I’ve had a lot of time to think on this season of Doctor Who. In many ways, it’s been the season I’ve looked forward to the most in the entire modern run of the show. Despite my reservations about Chibnall at a showrunner, despite the cynical tone of his previous contributions to the series and the uneven tone of Torchwood, I was buoyed by the prospect of change. After all, Steven Moffat’s first season as showrunner gave us what was the best season of the revival until Capaldi’s second season five years later. Doctor Who is a show built on change – that’s one of the reasons it has endured for as long as it has. If one is to love this show, one must embrace change.
However, not all change is good change, and while Whittaker’s turn as the Doctor absolutely sizzles, the writing and tone of the season have not. Let’s review, shall we?
Last week I tweeted about a song that had been stuck in my head that I discovered was, in fact, this piece of music from Ocean Software’s Jurassic Park game for the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy:
This was a little surprising because I’ve never actually played Jurassic Park on either of these systems. I had the Amiga version as a kid, but it’s an almost entirely different game with its own distinct soundtrack that sounds nothing like its Nintendo counterparts.
LaserFrog tweeted back at me that actually the piece of music was lifted from a Konami game called Comic Bakery for the Commodore 64. BEHOLD:
See? Jurassic Park adds an intro, but it’s basically the same piece of music. But I haven’t played Comic Bakery either, so where the Hell did I hear this tune? How did it get stuck in my head for three months?
The answer, as it turns out, is on the Amiga. See, we didn’t buy most of the games we had when I was a kid. We copied friend’s games, and we had an extensive library of pirated titles. Most of these titles’d had their copy protection circumvented (or cracked, for some reason) by cracking groups like Fairlight, Paradox and Skid Row, and they’d often slap a fancy intro onto the disk which would appear before the game itself loaded. I got very used to seeing these intros as a kid, and some of them featured some very snazzy animation and catchy music.
It turns out that much of the music was catchy for a reason – it had been lifted wholesale from other games. Check out this crack intro for Crystal’s release of the Team17 platformer Superfrog:
That tune sounds a little familiar, don’t you think?
I don’t remember ever watching that intro all the way through, but I must have done because that tune was lodged in my head for a long time, resurfacing earlier this year. Then there’s the weird chain that led to my discovering where this piece came from – hearing it in Jurassic Park, learning it originated in Comic Bakery, then realizing I’d heard it in Superfrog, where you’d not hear it at all if you owned a legit copy of the game (as I now do, of course).
That absolutely fascinates me. This goes beyond my love of video game ports – I wonder if there is other brilliant video game music I’ve heard in cracking intros like this?
Wreck-It Ralph opened last month, and I may well have become obsessed with it. I’ve seen it three times now – twice in 2D, once it 3D. I’d love to see it a fourth time at the El Capitan before it vanishes. It came at a pivotal time in my life – in September I had what I can only describe as a small breakdown, in October I lost my job, and in November my girlfriend and I parted ways. My life is in a state of upheaval right now.
At a time in my life when I’m questioning every action I’ve taken, every decision I’ve made, that has led me to this point, and when I find myself wanting more out of life, Wreck-It Ralph speaks to me.
About two weeks ago I was with some friends discussing what a possible sequel to Wreck-It Ralph might be about. Director Rich Moore has all but confirmed that they’re doing one, and he’s suggested he’d want the follow-up to explore console gaming and online gaming. That got me thinking: How exactly would they do that?
As I was talking, the story I’d write for a Wreck-It Ralph follow-up basically fell out of my mouth. It was, I thought, basically perfect, though not strictly speaking accessible. Literally no one at Disney would want to make my idea. Nevertheless, I’m going to share it with you now. Mild spoilers for Wreck-It Ralph follow. (more…)
It’s the BBC’s most popular show, but BBC Worldwide has no idea how to handle it.
There’s no doubt about it – Doctor Who‘s popularity has soared since its move to BBC America in 2009. The network has been pushing and promoting the show with vigor, giving it the star treatment and prime-time advertising that SyFy never afforded it. They’ve been pushing the show on social networks – the official Doctor Who Tumblr page is a little annoying at times but there’s no doubt they have a winning social media strategy. BBC America are amazing and are undoubtedly one of the key reasons for the show’s current popularity here in the States.
BBC Worldwide, on the other hand, appears to be staffed by incompetent morons who don’t really seem to understand what they’re sitting on.
