#ironic that the blue icon is from the reboot when they JUST TOOK IT OFF

[bluescluesposting]

Well my mom signed up for Paramount+ and made everyone in the house accounts.

I chose Blue as my profile pic. Not sure how often I'm gonna be using the service (I already have the Nick classics on DVD) but at least everyone gets to see Blue when they boot it up.

[davidmann95]

Knew deep down the moment I lay eyes on it that I'd end up making a key to this cover and laying out who's who, ostensibly for anyone who doesn't know all these folks but really to satisfy my own mania - shame I never went into clickbait, love making me a good list. All of these are either obvious or confirmed by Doc on Twitter or Tumblr:

1. Superman. You know, that guy!

2. Superman as he'll soon be in the current comics in the wake of Superman & The Authority.

3. Steel aka Natasha Irons - the niece of the original, she took up the mantle alongside him.

4. Savior, the 'Superman' of Earth 34 and also a riff on Samaritan from Astro City, born in the 'super-civilization' of MU and sent to the future to escape its collapse.

5. Steel aka John Henry Irons, a technologist saved by Superman who inspired to make the most of his life designed a suit of armor to become a hero himself.

6. Lois Lane. You know, that gal!

7. Jon Kent, Lois and Clark's son, in the suit he'll be wearing when he takes on his dad's title in Superman: Son of Kal-El.

8. Earth 23's Superman who serves as President of the United States in his secret identity as Calvin Ellis, while also acting as leader of the team Justice Incarnate which works to stop problems threatening multiple universes.

9. Bizarro, I guess right now of Earth 29 aka Htrae but really all that matters across his disparate incarnations he's Superman but a clone who looks like Frankenstein and he talks backwards, guy's great.

10. Captain Adam aka Allen Adam of Earth 4, a riff on Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan (who was himself a riff on the original version of Captain Atom, with some bits of Superman iconography bolted on too), he's a USAF pilot who was exposed to an isotope that gave him godlike quantum powers that leave him permanently disoriented in our world due to his higher-dimensional senses.

11. Superwoman of Gaea aka Earth 11, a world where genders are 'reversed' and Themyscira has long led the world openly.

12. Superman of Earth 12, better known as the 'DCAU' shared universe of cartoons from 1992 through 2006.

13. Superman in the t-shirt and jeans he wore in his early career during the New 52 reboot, an evocation of his 1930s roots fighting cops and corporations alongside alien invasions; he briefly returned to this look a few times prior to being rebooted away, and a 'purified' version of this incarnation still rocking this look was saved and left wandering the multiverse to find new ways to help in Sideways Annual #1.

14. Superman right after his resurrection from Death of Superman, in his dubiously iconic black uniform and indisputably iconic mullet.

15. Superman Blue, from a time when Superman was changed into an energy being for a year and had to relearn how to use his new electric powers.

16. The New 52 Superman in his standard 'Kryptonian armor' outfit, after assorted shenanigans that saw him dead and replaced by the pre-reboot version they basically did a cosmic fusion dance and now some of his adventures were folded back into the 'regular' Superman, which means we all just have to accept Clark completely lost his fashion sense for a minute there.

17. Superman II aka Val-Zod of Earth 2, another Kryptonian survivor who was adopted into the El family before being rocketed to Earth and took up the Superman title after the death of the original.

18. Krypto the Superdog, he was the El family pet back on Krypton and was sent out on a test flight of a prototype of the rocket that would save Superman, knocked off-course instead of returning but eventually landing on Earth and getting powers of his own, which somehow wound up adorable instead of terrifying.

19. Beppo the Super-Monkey, another test animal of Jor-El's who actually stowed away on the rocket to Earth and just immediately ran away upon landing to hang out in the jungle for a few decades until he ran into Superman and got the standard-issue cape.

20. Streaky the Supercat, this time an ordinary Earth cat and pet of Supergirl's who was exposed to X Kryptonite (which just made its live-action debut on Superman & Lois) which grants him sporadic superpowers. The least plausible of the super-pets in terms of not resulting in global devastation.

21. Comet the Super-Horse, who has NOTHING to do with Krypton or Kryptonite or the like but instead is an ancient centaur who was accidentally turned into a regular 'ol horse by Circe and given superpowers by her to make up for it, eventually becoming Supergirl's pet who privately loves her and unbeknownst to her dates her as 'Bill Starr' during the rare times he becomes human when a certain comet passes by. Dude's a real creep!

22. Superman Red, created when Superman Blue from earlier split into two different beings shortly before recombining back into regular Superman.

23. Super-Man aka Kong Kenan, he was given Superman's powers in an experiment by the Ministry of Self-Reliance, but due to those powers being connected to Superman's own life energy Super-Man had to embrace the spirit behind his counterpart's actions in order to master them.

24. Power Girl aka Kara Zor-L, the elder Earth 2 counterpart of Supergirl who took her cousin's place alongside Val-Zod.

25. Supergirl aka Kara Zor-El/Linda Danvers, you know her deal, she's on TV (at least for one more season).

26. Jimmy Olsen, Superman's Pal.

27. The Superman of the 1940s Fleischer cartoon shorts, the first big-screen version of the character.

28. Superboy aka Conner Kent/Kon-El, a clone of Superman and Lex Luthor created by Cadmus to replace the former in the event of his death or corruption who was woken up before fully maturing and decided to instead become a 90s kid with major 'dirtbag with a heart of gold' vibes; he also has the extra superpower of tactile telekinesis that lets him telekinetically manipulate whatever he's in direct physical contact with.

29. Just barely poking his arm in is Sunshine Superman, champion of the psychedelic, transcendentally groovy Earth 47.

30. The older version of the DCAU Superman from the future of Batman Beyond.

31. Optiman of Earth 36, all that's really known about him is he fell in battle with a rogue Superman from another universe but happily he seems to be alive and well here; he was also designed by Doc for his appearance in Multiversity.

32. Superdemon of Earth 13, the demon Etrigan sent from the doomed planet Kamelot to Earth where he bonded to Jason Blood to fight evil in Merlin's name.

33. Superman aka Kal Kent, the 853rd century descendant of the original who continues the never ending battle, empowered far beyond his predecessors by the light of the Super Sun where the now all-powerful original resides in that time.

34. Apollo aka Andrew Pulaski; originally created as a Superman-type for the Wildstorm line of comics but eventually incorporated into DC, he has sunlight-fueled powers due to alien experimentation as a teenager and fights the bastards of the world alongside his boyfriend Midnighter. They'll be working with Apollo's inspiration in Superman & The Authority.

35. The Superman of Kingdom Come, officially set on Earth 22.

36. The Superman of All-Star Superman.

Plus:

* Knew I'd miss labeling one of them and it turned out to be Lana Lang from during her brief stint as Superwoman, you can see her arm sticking out just underneath the Steels.

* I'd mistakenly assumed the little Superman between 11 and 15 looked distinctive enough that it was supposed to be a specific preexisting character, when asking he confirmed that wasn't the case but tossed out that that's instead SuperDoc of Earth-85. As the creator of the piece and DC talent this constitutes canon in lieu of further statements on the subject by Detective Comics Comics.

[thevindicativevordan]

On Kong Kenan/Super-Man

It should've been him. He should've been the Superman of 5G/Future State/right now not Jon, and he should be the one getting an HBO Max series not Val. Hell he should be getting a movie!

God this dude is literally the best legacy character Superman has ever gotten, wholly his own person with his own lore and status quo while still building on the idea of "Superman". I am so pissed at DC for essentially just dropping him after his ongoing ended, what the hell Lee? You keep trying to make the Wildstorm characters happen, I need you to get my man Yang another Kenan book.

Have to admit I was a bit nervous at first about whether or not Kenan would be a worthwhile character. Yang's New 52 Superman run had been a disappointment to me overall, with only the the arc where Superman has underground wrestling matches against forgotten gods really sticking with me. Now he was introducing a brand new Superman? Didn't feel like he had "earned" that yet. But from the first issue I was hooked on this new character.

Kenan was unlike any other member of the Superfamily. He wasn't kind or sweet, he was an asshole! He was a bully! He was fantastic! Right from the start Kenan was set up to undergo a very different kind of character journey than the other members of the Superfamily. Empathy, humility, respect for people weaker than himself, these are all traits most heroes wearing the S-shield already posses by the time they first don the crest, but not Kenan.

Like all bullies he was even a bit of a coward himself at first, trying to bail on the experiment meant to give him Superman's powers right as it begins. After "saving" Lixin (the kid he bullies and steals lunch from every day) from Blue Condor he demands all the money Lixin has on him as payment. He's not courageous or selfless either at the start, Kenan is as much of an opposite of Superman as you can get short of being Bizarro. Learning the appeal of these traits formed the basis for his growth over the course of his series.

Seeing Yang bring in a lot of recognizable "Superman" elements in the series, but with a twist, was also great. Kenan is the one who bullies "Luo Lixin" rather than the traditional Clark/Lex friendship of Pre-Crisis and Birthright. Initially Kenan develops a crush on intrepid reporter for Primetime Shanghai, Laney Lan, but she dismisses him as too young and Kenan eventually ends up pursuing Avery Ho (Flash) instead. Baxi the Bat-Man of China has a similar relationship with Kenan as the traditional Superman/Batman in terms of being vitriolic best buds, however Baxi is the one who has the most respect for authority while Kenan is the rebel. Kenan is a part of the "Justice League of China" which does not meet with the approval of the already established Chinese superheroes, the Great Ten. That contrasts nicely with the good relationship the Justice Society and Justice League have, as well as seeing Yang lampshade the "Chinese copy" trope and incorporate that into his storytelling.

One of the funniest differences is how Kenan chooses to immediately reveal his identity as Super-Man to the world by taking off the compliance visor he was forced to wear, contrasting with Clark's choice to hide his identity. He was so eager to impress people that he never gave any thought to the danger he could put himself or his family in by revealing his identity until it was too late, something Clark is well aware of and has taken great pains to keep his identity secret. Was a missed opportunity for DC to have Kenan comment on Clark copying him for once when he outed himself under Bendis.

But one of the most poignant differences between Clark and Kenan is the gulf in separation between their relationship with their parents. Clark has a loving relationship with Ma and Pa Kent, trying to live up to their lessons as best he can. In contrast Kenan's mom was believed to have died in an airplane crash when he was just a child, and he never really knew her. His father was distant from him after that and the two weren't really close despite Kenan's attempts to impress him. So Kenan lacks that strong connection while still clearly loving both of them.

Pa Kent's death is one of the most tragic examples of Clark's love for his parents, and I've always been a fan of takes where Clark promises his father to fight for the powerless on Pa's deathbed. Kenan gets a similar scene at the start of his career, his dad "dies" (after being exposed as Flying General Dragon, a pro-democracy "supervillain" from the Chinese authorities perspective) and wants Kenan to promise he'll fight for Truth, Justice, and Democracy. But because Kenan's dad never really bonded with him, Kenan doesn't know what those mean, and can only promise that he never wants to see people die, something his father takes comfort in at least. In classic comic book fashion it's revealed that Dr. Omen, Kenan's "boss" and the one who gave him his powers, saved Kenan's father, because she is Kenan's mother! Kenan's relationship with his parents forms a lot of the crux of his character arc, and seeing how Yang utilizes the classic Superman concept of family kept the storytelling exciting.

Yang's brilliant exploration of the concept of "Superman" through the prism of Chinese culture was a great way to differentiate Kenan as well.

I absolutely freaking love how he tied to the concept of Qi to the S-shield in particular. Connecting the shape of the shield with the way Kenan has acquired his powers along the path of the Bagua (eight trigrams used in Taoism that represent the fundamental principles of reality), with his octagon S-shield outline representing all eight principles together, was mindblowing! So was the idea of restricting Kenan's access to his powers unless he was actually acting in a Superman manner, that tied his character growth to his power growth in an entertaining manner. There were so many characters and concepts that meshed Chinese and DC lore together, like how Emperor Super-Man was Kenan's "Doomsday", they even recreated that iconic dual kill shot! The Chinese Wonder Woman Peng Deilan, being based on the Chinese Legend of the White Snake! There was even some Korean mythology referenced with the Aqua-Man member of the JLC "Dragonson".

Yang also managed to do a Superman Blue/Superman Red story with Super-Man Yin/Super-Man Yang!

Shameful that it took me a while to realize what Gene Yang was doing but once I caught on I was touched. You can tell how much Yang loved Superman and his mythology, and how he was excited to incorporate as much from Clark as he could, while still using it in a way that was solidly Kenan's. And not just Superman's mythology, but the history and lore of the entire DC Universe. I-Ching got to be brought in, fleshed out, and used as Kenan's mentor! The "Yellow Peril" villain from Detective Comics #1, the comic DC gets its name from was brought in and revamped as I-Ching's twin brother All-Yang! Hats off to Yang for taking a racist caricature and attempting to make him into something more.

This series was a beautiful attempt by Gene Yang to build a space for Asian heroes and villains where they could be more than stereotypes, Kenan himself being a defiant mold-breaker in every regard as the complete opposite of most Asian characters in Western media (a jock, a bully, loves his dad but not on great terms with him, a powerhouse as a hero, etc). So much thought and hard work was poured into this by Yang and his team of artist collaborators.

Especially the costumes, man Kenan had so many great looks. From his starting outfit (which is my favorite Superman variant not worn by Clark himself), to the one with the Yin/Yang shield he acquired later on, to his Super-Man Yin & Super-Man Yang outfits, Kenan looked damn cool. Part of me is bummed they didn't go with the Chinese character shield they toyed around with, but I loved how Yang used the "s-shield" as a plot point, so I'm not too broken up over it.

All that great work Yang did to build that space up has been more or less forgotten sadly. It was nice to see Kenan in the DC Asian Month Celebration issue. Avery is going to be in Justice Incarnate at least (unsurprising considering she was created by Williamson). So fucking bummed that Superman Family Adventures cartoon didn't happen, they were going to have Kenan and John Henry Irons in it! Would've been a dream come true for me to see Irons in animation again, and Kenan making the jump to outside media! Maybe that would've encouraged DC to let Yang keep writing New Super-Man, or at least encouraged them to use him elsewhere instead of allowing him fall into Limbo.

