Lois Lane. Which I love.

Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor is the most unapologetically evil version of the character that I have seen in a movie or on TV since John Shea played the character on Lois & Clark. Not to say the versions of the character we've had in those mediums since then have been bad portrayals but they haven't always been good either. Hoult's version isn't as scary as Michael Cudlitz's version in the fourth season of Superman & Lois, but he's just as dangerous, which Lex Luthor should be, rather than the sympathetic version that we got on Smallville.

The rest of the cast was great. I don't like Guy Gardner as a character, nor am I a big fan of Hawkgirl (or Hawkman for that matter), but I loved Mr. Terrific in this movie. He's not a character that I've ever encountered in the comics, only in seasons 5, 6, 7, and 8 of Arrow, and that version was...interesting to say the least. As for the staff of the Daily Planet, they were awesome. They were also the classic '80s and '90s version too. Perry White, Jimmy Olsen, Steve Lombard, Cat Grant, and Ron Troupe. The Daily Planet was noticeably absent from Superman & Lois, the Arrowverse, and had very little screentime in the DCEU, which is most unfortunate, so I'm glad that Gunn included them here.

I've talked a lot about the characters in this movie, but I'd like to talk about the way the movie was filmed and the special effects. Gunn and his crew filmed on location, they built complete physical sets, including the Fortress of Solitude, did wire work for the stunts (embellished with some CGI for things like Superman flying, among other more difficult stunts), and practical suits for Metamorpho, the rest of the Justice Gang, and Superman, as well as the villains. They shot the exterior shots of the Fortress of Solitude/the Arctic in Norway like Lucasfilm did for Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), they had Cleveland, Ohio, where Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster first created Superman back in 1938, stand in for Metropolis, and built the offices of The Daily Planet inside a bus station. So I thought that was really cool considering most movies don't go to that much effort to produce the film, preferring to do everything on the computer in conjunction with the big holodeck like device known as the Volume, which was first used on The Mandalorian (2019-).

I'm glad I got Superman on Blu-ray because there are several really cool bonus features on it. One of them is a 58 minute documentary on the production of the movie, including the casting. I don't think I've ever seen a movie, that wasn't a Star Wars movie, where everybody who worked on the movie was a fan of the franchise the movie was based on. I mentioned this earlier in this blog post that even the people who composed the music for the movie are fans of Superman. But you can really see it when the production designer talks about designing and building the Fortress of Solitude interiors, or the costume designer talks about how the decision to include the classic red trunks to the Superman costume came about, or how the music composers talk about using John Williams's "Superman Theme" from the 1978 movie as the main theme for this one, along with composing new pieces of music for the movie.

There aren't any deleted scenes or commentaries on the Blu-ray, unfortunately, but what we got in the documentary and the other featurettes is pretty spectacular. It felt like watching the DVDs that we used to get in the 2000s, that, even if they were only a single disc release, it'd still be full of bonus features. So I thought that was really cool. Superman is also available on DVD and 4K Ultra HD for those of you who are physical media lovers, and it's streaming on HBO Max in the U.S. and on Crave here in Canada, AND is available for rental on Amazon and Apple TV.

Overall I had a great time watching Superman. It was a really good movie, and I recommend giving it a try if you haven't already seen it. Parts of it made me feel like I was watching the 1978 movie, parts of it made me feel like I was watching episodes of Superman: The Animated Series, parts of it made me feel like I was watching episodes of Superman & Lois (not just because I watched it on a Tuesday night), and parts of it made me feel like I was reading a Superman comic. 

Alright my friends, that's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back soon with more blog posts coming your way. Until then, have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) Movie Discussion

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. Sorry for my absence over the last two weeks. I got a cold at Comiccon that popped up two days after I posted last here on the blog, and then last week I had a medical appointment. I'm back today though, and I wanted to write about my experience watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time last night. This isn't a review per se. I'm just gonna talk about the movie and my experience watching it. Let's get into it!