The international sales arm of the BBC are the cause of a number of issues for the show – just speak to anyone working for a company licensed to make Doctor Who merchandise – but nowhere is this more apparent than the show’s, frankly, appalling presence on Netflix. Since the show was added to Netflix in 2008 it has consistently been mishandled, mislabeled and mismanaged, and nobody at BBC Worldwide seems to have any interest in remedying any of the problems viewers may encounter when watching the show.
BE ADVISED: While the post itself doesn’t contain any spoilers, there are two inline images that contain spoilers for for Game of Thrones season one, and Saturday’s Doctor Who series 7 premiere “Asylum of the Daleks”. You have been warned.
It takes a lot, a lot, to get me watching a new TV show these days. It’s not because I’m a hipster who doesn’t want to watch the same thing everyone else is watching (though I will confess that in my teens I avoided the Harry Potter novels and films specifically because all of my friends were obsessed with the bloody things), but because most current shows have been thoroughly, utterly ruined for me by everybody on the internet everywhere ever before I’ve even had a chance to read a series synopsis.
Everybody is talking about Breaking Bad at the moment. Everybody. It’s the show’s final season – or, as is my understanding, the first half of its final season, the rest of which will be shown in the new year – and the internet is ablaze. People are nattering about it on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and all those other social networks I’m not hip enough to know about yet. Also Google+. Tumblr in particular is rather boisterous, with people posting quotes, clips of the show in subtitled GIF format, and reams of fanart based on episodes that aired less than 24 hours prior.
Now you know how Game of Thrones season one ends. Thanks, internet.
Breaking Bad isn’t the only show that suffers this problem, either. The pilot for CBS’ Elementary, their attempt to modernize Sherlock Holmes following the BBC’s rather successful go of it, recently leaked, and within minutes people on Tumblr were posting quotes, breakdowns and, of course, GIFs. Doctor Who‘s seventh series also started this Saturday in the UK, and Tumblr had already thoroughly ruined the show long before the east coast premiere rolled along later that night.
When Game of Thrones is running on HBO, damn near everybody on the internet knows what happened in the latest episode whether they’re watching it or not. When a new episode of Community airs, Tumblr almost immediately becomes a Dan Harmon fansite, and remains that way for the following 48 hours.
Tumblr cannot help but build its nest out of screengrabs, spoilers and snippets like a demented pop culture magpie. Amidst it all, the by now familiar cries of “ALL THE FEELS”, “DEAD” and “ASDFJGFGJKSDJK”, punctuated by reaction GIFs that inexplicably also spoil other shows and films you haven’t managed to get around to seeing yet.
For someone who spends a lot of time on Tumblr, this represents an enormous problem – seeing a TV show you want to watch becomes not just entertainment but a social obligation; something you have to do to avoid being behind the curve. This means torrenting the show before it comes up on Hulu the next day (or, in the case of Doctor Who, after it airs on the BBC but before its North American premiere on BBC America or SPACE), or, if you’re one of those people who still inexplicably has cable, actually sitting down to watch the show as it goes out live.
Imagine that for a moment – having to actually schedule your life around a television show. What is this, the Dark Ages?
A lovely piece of Doctor Who fanart that, if you haven’t seen “Asylum of the Daleks” yet, has the potential to utterly ruin the climax of the episode for you. [Source: Wil Wheaton, via Tumblr]DVRs and digital distribution are a Godsend – they allow us to digest content at our leisure. We are in a golden age of television not just because of shows like Louie, Breaking Bad and Doctor Who, but because we are no longer shackled to the television, forced to watch something as it goes out. We can record it or, better still, log on to Hulu or the iPlayer, to watch when convenient for us.
But to anybody who is active on a social network like Tumblr, that freedom is countered by the desire not to have your favourite show utterly and irrevokably ruined by some well-meaning fan who absolutely has to draw a picture of that new character in the latest episode right fucking now, utterly ruining the plot twist for the episode in the process.
Even webseries like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries are chewed up and spat out by social network users – why sit down to watch the show when it’s already splattered all over my dashboard in GIF form?
There are, of course, ways of avoiding this flurry of spoilers. You could install Tumblr Savior, a plugin that allows you to block posts including certain words or hashtags (such as, for instance, #doctor who or #breaking bad). It’s not an ideal solution, however – for a start, it’s predicated on the person posting about the show actually tagging the post, or even including the words you’re blocking. Not ideal if that person you’re following for their exceptional fanart doesn’t tag any of their posts or even post text in their image posts.