Unfortunately I'm not sure what the future holds for Kenan. Jon is being pushed as Clark's replacement in the comics, with DC keeping all the other contenders such as Kon benched. Calvin is leading the Justice Incarnate team likely due to the upcoming Coates reboot that will make Clark black. Val will probably get something once Taylor leaves Jon's book or once they officially announce the HBO Max show is happening. So where does that leave Kenan, my new favorite PoC legacy hero? Currently my only hope is that Yang is working on something for DC involving him. Yang left Batman/Superman, where I was hoping to see a Baxi/Kenan team up, to go work on "exciting other opportunities" per his Twitter. So fingers crossed that there's something in the works for Kenan!

One day I hope he gets his day in the sun again.

[popculturebuffet]

Goof Week: Sports Goofy in SoccerMania: GoofTales Woo-oo! (Paid For for WeirdKev27)

Gorsh all you happy people and welcome back to Goof Week, my Weeklong Celebration of everyone’s favorite goofus. 

And today we have a special treat, something nice and obscure but something that still has a vital place in Disney History. Welcome folks to Sports Goof in Soccermania!  

So yesterday in my Goof Troop review I wished there had been another DuckTales episode with Goofy, you know maybe find out what happened to Peg, see Max and Roxanne again that sort of thing.  Whelp SOMEONE must’ve hid a Monkey’s Paw around here somewhere because I got this special instead on comision. This is a VERY intresting little artifact as it came out only 4 months before DuckTales, was produced around the same time, and was written by Tad Stones, who would both go on to work on DuckTales and even more importantly create Darkwing Duck. 

Not only that but it has some odd things attached to it: it’s the first major production starting Scrooge, as he had an educational short about him, the first animated appearance of the Beagle Boys and most important the FIRST time Russi Taylor would voice Huey, Dewey and Louie, something she’d do till her passing a few years ago. At the time of this article she has not been recast, though I personally vote for Cristina Valenzuela, who took over the role of Young Donald and frankly does such a good job with that voice I didn’t know if Russi had already recorded lines for Season 3 before her passing. 

So what IS Sports Goofy in Soccermania you ask? It was a TV Special from 1987, again four months before DuckTales, that was later sold on VHS. My guess is Disney intended for this to become a regular thing like the Charlie Brown or Garfield specials, but my honest guess is with DuckTales MASSIVE success they wanted to put all the TV Animation resources into making more shows to go with it. The fact the special is essentailly a Scrooge story with Goofy in it and Scrooge and the Boys were now tied up in DuckTales probably helped the decision. So we only got one of these and i’m proud to share it for Goof Week. So join me under the cut to see what a Sports Goof is, what Scrooge sounds like without Alan Young or David Tennant andto see me refrence the film UHF because I likes it. 

 So we open with the titles which are neat and then open at the Money bin, we even get a great sign gag that looks like something Carl Barks would write.

So Scrooge greets his nephews the way he greets everybody.. with a canon to the face... though he backs of firing once he realizes it’s them. The boys ALL wear red this special so .. I guess Huey won and now rules all three bodies with an iron fist? So the Huey Hive Mind asks Scrooge for a donation, a standard Scrooge setup, ask the rich asshole for money, as their trying to help the local soccer program and they need a buck fiddy for a trophy. 

Scrooge’s voice here.. is terrible. I do not like to bash voice actors, they are hard working talented people who do a lot of great stuff, often for less pay than they deserve, and this blog ALWAYS makes that painfully clear. And Will Ryan is not without talent: While he hasn’t done much i’m familiar with he did play Petrie in Land Before Time and was great in it. So while I don’t dislike him as a person.. he did an utterly DREADFUL Scrooge. He dosen’t really attempt to do a scottish accent despite the character still saying cannae at one point, and as for what accent he is going for...

His Scrooge just sounds like someone trying to do a “foreign” accent and failing. It just sounds weird and makes every bit of his dialouge aside from one a chore to sit through. And the dialouge isn’t bad dialouge, it’s a well written and animated Scrooge even with the lower budget than Ducktales, but the voice just ruins it for me. Even without Young and Tennant to compare it to this just blows and the fact it’s paired up with the iconic Russi Taylor voice for the triplets.

This being Scrooge he instead fishes a Trophy out of the bin that’s all banged up and dinky and shoos them out. So in natural Barksian fashion the trophy turns out to be worth a million dollars. So we get some reaction shots.. INCLUDING GRANDMA DUCK!

For DuckTales fans joining us who have ZERO idea who that is, since she sadly did not make it into the reboot and Frank did have ideas, Grandma Duck is Donald, Della and Gladstone’s grandma. She’s a sweet old country woman who lives on a farm and is in fact the one who sold him Kilmotor HIll, with her husband renaming it from Killmule hill. I like her a lot since she reminds me of my own grandma and like her she still works when she can. Donald’s cousin Gus loafs around and eats as her farmhand. As you can tell I like her a lot, agani because she reminds me of one of my grandmas so this was nice even if she was only around for 20 seconds of screentime. 

This ends up in the paper and sends Scrooge through the roof, literally when he finds out. 

Two notes  before we move on: The bin has a unique really cool design , though I get why other productions haven’t used it: besides this one’s obscurity while cool it just looks a bit TOO nice for Scrooge. Even in 2017 while still damn cool looking it still looks practicle. This .. is not that.

This looks like MC Hammer built this. It still looks awesome bu tit’s just not Scrooge sadly. 

The other is that his Butler is named Jeeves here, but looks almost exactly like Duckworth. Just feels weird is all. 

Naturally the Beagle Boys happen upon the paper too and their leader, no name given has a plan: Enter legitmately and win the cup all legal like, which dosen’t sound like it lives up to the beagle code of no hones twork.... until he brings up theri going ot cheat their asses off. 

Meanwhile Scrooge tries bribing the boys with a giant trophy at their house... with Donald oddly absent despite Anselmo having taken over for Nash by this point. I know he was still a bit rough at the roll, but come on. It’s just.. weird especailly for reasons i’ll get into soon. 

So Scrooge agrees to sponsor the boys teams so he can get the trophy back square, and is forced to buy a knew ball and here we FINALLY get Goofy. I say finally because this special is 20 mintues long and it takes almost a fourth of it for him to arrive. It’s just weird for him to not be in it for so long. I mean I don’t want THIS

Flashbeagle didn’t take a fourth of the special to get to Flashbeagle. It did take longer than that to get to the title track but when your sitting on THIS

You gotta use it JUST right. Goofy here is not played by Bill Farmer, which IS odd as he did start playing him that year, but my guess is they weren’t sure if they were going with Farmer or the actor who played him in this special, Tony Pope, so they were trying out both as whoever DID get the role would have it for life. Disney takes the casting of the sensational 7 VERY seriously, as evidenced by the fact most cast changes are caused by death and unlike with Tony and Donald it’s clear Colvig hadn’t picked a succesor. I can also see why it’s a hard choice: while farmer IS excellent and was the right man for the job, Pope is still excellent in the role, bringing the warmth and energy you’d expect from Goofy and having excellent comedic timing that’s vital to getting the dog man right. I can see why this was such a hard choice, even if I also see they went with Farmer: Farmer just has slightly more energy to the roll. It’s a small diffrence and something that dosen’t effect the special, but it is a KEY diffrence and the reason Bill’s THE goofy to me even over his original voice actor Pinto Colvig. 

Also I may of mispoke there... see it’s not Goofy in this special it’s SPORTS Goofy. No really every bit of dialogue refers to him as Sports Goofy. It’d be like if they refered to then CEO Micheal Eisner as Won’t Think Through Eurodisneyland Micheal Eisner. 

So Sports Goofy helps them get a ball in an honestly awesome way and shows despite his clumsy manner, he’s damn cordinated, easily putting everything up and showing some real skill with the ball. So Moneygrubbing Scrooge decides Sports Goofy is his ticket to get the trophy back and recuits goofy as coach and star player for the boys team. 

So Asshole Scrooge meets his team the Greenbacks.. which are a bunch of random animal characters with no real personality. They are a hippo, a goat, expresso the ostrich, a navy (blue) seal,  an elephant in a beanie, a killaroo and a cheetah or leopard. But I have one question, really simple really easy one...

You need 11 players for a soccer team, thank you google. So they DID get that accurate. With Goofy and the Triplets you only need 7 more. THIS is why Donald’s absence is glaring: he’s just oddly not there when they needed 7 other characters but Elephant in a Beanie gets in there. And it’s not hard ot fill either: Donald , Daisy (Because duh), Gyro and Grandma Duck (Because both cameoed but I only mentioned Grandma Duck, though this is ALSO Gyro’s first apperance), Gladstone (who as it turns out had a cameo storyboarded that didn’t make it into the final product), Gus (Since grandma duck) and Scrooge’s butler since he was in an earlier scene anyway so why waste the character model. They could still play the same roll as easily steamrolled underdogs and it’d make more sense.  It just baffles me that with such a deep bench to play from, they don’t use ANY OF IT in favor of the cast of Animal Soccer World.

The Greenbacks can’t play for greenjack, which worries Scrooge.. but Goofy is able to carry them to the finals, while the Beagle Boys make their way there too. We find this out.. via newspaper transition. We get a bunch of headlines telling us what happened instead of you know a montage because that costs money and they already spent 1.50 making this special.. they only have 50 cents left. 

So the Beagles recognizing Sport Goofy is the only thing in their way plots a kidnappin. We get a gut busting scene of the beagles all hiding in Sports Goofy’s house with him being oblvious only to spring on him. 

The next day with Sports Goofy a no show the team is bummed, even mor ewhen they find a kidnapping note from Don’tGetNotToLeaveEvidence Beagle Boys. Seriously give that to the officals. 

So Asshole Scrooge tries to give a rousing speech... and it is a sight to behold and the one highlight of pope as scrooge... it’s why I picked it as the article image. That glitching isn’t me by the way: it REALLY does that. Coupled with the yellow eyes i’ts just fantastic. So the team decides to morosely play the game and Hivemind Huey boos scrooge for not having faith in him. Instead of again you know telling the officials. Maybe assimilating the other made Huey dumber. I

So the game begins and the Cheating Beagles cream the Give Up To Easily Green Backs, while Sports Goofy watches from the other Crime Beagles hideout. It honestly reminds me of UHF: a dumb well meaning guy whose vital to something succeding is kidnapped.. it dosen’t involve Weird Al dressing up as rambo but still. It also makes me want UHF but with the disney cast. Fethry as weird al, Donald as his best friend, Fethry’s girlfriend for the comcis as weird al’s girlfriend, Gyro as philo, Goofy as Stanley, and Pete of course is Stacey Keach. I could go on but you get the point. Someone draw this.  Sport Goofy is a clever bastard and escapes by working one of his shoes off, taking a nearbye knife and cutting himself free.. and almost stabbing a beagle boy in the face but that would just make two. Sport Goofy escapes and the lunkheaded beagle boys chase after him IN THEIR CAR WHILE GOOFY RUNS AHEAD OF IT.  Goofy, he can really move! Goofy, he’s got attitude! Goofy HE’S THE FASTEST THING ALLIIIIVEEEEEE. Sport Goofy makes it in time fo rhalf time, rallies the troops and it goes how you’d expect: They overcome the beagles blatant cheating, win the cup, the beagles attempt to cheat with a rigged ball backfires and they all get arrested. It’s by the numbers stuff. We end with Scrooge deciding to dontate the trophy instead (though in a great bit asking if it was tax deductible), and posing for a team shot> We get some awesome credits music and we’re out

Final Thoughts:

This special is mediocre: There are only a handful of great jokes, it’s your standard “teamwork makes the dreamwork plot” that dosen’t work because our underdogs really CAN’T play without their star, and Scrooge’s voice hurts to listen to. Pope and Taylor are great and while Will Ryan is an awful Scrooge, he is a good Beagle Boy or five. 

It IS worth a watch though. It’s riffable enough with the sometimes sloppy unfinished animatoin in the last part and Scrooge’s terrible voice, and it is still is a neat oddity for 90′s kids like myself to not only see Russi’s first thing as Huey Dewey and Louie, but to also see Scrooge and Goofy with vastly diffrent voice actors, as well as Gyro and the Beagle Boys first animated apperances. The fact this came just months before Ducktales makes it all the more intresting. So if your looking for a legit good Disney product.. this is shoddy at best if well meaning. But as a bit of disney history, especially only clocking in at 20 minutes so it’ sa brisk watch, it’s worth a look if your into that. 

Next On Goof Week: We come on in To The House of Mouse where goofy becomes faster than a speeding punchline,  more powerful than pete when his family has to wrestle him to the ground to take him to the doctor and able to make tall leaps of logic in a single bound. it’s SUPER GOOF!

So thank you for reading and if you liked this review give it a like and consider joining my patreon at patreon.com/popculturebuffet. As a patron you’d get access to exclusive reviews, the patreon’s discord and to pick a short each time I do one of these shortstaculars. Donald’s comnig next month and the deadline is in only a few days to join up for said month so the clock is ticking. Even a dollar a month helps me reach my stretch goals so please i fyou can sign up today and if not, I understand and i’ll see you at the next rainbow

[aion-rsa]

How Final Destination Went From Real-Life Premonition to Horror Phenomenon

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The year 2000 was a scary one for horror films and not always in a good way.  

While American Psycho and The Cell offered up visually striking nihilistic thrills to genre fans, the majority of horror movies released at the dawn of the new millennium were at best forgettable and, at worst, lamentable – yes, we’re looking at you, Leprechaun in the Hood.  

This was the year of duff sequels like Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, Urban Legends: Final Cut and, though it is painful to admit, Scream 3. Horror fans were screaming out for something different, something exciting. They found it with Final Destination.  

Discarding the stalk-and-slash thrills that had enjoyed a revival in the years following the release of Scream, Final Destination centered on a group of high schoolers who end up avoiding a fatal plane crash thanks to a premonition, only to discover there is no escaping death’s plan as one by one they are offed in a variety of brilliantly inventive “accidents”.  

Released in March of that year, Final Destination was a sleeper hit with word-of-mouth helping the film to clean up at the box office, earning $112 million off a $23 million budget with more than half of that coming internationally.  

To date, it has spawned four sequels as well as a variety of novelisations and comic book spin-offs while a franchise reboot is also on the horizon.  

Read more

Movies

The Final Destination Movies, Ranked

By Sarah Dobbs

Jeffrey Reddick has worked on several films during his career to date but he’s probably best known as the creator of Final Destination. It’s something he has come to terms with.  