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was first released in North America on September 26th, 1975. So I guess, I'm talking about this movie only three days before its 50th Anniversary. One of the reasons I think that this movie didn't do well when it first came out is because of the era it came out in. Critics at the time said that Tim Curry seemed to be having the most fun when filming the movie and you could see it on screen. Which is true as that's one of the things I noticed when watching the movie last night.

The cast is really good, and Tim Curry was amazing in the role. Barry Bostwick, who I know as Mayor Randall Winston in the 1998 sitcom, Spin City, kind of surprised me because anything I've ever seen him in, which isn't a whole lot, he usually steals the show. Not this time. In fact, his character, whose name is Brad, barely does anything, which places the focus solely on Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Curry) and his fellow alien beings. Which was refreshing even from the kinds of aliens I'm used to seeing in Star Trek and Star Wars.

I'd never seen this movie before last night. I'd heard of it, but had never seen it. I actually had the chance to see it in either 2004 or 2005 when my high school's Student Council organized a Rocky Horror Picture Show Night. However my parents couldn't give me a ride to the school for the viewing, and none of my friends could drive yet, so I wasn't able to go. That was probably the first time I'd heard of the movie. 

Naturally, it was mentioned on The VHS Club Podcast last week during their episode on cult classics. Not realizing that I had access to it via Disney+, I didn't really think anything of it. But, after dinner last night I went on Disney+ to see if Empire Records was on there so that, maybe, I could do another virtual movie night with Katie (and Nat this time) from The VHS Club, like she and I did with Clueless earlier this year. It is, so yay. However, having watched Katie and Nat's episode on cult classics last week, when I saw that Empire Records was on there, I went back to the search function, and typed in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" thinking that there was no way it could be on there, not knowing that it was released by 20th Century Fox, which Disney owns now. Sure enough, it popped up and that's when I decided that that would be the movie I would watch for last night.

With it being a movie that came out pre-internet, and it being a cult classic, I was able to escape knowing anything about the movie throughout the course of my life. So, I had no idea what to expect when I put on the movie last night. Aside from Tim Curry being in it, it being a musical, and it being based on a stage show, I didn't know a thing about the movie before watching it. Even Katie and Nat kept things really vague when they talked about the movie on the show last week, since it wasn't the focus of the episode. So I was surprised throughout the movie, which was fun.

At this point in my life, I've seen more movies (and shows) that Tim Curry is in than I have movies (and shows) that he isn't in. But seeing him in his film debut was a real treat, because I've enjoyed him in everything I've seen him in, including Home Alone 2. I loved Richard O'Brien, the originator of the stage show the movie is based on, as Riff Raff as well. 

I don't really know if I can pick one favourite song from the movie. However the two songs I enjoyed the most were "The Time Warp" and "Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me". The beats were just really good on those two songs. 

I'm never going to a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, as it would be too overwhelming for me, but I will definitely watch the movie again in the future. I had so much fun watching it last night and I was so nervous going into it because it's such an iconic movie. It was fun and if you've never seen it before, I highly recommend watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show on streaming, on DVD or, if you really feel you can manage it, one of the midnight showings.

I think that's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back soon for another blog post at some point. Don't know when yet though. Until then have a great rest of your day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Ottawa Comiccon 2025 Haul and Discussion

 Hey everyone, welcome back to the Geek Cave. I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. I had a great day yesterday. That's actually what I'm here to talk about today. This weekend was the 2025 edition of Ottawa Comiccon and I went for the day yesterday. Of course, I went with my best friend, Brad, and another friend of ours, Emily, joined us. There weren't any celebrity guests this year that I was interested in. They were either from Horror franchises that I've never seen, or from the Marvel Netflix shows, or other things that I'm not interested in. That's okay though because the shopping was excellent, and so was the company. 