I could avoid Tumblr and Twitter entirely, but that feels like not going to a bar simply because you don’t like the house ale, or deciding not to visit an art gallery because you know they’re currently running an exhibit of paintings by an artist you don’t like. It’s like throwing your iPod out the window because you might hear an Alanis Morissette song, and you’re just not in the mood to listen to “Head Over Feet” right now.
While these two solutions might keep me safe from the shows I’m actively watching, like Community and Doctor Who, it doesn’t save the shows I haven’t started watching yet, like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. I’ve seen neither show yet, not even so much as a pilot, because while Tumblr has convinced me that I absolutely have to see them, it’s also ruined every single fucking plot point in every episode that’s broadcast. There’s no point in ordering any box sets, no real sense in adding a show to my Netflix queue, when I already know what’s going to happen. These shows have, in a very real sense, been spoiled.
So my answer, when people nag me about why I haven’t started watching obviously brilliant TV shows yet, is that I simply can’t anymore. I crave new experiences, new stories and new media, but social networking is actively preventing me from receiving those things. Short of stepping away from these platforms and declaring myself a digital hermit, I don’t really know what else to do.
Y’know, other than just watching the shows to watch them. Which is obviously madness.
An example of exactly the sort of thing that should never, ever happen.
There has been a lot of talk over the last few years about a potential Doctor Who movie. Rather a lot of people seem to think this is an absolutely terrible idea, and given thetrackrecord I don’t particularly blame them.
Adding insult to injury, I recall reading somewhere that Davies actually liked the idea proposed by the rumour, though I can’t find anything about that online. If the man responsible for Doctor Who‘s triumphant return truly believes that such an awful, awful idea is actually worthy of consideration, then the good Doctor’s cinematic future does not look especially bright.
We all know what the fans want – they want something connected to the TV show. They want something that serves connects to the series in much the same way the X-Files movie was a part of the TV show continuity (though X-Files: Fight the Future might not be the best example). They want a movie featuring the current Doctor, whomever that may be at the time, ad his current companions.
That’s a pretty good list – and we know it’s good, because current showrunner Steven Moffat wants exactly the same thing – but the fans probably wouldn’t stop there. They’d likely want to see some, or all, of the Doctor’s greatest foes – the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, the Sontarans, the Weeping Angels, the Silurians, the Ice Warriors. They’d probably want to see multiple incarnations of the Doctor. They’d want something rife with canon ejaculate, a celebration of everything Doctor Who is.
Which is entirely the wrong way to go with it.
Too many cooks spoil the plot.
Let’s face it, if fans got everything they wanted we’d probably end up with something not too dissimilar from “The Five Doctors”, which is a fun story but not especially well-written, or something along the lines of“The Stolen Earth”/”Journey’s End,” which is a tangled mess of comic-book style crossover that lacks a good pay-off and isn’t able to properly accommodate all of the characters that have been shoehorned into the narrative.
So, what’s the logical middle-ground? A Doctor Who movie would need to be big bold, brash and every bit the spectacle of the television series, existing within the continuity of the television series but not necessarily drawing heavily from it so as to serve as a jumping-on point for potential newcomers. It would need to stand alone as a story, basically, complete with a unique villain or threat that hadn’t been seen in the television series before.
Basically, it would need the same approach that Moffat takes to writing his Christmas specials.
Steven Moffat has commented on the structure of the Christmas stories; that you have to write for a different audience when writing for a show that’s going out on Christmas day – the core of the Doctor as a man who arrives in the TARDIS and fixes things must be preserved, but beyond that the story needs to work for people who have never seen the show before. Great Christmas television takes precedence over a great episode of Doctor Who, and while some of the best Doctor Who stories include episodes like “The Christmas Invasion” and “The Next Doctor”, one cannot argue that these do not make for especially good Christmas day viewing to anyone who isn’t already a fan of the series.
This wouldn’t make for a good movie either, to be honest.
Obviously I’m not suggesting that a Doctor Who movie be a Christmas affair or be devoid of scifi elements, and obviously Moffat’s Christmas offerings so far have been far from feature quality (the only Christmas special I think would make a halfway decent movie is probably “Voyage of the Damned”, which isn’t even the best Christmas special), but I feel Moffat’s approach to the Christmas episodes would be ideal for a feature film. Fuse that with the sort of storytelling we saw in “The Pandorica Opens”/”The Big Bang” or “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead” and I think we’d have a pretty solid Doctor Who movie on our hands.
Just don’t let David Yates anywhere near it. Please. For the love of Glod.