“It’s probably going to end up on my gravestone, it’s such an ironic title,” he tells Den of Geek.  

“Sometimes I’ll be out and I will hear someone say ‘you just had a Final Destination moment’ and it will make me smile. The whole thing just took on a life of its own.”  

Nightmarish Origins  

A screenwriter and director, Reddick recalls how his neighbors in rural Jackson, Kentucky, would laugh when his six-year-old self would tell them about his plans to work in the movie business.   

An avid writer and reader of Greek and Roman mythology, he recalls spending his formative years watching horror movies with his friends. His mother was only too happy to indulge his burgeoning interest too, knowing it kept him out of trouble elsewhere.  

Reddick’s life began to change after he saw A Nightmare on Elm Street.   

“That film cemented my love of horror. I was this 14-year-old hillbilly from Kentucky but I decided I was going to write a prequel. I went home, banged it out on my typewriter and sent it to Bob Shaye.”  

The legendary head of New Line Cinema initially dismissed Reddick’s draft out of hand, returning it with a note explaining the studio did not “accept unsolicited material.”  

Undaunted, Reddick sent the script back with a note telling him “Look mister, I spent three dollars on your movie and I think you could take five minutes on my story.”  

Shaye was impressed and struck up a bond with the youngster that saw him sending everything from scripts to posters to Reddick during his teenage years.  

When Reddick moved to New York to study acting, age 19, he was offered an internship with New Line, which would become a full-time role despite acting being his “main passion.”  

“Diversity in casting was not a thing at that time,” he recalls.  

“My agent was like ‘I don’t know what to do with you as an actor. We can’t put you up for gangsters or pimps and you don’t rap and you don’t play basketball.”  

“So  I figured, screw it, I will just write stuff and put myself in it.”  

Reddick was present at New Line during their company’s early 90s creative heyday and credits the experience with helping him get Final Destination off the ground.  

“I learned a lot about how to get a movie made. I knew that to make a movie that connected with an audience you had to tap into something that was universal. Death is the ultimate fear.”  

As luck would have it, the idea actually came to Reddick while on a flight back to Kentucky.  

“I read about a woman who was on vacation and her mother told her not to take the flight she was planning to take home as she had a bad feeling about it. The woman changed it and the plane she was supposed to be on crashed.”  

At that point however the idea wasn’t Final Destination. It wasn’t a film either. It was an episode of The X Files.  

The Truth Is Out There  

“I was trying to get a TV agent at the time and they recommended I write a spec script for something already on the air. I was a huge fan of The X Files and thought about a scene where somebody has a premonition and gets off the plane and then it crashes and used that as the plot.”  

“It was going to be Scully’s brother Charles who had the premonition. He gets off the plane with a few other people but they start dying and Charles blacks out every time there is a murder so people suspect he is doing it.   

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I Still Want to Believe: Revisiting The X-Files Pilot

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“The twist at the end was that the sheriff who had been investigating alongside Mulder and Scully the whole time had actually been shot and flatlined at the same time as the plane crash.  Death brought him back to kill off all the survivors, including Charles.”  

It would have made for a great episode except it was never submitted to The X Files. Reddick showed his spec script to some friends at New Line who were so impressed, they told him to develop it into a treatment for a feature, which was eventually purchased by the studio.  

Producers Craig Perry and Warren Zide were brought onboard to develop the story and set about tweaking his idea.  

“Originally the cast of survivors were adults because I wanted to explore more adult themes but Scream had come out and teenagers were hot again so New Line got me to change it”  

In a twist of fate, two established writers from The X Files, James Wong and Glen Morgan, were brought onboard to rejig Reddick’s script.   

“My version was definitely darker and more like A Nightmare on Elm Street,” he says.  

“In my script, death would torment the kids about some kind of past sin they felt guilty about. They would then die in these accidents that ended up looking like suicides.”  

For example, Todd’s death saw him chased into the family garage by an unseen specter where he accidentally ended up rigged in a noose triggered when his dad opens the automatic garage door.   

Death is all around us  

Ultimately that death scene and several others were ultimately scrapped in favour of what would prove to be the franchise’s calling card.  

Reddick credits Wong and Morgan with coming up with the idea of having the film’s key death scenes kicked off by a Rube Goldberg machine-like chain-reaction that would see everyday things colliding to create a lethal scenario. It was nothing short of a masterstroke.   

“It created this notion that death is all around us,” Reddick says.  

“Death would use everyday things around us. It made it more universal and allowed us to set the deaths in places where people go all the time. The payoff would be fun but it was the build-up that had you on the edge of your seat.”  

There was one major sticking point for the studio though: the presence of death, or rather the lack of.  

“I fought really hard to make sure we never showed death because for me, if you didn’t show it, it could be something someone, no matter their belief system, could project onto our villain. That was a tough sell for the studio. They would be like ‘this doesn’t make any sense, you can’t see it and you can’t fight it’ but that’s the point, it’s death.”  

“Luckily both James Wong and Glen Morgan were very insistent we never show it and tie it in to a specific belief system.”  

Reddick credits the move with helping Final Destination become “an international phenomenon”.  

“It struck a chord with people around the world. It broke out beyond the horror audience.”  

Casting dreams   

When it came to casting, Reddick had a clear idea of who he wanted in the lead roles, even if the studio’s opinion differed drastically.  

“I had a wish list with Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst as my two leads but New Line was like ‘well…’”  

He might not have got his first pick but Final Destination boasted an impressive cast of up-and-comers who had already made waves among teen audiences.   

Devon Sawa had starred in Idle Hands, while Ali Larter was known for Varsity Blues and Kerr Smith was a regular on Dawson’s Creek. There was even room for Seann William Scott, fresh from his breakout turn in American Pie who was drafted in on the recommendation of producer Craig Perry, who told Reddick “you’ve got to get this kid, he’s going to be huge.”  

Even so, Reddick was left a little unhappy.  

“One of the conversations we had early on was like ‘Just remember this is set in New York, which is one of the most diverse cities in the world so let’s make sure we have some diversity in the cast’ and they were like ‘oh we will’ and then there wasn’t anyone who wasn’t white in it.”  

New Line chief Bob Shaye did find a way to make amends on some level at least, casting Candyman horror icon Tony Todd in a cameo role as a mysteriously foreboding mortician.  

“He called me up and said they had got Tony Todd and I flipped out. He is an icon. Such a talented, serious actor.”  

As well as co-write the film, Wong took on directorial duties while each of the film’s death sequences would require careful planning, his first aim was to have the film start with a bang by creating as terrifyingly realistic a plane crash as possible.  

“We want to do for planes and air travel what Jaws did for sharks and swimming,” he declared in one interview.  

Yet the film would later garner criticism for its eerie similarities to the explosion and crash of TWA Flight 800 off East Moriches, Long Island, New York in 1996 where 16 students and five adults died.  

“There was some criticism that the movie was written to exploit this real-life crash,” Reddick recalls.  

“I even realised later they used footage from one real-life crash which I wasn’t particularly happy about.”  

Indeed, much of the news footage shown in the film actually came from the 1996 crash.  

That didn’t stop the film becoming a major hit and spawning a sequel within three years.   

Final Destination meets Game of Thrones  

Reddick returned to write the treatment for Final Destination 2, determined to move the franchise away from its teen Scream origins.   

“We had tapped into that zeitgeist and didn’t have to do that again. I wanted to expand the universe and subvert it, so I had it open by following a bunch of teens who are then killed off.”  

Once again, divine intervention led to divine inspiration for the opening set piece.  

“Originally, I was going to have it open with some kids going to spring break and they stop off at this hotel and there is a fire but the producers were not sure. Writers always say you should go out and live life – life informs you and a lot of inspiration comes out when I go out for a walk.  

“I was driving back to Kentucky to see my family and I got stuck behind a log truck and the idea just came to me. I pulled off the highway and called Craig and was flipping out with this idea for a log truck on a freeway.”  

The resulting freeway pile-up that leads to multiple deaths is one Reddick ranks as his “favourite scene in the entire franchise.”  

“The second film is my favourite. I wanted to create a sequel that didn’t feel like a remake of the first. It went in a more fun direction – but it’s still scary.”  

That first sequel also represented the last of which Reddick was formally involved in, though he remained very much in the loop as the Godfather of the franchise, revealing that producers had been “looking at scripts before Covid hit.” 

He also revealed that, at one point, things looked to be heading in an altogether different and thoroughly fascinating direction.  

“There was talk about setting a Final Destination back in Medieval times. Like Game of Thrones in Final Destination. Craig Perry worked with a writer and they talked about the idea and put a teaser trailer together [which has leaked online].   

“I would go and see that movie in a heartbeat but the studio said that the reason Final Destination was so popular was that element of deaths in normal, everyday situations.”  

Future Destinations  

Reddick hasn’t given up on a return to the franchise though, hinting at a “unique” idea he has for a new film that is simply too good to reveal yet.   

In the meantime, he has been busy writing and directing Don’t Look Back, a film that shares some surface similarities with Final Destination and is painfully relevant to society today.  

“It’s a mystery thriller about a group of people who witness someone getting fatally assaulted in a park and don’t help the person and somebody films them and puts it online. The public turns on the witnesses and someone or something is coming after them.”  

Eager to make more horror films and celebrate diversity in his work, Reddick remains immensely proud of Final Destination and the impact it has had on audiences.  

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“It’s cool. To have one movie that is going to be talked about after you die is a life goal. If that’s what I leave behind as a legacy that’s enough – but I still want more.” 

Don’t Look Back is available on DVD & Digital from 14th June

The post How Final Destination Went From Real-Life Premonition to Horror Phenomenon appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3oUb1UD

[quilloftheclouds]

Writeblr Positivity Week!

(Ignore my heckin’ weird handwriting.)

I knooowwww this is super late but Quill got real busy this week with working on schoolwork and Nano so I didn’t have time to finish this up until now but!! Have this!!!

As a part of Writeblr Positivity Week, a lovely event hosted by the wondrous @pens-swords-stuff​, I have put together:

A Selection of Quill’s Favourite WIPs and Writeblrs

(Because there is absolutely No Way I could show all of them, and this is already super long so under the cut we go~)

@lady-redshield-writes​: Not only a wonderfully supportive icon of the writeblr community, who always leaves marvelously inspiring and insightful comments on original content that gives me and undeniably many others so much more motivation to write, but Lady Red is also such a heckin’ inspirationally SKILLED WRITER. IT’S HECKIN’ AMAZING. Her characters! Her description! The amount of personality in her dialogue and just how engaging her worldbuilding and created atmospheres are, but the EMOTION. THE EMOTION. GOOOO read something of hers and you’ll instantly know what I mean---good luck getting through not completely overwhelmed with feeling!

And Miles to Go Before I Sleep: Humans are the size of insects, warriors ride dragonflies into battle, and an eldritch god-ant rules with absolute power. 

Symphony Number Five: Evka Sekerak, composer and musician, directs the Teplirov Symphony, and is commissioned to write her fifth symphony by the military officials who keep her city captive.

@waterfallwritings​: HECK MATE. JASON. DUDE. WHERE DO I START? YOU’VE BEEN TOSSING COMPLIMENTS MY WAY ALL DAY WHAT. But seriously though, this kid is best. Best Friendo of the Quill. Jason is hugely supportive throughout my writing and throughout my real life since I met him, and his own writing is basically the main inspiration behind why OSS even exists in the first place. We’ve had absolutely so much fun reading through each others’ works and joking around, and talking with him has helped me to discover and develop so many things about my own wip. Not only that but!! His writing is marvelous. His characters are all so fun in their own ways, and I’ve loved watching as they’ve developed to such three dimensional personalities in a story full of epic adventure and intrigue!

A Selkie’s Home: After a storm and a shipwreck, a selkie missing her skin, a triton disguised as a human, a morally questionable sea witch, and a hapless lover of the ocean end up on the same island. When the selkie is kidnapped, the remaining three have to form an unlikely alliance to get her back.

@bookenders​: ENDERS IS A REAL DARN NEAT PERSON OKAY. She is the cool 🌵 friend!! She’s a wondrously creative and kind person, and so much fun to talk to! Her STS asks are always so interesting to answer and I just. And I! Just! Love! Her writing oh my stars it’s the best thing ever. Her characters are always so relatable and lovable, with such wonderful personalities and are always so detailed that they feel like real people. She’s also the creator of several of my favourite characters (see: Fred from H2H and Ryan from FF). Her description is astounding, and the way she experiments with different formats and styles is so, SO inspiring, and she always does it in such a skillful way, that reads so nicely!

Heart to Heart: After a series of half-drownings in the lake near the small town of Lindsay, a strange woman appears on the shore, refusing to speak. The local apothecary is sent in to try and help, and now... they’re roommates?

Fish Food: Now assigned to facing the villains of the lowest threat levels after suffering severe losses from his fight against the supervillain Nightmare, Iron Will has to team up with the worst villain he’s ever seen to fend off the threat of a conspiracy that could destroy their world as they know it.

@abalonetea​: OKAY FIRST. Amazingly supportive. Amazingly friendly and creative and an absolute delight to talk to! Katie is marvelous. Her art and her moodboards are so cool and so wonderfully fitting to her characters and stories. And her writing? Oh. Ohhh. Her writing is to die for. Her unique skill of manipulating different text formatting to match the emotion and thoughts of her narrative is just. Stellar, and sets her writing apart from anything I’ve read before. It’s so full of emotion, the way she writes dynamics is INSPIRATIONAL, and her worldbuilding is so wonderfully detailed and engaging. I just. I just LOVE. OKAY. I don’t normally ship characters but Red and Bolte will always be my favourite. And Katie’s message of hope being able to stick it through the worst of it is such a wonderfully motivational theme!

Groundhog Day: Two versions of the same classic rpg video game, one the gritty reboot of the other, glitch together, switching the games of one of the characters with his counterpart—Red and Blue. Now they have to try and find their ways back amidst the formation of friendship and family and the threat of a new war.

As Time Passes On: Two classic pirates form a precarious alliance to set out to find the Eighth Sea, and a device that can turn back time.