On top of hanging out with Brad and Emily all day, I saw two friends from high school, DJ and Stephanie, who I've known since middle school and elementary school. I met DJ when I was in grade 5 and I met Stephanie when I was in grade 8. I also saw some of my favourite vendors that I see every year. I always have fun seeing them, especially because they're at pretty much every geek event in Ottawa. The weather was pretty decent the whole day so we were able to eat outside. Apparently it rained a couple of times while we were in the convention, but it wasn't raining when we had our lunch, and it wasn't raining when Brad and I were leaving for the day. So it was pretty fun. Now, you may be wondering what I got at the convention. Let's get into it.

I got eight VHS tapes and a DVD. Five of the tapes were bought for me on Saturday as Brad was at the convention all weekend, and I got the other three, along with the DVD, when I was there yesterday. Looking at the top row from left to right, the first two Star Trek: The Next Generation tapes were ones I had when I was a kid. I've talked about the "Encounter at Farpoint" tape a few times here on the blog, but "When the Bough Breaks" was another first season episode that I had when I was a kid. The rest of the TNG tapes aren't any that I've owned before, but they're some of my favourite episodes of Star Trek. The Star Trek: Voyager tape was quite the find as Paramount didn't release the show on VHS until 2000 and only the first three seasons getting released. Even then only about half of season 3 was released.

So the vendor that I got the Star Trek tapes from is a huge Trekkie, like myself, so Brad had been able to grab "Encounter at Farpoint" and "The Q and the Grey" for $5 in a 2 for $5 deal. Then I bought "All Good Things..." from him yesterday morning for $2. Brad and I went back to Bill's booth yesterday afternoon to say goodbye on our way out the door and Bill told me to pick two more Star Trek tapes and he'd give them to me for free. So that's when I grabbed "When the Bough Breaks" and "The Emissary". So that was really cool.

I grabbed Mallrats on Blu-ray about a month ago during Brad's and my last hangout, and I enjoyed it when I watched it. So, when Brad showed me that a vendor had it on VHS on Saturday, I asked him to grab it for me. He also grabbed the Ewoks and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers tapes. The Ewoks tape is one we had when I was a kid. However, my siblings and I only got to watch it once or twice because the top-loading VCR we had in our space at the time, decided to be a dick and eat the tape on us, rendering it unwatchable. So I was really excited when Brad showed me the picture of it I asked him to grab it for me. The Power Rangers tape is one that Grandma rented for me along with the other four episodes in the "Green with Evil" saga in around 1995, after she'd taken my siblings and I to something. It was either a children's entertainment concert or a movie. I don't remember which, but she rented all five tapes for us. So I saw it from the top of the case and I instantly knew what it was, even if I didn't know which part of "Green with Evil" the tape was.

The 101 Dalmatians DVD was a great find too. Bill had it with the small selection of DVDs he was selling along with the VHS tapes he was selling. I grabbed it because it was the last DVD I needed to complete the Walt Disney Platinum Editions DVD line that I'd been trying to find for a few years now. So now that I have all thirteen releases, I can watch all of them, including the bonus features, and then do an entire blog post on the line as an update to my History of Walt Disney Home Video series that I did a few years ago. So that'll be fun. 

 I also picked up five comic books while I was at the convention. Four Star Trek comics and one Star Wars comic. Aside from Star Trek: Voyager #1, I had all of these comics when I was a kid. My dad had the Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Series Finale comic, but he let me read it once and I always remembered it. So, when I found it for $5, I grabbed it. Star Trek #31 is the first comic I ever got when I was a kid. That, and Star Trek: The Next Generation #31, which I'd already bought a new copy of a while back, so having both issues in my collection again is amazing. The Queen Amidala one-shot that Dark Horse published in 1999 as a tie-in to Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace was another comic I had when I was a teenager. So to find it again, with the picture cover that my original copy had, was spectacular.

I think my favourite finds, besides the VHS tapes, are the soundtrack for The Phantom Menace on CD, and the original paperback edition of Path of Destruction, the first book in the Darth Bane Trilogy. I've never owned any of the Star Wars soundtracks on physical media, and with The Phantom Menace being the first brand new Star Wars movie to be released in my lifetime, I had to grab it. Especially because it was $5. I listened to the CD this morning and loved every minute of it. Path of Destruction, along with the rest of the Darth Bane Trilogy, is a Star Wars novel that I've been wanting to read for a while since it came out at a time where I wasn't keeping up with the then current Star Wars novels, between trying to catch up on The New Jedi Order and some of the early 2000s Clone Wars novels, as well as graduating from high school and then going into college, I didn't have time to really keep up with the number of Star Wars novels that were coming out at the time. I read the first chapter before I went to bed last night. It was pretty good.

