Tagged: Doctor Who

Sarah Jane’s Back

Sarah Jane’s Back

The second spin-off from the revived Doctor Who teevee series, The Sarah Jane Adventures, has finally completed casting and is now being written.

The show, starring Elisabeth Sladen as former Doctor Who companion Sarah Jane Smith (she co-starred with Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker from 1973 to 1976) plays an investigative journalist with a passion for extra-terrestial stories. Her previous life is only known to a trio of neighborhood children. Whereas the Doctor’s robotic dog K-9 appeared in the pilot, he/it is not expected to have a regular presence in this new series.

The pilot aired in England at the beginning of this year with a somewhat different cast. The Sarah Jane Adventures is oriented towards children in the way Torchwood is oriented towards adults, and is executive produced by Who honcho Russell T. Davies. No air date has been confirmed by the BBC.

Sladen has also played Sarah Jane in eight original full-cast audio adventures by Big Finish Productions.

MIKE GOLD: The Sound of Crisis

MIKE GOLD: The Sound of Crisis

If you’ve been taking careful notes while reading my sundry ComicMix entries, no doubt you’ve noticed I’m quite a fan of audio drama. There are a lot of reasons for this, the least of which is that I prefer driving to all locations within a thousand mile radius instead of subjecting myself to the massively frustrating incompetence and arrogance of our air transportation industry.

Ergo, I have a lot of time to listen to stuff in my car, particularly around convention season (May through April, each year). I’ve got a six-disc mp3 player buried in my little 2005 Ford Focus hatchback, which means I can program enough sound to drive from Connecticut to California without actually changing discs. I (literally) just got back from a round-trip to Chicago, my most frequent location, accompanied by my patient wife Linda and my beautiful daughter Adriane. All three of us are comics fans.

Usually, I program a Nero Wolfe adaptation – brilliant stuff, wonderfully produced – and one of Big Finish Productions’ full-cast original Doctor Who shows. And some other stuff – lots of music, some comedy (Firesign Theater, Jack Benny, or in this case The Marx Brothers), maybe a podcast or six. But this time, I was armed with GraphicAudio’s adaptation of Greg Cox’s novelization of the DC Comics miniseries Infinite Crisis.

All three of us had read the original miniseries, all three of us had read much of the sundry miniseries that lead up to Infinite Crisis, and all three of us figured that by listening to this adaptation we might, this time, actually figure out what happened in the miniseries. Not that it really matters, as we’ve lived through 52 and One Year Later and World War III and now Countdown and we’ll probably sucker down and read Final Crisis after that. After all these years, DC still has problems maintaining a cohesive thought.

The GraphicAudio adaptation is only the first half of Cox’s book, and is clearly labeled as such. The second half will be out soon; it was listed in last month’s Diamond catalog. The adaptation is neither full-cast audio nor a straight-forward spoken word reading. There is a narrator who dramatizes the narrative (hence his title), but when it comes to the actual dialog each character has his or her own voice. With original music and full sound effects, it works quite nicely… although I did have to get over my initial disappointment that it wasn’t a full-cast audio theatrical production.

I hadn’t heard any of GraphicAudio’s other work, although there is a heck of a lot of it. They adapt many paperback action-hero series such as The Destroyer and The Executioner (and others), and if the quality of these productions matches their Infinite Crisis, I might check a few out.

We were particularly impressed by the production itself: the original music and the sound effects were appropriate and gave the two-dimensional world of original audio much needed depth. They summarized all of the various miniseries that led up to Infinite Crisis in the three minutes before the opening credits, which was all that was necessary to provide the backstory.

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David Tennant IS Luther Arkwright

David Tennant IS Luther Arkwright

Bryan Talbot’s legendary British graphic novel of the 70s and 80s, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, has been adapted to a full-cast audio drama by the folks at Big Finish Productions, the same people who bring us original full-cast audio of Dark Shadows, Sapphire and Steel, and Doctor Who. The production spans three CDs and stars everybody’s favorite 10th Doctor, David Tennant, as the title character.