@livvywrites​: I’ve only more recently been getting into Livvy’s works but. Wooooooow. WOW. Her writing is fantabulous. Her graphics are gorgeous. I LOVE her characters, so so much. They’re all so distinct in personality and backstory and situation, and the way they’re all involved in the story is marvelously fascinating. SPEAKING OF THE STORY THO. Livvy’s worldbuilding is???? SO IN DEPTH. It is the most deep worldbuilding for a magic type world I think I’ve yet to see on writeblr? I am sooo very excited to see how she integrates it into the plot! But also Livvy is an absolutely magnificent person all around and so supportive and creative and sooo fun to talk to. Love ya, darling~

The Martyr Queen: Alinora Mynerva is visited by one of Death's Reapers, and told she was never meant to exist. She is asked to become his Champion, to stop Fate from destroying the world. Alinora isn't sure she's willing to fight a god... but she is willing to fight the man who took her homeland from her 10 years ago.

Pirate’s Bane: [Quill legitimately can’t summarize this one in so short a space because it’s so delightfully complex, but it’s a brilliant continuation of the previous book above! Go click the link to read the synopsis on the intro post~]

@mvcreates​: I’M SORRY FOR ALL THESE TAGS DEAR MINA BUT YOU DESERVE THEM. Probably just the most interactive person in the writeblr community, Mina’s events and ask games and onwards all are so wonderful, and her engagement with reblogging and commenting on people’s original content is inspirational. AND I’M SAYING IT FOR THE THOUSANDTH TIME BUT THAT DOESN’T DECREASE IT’S MEANING: heckin’ poetic like prose with how much symbolism she fits in there and how lovely it sounds to read aloud, wonderfully clever dialogue and banter and characterization, and characters you love to root for. And her ART. OH MY STARS HER ART. *swoons at majestic colours and shading and textures*

Retrocognition: An investigative journalist with a paranormal gift joins forces with a cantankerous federal agent to expose a Reno-based politician’s (murderous) corruption.

The Vizier’s Apprentice: An alternate universe retelling of a classic Persian love story: One Thousand and One Nights.

@dogwrites​: Venturing into the world of Crime of Mind has only been a very recent endeavour of mine, and I’m only two episodes in at the moment, but gosh golly yarn darn it this story is MARVELOUS. Dog’s ability to write memorable characters with such distinct and identifiable personalities is lovely, their dialogue is wonderful and the body language and description is so heckin’ engaging, and puts you right in the scene with them. And Dog’s also a marvelous artist holy wow. NOT TO MENTION just how awesome Dog is as a person?? Heckin’ ridiculously nice, leaves such insightful and appreciated comments that charge me on. AH. JUST A LOVELY LOVELY THAT I HAD SUCH AN HONOUR OF MEETING. YES.

Crime of Mind:  Dr. Benji Russells, an autistic federal agent, is the youngest member of the Behavioral Analysis Unit, whose knack at viewing individuals and their behavioral chemtrails turned her into a viable asset---but delving into the minds of the country's most insidious leaves none unscathed in the end.

@ardawyn​: OH. MASTER OF DESCRIPTION, HERE. All of Sophie’s writing feels like it could have been written in the world of the story itself despite being very clear and lovely to read, with a vaguely medieval vibe to it all that adds so much to the reading experience. The way she describes environments just puts you right into the scene with the characters, characters that are all written marvelously with beautifully lovable personalities and dialogue and dynamics. And her graphics? Oh, ohhhh. Sophie is probably my greatest inspiration for making graphics and aesthetics for writeblr. Every single one of hers are instantly eye-catching and fit the mood and theme sooo well. Plus, the comments she leaves on my content are just the sweetest thing, and always warm my heart when I read them. <3

The Dawnbringer: A niece of Issarien’s king, Tilda fights against the constricting expectations of her role, making it her mission to find her brother after his disappearance. Rajani is given rooms in the castle of the Prince of Hallrein after being caught stealing, offered a perilous deal she has no choice but to accept. But these two women are connected in an unknown way...

Night Crystals: Amaria was raised an assassin at the orphanage The Obsidian to serve the king of Calastari. But after discovering a secret, she must make the choice whether to stay and swallow lies, or seal her death sentence trying to leave.

@radley-writes​: Although I haven’t interacted much yet with Radley, I’ve fallen completely in love with their writing and ideas. Their art is so lovely and professional and clean, and the body language and personality it portrays is marvelous. But their writing? Outrageously good, and brilliantly hilarious. I’ve mainly only been following His Majesty’s Starship so far, but the way that Radley is able to match the vocabulary and narrative to the time period of the story is so skillful and inspiring, and is absolutely wonderfully engaging by placing you right into the setting like it’s real. The integration of worldbuilding is done extraordinarily well and I am in love with all of the distinct personalities and dialogue of their wondrous cast of idiots.

His Majesty’s Starship: The Eurasian powers expand their empires to the furthest-flung reaches of the solar system – as well as their endless wars. As nations and companies vie for control of the Off-World Colonies , a trio of utter imbeciles come into possession of a secret that many would kill for. A secret that changes everything…

Anywayssss there are sooo, so many more wips that I consider favourites of mine, and so many more writeblrs that I think are the absolute bomb, but Quill’s energy isn’t limitless! 

That said, maybe I’ll make up a simpler post of a bunch of recommendations later... hm..........

ANYWAYS YEAH GO CHECK THESE LOVELIES OUT

[ramajmedia]

10 Blade Storylines We Want To See In The MCU | ScreenRant

Marvel fans were both surprised and delighted when it was announced at this year’s Comic-Con that the imprint’s beloved half-vampire vampire hunter Blade would be joining the MCU. The MCU didn’t seem like the place for a dark, creepy, ultraviolent character like Blade, but fans aren’t complaining about the fact that he’ll be bumping shoulders with the likes of Thor, Doctor Strange, and Black Panther on the big screen – especially since two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, one of the greatest actors working today, has been cast to play him.

RELATED: 5 Reasons We're Excited About Mahershala Ali's Blade (& 5 Why Marvel Should've Kept Wesley Snipes In The Role)

Here are 10 Blade storylines we want to see in the MCU.

10 Curse of the Mutants

In this X-Men storyline, also sometimes dubbed “Mutants vs. Vampires,” Blade finally manages to defeat his arch nemesis Dracula for good. However, with Dracula gone, his son Xarus takes over and turns out to be an even more formidable enemy as he rallies together all the vampires and leads them against Earth’s mutant population.

As the vampires try to turn all the mutants into vampires – managing to turn Jubilee and capture Wolverine – Blade teams up with the X-Men to stop the vampires and save the mutants. This would be a two-birds-with-one-stone for the MCU; an X-Men movie and a Blade movie rolled into one.

9 Blade and the Midnight Sons

In “Blade and the Midnight Sons,” Doctor Strange uses his magical powers to create a dark superpowered team called the Midnight Sons, consisting of the Nightstalkers (Blade and his allies), Morbius the Living Vampire (whose rights are unfortunately wrapped up with none other than Sony), the Spirits of Vengeance (including the Johnny Blaze version of Ghost Rider), and the Darkhold Redeemers.

Due to rights issues and the need to tie stories into the wider MCU, these teams might have to be altered, like the sides of Civil War. Adapting this comic book would be a great way to do an on-screen team-up with Doctor Strange and Blade.

8 Tomb of Dracula

The “Tomb of Dracula” series was one of the most significant in Marvel Comics’ history. Until 1971, the Comics Code Authority had controlled what could or could not be depicted in horror comics, and one of the most blatant restrictions was that vampire characters couldn’t appear.

RELATED: Blade: 10 Facts You Didn't Know About The Franchise

So, as soon as the regulations became more lax, Marvel pounced at the opportunity to make vampire comics with a series about the most famous public-domain vampire of all time: Dracula. In the comic, Dracula took on various Marvel characters, like Spider-Man, Howard the Duck, the X-Men, and most notably, the vampire hunter Blade.

7 Undead Again

In this twelve-issue series, writer Marc Guggenheim and artist Howard Chaykin revisited Blade’s origin story to give a few new details, like his heritage in Latveria (the fictional country in the Marvel universe for which Doctor Doom is an ambassador and therefore has diplomatic immunity) and the truth about his biological father.

There isn’t an awful lot of action in the comic, so it would need to have its action quotient punched up for the big-screen translation, but it does feature Blade fighting Doctor Doom, who’s in dire need of an MCU debut, and also a fight with Spider-Man, who will hopefully return to the MCU at some point.

6 Blade vs. the Avengers

In this Ultimate Avengers storyline, a number of the Avengers got infected by vampires and turned into bloodsuckers. So, it was up to Blade to hold them off or incapacitate them until they could be cured. Some of them died in the comic, but this wouldn’t be a fitting way for any MCU characters to go for good.

Still, it would be exciting to see characters like the Hulk and Black Panther as vampires. A lot of plot points and aesthetic stylings from the Ultimate Marvel universe have been borrowed by the MCU, so this might not be as far-fetched as it sounds.

5 Spirits of Vengeance: War at the Gates of Hell

In “Spirits of Vengeance: War at the Gates of Hell,” Heaven and Hell call off their war for one day a year as the ambassadors for each realm meet for a discussion. When an angel is discovered murdered with a silver bullet during the ceasefire, Ghost Rider teams up with Blade to investigate.

They’re also joined by Hellstorm and Satana. Ghost Rider, Hellstorm, and Satana all have streaming series on the way to Hulu, which won’t technically be set in the MCU, but thanks to the multiverse, could lead them to a big-screen appearance alongside Blade (some fans have already theorized that the multiverse is how Blade will be introduced).

4 Undead by Daylight

Following up Blade’s arch-rivalry with Dracula from the “Tomb of Dracula” comics, everyone’s favorite vampire hunter teams up with a pair of fellow vampire hunters – both based on other characters from Bram Stoker’s gothic classic – to take on the infamous Count. These two other vampire killers are Quincy Harker, the son of Jonathan Harker, and Rachel Van Helsing, the great-granddaughter of Abraham Van Helsing.

Mini Avengers-style team-ups with teams of three or four characters like Thor: Ragnarok and Captain America: The Winter Soldier are a lot of fun in the MCU. This would be a great horror-themed version of that.

3 Sins of the Father

MCU movies love plot twists where allies of the protagonist turn out to be villains – Iron Man, Captain Marvel, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 etc. – so “Sins of the Father” would be a great Blade storyline for the franchise to tackle. It sees a vampire enlisting the help of Blade to kill her father as revenge for turning her into a vampire in the first place.

RELATED: 10 Best Gifts For Fans Of The Infinity Gauntlet

Since Blade hates vampires, he reluctantly agrees. However, it all turns out to be a ruse, as the vampire and her romantic interest just want to destroy Blade.

2 Nightstalkers

In this storyline, Blade ends up getting possessed by a curse taken from a page torn out of the demonic book known as the Darkhold. Some MCU fans have been expecting the Darkhold to show up in either WandaVision or Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to prevent Chthon from escaping the void between realities that he occupies.

RELATED: Blade: 6 Characters We Want To See Return (& 4 We Don't)

So, if the Darkhold is going to be the MacGuffin in this scary chapter of the MCU following the Infinity Stones in the Infinity Saga (heck, this next one might be “the Darkhold Saga”), then the “Nightstalkers” storyline could be in order.

1 Crescent City Blues

The “Crescent City Blues” storyline sees Deacon Frost take over the criminal underworld of New Orleans, which would make a fresh and interesting setting, especially in the MCU, which usually stays on the East and West Coasts and rarely takes a trip down south. Dracula is easily one of Blade’s most iconic villains, and in this storyline, he becomes even more powerful in his reign as Lord of Vampires when he captures both Blade and his sidekick Hannibal King.

This is an all-action comic book that is often recommended to first-time Blade readers looking to get into the character, so it would make the perfect starting point for his rebooted movie series.

NEXT: 10 Storylines Disney+'s She-Hulk Series Could Use

source https://screenrant.com/blade-storylines-want-see-mcu/

[cryptoriawebb]

War for the Planet of the Apes: review

*Captain Kirk voice* “CAEEEEEEEEEEEESERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR”

There was a lot I loved about this movie. A lot. That isn’t something I say so easily. Especially with trilogies. Over the last couple of years, sequels and “threequels” as they say haven’t have been all over the movie map. Some have leapt levels above their predecessors, while others miss the mark by such length it’s all you can do not to cringe. Still, some hang squarely in the middle, neither good or bad, memorable or forgettable. This is especially true for reboot films: X-men, Star Trek and now Star Wars come to mind. Ironically, all three serve both as reboot-prequels to three iconic franchises. You can argue til the cows come home which of these is more successful (much less which are better in terms of content and characters) and maybe one day I’ll write up my own thoughts: I think it’s pretty obvious who the winner is.

I mean, of course, Planet of the Apes (like I said, one day I’ll do a comparison; that day is not today.) I don’t know how these movies manage to maintain their ongoing success…I mean, I do, but it’s so rare to see in Hollywood these days.  So many movies rely on the same, tired plots, conflict and cardboard character chemistry. More often than not I find myself walking into a sequel on eggshells: will it be good? Will it maintain its predecessor’s pace? Will it exceed my expectations? Will I remain engaged and attached to these characters? This movie checks off every box. Well…most of the boxes, but even so, this is the one trilogy I trust to deliver the same excitement promised in its trailers. I’m honestly awed by that, even all these years later. So many of their predecessors got it wrong: the original sequels, Burton’s remake…how, I wonder, how have they managed to get it right after so long?

(I ask because I’ve lost a lot of faith in Hollywood, not because I don’t understand creative mechanic.)

Right, staying on track—this is about War, not the franchise overall.

I absolutely adored the opening text sequence. Paired with the ambience, it was so subtle and eerie and immediately sucked you into the mood. The lingering words (rise, dawn and war) didn’t feel corny or excessively enforced, either. Actually, the summaries themselves remained on screen long enough to read through without rushing—I would know, I rushed through the last segment fearing it would fade before I finished. It didn’t, so shout out to the editor.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of opening a movie with battle sequences but it works very well for this setting and storyline, especially given how the last one ended. It didn’t last too long either. In my opinion, fight scenes and battle sequences should be like cinnamon to French toast: included to enhance the flavor without overpowering it.  I will say it took me a little while to figure out why there were apes fighting on the human side but that’s probably because I haven’t seen the previous film in some time. I really liked the whole ‘donkey’ concept, too…although ‘like’ isn’t the right word. Sad, maybe, to see how these traitors chose to survive and knowing despite what they’ve been told they likely won’t be spared.

