General TV News

[Animalmother]

Really enjoying it as well. The animation style reminds me of Ulysses 31.

Practically everything on the planet is a nightmare.

[ManBearSquid]

Gonna have to check this out at some point, also heard good things elsewhere about it.

Currently rewatching One Punch Man before starting season 2 as it was years ago that I watched it and I never expected more. It's still as charmingly satirical and funny as ever.

[Animalmother]

Do we really need more Rick & Morty?

[Hatredsheart]

https://scifibulletin.com/2024/07/19/pa ... cels-halo/

[Can't think of one]

[Raid]

So to, I imagine, few people's surprise, Star Wars The Acolyte has been cancelled after one season. The show was exceedingly average, I think I enjoyed maybe two of its eight episode run, while the rest just felt like filler. Apparently it cost $180 million to produce (I'm not sure whether that figure includes the marketing budget), which is just a ridiculous amount of money. With the exception of one or two pretty decent fight scenes, I just don't see where that money went, or how it hoped to recoup it. It was badly written, had maybe one interesting character left by its conclusion, and the story provided no hook that it elaborated on anyway - I think it was setting up to be the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise, the awful dialogue scene from Episode III that launched a thousand memes? Who bloody knows, the only thing we get at the end is an extremely brief shot of some shadowy figure creeping around. I doubt anyone really cared about the story of the main character, who was probably the least interesting one in it. And it's annoying, because this was the first genuinely new Star Wars setting we've had in years, with no real links to the Skywalker saga. I'm guessing it was supposed to properly launch the new High Republic era (there've been books and Jedi: Survivor featured some elements, but this is the first truly mainstream entry) - but it's a critical and commercial failure, and who knows whether Disney will now pay it any further attention?

I just don't get what's happening with Star Wars under Disney. I've personally enjoyed a lot of what they've put out, but I'm a huge fan of the franchise and even I can see how lethargic and poorly written most of their output has been. So much of their live-action stuff has just been a bit naff, with fight scenes filled with obvious wire-work instead of good stunt actors, and plodding dialogue with bizarrely paced stories. Hell, they couldn't even get the lightsabers looking right in Acolyte - they were big, bulky cylinders and the blades looked more like big glowsticks than the effects we're used to. It surely has to be coming from the top, right? With the amount of money Disney evidently have to throw at these productions, they should have the best creative teams in the industry, but in some cases they barely feel better than fan productions.

[Raid]

And on an unrelated note, a new anthology series by the creators of Love, Death and Robots is coming to Prime in December. It's called Secret Level, and it's a set of stories based on well-established game franchises.



There's a bunch of properties mentioned; Warhammer, God of War, Unreal Tournament, D&D, Spelunky and Pacman, of all things. It doesn't appear to be stories contained entirely within each game's own setting - there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot of Kratos walking through what looks like a relatively modern city.

I think this is quite exciting, it's a chance for fairly popular franchises to have a beautifully animated adaptation, but without the need to sustain an entire series. How much they'll intermingle is something I'm curious about though; I've never seen Ready Player One, but I understand people criticised it for just throwing recognisable elements in without any real care for why people loved them in the first place, and that's not the kind of stuff I'd really want to see more of.

[Sly Boots]

Yeah, Ready Player One was really disappointing imo, just a barely connected sequence of references and nods to nostalgia