New stuff I've seen...

[Bravo]

More "old stuff I've seen"
Watched some episodes of "The Wild, Wild West" on MeTV last weekened. I'd forgotten it was a fun show. Used to watch its reruns as a kid. That Will Smith movie tainted my memory. I read that it was cancelled after season 4, despite good ratings, because it was labelled as too violent and the network heads were cowards.
Chris Pine would be a decent modern Jim West, but best they leave it alone.

[Felix]

Watching X-Men the animated series the whole way through for the first time.


X-MEN

[Bravo]

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (Nteflix) Season 3 Episode 1
- Alan Oppenheimer as voice of King Grayskull (flashbacks/ghost)
- Snakemen are generics, but called rattlors and lashers. Okay. Also, havoc energy so they can be blasted and destroyed but then reform, sometimes into giants.
- "The sword of power cannot be used to take life"...sure whatever, thanks, King Expositionor.
- Everyone's on some quest. Skeletor and Rampage to find Grayskull's bones. The good guys I forget. The other baddies (Evil-lyn, Beastman, Kronis) trying to use the snakemen's havoc to get their powers back.
- Old Guardian of Grayskull (Sorceress) shows up alive on what I guess is Stridor.

My only complaint here is the newer characters are cameos if at all. There's Webstor cameo. Triklops appears, but that drone thing is so removed from other versions of Triklops, it's hard to think of it as such.

[Bravo]

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (Netflix) Season 3 Episode 2,3 and 4
Spoilers.

Episode 2
- Boring repetitive fight scenes against snake men that cannot be destroyed since the just reform.
- Some crap happens...I can't recall. Webstor and spider people appear and fight snakemen.
- He-Man finds out Skeletor and Rampage want to go to King Grayskull's tomb.
- Grayskull's tomb protected by monstroids, ancient crab machines, only vaguely like the toy Horde monstroid.
- Eldress is fading because...I don't know, why bring her back solid and then slowly have her die?
- Mer-Man shows up at the end, apparently the last of his kind and voiced by George Takei.

Episode 3
- Evil-Lyn Trapjaw and Beastman get their powers back. Yawn.
- Tri-klop's host is cute young woman whom i don't even remember from last season. When free of the drone, I can't sure if she's on their side or just going with the flow.
- The create some big techno-magic bat ship to fly them to the arctic to join the storyline with everyone else.
- Mer-Man is a level boss in this show, has psychic attack powers, and shoots tentacle things from his palms. I guess that makes up for his lame Revelations appearance.
- Mer-Man wants Grayskull resurrected. Because Grayskull was good to the merfolk.
- Eldress apparently killed Grayskull or something, so Mer-Man hates her.
- Eldress finally fades away, merges what's left of her energies with Teela, who flashbacks to being dumped on Man-E-Faces as a toddler. Teela's appearance as Sorceress changes somewhat, so an excuse for another action figure?
- More monstroid fighting with the Masters and evil Masters and...yawn
- Rampage (with Skeletor's spirit) and He-Man enter the tomb, then it closes.

Episode 4
- Everyone fights each other and/or Merman and/or Snakemen for most of the episode. I literally fell asleep and had to rewatch most of the episode.
- Evil-Lyn helps Teela for some reason. Maybe she's really Teela's other mom?
- Duncan's Wind Raider is destroyed, it was like the Millenium Crest/Razor Falcon of the show or something.
- He-Man fails to stop Rampage and Skeletor, because he won't hurt Crass/Rampage. They use the whatever snakemen crest thing that controls them to merge all snake-men into a giant snake and swallows He-Man.
- Giant snake bursts from tomb, crushing Merman after Takei says his trademark "Oh, my!"
- Recalling that Grayskull had to use havoc to defeat snakemen, He-Man absorbs havoc energy inside snake's stomach to get strong and kill it. We think he's gone bad, then he's like "Wazzzup?!" to everyone.
- Somehow King Randor is the everyman in all this, lacking any powers.

[Bravo]

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (Netflix) Season 3 Episode 5 and 6

Episode 5
-He-Man is high on havoc, the power sword rejects him. He leaves it and leaps great distances to go stop Skeletor.
-Teela spells out to the audience that she was always part of Eldress and now is whole...I think.
-Teela and Man-At-Arms with our powers combined, create the Talon Fighter from wind raider wreckage. You'd think they'd use monstroid parts, too or something.
-Evil-lyn abandons Beastman and Trapjaw in arctic, but they repair the "Pain-thor" and get away anyway.
-Teela recruits Stratos and his team (a big bug, Webstor and Mosquitara) to help stop He-Man, because we don't want He-Man to get there in time to stop Skeletor from regaining physical form, do we?
-Somehow they restrain He-Man using actual teamwork. What?
-Teela reveals via motion comic (yeah, way to save money) that to defeat the snakemen, King Grayskull tapped into havoc too much and became a skekegod, so we get Allan Oppenheimer doing his Skeletor voice briefly. So Eldress had to defeat Grayskull.
-He-Man powers down, but Adam still have havoc energy in him, and it's beyond Sorceress/Teela's ability, so we can segue to going to see ORK-O next episode.