That’s an odd thing about this movie: yes there were a few standard Hollywood plots but the way they were presented prevented them from feeling stale. To watch Caesar struggle with the death of his wife and son, this empathic leader who never wanted war…it’s so different from watching, say, Magneto give in to heartache, or Logan, or Spock in the new Star Trek films. Caesar carries himself with a different weariness, one that isn’t guarded or hesitant and mistrusting. He’s a different kind of survivor, a leader aware of his importance without letting it go to his head. He’s good. Genuinely good and despite the biblical parallels circulating these movies that goodness feels grounded, tangible and vulnerable. Capable of wavering if pushed too far…yet even when it was, it never shattered completely. I felt I could see the conflict swarming him throughout this movie: that part blinded by rage and grief that seemed to give up on everything but revenge, and that goodness that kept him going, kept him from falling completely into self-centered destruction.  I’m in awe of Andy Serkis; each time he takes on Caesar his performances get better and better. While I must confess there were a few times I felt the camera lingered a little too long on his face (which of course isn’t his fault), he never wavered, and gotta throw a shout out to the visual effects department because they outdid themselves again. We might still live in an era where CGI characters look distinctly computerized, but technology has come a very long way, and each year past closes that gap a little more.

Maurice definitely came into his own as well. He was starting to in the last movie, from what I remember, but here I really felt like I learned who he was as an individual. Like Caesar, he too, possessed an emotional heart, yet more rational and empathetic, able to maintain a neutral outlook when needed. Doing this helped highlight Caesar’s diminishing ability to do so as time went on, and while, again, it brought up points used often in films, it worked without feeling tired. The more I think about it, the more I realize these tropes actually help this budding world: a second civilization rising to prominence, dealing with self-doubt and personal loss and shaken loyalty—humans have dealt with for centuries. I adored his relationship with Nova. It reminded me a little bit of Zira and Taylor from the first film, although with far less strain and a lot more trust. It’s both sweet and sad, knowing where the relationship with apes and humans will ultimately go—where it’s heading already. On a slight side note, part of me worried Maurice would die; I’m glad he didn’t, he’s always been one of my favorite side characters.

Speaking of Nova, I’m super curious about her character and possible future development. I’ve heard more films are in the works, I’m just not sure how far ahead they’ll jump. I hope not too far. I want to see this new civilization before we launch to Charleton Heston’s time, and like I said, I want to see what happens to Nova. Will she regress into a primitive state? I’m not sure how long Nova lost her voice before the apes found her. The Colonel devolved so quickly part of me wonders if Nova might be some kind of exception. If not, then she’ll probably become the first example of apes coexisting with animalistic humans.

I’d also like to see what happens to Cornelius. One thing I can’t tell about these films: if these names (Bright Eyes, Nova, Cornelius) are designed as a throwback favor to fans or if these characters are meant to grow into the ones we see in the original movie, however closer to modern time it is. Maybe their significance are important to characters and become popular and circulated in their society centuries after their original use…I hope the former is true, only because this new world is a little more interesting than the popular 1960s “NUCLEAR WAR DESTROYED ALL THE THINGS” post-apocalyptic settings.

I think if there’s any character I’m iffy on, it’s Bad Ape. You know, the hermit who learned to speak while living in a zoo. I did find the outsider angle interesting—we really don’t know how apes in other parts of the world have evolved since the Simian Flu outbreak. I also loved the nod to their future society’s uniforms (which I initially didn’t catch; it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the first film.) I just wasn’t sold on the humor. It felt very out of place in an otherwise intense movie. I kept getting a “Disney dopey sidekick” vibe from his antics—added to lighten a mood I don’t believe needed lightening. I mean, it wasn’t so jarring it completely severed the tone, just nudged at it, created a small ripple and I didn’t particularly like it. I liked Bad Ape as a character, though. His past, like I said, made him unique and an outsider in different ways than Koba’s followers. He and Nova both stand as interesting parallels: she can’t speak but understands (at least somewhat) sign language, while Bad Ape doesn’t understand it but can speak almost as well as Caesar.

As far as characters go, I think the Colonel is the last one worth nothing. I only vaguely remember Rocket from the last film and I have no recollection of Luca or Winter. Blue Eyes, I had hoped, would play a larger role, given his significance in the last film, but I suppose his character arc could only go so far without fading to the background or losing someone close to him…at least in the Hollywood handbook. Even for a franchise like this one. Although the love interest, side note, I kinda felt was shoe-horned in there. I realize two years have passed, but it’s hard to engage in so short-lived a relationship, on-screen.   There was one soldier I took interest in, too, the survivor at the beginning of the film. What was his name, Preacher? I thought he’d play a larger role, apart from the wary observer. Perhaps that’s all he needed to be. Either way, I’d have liked to see more development.

I’d like to go back to the Colonel again: he, too, followed the same “similar yet different” pattern the rest of the characters maintained. I’ve seen a lot of movies over the years, and ‘General Badass who believes the different species is expendable’ is no stranger to the silver screen (Avatar, anyone?) I almost wrote him off, during that scene he spoke with Caesar. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s cardboard villains (alright there are a lot of things I can’t stand but this really irritates me.) Imagine my surprise when I learned the intent of his to-be wall. He wasn’t the commanding force of all or most survivors at all, but rather the boxed in outsider trying to survive. I don’t agree with his methods of course, much less the treatment and execution of his men but it was interesting, from that sort of psychological perspective: how far fear will push someone. Fight or flight and all that.

His final scene with Caesar broke my heart. I knew what had happened of course—admittedly not as early as I’m sure others did but certainly from “where the hell is he?” I also admit I thought he was going to use his remaining humanity to kill Caesar (both at first and then when Caesar put his gun down.) Begging for death and killing himself spoke more of his own humanity, and I use that term in reference to the humanness in him, rather than compassion towards others. The tight shots of their faces didn’t help. Part of me wonders if that was intentional, beyond capturing the emotion. I believe it was the Colonel who noted that Caesar’s eyes were almost human: in those final scenes, the eyes were front and center and you could see the almost animalistic terror in the Colonel’s, while tortured conflict filled Caesar’s. I still maintain the close-ups lingered too long but it was an interesting contrast nonetheless.

I’m not sure how I feel about the Simian flu reverting people to animalistic creatures. It’s certainly an interesting take, but it almost feels like a plot device, as opposed to regressing naturally which I believe happened in the original film? The more I consider it the more I wonder if these reboot prequels will shorten the distance between present day and ‘Planet of the Apes.’ Instead of, what was it, two thousand years, crunch it down to two hundred, if that. This does, admittedly, heighten the horror, and I do like that…but I also like my continuity (ignoring the original disastrous sequels.) I guess we’ll see what happens.

Let’s see, what else…

I took particular note of the score, something I don’t always do. One of those things where, at least in my case, it tends to weave its way through the brain as part of the mood, subconsciously. Rarely does a score jump out at me unless it’s either unusual (Tron Legacy, for example) or I make a point to listen. I’m not sure what about the music stood out to me, this time around. I will say now that I have noticed I found the choice for the more humorous elements worked—not too subtle, not too loud or excessive—but still felt a little out of place.

The set design, too, I feel worth mentioning. While I haven’t watched any behind the scenes I’m assuming it was, in large part, computer-generated. I tend to be partial towards practical sets; it speaks to the creative individual in me, always marveling over how it manifests in others. That isn’t to say I didn’t appreciate them as they were, especially as someone with a fascination towards abandoned buildings. The gift shop stands out as my favorite of the ‘human’ sets, although my favorite overall has to be the ape society before the ambush. Not only did I love the design, but found it practical and appropriate for the skills developed by the apes since the flu broke out; still primates, but more and more human with each day gone by. It’s amazing and fascinating to see how they’ve developed and knowing where they’re ultimately headed.

I think the last thing I want to mention is Caesar’s death. I thought Blue Eyes said the distance from their home to the desert was a long one…I realize since then they resumed their journey from a different location, but I find it a bit odd Caesar managed to survive with a bleeding wound. If their new home is far enough away from human life, how far did they have to go from the facility? It really is just a minor quibble I have; I wouldn’t have had him go any other way. I’m going to miss him though. Caesar and his journey are half the reason I enjoyed these films, he’s such a compelling character. I hope whatever comes next can hold together without him.

All in all, really liked this movie, would definitely recommend. I think the first two were better, but I was far from disappointed. RIP Caesar, I’ll miss you.

[jehanimation]

Celebrating the undersung heroism of The Peanuts Movie

In December 2015, a movie reboot of one of history’s most beloved entertainment brands was released in cinemas, and it took the world by storm. That movie was not The Peanuts Movie.

Not that I’m setting myself up as an exception to that. Like pretty much everyone else, I spent the tail-end of 2015 thoroughly immersing myself in all things Star Wars: The Force Awakens, drinking deeply of the hype before seeing it as many times as I could - five in total - before it left theatres. In the midst of all that Jedi madness, I ended up totally forgetting to see The Peanuts Movie, Blue Sky Studios’ well-reviewed adaptation of Charles M. Schulz’s classic newspaper strip, which I’d been meaning to catch over the festive period. But then, it’s not as though the schedulers made it easy for me; in the US, there had been a buffer zone of a month between the launches of the two films, but here in the UK, Peanuts came out a week after Star Wars; even for this animation enthusiast, when it came to a choice between seeing the new Star Wars again or literally any other film, there was really no contest at all.

A year later, belatedly catching up with the movie I missed at the height of my rekindled Star Wars mania proved an eye-opening experience, and places Blue Sky’s film in an interesting context. With a $246.2 million worldwide gross, The Peanuts Movie did well enough to qualify as a hit, but it remains the studio’s lowest earner to date; in retrospect, it seems likely that going head-to-head with Star Wars and the James Bond movie Spectre didn’t exactly maximise its chances of blockbuster receipts. Yet in an odd way, modest, unnoticed success feels like a fitting outcome for The Peanuts Movie, a film that acts as a perfectly-formed celebration of underappreciated decency in a world of bombast and bluster. Charlie Brown, pop culture’s ultimate underdog, was never fated to emerge victorious in a commercial battle against Han Solo and James Bond, but his movie contains a grounded level of heartfelt sympathy for the small-scale struggles of unassumingly ordinary folk that higher-concept properties don’t have the time to express. The Peanuts Movie is a humbly heroic film about a quietly laudable person, made with understated bravery by underrated artists; I hope sincerely that more people will discover it like I did for years to come, and recognise just how much of what it says, does and represents is worth celebrating.

CELEBRATING... BLUE SKY STUDIOS

Before giving praise to The Peanuts Movie itself, it’d be remiss of me not to throw at least a few kind words in the direction of Blue Sky Studios - a group of filmmakers who I’m inclined to like, somewhat despite themselves, and who don’t always get very kind things written about them. After all, the 20th Century Fox subsidiary have been in the CGI feature animation mix since 2002, meaning they have a more established pedigree than most studios, and their long-running Ice Age franchise is a legitimately important, formative success story within the modern era of American animation. Under the creative leadership of Chris Wedge, they’ve managed to carve and hold a niche for themselves in a competitive ecosystem, hewing close to the Shrek-inspired DreamWorks model of fast-talking, kinetic comedy, but with a physical slapstick edge that marked their work out as distinct, at least initially. Sure, the subsequent rise of Illumination Entertainment and their ubiquitous Minions has stolen that thunder a little, but it’s important to remember that Ice Age’s bedraggled sabretooth squirrel Scrat was the CGI era’s original silent comedy superstar, and to recognise Blue Sky’s vital role in pioneering that stylistic connection between the animation techniques of the 21st century and the knockabout nonverbal physicality of formative 20th century cartooning, several years before anyone else thought to do so.

For all their years of experience, though, there’s a prevailing sense that Blue Sky have made a habit of punching below their weight, and that they haven’t - Scrat aside - established the kind of memorable legacy you’d expect from a veteran studio with 15 years of movies under their belt. Like Illumination - the studio subsequently founded by former Blue Sky bigwig Chris Meledandri - they remain very much defined by the influence of their debut movie, but Blue Sky have unarguably been a lot less successful in escaping the shadow of Ice Age than Illumination have in pulling away from the orbit of the Despicable Me/Minions franchise. Outside of the Ice Age series, Blue Sky’s filmography is largely composed of forgettable one-offs (Robots, Epic), the second-tier Rio franchise (which, colour palette aside, feels pretty stylistically indistinct from Ice Age), and a pair of adaptations (Horton Hears a Who!, The Peanuts Movie) that, in many ways, feel like uncharacteristic outliers rather than thoroughbred Blue Sky movies. Their Ice Age flagship, meanwhile, appears to be leaking and listing considerably, with a successful first instalment followed by three sequels (The Meltdown, Dawn of the Dinosaurs and Continental Drift) that garnered successively poorer reviews while cleaning up at the international box office, before last year’s fifth instalment (Collision Course) was essentially shunned by critics and audiences alike. Eleven movies in, Blue Sky are yet to produce their first cast-iron classic, which is unfortunate but not unforgivable; much more troubling is how difficult the studio seems to find it to even scrape a mediocre passing grade half the time.

Nevertheless, while Blue Sky’s output doesn’t bear comparison to a Disney, a Pixar or even a DreamWorks, there’s something about them that I find easy to root for, even if I’m only really a fan of a small percentage of their movies. Even their most middling works have a certain sense of honest effort and ambition about them, even if it didn’t come off: for example, Robots and Epic - both directed by founder Chris Wedge - feel like the work of a team trying to push their movies away from cosy comedy in the direction of larger-scale adventure storytelling, while the Rio movies, for all their generic antics and pratfalls, do at least benefit from the undoubted passion that director Carlos Saldanha tried to bring to his animated realisation of his hometown of Rio de Janeiro. I’ll also continue to celebrate the original Ice Age movie as a charismatic, well-realised children’s road movie, weakened somewhat by its instinct to pull its emotional punches, but gently likeable nevertheless; sure, the series is looking a little worse for wear these days, but at least part of the somewhat misguided instinct to keep churning them out seems to stem from a genuine fondness for the characters. Heck, I’m even inclined to look favourably on Chris Wedge’s ill-fated decision to dabble in live-action with the recent fantasy flop Monster Trucks; after all, the jump from directing animation to live-action is a tricky manoeuvre that even Pixar veterans like Andrew Stanton (John Carter) and Brad Bird (Tomorrowland) have struggled to execute smoothly, and the fact he attempted it at all feels indicative of his studio’s instinct to try their best to expand their horizons, even if their reach sometimes exceeds their grasp.