All in all I had so much fun at Ottawa Comiccon this year for only the second time I've been to the convention since 2019. Going on the Friday last year was great, but I really didn't have a whole lot of time since the con doesn't open until 3 pm on the Friday. So I'm glad I was able to go on the Sunday this year. It was a lot of fun. And, like I said, I got to hang out with friends and see people I haven't seen in a while. So it was worth the price of admission for sure. 

Alright my friends, that's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back soon with more posts, including this week's Geekdom in 1996 post. So until then, have a great rest of your day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Geekdom in 1996: Star Trek: Voyager S03E02, "Flashback", and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine S05E06, "Trials and Tribble-ations"

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. So, on Friday night I watched the premiere of Geekvolution's new movie, Superhero Rewind: The Movie, on YouTube. For those of you who don't know, Geekvolution is a YouTube channel that has been around since 2008 when the channel's host, Captain Logan, began his review show, Superhero Rewind, where he reviews every superhero movie ever produced. The movie is a sequel to Cap's webseries, Spawn Year, which came out from 2012 to 2014. Anyway, in the movie a version of Captain Logan from 2044 goes back to the year 1996 to convince his 12 year old self (played by his oldest son, Jayson) to never start Superhero Rewind in the first place.

Watching the movie has inspired me to start a new blog series called Geekdom in 1996. In this series I'll be talking about something geeky that came out in 1996 whether it's a book, a video game, a movie, a comic or a TV show, that I've seen previously. It doesn't matter when I saw it, as long as I've seen it. In this installment, I'm talking about two special episodes of Star Trek. Let's get into it!

I decided to do a double feature of the two 30th anniversary episodes of Star Trek that came out in the fall of 1996. Because I'm going in airdate order, the first of these two episodes I'm talking about today is the second episode of the third season of Star Trek: Voyager, "Flashback", which aired on Wednesday, September 11th, 1996. Unlike the two part episode, "Unification", which acted as the 25th anniversary of Star Trek episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Flashback" isn't a present day teamup between TOS and Voyager. Instead it reveals that Tuvok was a member of the crew of the USS Excelsior, under the command of Captain Hikaru Sulu during the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which came out in 1991 to celebrate Star Trek's 25th Anniversary.

Besides George Takei and Grace Lee Whitney, who reprise their roles of Hikaru Sulu and Janice Rand from TOS, the production crew was able to get the majority of the people who played the Excelsior's crew in Star Trek VI to come back to reprise their roles from the movie. I think there was only one or two people who were in the movie that weren't in the episode. Which is pretty impressive considering the movie filmed six years earlier and had come out five years earlier. Obviously they recreated the Excelsior's bridge. 

I remember when I first saw this episode. It was Boxing Day 1996, the Canadian channel that Voyager aired on at the time reran the episode, and my family were up at the cottage to have Christmas dinner with my dad's side of the family. Grandma had put the TV on after we had had dinner and opened presents and the episode was on. This was before I was on the internet, and I wasn't getting issues of Star Trek Communicator, so I had no idea that George Takei was returning to play Sulu in the episode. So when he popped up out of the cloud of coolant from the ruptured plasma conduit, I was pleasantly surprised as Sulu was, and still is, one of my favourite characters in TOS. Other than Rand appearing in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and in the "Tabukan Syndrome" story arc of DC Comics's late '80s-mid '90s Star Trek (TOS) comic book series, which chronicled Sulu's first mission as captain of the Excelsior, I didn't really remember her that well from TOS. Because of that, her return wasn't as big for me as Sulu's return was.