No stranger to audio drama, Tennant has been featured in several Big Finish Doctor Who-related adventures prior to being cast in the current television version.

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright was published in the United States by Dark Horse Comics.

JOHN OSTRANDER: That’s A (TV) Wrap Part 1

It’s May which means, out in TV-land, it’s the final sweeps period of the season. Yeah, a few of the final shows have yet to air but I might as well look back on what I liked/disliked over the past season. This may not be what you watched, liked or disliked but, hey, it’s my column.

Battlestar Galactica. I finally succumbed and started looking in on the series. I’d been afraid that it would be too dense at this point, that there was too much backstory, to be accessible to late viewers like myself but I found I was able to pick things up as I went. Yes, it would be better if I knew more of the backstory and I plan on picking up the DVDs but I’ve gotten into the series. I’m not certain why finding Earth is such a good idea for these people or why so much of their culture seems to be very post-1940’s American culture but I’m willing to hang in and find out. Yes, I liked it overall.

Boston Legal. A tip of the hat to ComicMix head inmate Mike Gold for getting me to watch this series. Mary and I started watching late last season and it’s become one of our favorites. I was resistant because I’m not really a big David E. Kelley fan but this show causes me to laugh out loud. It makes brilliant use of some old pros – James Spader, Rene Aubenjois, Candace Bergen, and the simply amazing William Shatner – as it talks about current issues, goes consistently over the top, touches the heart and simply entertains me more than almost any other show in a given week.

Deadwood. Big fan of this show and I can’t tell you how pissed off I am that HBO didn’t let it continue. Yeah, they talked about two movies to finish it up but a) that’s not the same and b) I haven’t heard that those are actually going forward. Creator David Milch had said that the concept was the advance of civilization as seen through the focus of the town of Deadwood, South Dakota, originally a boom camp for the gold found in the hills nearby. Real historical figures intermingled with totally fictional creations much the same way real history was mingled with a lot of inventive writing (and serious profanity). It’s not a technique unknown to me; I did the much the same thing when I wrote my historical graphic novel The Kents. The show boasted some fine performances topped by Ian McShane’s incendiary Al Swearingen.

All that said, I have to confess that Season 3 turned out to be a disappointment to me. The through line was the gradual take-over of the town by George Hearst (given a dynamite performance by Gerald McRaney). Hearst was an actual historical figure, the farther of William Randolph Hearst who, in turn, was a model for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and that was both the attraction and the problem. The actual Hearst himself never visited Deadwood, so far as my researches showed, although he did wind up owning several big mines there.

The problem in Season 3, for me, was that it was headed for an almost apocalyptic showdown between Hearst and his men versus the citizens of the town who, although usually at violent odds with one another, were brought together by a common threat. The season built in tension to what should have been a staggering climax and then – Hearst simply decides to leave town. Go on to his next location. The tension dribbles away.

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Woody Allen Who?

Woody Allen Who?

Okay, there’s been all kinds of rumors about this year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special. People have been fighting about Australian pop star Kylie Minogue, and nobody’s been able to confirm her appearance. That’s fine; the last pop star (Billie Piper) turned out swell, so what the heck.

But Woody Allen playing Albert Einstein?

That’s what the British newspaper The Sun reports. But we’ll believe it only when writer/producer Russell T. Davies sez so… even though Allen’s "people" did the "neither confirm nor deny" thing.

While we’re at it, Outpost Gallifrey notes SyFyPortal is reporting "new interest" in a Doctor Who movie starring Paul McGann, the eighth Doctor who appeared on screen as the Doctor but once in the made-for-teevee movie, against Eric (Heroes) Roberts as The Master. McGann has also played the part in literally dozens of full-cast original audio productions for the BBC and Big Finish.