Besides, it’s not as though their efforts so far have gone totally unrewarded. The third and fourth Ice Age movies scored record-breaking box office results outside the US, while there have also been a handful of notable successes in critical terms - most prominently, Horton Hears a Who! and The Peanuts Movie, the two adaptations of classic American children’s literature directed for the studio by Steve Martino. I suppose you can put a negative spin on the fact that Blue Sky’s two best-reviewed movies were the ones based on iconic source material - as I’ve noted, the films do feel a little bit like stylistic outliers, rather than organic expressions of the studio’s strengths - but let’s not kid ourselves that working from a beloved source text isn’t a double-edged sword. Blue Sky’s rivals at Illumination proved that much in their botching of Dr Seuss’ The Lorax, as have Sony Pictures Animation with their repeated crimes against the Smurfs, and these kinds of examples provide a better context to appreciate Blue Sky’s sensitive, respectful treatments of Seuss and Charles Schulz as the laudable achievements they are. If anything, it may actually be MORE impressive that a studio that’s often had difficulty finding a strong voice with their own material have been able to twice go toe-to-toe with genuine giants of American culture and emerge not only without embarrassing themselves, but arguably having added something to the legacies of the respective properties.

CELEBRATING... GENUINE INNOVATION IN CG ANIMATION

Of course, adding something to a familiar mix is part and parcel of the adaptation process, but the challenge for any studio is to make sure that anything they add works to enrich the material they’re working with, rather than diluting it. In the case of The Peanuts Movie - a lavish computer-generated 3D film based on a newspaper strip with a famously sketchy, spartan aesthetic - it was clear from the outset that the risk of over-egging the pudding was going to be high, and that getting the look right would require a creative, bespoke approach. Still, it’s hard to overstate just how bracingly, strikingly fresh the finalised aesthetic of The Peanuts Movie feels, to the degree where it represents more than just a new paradigm for Schulz’s characters, but instead feels like a genuinely exciting step forward for the medium of CG animation in general.

Now, I’m certainly not one of those old-school puritans who’ll claim that 2D cel animation is somehow a better, purer medium than modern CGI, but I do share the common concern that mainstream animated features have become a little bit aesthetically samey since computers took over as the primary tools. There’s been a tendency to follow a sort of informal Pixar-esque playbook when it comes to stylisation and movement, and it’s only been relatively recently that studios like Disney, Illumination and Sony have tried to bring back some of that old-school 2D squash-and-stretch, giving them more scope to diversify. No doubt, we’re starting to see a spirit of visual experimentation return to the medium - the recent stylisation of movies like Minions, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Hotel Transylvania and Storks are testament to that - but even so, it feels like there’s a limit to how far studios are willing to push things on a feature film. Sure, Disney and Pixar will do gorgeous, eye-popping visual style experiments in short movies like Paperman, Inner Workings and Piper, but when it comes to the big movies, a more conservative house style invariably reasserts itself.

With the exception of a greater-than-average emphasis on physicality, Blue Sky’s typical playbook hasn’t really differed that much from their peers, which is partly why their approach to adapting Seuss and Schulz - two artists with immutable, iconic art styles of their own - have stood out so much. Their visual work on Horton Hears a Who! was groundbreaking in its own way - it was, after all, the first CG adaptation of Dr Seuss, and the result captured the eccentric impossibilities and flourishes of the source material much better than Illumination managed four years with The Lorax - yet The Peanuts Movie presented a whole new level of challenge. Where Seuss’s worlds exploded off the page with colour and life and elastic movement, Schulz’s were the very model of scribbled understatement, often eschewing backgrounds completely to preserve an expressive but essentially sparse minimalism. Seuss’s characters invited 3D interpretation with their expressive curves and body language; the Peanuts cast, by contrast, make no three-dimensional sense at all, existing only as a limited series of anatomically inconsistent stock poses and impressionist linework that breaks down the moment volume is added. It’s not that Charlie Brown, Snoopy and co are totally resistant to animation - after all, the Peanuts legacy of animated specials and movies is almost as treasured as the comic strip itself - but it’s still worth noting that the Bill Melendez/Lee Mendelson-produced cartoons succeeded mostly by committing fully to the static, spare, rigidly two-dimensional look of Schulz’s comic art, a far cry from the hyper-malleable Chuck Jones/Friz Freleng-produced style of the most famous Seuss adaptations.

Perhaps realising that Schulz cannot be made to adapt to 3D, Blue Sky went the opposite route: making 3D adapt to Schulz. The results are honestly startling to behold - a richly colourful, textured, fluidly dynamic world, populated by low-framerate characters who pop and spasm and glide along 2D planes, creating a visual experience that’s halfway between stop-motion and Paper Mario. It’s an experiment in style that breaks all the established rules and feels quite unlike anything that’s been done in CGI animation on this scale - with the possible exception of The Lego Movie - and it absolutely 100% works in a way that no other visual approach could have done for this particular property. Each moment somehow manages to ride the line of contradiction between comforting familiarity and virtuoso innovation; I’m still scratching my head, for example, about how Blue Sky managed to so perfectly translate Linus’s hair - a series of wavy lines that make no anatomical sense - into meticulously rendered 3D, or how the extended Red Baron fantasy sequences are able to keep Snoopy snapping between jerky staccato keyframes while the world around him spins and revolves with complete fluidity. Snoopy “speaks”, as ever, with nonverbal vocalisations provided by the late Bill Melendez, director of so many classic Peanuts animations; the use of his archived performance in this way is a sweet tribute to the man, but one that hardly seems necessary when the entire movie is essentially a $100 million love letter to his signature style.

I do wonder how Melendez would’ve reacted to seeing his work aggrandised in such a lavish fashion, because it’s not as though those films were designed to be historic touchstones; indeed, much of the stripped-back nature of those early Peanuts animations owed as much to budgetary constraints and tight production cycles as they did to stylistic bravery. Melendez’s visuals emerged as they did out of necessity; it’s an odd quirk of fate that his success ended up making it necessary for Blue Sky to take such bold steps to match up with his template so many decades later. Sure, you can argue that The Peanuts Movie is technically experimental because it had to be, but that doesn’t diminish the impressiveness of the final result at all, particularly given how much easier it would have been to make the film look so much worse than this. It’d be nice to see future generations of CG animators pick up the gauntlet that films like this and The Lego Movie have thrown down by daring to be adventurous with the medium and pushing the boundaries of what a 3D movie can look and move like. After all, trailblazing is a defining component of Peanuts’ DNA; if Blue Sky’s movie can be seen as a groundbreaking achievement in years to come, then they’ll really have honoured Schulz and Melendez in the best way possible.

CELEBRATING... THE COURAGE TO BE SMALL

In scaling up the visual palette of the Peanuts universe, Blue Sky overcame a key hurdle in making the dormant series feel worthy of a first full cinematic outing in 35 years, but this wasn’t the only scale-related challenge the makers of The Peanuts Movie faced. There’s always been a perception that transferring a property to the big screen requires a story to match the size of the canvas; in the animation industry, that’s probably more true now than it’s ever been. Looking back at the classic animated movies made prior to around the 1980s and 1990s, it’s striking how many of them are content to tell episodic, rambling shaggy dog stories that prioritise colourful antics and larger-than-life personalities over ambitious narrative, but since then it feels like conventions have shifted. Most of today’s crop of successful animations favour three-act structures, high-stakes adventure stories and screen-filling spectacle - all of which presents an obvious problem for a movie based on a newspaper strip about a mopey prepubescent underachiever and his daydreaming dog.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Charlie and Snoopy have had to manage a transition to feature-length narrative, but it was always unlikely that Blue Sky would follow too closely in the footsteps of the four previous theatrical efforts that debuted between 1969 and 1980. All four are characterised by the kind of meandering, episodic structure that was popular in the day, which made it easier to assemble scripts from Schulz-devised gag sequences in an essentially modular fashion; the latter three (Snoopy, Come Home from 1972, Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown from 1977 and Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don't Come Back!!) from 1980) also made their own lives easier by incorporating road trips or journeys into their storylines, which gave audiences the opportunity to see the Peanuts gang in different settings. The first movie, 1969’s A Boy Named Charlie Brown, also features a road trip aspect to its plotline, but in most respects offers the most typical and undiluted Peanuts experience of the four original films; perhaps as a result, it also feels quite aggressively padded, while its limited cast (lacking later additions like Peppermint Patty and Marcie) and intimately dour focus made it a sometimes claustrophobic cinematic experience.

Given The Peanuts Movie’s intention to reintroduce the franchise to modern audiences who may not necessarily be familiar with the original strip’s melancholic sensibilities, the temptation was always going to be to balloon the property outwards into something broad, overinflated and grand in a way that Schulz never was; it’s to be applauded, then, that The Peanuts Movie ends up as that rare CGI animation that tells a small-scale story in a focused manner over 90 minutes, resisting the urge to dilute the purity of its core character-driven comedy material with any of the family adventure elements modern audiences are used to. Even more so than previous feature-length Peanuts movies, this isn’t a film with any kind of high-concept premise; rather than sending Charlie Brown out on any kind of physical quest, The Peanuts Movie is content to offer a simple character portrait, showing us various sides of our protagonist’s personality as he strives to better himself in order to impress his unrequited love, the ever-elusive Little Red-Haired Girl. The resulting film is certainly episodic - each attempt to impress his object of affection sends Charlie Brown into new little mini-storylines that bring different classic characters to the foreground and evoke the stop-start format of Schulz’s strip, even though the content and style feel fresh - but all of the disparate episodes feel unified by the kind of coherent forward momentum and progressive character growth that Bill Melendez’s older movies never really reached for.

Indeed, it’s probably most telling that the film’s sole major concession to conventional cinematic scale - its extended fantasy side-story featuring Snoopy engaging in aerial battles in his imaginary World War I Flying Ace alter-ego - is probably its weakest element. These high-flying action sequences are intelligently conceived, injecting some real visual splendour and scope without intruding on the intimacy of the main story, but they feel overextended and only infrequently connected to the rest of the film in any meaningful way. This would be less of a problem if the Snoopy-centric narrative had effective emotional hooks of its own, but sadly there’s really not much there beyond the Boys’ Own parody trappings; any real investment in Snoopy’s dreamed pursuit of his poodle love interest Fifi is undermined by her very un-Schulz-like drippy damselness, and it becomes hard to avoid feeling that you’re watching an extended distraction from the parts of the movie you’re actually interested in. Of course, it’s arguable that an overindulgent fondness for Snoopy-related flights of fancy drawing attention away from the more grounded, meaningful exploits of Charlie Brown and friends is actually a fair reflection of the Peanuts franchise in its latter years, showing that Blue Sky were faithful to Schulz to a fault, but I wouldn’t like to focus too much on a minor misstep in a film that’s intelligent and committed about its approach to small-canvas storytelling in a way you don’t often see from mainstream animated films on the big screen.

CELEBRATING... LETTING THE ULTIMATE UNDERDOG HAVE HIS DAY

All of these achievements would count for very little, though, if Blue Sky’s movie wasn’t able to adequately capture the intellect and essence of Schulz’s work, a task that seems simultaneously simple and impossible. For such a sprawling franchise, Peanuts has proven remarkably resilient to tampering, meddling or ruination, with each incarnation - whether in print or in animation - remaining stylistically and tonally consistent, thanks to the strict control Schulz and his fastidious estate have kept over the creative direction of the series. On the one hand, this is a blessing of sorts for future stewards of the franchise, as it gives them a clear playbook to work from when producing new material; on the other hand, the unyielding strictness of that formula hints heavily at a certain brittleness to the Peanuts template, suggesting to would-be reinventors that it would take only a small misapplication of ambition to irrevocably damage the essential Schulz-ness of the property and see the result crumble to dust. This has certainly proven the case with Schulz’s contemporary Dr Seuss, one of few American children’s literature writers with a comparable standing to the Peanuts creator, and an artist whose literate, lyrical and contemplative work has proven eminently easy to ruin by misguided adapters who tried and failed to put their own spin on his classic material.

There’s no guesswork involved in saying these concerns were of paramount importance to the Schulz estate when prepping The Peanuts Movie - director Steve Martino was selected specifically on the strength of his faithful adaptation of Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!, and the film’s screenplay was co-written by Schulz’s son Craig and grandson Bryan - but even taking a cautious approach, there are challenges to adapting Schulz for mainstream feature animation that surpass even those posed by Seuss’ politically-charged poetry. For all his vaulting thematic ambition, Seuss routinely founded his work on a bedrock of visual whimsy and adventurous, primary-colours mayhem, acting as a spoonful of sugar for the intellectual medicine he administered. Schulz, on the other hand, preferred to serve up his sobering, melancholic life lessons neat and unadulterated, with the static suburban backdrops and simply-rendered characters providing a fairly direct vessel for the strip’s cerebral, poignant or downbeat musings. The cartoonist’s willingness to honestly embrace life’s cruel indignities, the callousness of human nature and the feeling of unfulfilment that defines so much of regular existence is perhaps the defining element of his work and the foundational principle that couldn’t be removed without denying Charlie Brown his soul - but it’s also something that might have felt incompatible with the needs and expectations of a big studio movie in the modern era, particularly without being able to use the surface-level aesthetic pleasure that a Seuss adaptation provides as a crutch.

I’ve already addressed the impressive way The Peanuts Movie was able to make up the deficit on visual splendour and split the difference in terms of the story’s sense of scale, but the most laudable aspect of the film is the sure-footed navigation of the tonal tightrope it had to tread, deftly balancing the demands of the material against the needs of a modern audience, which are honestly just as important. Schulz may have been a visionary, but his work didn’t exist in a vacuum; the sometime brutal nature of his emotional outlook was at least in part a reaction to the somewhat sanitised children’s media landscape that existed around him at the time, and his work acted as an antidote that was perhaps more necessary then than it is now. That’s not to say the medicinal qualities of Schulz’s psychological insights don’t still have validity, but to put it bluntly I don’t think children lack reminders in today’s social landscape that the world can be a dark, daunting and depressing place, and it feels like Martino and his team realised that when trying to find the centre of their script. Thus, The Peanuts Movie takes the sharp and sometimes bitter flavour of classic Schulz and filters it, finding notes of sweetness implicit in the Peanuts recipe and making them more explicit, creating a gentler blend that goes down smoother while still feeling like it’s drawn from the original source.