Oh dear. It turns out Seth Macfarlane’s new movie, Ted, bears some similarity to a webcomic called “Imagine This“, leading cartoonist Lucas Turnbloom to believe he’s the victim of a rather unfortunate case of plagiarism. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Sam Logan of “Sam and Fuzzy” also believes Ted may be in part based on his comic. Oh no! That dastardly Seth Macfarlane. He thinks he can just take ideas he likes just because he’s preposterously rich, incredibly famous, and occasionally brilliant? The nerve of some people.
My problem with all this, besides my unfortunate use of the word “bears” in the previous paragraph, is that I’m not terribly convinced that Ted is based on either of these comics in any way, shape or form. The “rude, crude, loudmouthed teddy bear” concept is far from new, as anybody who collects Bad Taste Bears or has played Naughty Bear will attest, and anybody whose ever sat and wondered what Calvin and Hobbes would be like if the eponymous child grew up will probably have gone down the “What if he’s a slacker and Hobbes is a jerk?” route.
Even the Toy Story trilogy touched upon some of these ideas. These are not especially original or clever notions. If they were, I think Turnbloom and Logan would probably have to turn their weapons on each other – aren’t they both basically doing the same thing, after all?
“A kid hugging a bear? I drew a kid hugging a bear! Get my lawyer on the phone!”
What sets these ideas apart is execution, and as Ted hasn’t even opened in theaters yet we have zero basis for comparison other than a few trailers and some selectively chosen storyboard/screengrabs (a few of which are profoundly stupid). To point a finger and yell “Plagiarism!” before we even reach Zero Day, especially for such a general concept, strikes me as a kneejerk reaction to a potential non-problem. It feels very much like people are making a mountain out of flat terrain, here.
Edit: As a testament to just how not-at-all-unique this idea is, my friend Jill just pointed me in the direction of another webcomic about a maladjusted teddy bear living with an adult male, called Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles, which started in 1999 – almost a full decade prior to Imagine This.
Try not to dwell on the MSPaint-looking “Closed” sign.
Next year, Arrested Development returns after having been mercilessly cancelled by Fox back in 2006. Ten brand spanking new episodes are being produced for distribution exclusively via Netflix, which is very exciting news for fans of great comedy.
My worry, though, is that the new Arrested Development is going to make the same mistake that other similarly revived shows made upon their triumphant returns. Shows brought back from the brink of disaster have a worrying habit of wasting their second chance nodding at their past rather than looking optimistically towards their future.
Two of my favourite shows, Futurama and Red Dwarf, were revived in recent years, and both fell prey to nostalgia. The first of the straight-to-DVD Futurama movies, “Bender’s Big Score”, seemed to hinge almost entirely on winks to the audience, nostalgic self-referential gags, and “Hey, remember this minor character and/or in-joke?” moments. “Into The Wild Green Yonder”, the fourth and final Futurama movie, also ended on a very forced note that tried to wrap up as many elements of the show as possible very quickly while also providing an opening should the show return for a full season (as it did last year, with somewhat disappointing results).
Similarly, the 2009 Red Dwarf miniseries “Back to Earth” intentionally recycled and referenced elements of previous episodes rather than making the effort to stand out and be it’s own thing. While in Red Dwarf‘s case this can be forgiven to an extent – the miniseries was an anniversary event intended to celebrate the series – it does unfortunately mean that, as a story, “Back to Earth” struggles to stand on its own two feet.
Other successful show revivals such as Doctor Who and Family Guy somehow found it within themselves to soldier onward almost as though they’d never been off the air (aside from the opening scene of Family Guy‘s fourth season, which pokes fun at the Fox Network’s predilection for greenlighting and cancelling shows almost in the same breath).
With Doctor Who, then-showrunner Russell T Davies made a very deliberate choice not to refer heavily to the classic series, despite being a continuation. This made the first episode much more accessible and, more importantly, didn’t bog it down in self-reference and continuity. Anyone can watch “Rose” and enjoy it, but I have a hard time imagining non-Futurama fans getting much out of “Bender’s Big Score”.
The new Arrested Development ultimately has to make good on the promise that “new” implies – new stories featuring the same characters. No wasting time paying lip-service to the past, just focusing on what’s to come. If they can check that box, if they can get through the ten episodes without relying too heavily on Remember-Whens and in-jokes, then they can’t go wrong.
will attest, and anybody whose ever sat and wondered what Calvin and Hobbes would be like if the eponymous child grew up will probably have gone down the “What if he’s a slacker and Hobbes is a jerk?” route.