Episode 6
-ORK-O can't do real magic, but Teela sends him to see the real Orko the Great, who is someplace weird.
-Orko is voiced by Wallace Shawn. Inconceivable!
-Evil-Lyn can't get in Grayskull but has a talk-fight or something Rampage, so when Rampage goes back from heel to face, it will seem rationalized. I dunno.
-Tri-klops, just the flying drone, is spying on the Masters hoping to steal power sword.
-ORK-O gets spell from Orko, Teela uses it and it works, but the orb the spell in drops and breaks.
-THis leads to body swapping nonsense, and the Masters exchange minds with these silly hopping vegetable creatures.
-ORK-O tries magic and swaps them back, but now the Masters are in the wrong bodies...that tired bit.
-Then he tries another spell and they briefly look like their Revelations versions.
-Then he gets it right and they detect tri-klops and deactivate it.
-Trapjaw discovers his plane to steal power sword fails, then Beastman tosses Trapjaw off flying bike and whatever.
-ORK-O goes back to Orko and there's a believe in yourself message, a nod to old moral lessons of vintage MOTU.
-Real Orko admits he screwed up and admits he never got his people back to the real New Trolla, but leaves to set things right. Who cares?
-Skeletor emerges in a new Skelegod look. Nice job, Masters, you dicked around long enough for him to come back.

Not as repetitive as previous episodes, but still some filler and predictable.
Also, guess Mer-Man really is dead.

[Felix]

First season of TMNT 1987 LINK



I hope Neca makes "machine-gun granny" with the shopping cart.

[Bravo]

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (Netflix) Season 3 Episode 7 and 8, total spoilers

episode 7
-Skeletor is going to turn everyone into skeledrones (sounds familiar)
-Triklop drone now voiced by Kevin Smith
-Beastman become skeledrone Beastman, he's the only who gets changed. I guess new animation models are expensive.
-Krass finally turns against Skeletor and him, being the audience surrogate, says It's about time! or words to that effect.
-To save Krass, He-Man offers Skeletor the power sword, saying he could recreate the universe with both types of power. Real smart, Adam.
-Skeletor becomes a giant, winged, tailed Skeledragongod whatever. So obnoxious.

Episode 8
-Skeletor depowers He-Man and Battle Cat
-The good and evil masters, sans Beastman, try to fight giant skelegod, he depowers, except Evil-lyn who escapes, them since he controls both energies.
-Skeletor starts recreating universe in his image, literally. Yeah.
-Basically, without the power of grayskull, heroic masters discovers that friendship is the real power, so their costumes get a star field look, easy repaints!
-Long battle, beat Skelegoddragon whatever, recover power sword, sever its arm. He-Man depowers Skeletor back to Keldor. Keldor sent to dungeon, gives a vague warning about what's out there.
-Still a Skeledrone, Beastman finds giant skelegod's severed arm with the Havoc staff imbedded in it.
-Krass now has weird neon green tattoo between her eyes which isn't explained. Of course, she never gets punished for turning evil for most of the season, because that's just how women in modern fiction are now.
-Evil-Lyn's bat avatar turns into HORDAK and he's her daddy. LOL. Set up the next season, which sounds like it won't happen.
-Palace guards Tuvar and Baddra never become Two-Bad. Merman is still dead. Webstor still not evil.

Yeesh, the big problem with this series was the second season slump and the fact it was really all one long story. There was never any stand alone adventures to break things up. The other problem was the final season was just a different spin on Revelations story, except Skeletor, not Evil-Lyn, gets all the power. Why exactly Eternia has all this magical power isn't explained.

[Swindle]

Finally saw Top Gun Maverick with my movie group. Thoroughly enjoyable. Gives you everything you want and more. I was super impressed. I'd give it 4 out of 4 stars.

[Felix]

Aug 23, 2022 22:41:47 GMT -8 Swindle said:

Finally saw Top Gun Maverick with my movie group. Thoroughly enjoyable. Gives you everything you want and more. I was super impressed. I'd give it 4 out of 4 stars.