The core of this delicate work of adaptation is the film’s Charlie Brown version 2.0 - still fundamentally the same unlucky totem of self-doubt and doomed ambition he’s always been, but with the permeating air of accepted defeat diminished somewhat. This Charlie Brown (voiced by Stranger Things’ Noah Schnapp) shares the shortcomings of his predecessors, but wears them better, stands a little taller and feels less vulnerable to the slings and arrows that life - and ill-wishers like Lucy Van Pelt - throw at him. Certainly, he still thinks of himself as an “insecure, wishy-washy failure”, but his determination to become more than that shines through, with even his trademark “good grief” sometimes accompanied by a wry smile that demonstrates a level of perspective that previous incarnations of the character didn’t possess. Blue Sky’s Charlie Brown is, in short, a tryer - a facet of the character that always existed, but was never really foregrounded in quite the way The Peanuts Movie does. In the words of Martino:

“Here’s where I lean thematically. I want to go through this journey. … Charlie Brown is that guy who, in the face of repeated failure, picks himself back up and tries again. That’s no small task. I have kids who aspire to be something big and great. … a star football player or on Broadway. I think what Charlie Brown is - what I hope to show in this film - is the everyday qualities of perseverance… to pick yourself back up with a positive attitude - that’s every bit as heroic … as having a star on the Walk of Fame or being a star on Broadway. That’s the story’s core.”

It’s possible to argue that leavening the sometimes crippling depression in Charlie Brown’s soul robs him of some of his uniqueness, but it’s also not as though it’s a complete departure from Schulz’s presentation of him, either. Writer Christopher Caldwell, in a famous 2000 essay on the complex cultural legacy of the Peanuts strip, aptly described its star as a character who remains “optimistic enough to think he can earn a sense of self-worth”, rather than rolling over and accepting the status that his endless failures would seem to bestow upon him. Even at his most downbeat and “Charlie-Browniest”, he’s always been a tryer, someone with enough drive to stand up and be counted that he keeps coming back to manage and lead his hopeless baseball team to defeat year after year; someone with the determination to try fruitlessly again and again to get his kite in the air and out of the trees; someone with enough lingering misplaced faith in Lucy’s human decency to keep believing that this time she’ll let him kick that football, no matter how logical the argument for giving up might be.

Indeed, Charlie Brown’s dogged determination to make contact with that damn ball was enough to thaw the heart of Schulz himself, his creator and most committed tormentor - having once claimed that allowing his put-upon protagonist to ever kick the ball would be a “terrible disservice to him”, the act of signing off his final ever Peanuts strip prompted a change of heart and a tearful confession:

“All of a sudden I thought, 'You know, that poor, poor kid, he never even got to kick the football. What a dirty trick - he never had a chance to kick the football.”

If that comment - made in December 1999, barely two months before his death - represented Schulz’s sincere desire for clemency for the character he had doomed to a 50-year losing streak, then The Peanuts Movie can be considered the fulfilment of a dying wish. No, Charlie Brown still doesn’t get to kick the football, but he receives something a lot more meaningful - a long-awaited conversation with the Little Red-Haired Girl, realised on screen as a fully verbalised character for the first time, who provides Charlie Brown with a gentle but quietly overwhelming affirmation of his value and qualities as a human being. In dramatic terms, it’s a small-scale end to a low-key story; in emotional terms, it’s an moment of enormous catharsis, particularly in the context of the franchise as a whole. It’s in this moment that Martino’s film shows its thematic hand - the celebration of tryers the world over, a statement that you don’t need to accomplish epic feats to be a good person, that persevering, giving your all and maintaining your morality and compassion in the face of setbacks is its own kind of heroism. The impact feels even greater on a character level, though; after decades of Sisyphean struggle and disappointment, the ending of The Peanuts Movie is an act of beatific mercy for Charlie Brown, placing a warm arm around the shoulders of one of American culture’s most undeservedly downtrodden characters and telling him he is worth far more than the sum of his failures, that his essential goodness and honesty did not go unnoticed, and that he is deserving of admiration - not for being a sporting champion or winning a prize, but for having the strength to hold on to the best parts of himself even when the entire world seems to reject everything he is.

Maybe that isn’t how your grandfather’s Peanuts worked, and maybe it isn’t how Bryan Schulz’s grandfather’s Peanuts worked either, but it would take a hard-hearted, inflexible critic to claim that any of The Peanuts Movie’s adjustments to the classic formula are damaging to the soul of the property, particularly when the intent behind the changes feels so pure. The flaws and foibles of the characters are preserved intact, as is the punishingly fickle nature of the world’s morality; however, in tipping the bittersweet balance away from bitterness towards sweetness, Martino’s movie escapes the accusation of mere imitation and emerges as a genuine work of multifaceted adaptation, simultaneously acting as a tribute, a response to and a modernisation of Charles Schulz’s canon. The Peanuts Movie is clearly designed to work as an audience’s first exposure to Peanuts, but it works equally well if treated as an ultimate conclusion, providing an emotional closure to the epic Charlie Brown morality play that Schulz himself never provided, but that feels consistent with the core of the lessons he always tried to teach.

In reality, it’s unlikely Peanuts will ever be truly over - indeed, a new French-animated TV series based on the comics aired just last year - but there’s still something warmly comforting about drawing a rough-edged line under The Peanuts Movie, letting Charlie Brown live on in a moment of understated triumph 65 years in the making, remembered not for his failings but by his embodiment of the undersung heroism of simply getting back up and trying again. It’s not easy to make a meaningful contribution to the legacy of a character and property that’s already achieved legendary status on a global scale, but with The Peanuts Movie, the perennially undervalued Blue Sky gave good ol’ Charlie Brown a send-off that a spiritually-minded humanist like Charles Schulz would have been proud of - and in my book, that makes them heroes, too.

[dailynynews-blog]

New Star Wars Lands to Blast Off at Disneyland and Disney World

New Post has been published on https://www.usatelegraph.com/2018/new-star-wars-lands-blast-off-disneyland-disney-world/

New Star Wars Lands to Blast Off at Disneyland and Disney World

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Disney Parks’ Creative Force Awakens

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February 2016 update: Disney presented a Disneyland 60th anniversary celebration TV special on ABC (the network that is part of its vast media empire) and included a segment about the Star Wars lands hosted by none other than Harrison Ford. The special didn’t reveal too much that hadn’t already been divulged. Although Disney is still referring to the projects as “Star Wars-themed lands,” Han Solo, er Mr. Ford, called them “The Star Wars Experience.” That may or may not be the official name.

Previously written in 2015: After many months of vague promises from company honchos and speculation by rabid fans, Disney CEO Bob Iger finally made it official: Star Wars rides are on the way.

Speaking at the 2015 D23 Expo, Mickey’s boss said that Star Wars-themed lands — and yes, that’s “lands” with an “s,” as in more than one — will be built at both the original Disneyland Park and at Disney’s Hollywood Studios , part of Walt Disney World in Florida. Big Thunder Ranch and nearby areas will be used at Disneyland. It’s unclear exactly where the land will be located at Disney World, although it would make sense to place it near the existing Star Tours ride. 

Each of the lands will span 14 acres, which is enormous for theme parks. As to the level of detail and immersion, Iger assured the D23 crowd that his merry band of Imagineers would build “jaw-dropping new worlds.” Just look at Disney’s lush rendering at the top of the page to get a sense of what’s coming.

When, you surely want to know, will all of this galactic goodness be good to go? Opening dates and nearly all other details about the Star Wars park projects are still unknown. Iger and others at the D23 Expo kept emphasizing that such a massive undertaking would take time to develop and build. Reportedly, construction will begin in 2017. I wouldn’t anticipate that anything would open much before 2020, so you’ll have to hang tight for awhile.

Pilot the Millennium Falcon

So, what details were revealed? Rather than re-create an existing world from the Star Wars canon, the lands will represent an entirely new world. According to Bob Chapek, chairman, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, guests will enter a “gateway planet on the outer rim.” The way station, which Chapek also referred to as a “remote frontier town,” will include established characters as well as new ones.

There will be two major attractions, both of which sound like they will be media-based rides. One will invite rookie pilots to fly a mission aboard the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo’s “bucket of bolts” from the original trilogy. With talk about “customized adventures,” it appears that this could be some sort of an interactive ride with many variables.

The other announced attraction will place visitors in the middle of a battle between the First Order and the Resistance. If that doesn’t sound familiar, it’s because the story will focus on the new movie, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which will open in December 2015.

Care for Some Blue Milk?

In addition to the blockbuster rides, expect the Star Wars lands to be encompassing and rich environments that will be feasts for the senses. At D23, Scott Trowbridge, portfolio creative executive and the Imagineer tapped to lead the Star Wars projects, hinted at what’s to come.

“Who ever wondered what Bantha fodder smelled like?” he teased. (The foul-smelling food is used as a pejorative term in the Star Wars universe.) Trowbridge also indicated that guests might be able to taste blue milk, a yummy treat. I don’t know whether either of the items will be available for actual consumption, but there will be a Cantina restaurant with themed dishes.

That kind of multi-sensory focus and attention to detail is indicative of the extreme level of themeing that the major park operators are now incorporating into their lands. Disney may have pioneered the concept of the theme park, but arch-rival Universal took themeing to new levels with the impeccable Wizarding World of Harry Potter Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade lands at its Orlando resort. Harry will head west into Disneyland’s playground when Universal Studios Hollywood opens its Potter land in 2016.

Disney responded with its over-the-top, single-intellectual-property project, Cars Land at Disney California Adventure. The new Star Wars lands will continue the high-stakes brinkmanship. Iger said that the intergalactic outpost will be filled with humanoids, aliens, and droids and that the shops and eateries will be “run by local inhabitants. Nothing will be out of character.”

Nothing but Star Wars

All of the devotion to detail and wild-soudning attractions are enough to make a droid blow a gasket in anticipation. Star Wars and theme park fans may also melt down before the Force awakens on the as-yet-unannounced opening date in some year far, far away. Have no fear droids and fans. Disney’s got you covered.

To capitalize on the synergy from the new film’s Christmas 2015 release (and steal some thunder from Universal’s upcoming Potter and King Kong attractions to boot), Star Wars mania began in earnest in 2015. In fact, park guests may be belting out a hearty rendition of “Nothing but Star Wars” with all that’s now open and on the way. Here’s a rundown of what to expect in the months and years leading up to the completion of the new lands:

Star Wars Launch Bay – Visitors can now meet characters, buy some special merch (of course), chow down on some themed treats, and ogle artifacts related to the new film at a popup exhibit. At Disneyland, the Launch Bay joins forces with the Marvel-themed Super Hero HQ in Tomorrowland. The Animation Courtyard serves as the location at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.

Star Tours – The Adventures Continue – The original Star Wars-themed attraction got a reboot in late 2015 with new stories culled from the movie trilogy. Speaking of Star Tours, what will become of the simulator attractions? Since Disneyland’s new Star Wars project will be built away from Tomorrowland, the imperative to maintain continuity dictates that Star Tours should close. Perhaps Disney will move it to the new land and repurpose the existing attraction (maybe turn it into the Iron Man Experience, which is on tap at Shanghai Disneyland?). At Disney’s Hollywood Studios, the new land will likely be built adjacent to Star Tours and will be able to encompass the ride.

Jedi Training Academy – At both parks, the popular experience has introduced new characters based on the animated TV show, “Star Wars Rebels.”

Season of the Force – Based on Disney World’s successful Star Wars Weekends, both parks are hosting new limited-time seasonal events.

Hyperspace Mountain – As part of Season of the Force, Disneyland now features a Star Wars-themed overlay to Space Mountain.

Star Wars Fireworks – Starting in spring 2016, Disney’s Hollywood Studios will cap its evenings with a themed pyrotechnics show.

Next up: Check Out the Rockwork

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Check Out the Rockwork

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Based on the renderings, the 14-acre lands will include vast amounts of rockwork and other architectural flourishes. That’s the Millennium Falcon in the foreground. The iconic starship will be featured in one of the lands’ two major attractions.

Disney has not revealed any costs. But the ambitious, elaborate-looking and -sounding Star Wars project will surely cost in the hundreds of millions dollars — and possibly in the billion-dollar range. That’s for each land. That’s a lot of Galactic Credits.

​Next up: Bustling Frontier Town

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Bustling Frontier Town

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Don’t look now, but isn’t that C3PO and R2D2 chatting with a certain princess? When they open, the lands will include alien creatures, humanoids, and other assorted Star Wars characters. Expect pervasive themeing throughout the new areas.

​Next up: Line Up

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Line Up

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Disney released this piece of concept art in February 2016. It appears to be one of the queues, perhaps for one of the major Star Wars attractions. Whatever it is, it sure looks sweet.

Next up: Guarded by storm troopers

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Guarded by Storm Troopers

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Another piece of concept art released in February 2016. Storm troopers will, apparently, be scattered throughout the lands.

Next up:  Mouse Ears and Lightsabers

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Mouse Ears and Lightsabers

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In another piece of concept art released in February 2016, you can get a sense of the scale of the land. Note how the young visitor in Mouse ears is dwarfed by the ship. Is that the Millennium Falcon?

Next up: New Star Wars Event

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New Star Wars Event

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The temporary Star Wars Launch Bay exhibits opened in California and Florida with the release of the new Star Wars movie in December 2015. They will likely remain open until the permanent Star Wars lands open.

​Next up: Take Off into Hyperspace

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Take Off into Hyperspace

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As part of Season of the Force, Space Mountain at Disneyland has been re-themed to Star Wars. For a limited time, the classic ride is featuring new digital projections, new effects, and enhanced onboard audio.

​Next up: But Wait, There’s More!

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But Wait, There’s More!

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Disney CEO Bob Iger announced the new Star War lands at the 2015 D23 Expo. He and his team also made a bunch of other park announcements at the event, including:

New Toy Story Land at Disney’s Hollywood Studios – A Slinky Dog coaster, alien saucers ride, and an expanded Toy Story Mania! are coming.

Pandora – The World of Avatar – More info was released about the new land coming to Disney’s Animal Kingdom.

Soarin’ Around the World – Instead of sticking with California, the fabulous Soarin’ ride will take off to locations far and wide starting in 2016.

