Entertainment

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/36676851

For those interested in creature models — both practical physical models and vfx — as well as anything Monsterverse or kaiju in general, this new AppleTV official featurette is a ‘must see.’

When to see it will depend on your interest in or willingness to be spoiled as it does give some things away about what’s upcoming in season two of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

It seems to make clear that Le Gran Dios de le Mar aka “Titan X” is a wholly new creation for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. There remains nonetheless much to speculate about.

We haven’t had a new film from Gore Verbinski for nine years. But the director who brought us the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the nightmare-inducing horror of The Ring (2002), and the Oscar-winning hijinks of Rango (2011) is back in peak form with Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. It’s a darkly satirical, inventive, and hugely entertaining time-loop adventure that also serves as a cautionary tale about our widespread online technology addiction.

(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)

Sam Rockwell stars as an otherwise unnamed man who shows up at a Norms diner in Los Angeles looking like a homeless person but claiming to be a time traveler from an apocalyptic future. He’s there to recruit the locals into his war against a rogue AI, although the diner patrons are understandably dubious about his sanity. (“I come from a nightmare apocalypse,” he assures the crowd about his grubby appearance. “This is the height of f*@ing fashion!”)

The fact that he knows everything about the people in the diner is more convincing. It’s his 117th attempt to find the perfect combination of people to join him on his quest. As for what happened to his team on all the previous attempts, “I really don’t like to say it out loud. It’s kind of a morale killer.”

I'm not often a fan of direct reboots, but this review suggests "Season 10" may be the exception that proves the rule.

It is possible to believe contradictory things. For instance, I believe TV’s reliance on reviving old shows is a risk-averse, creative regression. On the other hand, I love it. I particularly love it when fictional characters have visibly aged. There’s a broken humanity that you don’t get with flawless, collagen-rich skin. You sense you could talk to them about your sciatica and they’d get it.

I got that feeling with the new series of Scrubs (Disney+, from Thursday 26 February), a show I once mainlined on E4. Scrubs was as comforting as tea and toast. Surprisingly malleable, too. In its bones, it was a coming-of-age workplace bromance between junior doctors JD and Turk, played by then newcomers Zach Braff and Donald Faison. Their chemistry was the show’s anchor, balancing sassy racial harmony with irreverence and heart, as they bore witness to universal human drama. But is it healthy enough to survive resuscitation, more than 15 years after its last episode aired?

Sensibly, the writers have shaken things up. JD has grown into complacent early middle age, working as a private doctor for the affluent and elderly. “You write scripts in the suburbs” is Turk’s withering appraisal. (For a hot second, I thought he was beefing with Braff’s indie film-making.) Braff directs the first episode, in which a problem with one of JD’s pampered patients takes him back to Sacred Heart, the training hospital where he earned his wheels.

https://archive.ph/Zb2sW

🎶Repeat to yourself it's just a show, I should really just relax! 🎶

Longtime fans of the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 know that the series’ one constant is change (well, that and bad movies).

The show’s cast and crew were in a near-constant state of flux, a byproduct of the show’s existence as a perennial bubble show produced in the Twin Cities rather than a TV-and-comedy hub like New York or LA. It was rare, especially toward the middle of its 10-season original run on national TV, for the performers in front of the camera (and the writers’ room, since they were all the same people) to stay the same for more than a season or two.

Series creator Joel Hodgson embraced that spirit of change for the show’s Kickstarter-funded, Netflix-aired revival in the mid-2010s, featuring a brand-new cast and mostly new writers. And that change only accelerated in the show’s brief post-Netflix “Gizmoplex” era, which featured a revolving cast of performers that could change from episode to episode. Hodgson leaned into the idea that as long as there were silhouettes and puppets talking in front of a bad movie, it didn’t matter much who was doing the talking.

But the other thing longtime fans know about the original show is that many of its casting changes were extremely controversial, causing long-running old-school flame wars in the Usenet group that served as the fandom’s online hub back in the day. In retrospect, the original show’s quality and the hit rate of its jokes remained remarkably consistent from season 3 or 4 onward, but people watching it could be incredibly proprietary about their preferred performers and which of the show’s three or four major epochs they considered the best. Some blamed a combination of crowdfunding fatigue and frustration with the revived show’s constant changes for the failure of its third crowdfunding campaign in 2023.