Of all of the characters from Voyager, Tuvok made the most sense since he's a Vulcan, and Vulcans have fairly long lives. And I felt he didn't feel shoehorned into the scenes from Star Trek VI that they recreated for this episode. I also felt that the episode filled in the gaps of what Sulu and the Excelsior were doing inbetween their scenes in the movie as they don't really have that many scenes in the movie. 

There was a novelization for the episode, which I had in the 2010s, but I don't think I actually got around to reading it. Partly because by then I was fully steeped in finishing The New Jedi Order and trying to keep up with the Voyager relaunch novels that were coming out at the time. 

"Trials and Tribble-ations" is a completely different story. Because I didn't watch DS9 until it was on in reruns when I was in high school in the early to mid 2000s, I didn't see this episode until either the mid 2000s during one of those reruns, or I was an adult and I got all of Star Trek (up to that point) on an external hard drive. Regardless, I've seen it a few times, but not nearly as often as other people have.

The episode originally aired on Monday, November 4th, 1996, and unlike "Flashback", this episode didn't rerun on Boxing Day. Or, if it did, it was later at night, after I'd gone to bed. TOS isn't my favourite Star Trek series. I appreciate the show for what it did as the series that launched the franchise, but also what it did for pop culture, and society as a whole, but I honestly prefer the TOS movies over the TV show. However, "Trials and Tribble-ations" really highlights the differences between the TOS era and the TNG/DS9/Voyager era. Not just in terms of technology like communicators and tricorders, but also the visual style of each era. DS9 is visually darker and more atmospheric, while TOS is bright, colourful and cheesy, similar to how the 1966 Batman TV series looks. Weirdly enough the two visual styles blend well together in this episode.

Having seen the bonus features on this episode from the DS9 season 5 DVD box set, as they're included, along with the episode, on the "Trouble with Tribbles" disc in the TOS season 2 Blu-ray set, I understand how much of an undertaking making this episode was. Not just in getting the actor who originally played Arne Darvin in the original episode, Charlie Brill, to come back to reprise the role, but, also placing the DS9 characters seamlessly into the original footage from the 1967 episode of TOS. They also had to recreate the original Enterprise as well as Space Station K-7, and the Klingon Battle Cruiser, as the original effects from the '60s wouldn't hold up on 1996 television in a new episode. There's even a shot from the TOS episode, "Mirror, Mirror" from the end of the episode where Kirk meets the main universe's version of Marlena Moreau, whom he met in the Mirror Universe, which was altered to have Sisko take Marlena's place, so that Sisko could, after a fashion, meet Kirk, since the de-aging techniques that movies and TV shows use today, didn't exist back then, so they couldn't film a brand new scene with William Shatner and Avery Brooks together. 

Story wise, both episodes are pretty straightforward. The time travel in "Trials and Tribble-ations" is well explained with the Orb of Time from the Prophets, and even Tuvok's mind meld was an easy way to understand how Janeway and Tuvok ended up on the Excelsior with Tuvok taking the place of his younger self. 

I really like these two episodes. While "Flashback" is nostalgic for me because of when and where I first watched it, "Trials and Tribble-ations" is just a fun episode that blends TOS and DS9 together perfectly.

That's it for me for today. I'm not sure if I'm going to do other blog posts this week because I have to go for my annual ultrasound on Friday, I'm doing groceries tomorrow, and I'm getting ready for Ottawa Comiccon which is this weekend. I'm going on Sunday since I had to change my plans slightly due to the ultrasound happening early Friday morning. But, I'll be back here as soon as I possibly can. If I don't see you before Comiccon, have a great rest of the week and I will see you next week. Take care.  

Starter Villain (2023) Book Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well for a Monday. So today, I'm going to be reviewing a novel called Starter Villain by John Scalzi, who also wrote the 2012 novel, Redshirts. There might be some minor spoilers in this review, but I'm not sure on that yet. Let's get into it.

