Sure, it’s been done before, but this is the first I’d seen this meme in the wild.
For the record, I didn’t have any pie, but I did have an awesome Belgian waffle drenched in blackberries.
Category: Entertainment
Not Going to Comic-Con This Year (But I Feel Fine)
It’s been getting more and more difficult each year to get tickets (not to mention hotel rooms) for Comic-Con International, and each of the last few years I’ve been wondering if this one might be the year I’d be shut out. The current system is a lottery: Everyone who wants tickets signs into a “waiting room” website before the sale starts, and the system randomly selects batches of people to let into the ticketing system, slowly enough that it won’t crash under the load, until all the tickets are sold out.
It took about an hour to sell out on Saturday.
Despite teaming up — you can buy tickets for yourself and up to two other people, so you can make arrangements among a group of three that whoever gets in first will buy tickets for the others — we watched as first Preview Night, then Saturday, then Friday, then Thursday, and finally Sunday each sold out. The official SDCC Twitter account was more timely with that information than the waiting room, which refreshed its message every 2 minutes, but insisted that Thursday was “very low” for at least one refresh after they reported the sellout on Twitter.
It’s going to be the first year since 1990 that I haven’t been to San Diego for Comic-Con.
Oddly, I’m only mildly disappointed.
- I was half-expecting it.
- WonderCon and Long Beach Comic-Con are both great conventions in the area (WonderCon 2014 & LBCC 2014 writeups) that are a lot easier to get into (and less crazy to attend). The kiddo might enjoy Comikaze — he’ll be almost five by then. (Wow!)
- I’ve been lucky the last few years, so I guess now it’s someone else’s turn.
- If we really want that SDCC experience, there’s the possibility of taking the train down to San Diego on Saturday to look at the stuff outside that doesn’t require a ticket. The kiddo will like the train ride too, I suspect.
Then again, the last two times I’ve gone to San Diego, I’ve gotten a first-hand look at the inside of an emergency room. Maybe it’s just as well that I don’t try for three in a row.
Flash and Les Mis in the Golden Age of Radio and Comics
Two of my fan interests sort of intersected* with a pair of articles I wrote last night, as I found myself looking at the Flash and Les Misérables in the late 1930s/early 1940s.
I review Orson Welles’ Les Misérables radio play over at Re-Reading Les Mis. Last weekend I stumbled on a cassette recording of the 1937 series, but since I don’t have anything portable to play cassettes on anymore, I went looking online, found it at the Internet Archive’s Old Time Radio collection, and listened to it on the way to and from work for several days. (I wish I hadn’t already used the Cassette…now I remember pun.)
A 1943 Flash comic book features Jay Garrick playing every role at once in a stage play, quick-change style, when the entire cast is quarantined for a measles outbreak. I’d recently updated the scans on an old post on the one-man team trope. The Disneyland outbreak made me think of the story, and I’ve posted a few scans at Speed Force.
*They’ve been intersecting all week, actually, since the actor playing Pied Piper on the Flash TV show is playing Marius on Broadway right now, and has been posting Les Mis-related stuff.
Well, THAT narrows it down.
We went to see a 75th Anniversary screening of The Wizard of Oz over the weekend. Not that you could tell from this ticket stub. But hey, they made sure you knew it was presented by TCM, right? *sigh*
Pumpkin Spice ALL the things!
We found this salsa at the market last night (and not on clearance, either). I guess the season of pumpkin-spice everything isn’t quite over yet.
Looking Forward to iZombie
iZombie has a premiere date! The comedy/horror/murder mystery show launches March 17 on the CW.
I’ve been describing iZombie as a mash-up of the Robeson/Allred comic’s premise (woman becomes a zombie, but can keep her mental faculties as long as she eats one brain a month…then starts picking up memories and personality quirks from the brains she eats) with Pushing Daisies (someone able to communicate with the dead in an odd, but limited manner teams up with a detective to solve murders) and Veronica Mars (produced by Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero), all of which sounded promising, since I liked the iZombie comic, Pushing Daisies, and Veronica Mars. Based on the previews I’ve seen online and at SDCC last summer, that description is (if you’ll pardon the expression) dead-on.
CW has the first look trailer for the show.
ComicBookMovie has the official synopsis of the show. Rose McIver stars as the main character, Liv, who takes a job in the coroner’s office to satisfy her need for brains, but gets found out by her boss…who is actually quite fascinated. As she picks up memories and skills from murder victims, she helps a detective solve cases while seeking the man responsible for her own zombification.
The Hollywood Reporter has an extensive article talking with the producers and stars about the show’s tone, characterization, how Liv differs from Veronica, the nature of zombies on the show (if they don’t eat brains regularly, they turn into classic Romero-style zombies) and so on.
It looks like it will be a lot of fun, and while it’s got half-season-wonder written all over it, you never know. I mean, the fact that we got a second season of Pushing Daisies qualifies as a television miracle!
They Didn’t Know What They Were Getting Into: the Woods
Despite an overall 7.0 rating, there are a slew of one– and two-star reviews of Into the Woods on IMDB. Did these people see the same movie I did? As I looked through several pages seemingly sorted by rating, a few common threads emerged:
1. Too much singing! It’s a musical. Unfortunately, the trailers seemed to be trying to hide this fact.
2. It wasn’t a fluffy, happy family movie. Well, no. It’s supposed to be a darker, more complex take on the stories. Again, the ad campaign wasn’t entirely clear on this, and several people said they had expected it to be kid-friendly because of the Disney name. That says something about the power of the Disney brand (especially when associated with fairy tales), and makes me wonder if it would have been better to release it through, say, Touchstone.
Interestingly, the things people were most upset by are things that were toned down (or moved off-screen) from the stage version. I guess the studio shouldn’t have bothered with those notes. And one recurring complaint, Cinderella’s stepsisters’ more extreme efforts to get into the shoe, is actually in the Brothers Grimm version (where her name is translated as Ashputtel).
Those two threads are a failure of the ad campaign to prepare people for what they were going to see. (Though the viewers complaining that it’s “not PG” seem a little unclear on the concept of “Parental Guidance suggested: Some material may not be suitable for children.”) But then there’s this…
3. It should have stopped before the final act. That would be missing the point, which is to follow through with the consequences of what everyone did in act one, and the personality traits that brought them through it.
Consider: How does Cinderella fit in with the royal family? How does Red Riding Hood deal with the trauma of her experience with the wolf? How is Rapunzel affected by her life in isolation? The baker and his wife had a lot of trouble working together just to get their child; how are they going to handle raising him? The princes are still going to be charming, and they’re accustomed to the chase. And when you come down to it, Jack broke into someone’s house, stole a bunch of stuff, and then killed him.
Admittedly, the second act isn’t as strong in the movie as it is in the play, because they cut out a lot of it…but I’ve heard the same complaint leveled at the show. That would be like cutting the second act of The Fantasticks. You could perform just the first act, sure, but it would be much less meaningful.
Once you get to the three-star reviews, you find more people who still didn’t like it, but understood what it was supposed to be. They didn’t like the performances, or thought the story structure didn’t hang together, or just don’t like Sondheim, or knew it was going to be a darker take but still didn’t like it. Fair enough. Everyone has different tastes, and what works for one viewer doesn’t always work for someone else. But at least they disliked it for what it was, not for what it wasn’t.
Though it would help if the ads had been a bit more clear.