Whovians would love the chance to see McGann morph into Christopher Eccleston, although I suspect Mr. McGann would rather squeeze out a few more teevee movies before that happens – if he’s interested at all.

Artwork from The Sun. Copyright BBC, Woody Allen, and Rollins-Joffe Productions.

2006 Eagle Awards Announced

2006 Eagle Awards Announced

Since you couldn’t watch a new episode of Doctor Who this past Saturday, maybe you were at the Eagle Awards, as part of the Bristol International Comic Expo.

Established in 1976 by Mike Conroy, the Eagles are the comics industry’s longest established awards. Acknowledged as the pre-eminent international prizes, they have been featured on the covers of leading US and UK titles across the last three decades with such diverse titles as X-Men, Swamp Thing, Preacher, 2000 AD and MAD among those proud to display the Eagle Award emblem.

Winners are after the jump.

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Flash gets real

Flash gets real

Gina Holden will be starring with Eric Johnson in the SciFi Channel’s new Flash Gordon series, debuting this August. No stranger to heroic fantasy projects, the Canadian actress previously appeared in Fantastic Four, The Butterfly Effect 2 and the upcoming Alien vs. Predator 2.

Based upon Alex Raymond’s classic newspaper comic strip, SciFi has already committed to a full 22 episode season. Jody Racicot (Night at the Museum) will play Dr. Hans Zarkov, and John Ralston (Earthstorm) will play the greatest villain of all time, Mongo’s Emperor Ming the Merciless. Anna van Hoft will play Ming’s daughter Aura, who has the hots for Flash and, therefore, doesn’t like Dale very much.

No word on who’s going to play Vultan, king of the original Hawkmen. Brian Blessed, who played the role in the 1980 motion picture, is currently filming Doctor Who.

Superman’s birthmom to Who

Superman’s birthmom to Who

Susannah York, the honored British actress who played Lara in Superman The Movie and Superman II (not to mention such classy movies as They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and The Killing of Sister George), is a featured player in Big Finish’s 96th regular monthly Doctor Who full-cast drama.

Named "Valhalla", the two-hour original full-cast audio drama is another high-energy science-fiction thriller about a planet that is, well, anything but Valhalla. York joins Sylvester McCoy, who of course is playing the seventh Doctor – the last from the original series.

For more information about this and the approximately 150 original Doctor Who audio adventures, check out Big Finish Productions.

Sci-Fi Summer Schedule

Sci-Fi Summer Schedule

As regular series on the major networks wind up this month, ComicMix fans can start programming their DVRs for the summer series over at the Sci-Fi Channel.

New programming kicks off on June 6 with the return of Ghost Hunters at 9, followed by the new show, Destination Truth.  The six-episode series followers Josh Gates, an adventurer visiting weird places and investigation the supernatural.

Doctor Who’s third season returns on July 6 in the 9 p.m. slot.  It begins with the Christmas special, something to make you forget the summer heat.

On July 10, Eureka returns for its second season.

The second season of Stan Lee’s Who Wants to be a Superhero? arrives on July 25 at 9 p.m.  And if that isn’t enough to make you Face Front, True Believers, then be astounded at 10 p.m. when the untitled Derren Brown show debuts.  Brown is a British mentalist – imagine the Amazing Kreskin with an accent.

The thoroughly reimagined Flash Gordon series starring Smallville‘s Eric Johnson takes viewers from Earth to Mongo beginning August 10.

Who’s late?

Who’s late?

There won’t be a new Doctor Who episode a week from this Saturday, also known as May 12th here on Earth. The hit show is leaving this time–space continuum to make room for the Eurovision Song Contest and if they didn’t bump it the BBC would have to move the Doctor’s starting time up and the earlier the starting time the lower the ratings so screw it, they’re taking the week off.

Of course, the BBC is ad-free, so why sweat the ratings? Whatever. We’ll live. Angry, but breathing through it.

At least Doctor Who‘s not being bounced for Dancing With The McCartneys.

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