Despite having heard of Scalzi's work from people talking about Redshirts for years, I've never read it and I want to so badly, as a fan of Star Trek. However, my sister got me Starter Villain for Christmas last year and I read it as soon as I finished another book I was reading at the time. I loved it. I didn't review it at the time though because I was focusing a lot on nostalgic stuff, and with this book having come out in 2023, it doesn't exactly fit the bill for a piece of nostalgic media. 

So the book is about Charlie Fitzer, who lost his dad and is barely making ends meet as a substitute teacher. When his estranged uncle, Jake, dies, Charlie inherits millions of dollars and all of his uncle's businesses. However, he also inherits all of the dangers that come along with those businesses. He also gets a secret volcano island lair though, and finds out his cats talk and dolphins are planning on going on strike due to their working conditions. 

If you're confused about anything in that synopsis, you've never watched the James Bond series, or the Austin Powers Trilogy. Or any spy thriller or even superhero movies and shows. While having nothing to do with Science Fiction properties like Star Trek or Star Wars, Starter Villain is one of the geekiest books I've ever read. And I've read Ready Player One and Armada by Ernest Cline. Basically this book is James Bond meets The Godfather by way of Austin Powers. Like I said in the synopsis, Charlie has a secret island volcano lair like Dr. Evil does in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. 

The thing about Scalzi's writing is that it's satire. So, even though the stakes are real and the dangers the characters face are real, it's meant to be humourous and make fun of the James Bond movie tropes that people love so much. The same way that Seth MacFarlane or Mel Brooks make fun of the tropes in the genres they love in movies like A Million Ways to Die in the West, Spaceballs, Ted, and Blazing Saddles.

My favourite scenes in this book is whenever Charlie talks to the dolphins. There's just something about the dolphins that make me smile. Probably because they serve as a commentary, along with Mathilda Morrison, on things happening in the world currently. Especially when it comes to rich people and how frustratingly despicable the majority of them are. Mathilda, or Til, is Charlie's assistant and had been his uncle's assistant before that.

Something I found interesting about Starter Villain is that Charlie has no love interest in the book. He'd been married, but he and his wife had gotten divorced at some point prior to the beginning of the book, so he's single throughout the book. Yet, Scalzi chose not to give him a love interest. Til is a badass assistant, but there's nothing between her and Charlie, and the only other women in Charlie's life are his two cats, Hera and Persephone. So there really isn't anyone for Charlie to become romantically involved with.

Overall, this was a really good book. If you like Kevin Smith films, Seth MacFarlane films and TV shows, or Mel Brooks movies, you'll love this book. It has all the right kind of poking fun at movie genres that few other things end up being able to do.

That's it for me for today. I'll be back soon with more posts. Until then, have a great rest of your day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.  

Superman #149 (1961) Comic Book Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well for a Sunday morning. Today I decided to do a quick comic book review. For this review we're going back to 1961 to talk about a Superman comic. Let's get into it!

Superman #149 tells the tale of "The Death of Superman". No, not THAT "Death of Superman", a different one. These stories would be called "Elseworlds" these days, but in the '50s and '60s, DC would occasionally publish what they referred to as "imaginary stories" for Superman and Batman. I think they did it for their other characters too, but Superman and Batman are the two that I know of for sure. For Superman, they put him in all kinds of situations, from being married to Lois Lane to being split into Superman Red and Superman Blue, to being killed (this issue). Oddly enough they actually did all three of these things in the regular Superman stories in the '90s, with Superman Red/Superman Blue being the most notorious storyline that they did in the late '90s (apart from giving him the mullet when he came back from the dead in 1994).

This story, written by Superman's co-creator, Jerry Siegel, takes place on an Earth where Luthor discovers the cure for cancer as a ploy to trick Superman into believing that he'd turned over a new leaf and wanted to do good, instead of evil. Remember, this isn't businessman, Lex Luthor, this is the mad scientist/evil genius Luthor. So everything we know about him now was different back then. Obviously, he's still evil since he'd use the cure for cancer in a scheme to kill Superman. I mean, he didn't use the cure to kill Superman, he used lethal doses of Kryptonite for that, but the cure for cancer was developed with the intention of being put into a position where he could kill Superman. After Superman is killed, Supergirl takes over his job of protecting Metropolis and the world, having been kept as Superman's secret weapon up to this point. This is the original Kara Zor-El version of Supergirl, though her secret identity is Linda Lee rather than Kara Danvers or Linda Danvers or whatever she is called in different periods of her publication history.