Maverick really does shine breaking some rules.

I know it's military propaganda, but I still had a blast :-)

[Bravo]

For some reason I recently watched the Thundercats episode where Mandora first appears. Lion-O the retard lets 3 criminals loose. I've seen very few Thundercats episodes.

I occasionally watched the old Quantum Leap (there's a revival/sequel series coming this fall). I rarely checked it out over the past decades, the awkward premise was not fun to me, but I've come to appreciate the lead actors more. Having seen the first episodes and the last couple of episodes and some in between, the problem with the show is that it barely moves Sam Beckett's story forward. Once we establish the cringy "Oh, boy!"/I dunno who I am and have to fake it/set right what went wrong/ the base premise of the show . Once we get that down, there's little shown of the quantum leap project and when it does appear in a leap home, it looks like the set of a late 70's live-action kid's show. Not impressive even by early 90's standards.
I read the network said the 5th season was likely to be the last, the show runners knew but left Sam stuck in time jumps, and retconned Al's history by having his first wife not remarry. Nice work, show runners.

It was weird in the first season Ziggy was male and Al's handheld thingie didn't look like it was made of translucent Legos.

There was some fan theory Sam was dead/a ghost the whole time. Makes no sense. Is everyone at the project also dead? Angels faking being humans? What about that episode with an actual ghost?

Somehow I watched the last two episodes of Hart to Hart, just by happenstance. My parents used to watch that show. Stephanie Powers...she looked a'ight.

[Swindle]

Quantum Leap. that's interesting as I loved the show, but it was looked at it more as a backdoor way of doing an anthology series basically, when network tv had soured on that kind of concept. Another thing the show has going for it is as every episode is a period piece, the show has dated fair less than alot of other series. They also got to make use of other set pieces being used to save on cost. And it was a two man show with guest stars every episode. I will admit it did get long in the tooth near the end.

Also, its not a recon, Sam in the final episode, it turns out he's been controlling his own leaps the entire time, and leaps back to the ending of MIA, telling Al's wife, Beth, that he's alive and coming home. So, she never remarried and waits for Al. The idea if there was a next season is Al would leap himself to try to find Sam, but it got cancelled. Instead, we get the idea that Sam never returned home and kept on leaping. Which I am fine with. Sometimes heroism requires real sacrifice. What's he gonna do anyway? He gets back and be bogged down in debriefs and people trying to leverage him for whatever reason? He worked for God now, not the US Government.

[Bravo]

I'd agree that the show isn't very dated looking if it weren't for a few bits, like the project scenes and that weird opening bit with Al in the car and the woman with the light up earrings. Al's personality was based on lusting after women and mentioning ex-wives. If you change his history, what do we know about him? Sam stuck leaping. His wife might've wanted him back. I think that was a misstep giving him a wife he can't remember.
I never understood why the US Navy was involved with a project based in New Mexico, either.
The supernatural aspects are curious. Like the mummy episode.
It's interesting how Al would mention the person Sam replaces was in the waiting room in Sam's body, but not that frequently. In fact, I had no idea that was part of premise until watching the show recently.

As a Trek fan, I like the episode where Captain Archer is having an affair with Jadzia Dax and then is accused of murdering Commander Riker's wife. Well, not exactly, only Commander Riker was probably an in-joke/reference. Terry Farrel and Bakula weren't part of Star Trek yet.

[Swindle]

Andor on Disney Plus... first 3 episodes. Boba was sad, Obi was cringe... this is excellent. Best Star Wars since Rogue One. I'd recommend it. No space wizards, no empire, no stormtroopers, no vader showing up as if he'd give a shit about the situation. Direction, world building and character motivations all make sense. The lead up and big fight in ep3 are all well done. It feels real. The kind of Star Wars we rarely see. I say this as someone who is very down on the brand. I'd recommend it.

[Bravo]

I've heard it was boring, so yeah, that tells me it's better than people are saying.

Stargirl 3: "Frenemies" - So far so meh, they decided to make this season a murder mystery or at least so far. That's soooo Riverdale, among other shows. It's also pushing the too many characters boundary that hurt previous CW shows. I remember some older superhero shows, 60's Batman, Wonder Woman, the 90's Flash, where'd I think it would be cool if other heroes appeared. Now, it's like "Go away. Can't we have something about the title character?"

[Felix]

He-Man Netflix series...

Now I realize that there is a story taking place...

And if they really want to make Teela black and change her hair white, fine.


But Teela has like two cell phones floating next to her head all the time...and I'm just supposed to accept this as normal?