The years 2008 to 2016 are arguably the golden age of this specific brand of anime content, as an enormous wave of abridged shows and videos flooded YouTube during that era of the Internet. If there was a popular anime, then there was likely an abridged version of it somewhere online. Some anime, such as Naruto, Pokémon, My Hero Academia, and Attack on Titan, were so popular that they had multiple abridged series from different content creators. Some YouTubers dedicated their channel to a single anime and maybe had one or two other abridged series as side projects (i.e., LittleKuriboh creating Naruto: The Abridged Comedy Fandub Spoof Series Show in 2009 on his second channel, Ninjabridge, and TeamFourStar launching their Hellsing Ultimate Abridged series in 2010). Others bounced around between different anime and created multiple abridged series, such as Grimmjack, who made abridged videos for shows like Food Wars (2015), Goblin Slayer (2018), My Hero Academia (2019), Demon Slayer (2021), and Chainsaw Man (2023). No matter how you slice it, anime abridged videos were everywhere at the peak of their popularity. For reference, when examining the Abridged Archive, a list on the Internet Archive created by pzykosiz that documents and catalogs almost every piece of anime abridged content (series, movies, one-shots, etc.) ever made, a total of 543 results pop up. According to the Abridged Series Wiki, which is an official partner of the Abridged Archive, the Abridged Archive is “Currently hosting roughly 500 abridgers, 1600 series and 8000 videos, including One Shots, Special Episodes, Abridged Movies & other side videos.” Though, spoilers for later, this ubiquity inevitably led to this genre’s oversaturation and downfall.

Yet even if most of the abridged videos from this golden age aren’t particularly memorable or amusing, I nonetheless value their existence because of what this content represents to the greater anime fandom. Abridging arguably requires even more effort than other anime content, such as AMVs (anime music videos), reviews, and even fandubs, because creating an abridged video, much less a series, demands a tremendous amount of coordination, creativity, and time. The best ones are those that possess professional-level production quality, including a tightly polished script, talented voice acting that delivers solid performances and jokes, and most importantly, a detailed and precise editing process that brings everything together. There’s so much work that goes into abridging that these videos end up becoming entirely new experiences that feel unique from the original show that they are parodying. That level of dedication is only possible because the YouTubers behind these abridged shows loved an anime so much that they channeled that passion into creating a piece of art that both honors and is distinct from the source material.

Are you reading this article on your phone while "watching" your favourite TV show? No judgment; you're far from the only one.

The “second screen” phenomenon tells us that TV bosses – those in charge of streamers like Netflix in particular – are more than aware that we are scrolling social media or perusing articles while consuming their content. A recent study found that 94% of 25–34-year-olds scroll while watching TV, with 1 in 3 admitting they 'always' do it. 91% of those aged between 35 and 44 agreed.

This isn't a brand new phenomenon persé, but it does seem to be getting increasingly common. As someone who is a big fan of “background noise” as I work, I've often whacked on a sitcom I've seen thousands of times while I write. But it feels like some of the biggest releases of recent weeks and months have been made with the same somewhat “ambient” nature in mind.

During a recent appearance on The Romesh Ranganathan Show, Jameela Jamil opened up about how writers are being told to “dumb down” the content we watch to ensure it still holds our attention while we doomscroll.

“It's a directive that's being handed out by big studios to filmmakers,” she said. "You have to acknowledge that people are on their phones the whole time they're watching telly. [Writers] have to simplify the plot so that [audiences will] be able to follow along while they're browsing on their phone.

Ryan Coogler’s blues-steeped vampire epic “Sinners” led all films with 16 nominations to the 98th Academy Awards on Thursday, setting a record for the most in Oscar history.

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters showered “Sinners” with more nominations than they had ever bestowed before, breaking the 14-nomination mark set by “All About Eve,” “Titanic” and “La La Land.” Along with best picture, Coogler was nominated for best director and best screenplay, and double-duty star Michael B. Jordan was rewarded with his first Oscar nomination, for best actor.

キラキラなクリスマスで正月風の写真風加工イラストです♪♪

A sparkling Christmas illustration with a New Year's-style photo effect!!

For those who have been yearning for the absurdity of Airplane!, your ship has come in.

Visual gags, bad puns, crazy interpretations of a line ... it's all here. I'm glad they still make these.

Crowdsourcing to fill out a more extensive list of women working at Studio Ghibli.

Happy New Year 2026.

In a time when the Trump administration has stripped federal funding from PBS and is partnering with right-wing video publisher PragerU to pump out AI-generated videos of the founding fathers barking conservative catchphrases, it is now more important than ever to remember all the good this type of high-quality, thoughtful, original children’s programming has done. Doing the research for this piece allowed me to revisit several other PBS Kids’ shows whose influence on me I had, until recently, taken for granted. For example, Cyberchase, a cartoon following the adventures of three kids learning math and science to solve problems plaguing the digital universe, AKA Cyberspace. It’s thanks to that show I knew what symmetry was before my first-grade teacher even got around to it in class! And who can forget that bop of a theme song? C-Y-B-E-R CHASE!

Liberty’s Kids, a historical fiction cartoon about three kids who live through the American Revolutionary War, is another. It even had a stacked voice cast for several historical figures like Walter Cronkite voicing Ben Franklin, Dustin Hoffman as Benedict Arnold, and Billy Crystal as John Adams, just to name a few! That line in the show’s theme song about how “the truth will rise and fall” definitely hits differently nowadays, as well. But The Magic School Bus was my favorite. Miss Frizzle is proof that kids can have abnormal experiences and still be better off for it. No Spider-Man assault or Elsa toilet humor, just an octopus in the neighborhood and a river of lava with the comedic charms of Lily Tomlin to guide it.