What's interesting is that when Doomsday killed Superman in Superman #75 in 1993, people thought that Supergirl was going to replace him. It was the Matrix Supergirl at that point, but I'm wondering if readers who'd been around 32 years earlier, when this issue came out, got that idea from this issue, because there are a few things that Dan Jurgens and the other Superman writers took from this issue for the "Funeral for a Friend" story arc. Namely the size of Superman's funeral. Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash, and Green Arrow are present as are Lois Lane, Perry White, Jimmy Olsen, Lana Lang, and Superman's Mermaid ex-girlfriend, Lori Lemaris. Lori is a character that hasn't been used much since the '60s, so modern readers might not know who she is. I definitely didn't until about twelve years ago. More on that later.

The only thing that confuses me is how Luthor managed to kidnap Lois, Perry, and Jimmy without Superman noticing that they're missing. Mostly because he works at The Daily Planet with them as Clark Kent, but there's no panel showing Clark seeing that his three friends aren't at work or him flying around, looking around for them as Superman. He just sees Luthor's distress signal as other criminals had been gunning for Luthor thinking he'd turned his back on crime, not realizing it was a ruse to kill Superman. 

There's one other panel that I'd like to discuss. During Superman's funeral, Lana thinks about how she'd been Superman's childhood friend in Smallville. I know all about the Superboy comics and how Clark had been Superboy before he became Superman in the comics of the '40s to the '80s, but Lana's thought dialogue doesn't specify if she's talking about Superboy or Clark Kent. In the regular stories during this time, neither Lana nor Lois know that Superman is really mild mannered reporter, Clark Kent, and Lana never discovered that Clark and Superboy were one and the same. But this story takes place on another Earth within the pre-Crisis Multiverse, so could the Lana of this story know that Clark/Superboy/Superman were the same person? There's no way to tell, because Clark Kent isn't even mentioned by the other characters after Superman dies.

The art in this issue was done by Curt Swan, who was the definitive Superman artist from 1948 until 1986. Other artists worked on the book naturally, but Swan was THE Superman artist of the '60s and '70s. I really like his art style, and when I think of Superman in the '60s, that's the version I think of, because even his cartoon version from the 1966 Filmation series, The New Adventures of Superman, looks like the Curt Swan version.

Obviously this issue is really hard to find nowadays, even in back issue long boxes at cons. It was collected in a few collected editions, the most recent being in Superman: A Celebration of 75 Years, which is a hardcover collection that DC published in 2013. I don't think it's still in print being that it's been 12 years since it was published, but that's how I read this issue, as I got that book back in either 2013 or early 2014 with Chapters gift cards that I got for my birthday and Christmas in 2013. It's still a fun read though and an interesting one given what we got in the '90s with The Death of Superman.

That's it for me for today. I'll be back soon with more fun posts throughout the week. Until then have a great rest of the day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Star Trek Novels, Comics, and Video Games that are most likely inspirations for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (2025)

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. It's Wednesday, which means it's time for this week's non review blog post. Today I wanna talk about three pieces of Star Trek media that aren't a movie or TV show that could be inspirations for the upcoming TV series, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Let's get into it.

While there has never been a movie or TV series that has been set at Starfleet Academy, the institution has been part of Star Trek lore pretty much since the very beginning of the franchise. There have also been several novels and comics that have Starfleet Academy. The ones I'm talking about today are ones where the majority of the stories's cast are completely original characters with established characters from the TV shows and movies appearing as background characters or supporting characters only. So, I won't be talking about the junior novels that have main characters from TOS, TNG, and Voyager as young adults at Starfleet Academy.

Published by Marvel comics from 1996 to 1998, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy was a 19 issue comic book series that focused on a group of cadets, with the only pre-established character as a main character in the story is Nog from DS9. Both Benjamin and Jake Sisko appear in issue #17, Pike appears in issues 9 and 10, and Charlie Evans appears in issue 8. Otherwise it's all original characters, including an Andorian, a Vulcan inhabited by a Romulan (don't look at me, I'm just looking this up on Memory Alpha), a Betazoid, and a Trill. While the time period of this series is set during the fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons of DS9 (seasons 2, 3, and 4 of Voyager), I'd say this series is probably the most likely out of all of these that Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau, the showrunners of the new TV show, took inspiration from for the show.

The next item on the list is the 1997 PC game, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Once again, while Kirk, Sulu, and Chekov appear in the game, as this game is set between Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the cadets are all original characters who don't appear in any other piece of Star Trek media outside of the novelization of the game. You play as Cadet David Forrester, a human, and your job is to assemble a crew that also seems to include a Vulcan and an Andorian. This game is unique in that it has full video cutscenes rather than animatic sequences or static images with text over it like the various console video games Star Trek had in the '80s and '90s. 

As mentioned, there was a novelization for the game. It was published by Pocket Books in 1997, a few months before the game was released. Having never read the novel, I have no idea how much of the game's story is left out of the book being that the mediums are very different from one another. Memory Alpha only list Kirk, Sulu, Chekov and Forester (his name is spelled with two Rs in the game apparently) as characters in the novel, Memory Beta, the Wiki for Star Trek novels, comics, video games, and other tie in media, lists all of the characters from the game for the novelization. Being that I don't have a computer that can play the game, and even if I did, finding a copy of the game would be extremely difficult, the novelization might be something I can get my hands on at some point.

The final piece of media on this list is the 1998 Star Trek: The Next Generation novel, The Best and the Brightest by Susan Wright. Once again, all the cadets are original to this novel, but characters from TNG, DS9, and Voyager are either seen or mentioned throughout the book. The novel also spans from the end of the fifth season of TNG to the fourth season of DS9, and heavily features the destruction of the Enterprise-D in Star Trek Generations. Like with the comic and the game, this novel's cast includes other races besides humans. However, while a Vulcan cadet appears in the first chapter, he isn't part of the main cast, and doesn't appear after the first two or three chapters. However, there is a newly-joined Trill, a Bajoran, two humans, a Rex, which is a felinoid race, and an Oppalassan, which is a humanoid race who goes through puberty in their 20s rather than their early teens.

Any of these three stories would be easy to pull inspiration from for the upcoming TV show. While Star Wars's Expanded Universe of novels, comics, and video games is more well known, as is its impact on the Star Wars movies and TV shows, Star Trek's Expanded Universe has had just as much impact on the TV shows and movies. For example Kirk's middle name was Tiberius in the novels for about ten years, or longer before it was spoken on screen for the first time in Star Trek VI, as was Uhura and Sulu's first names, Nyota and Hikaru. Not to mention Star Trek: Early Voyages featured the adventures of Pike, Spock and Number One aboard the Enterprise both before and after "The Cage" similar to what Strange New Worlds is doing on television today. 

The world of Star Trek novels and comics isn't as well known as the Star Wars Expanded Universe is. Likely because Star Trek is a TV franchise first and a movie franchise second, so while the novels and comics were especially important in the '70s and again between 2005 and 2017, because we haven't had a whole lot of periods where there hasn't been a Star Trek show airing or a Star Trek movie being released, the novels, comics, and video games have felt more like tie in material rather than carrying the bulk of the franchise due to the uncertainty of more movies being made the way the Star Wars Expanded Universe felt.

Nonetheless, the Star Trek novels and comics have evidently served as inspiration for a lot of things in the Star Trek movies and TV shows, with SNW being inspired by the novels and comics set during Pike's tenure as commanding officer of the Enterprise.

Alright my friends, that's it for me for today. I'll be back soon for more reviews in the near future. Until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.