[movietvtechgeeks]

Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/ten-superheroes-definitive-actors/

Ten Superheroes and Their Definitive Actors

We all have our favorite superheroes that have appeared on both TV and cinema and asked if they were real, we’d identify them with a face, and it would be that of the actor that portrayed them. For some of us who have lived longer than others, we’d probably think of faces the current generation doesn’t know of so this list will be limited to our heroes’ cinematic outings. But even then an entry or two would be from an older era. These roles have made or broken some actors but what matters is, that they brought the role to life and we couldn’t think of anyone else more suited. If only they didn’t age, right? Superman – Richard Donner’s Superman starring Christopher Reeve was a groundbreaking superhero film. The choice of Christopher Reeve as Superman was perfect. Reeve had the looks and the build to support the role. He wore the bright, red, blue and yellow costume without looking silly even by today’s standards. He also had a certain charm and charisma that embodied DC’s flagship hero. And though several actors have played the role on film and TV, many people still identify the late Christopher Reeve as the definitive Superman. Wonder Woman – the character had been waiting for so long for a cinematic outing. Whether Warner Brothers and DC were afraid a female-led film wouldn’t work, or Batman just makes a lot more money. But the world was greeted with surprise when Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot turned out to be such a great film. It’s now being compared to Richard Donner’s Superman film, and Gal Gadot is now being billed as the definitive Wonder Woman. Though she first appeared in Batman V Superman, the film’s reception has been disappointing that Gal Gadot’s appearance became muted but many agree that it was one of the best parts of the film. The DC Trinity is finally complete in cinematic form, and hopefully, she’s handled carefully in Justice League and in the Wonder Woman sequel to really cement Gal Gadot’s face to the character, replacing the lovely Lynda Carter who has as the face of the iconic female hero. Batman – Now this is a tough one. In deference to the recently departed Adam West, he just wasn’t well-known as the cinematic Batman even though the TV series had a cinematic special called Batman The Movie. Two actors actually fit the bill and there have been many since Batman was made into the superhero equivalent of James Bond surrounded by much hype as who will play the iconic hero as well as the villain of the year. Michael Keaton is credited into propelling the character to great heights in cinema thanks to director Tim Burton. Michael Keaton has brought the character out of darkness or rather back into it through the film simply titled Batman in 1989. Keaton played the role again in Batman Returns. The two subsequent films weren’t as well received as the first two and changing directors as well as lead actors aren’t well received back then as it is now. This franchise died taking the early superhero genre along with it in the disastrous Batman and Robin. Keaton had the seriousness it took despite doubts being a comedic actor. He had the looks and the build though Batman also popularized the rubber muscle trend. The quirky directing also worked plus the darker tone, the awesome costume and the awesome Batmobile and Batwing made this film very memorable, placing Keaton in an enviable role as the face of Batman. Though some fans would dispute this as the new Dark Knight Trilogy by Christopher Nolan, starring Christian Bale revitalized the popularity of the character in cinema. Not to mention Bale playing the character throughout the trilogy. The best film of the trilogy, The Dark Knight, was well received, thanks to a great plot, direction and acting with an awesome performance by the late Heath Ledger as the Joker who might as well have taken over Jack Nicholson as the face of Batman’s best villain. Iron Man – It’s very difficult to think of anyone else playing Iron Man than Robert Downey Jr. You could say that he was born for the role; and like Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, he has been playing the role since forever or more than a decade since the MCU franchise began. RDJ has the looks, RDJ has the build and RDJ has the snark of the character to a T. Robert Downey Jr. also shares some of the character’s own personal battles with alcoholism and thanks to the Iron Man film last 2008, RDJ’s career is at an all-time high. He has the majority of the MCU films under his belt, so it will be difficult to forget him as the definitive Iron Man. Spider-Man – This is another tough one, but there’s still no doubt that the majority still identifies Tobey McGuire as Spider-Man. McGuire has three films under his belt, and two of them were spectacular (pun intended). Spider-Man 3 is seen as a troubled sibling, but it’s not that bad. Some critics say though that Director Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy was too dramatic. What we have to remember though is that Marvel’s heroes are often thrust with real-world problems much like everyone else. They have to deal with problems regarding nerdity, love, responsibilities, and finances all of which are depicted nicely in the films. Tobey may now be memed for his role, but those serve to remind us that he’s still Spider-Man and not the other guy with the weird hair. Whether we’ll be singing a different tune after Spider-Man: Homecoming remains to be seen as Tom Holland seemed to have a handle on Spider-Man in the few minutes he was in Captain America: Civil War. Personally, Marisa Tomei nails it as the face of Aunt May but Rosemary Harris nails it too if we stick through the comics and the Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends cartoon. Captain America – Captain America has been around for a long, long time like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. But unlike Wonder Woman, he had several cinematic outings before Captain America: The First Avenger. First, there was Matt Salinger in that lackluster 90s film, and there were those TV movies starring Reb Brown, but they were forgettable, low-budget and lackluster not to mention strayed too far from the source material. Actor Chris Evans certainly has the looks and the build to star as the Star-Spangled Man with a Plan. He also has the talent as he delivers his archaic period lines and attitude on the big screen. To further emphasize, Evans might as well be the face of the Human Torch as he played the Fantastic Four’s rambunctious Johnny Storm quite well. Seriously, these guys and the talk about their contracts. They need to be cloned. Wolverine – Hugh Jackman would probably be stuck down under as a great actor in that part of the world if it wasn’t for Ol’ Canucklehead. Hugh Jackman isn’t exactly well known for his other films, Pan being the worst. And imagine if Bob Hoskins got the role because Wolverine calls for a short, stocky guy? Lucky for us, Jackman got the part, and the height thing was thrown out the window. Unfortunately, Logan is the last we’ll see of him as Wolverine and Logan, being a great film compared to the other X-titles, is a great way of coming out on top. Professor X – speaking of another hero we won’t be seeing again; Patrick Stewart has also called it quits after Logan. His role in the film was perhaps his greatest and most effing tragic. We’ve known him as Professor X from the beginning of the film franchise and upon knowing there was going to be an X-Men film, the first person fans may have thought of is Patrick Stewart. Yes, because he’s old and bald but he’s also a great actor. Debate still rages in the Trek world if he’s better at being captain of the Enterprise than William Shatner. Again, Patrick Stewart pulls off the looks quite nicely and delivers his lines effectively. The role of Professor X has now been passed on to James McAvoy, but for most of us, Professor Xavier’s cinematic face will be Patrick Stewart. Nick Fury – Samuel L. Jackson has influenced the character of Nick Fury even before he took the cinematic role. Sounds like a Chuck Norris meme but it’s true. Samuel L. Jackson was the face of Nick Fury in Marvel’s Ultimate universe. That’s how great his appeal is. That is the very reason he secured the role of Nick Fury in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Iron Man 1. ‘Okay, you can use my mother$%#ng face, but I gotta be in your mother$%#ng films!’ He nails the role through sheer talent, and he doesn’t have to worry about his looks straying from the source material. He is the source material. What was that? The Hoff was first? The point is? Blade – Not many actually thought of Blade as a comic book superhero, but everyone knew that Wesley Snipes nailed the stake right through the heart, at least for the first two films. Good Lord, Trinity… Anyway, there hasn’t been any mention of Blade in other media apart from an appearance in the 90s Spider-Man cartoon. The first guy for the role is often the best especially if the film was great, just like Christopher Reeve and unlike Ben Affleck in Daredevil. Wesley Snipes was perfect for the film with his looks and his action cred. His acting is okay, but the film pulls through on his badass appearance and action alone. The Snipes look carries through the Blade anime TV series and recent comic books. Now Snipes may be the face of Blade, but is a reboot with him recast in the MCU a good idea? Honorable Mentions Deadpool – Ryan Reynolds had his chance at being the Green Lantern. It’s not that he blew it, there were other factors at play. But he did nail Deadpool, and he’s more attuned to his character due to his own method of acting. He also has the looks and build though his good looks need to be tinkered to look like an oversexed avocado. Ryan Reynolds is the only face for Deadpool right now, and we give it to him unless Fox screws up the next film. He’s actually been Deadpool twice with the first in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He was great in the first act, and comic book fans immediately knew he was the Merc with a Mouth. The last act where they sewed that mouth shut was probably what killed the movie for a lot of fans. Hulk – There has already been five cinematic Hulks. Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Eric Bana, Edward Norton and Mark Ruffalo. We count Lou as he played the actual Hulk opposite Bill Bixby’s David Banner (yes, not Bruce). Bana and Norton played the character once, if we’re going to base this on number of appearances but Bill, Lou and Mark have played it several times already. Unfortunately, Bill and Lou don’t count as the film The Trial of the Incredible Hulk was made for TV. To be fair, Edward Norton had the better and full cinematic appearance as Bruce Banner than Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk has yet to star in a solo film. But Mark has been in the game since Avengers and is set to appear in Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Infinity War. Edward probably owns this one until Hulk is better defined in the upcoming films. What do you think?

Movie TV Tech Geeks News

[aion-rsa]

Black History Month: 15 Influential Black Superheroes

Since their first appearances in comics in the ’60s, black superheroes have provided a mirror to many generations of children who have ever wanted to have superpowers. Early versions of superheroes like Black Panther, Luke Cage and Storm have paved the way for their contemporaries as well as modern incarnations of black superheroes.

RELATED: Black Heroes Matter: 17 Black Defenders Of The MCU

After appearing on the pages of Marvel and DC Comics, these heroes also inspired black creators like Dwayne McDuffie and Roy Okupe to make their own heroes, filling a void by the sporadic appearances in mainstream superhero comics. Today, black superheroes can be found on the page and on the screen in films, television shows and animated series. To commemorate Black History Month and the influence of black superheroes, here are 15 black superheroes that have helped make comic book continuity more inclusive.

STORM

One of the most famous members of the X-Men, Ororo Monroe was created by Lein Wein and David Cockcrum and first appeared in May 1975. As a mutant, she has the ability to control the weather and fly; she is also an expert thief and skilled in hand-to-hand combat. She has led the X-Men herself a few times, notably after the events of the “Dark Phoenix Saga” and when the main X-Men team split into the gold and blue teams.

She has also been a member of The Avengers and the Fantastic Four, and even served as the Queen of Wakanda when she briefly married her long-time lover T’Challa, the Black Panther. On top of that, she is descended from a long-line of witch-priestesses; her mother was a princess of a Kenyan tribe, and Ororo herself was worshipped as a goddess before being recruited by Professor Xavier for the X-Men. Currently, she is the leader of the Extraordinary X-Men.

LUKE CAGE

Luke Cage is the first black comic book character to star in his own series. Making his first appearance in 1972, he was created by Archie Goodwin, John Romita Sr and George Tuska. After being imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, he is involuntarily subjected to an experimental procedure that gives him bulletproof skin and super strength. Once he is freed, he teams up with Iron Fist to form the duo Power Man and Iron Fist and becomes a hero for hire.

As Powerman and part of the original Heroes For Hire team, he would work with not only Iron Fist, but also Misty Knight and Jessica Jones. He would also become a member of The Defenders and The Mighty Avengers, as well as the Thunderbolts. In 2015, Luke Cage made his first onscreen appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the Netflix original series “Jessica Jones.” The following year, he would star in his own Netflix spin-off series “Luke Cage,” which was recently renewed for a second season.

MISTY KNIGHT

Created by Tony Isabella and Arvell Jones, Misty Knight leapt into comics in January 1975, debuting just a few months before Storm to become one of Marvel’s first black female superheroes. She was an NYPD officer until a bomb attack caused her arm to be amputated. After quitting, she was given a bionic arm by Tony Stark that gave her super strength. Suitably “armed,” she met Colleen Wing and together they formed their own private investigation agency, becoming the crime fighting duo, Daughters of The Dragon.

The two would have their own adventures and provide assistance to Power Man and Iron Fist, the aforementioned Heroes For Hire. Misty would also reform Heroes For Hire with a new team during the events of Marvel’s Civil War, leading the team and revamping it again after the immediate end of tensions. She would also form and lead the team known as The Fearless Defenders alongside Valkyrie. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, she can be seen in a prominent role on the Netflix series “Luke Cage” and is portrayed by Simone Missick.

STATIC

Originally a part of Milestone Comics, Static was created by Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Derek Dingle and Michael Davis. Named after the first black person to attend the law school at University of Florida, Virgil Hawkins gains the ability to manipulate electro-magnetic energy after unwittingly being caught up in a big showdown between Dakota’s gang wars and doused with an experimental chemical. The event would become known as “The Big Bang” and would not only affect Virgil but those who would become Virgil’s future archenemies.

Virgil became Static after finding other “Big Babies” that got powers and chose to cause problems in Dakota. After Milestone Comics closed in 1997, Static was reintroduced in the animated series “Static Shock,” which aired from 2000 to 2004. The show gave Static an entry point into the DC Comics Universe, where he would eventually become a member of the Teen Titans. Static would also make appearances in the animated shows “Justice League: Unlimited” and “Young Justice.”

MONICA RAMBEAU

Monica Rambeau was created by Roger Stern and John Romita Jr. Since her 1982 debut, she has been known by several superhero names. She first went by Captain Marvel, after being exposed to extra-dimensional energy and gaining the ability to convert her body to light. Once she joined The Avengers, she learned to control her powers and eventually became their leader. Later on, she would change her name to Photon after teaming up with the son of the original Captain Marvel and realizing he wanted to use the name for himself.

After a while, he changed his name to Photon and Monica changed her named to Pulsar. Eventually, Monica would become the leader of the team Nextwave, but didn’t use any code-name in the field. During Marvel’s “Infinity” storyline, she took up her current superhero alias, Spectrum, and became field leader of Luke Cage’s Mighty Avengers team. Currently, she is a prominent member of the The Ultimates, fighting cosmic threats to the Earth and the very universe itself.

VIXEN

Vixen, aka Mari McCabe, would’ve been DC’s first African female DC superhero to have her own series had it not been cancelled. Nonetheless, she has managed to have a decent run in comics after her 1981 debut. Created by Gerry Conway and Bob Oskner, Vixen can use the abilities of any animal by focusing on them with the Tantu totem given to her ancestors by the African trickster god Anansi. After a brief time as a solo hero, Vixen became a member of the Justice League, as well as Suicide Squad, with the majority of her work having been in the former.

In addition to making modern-day appearances in the comic series “Justice League of America,” Vixen also starred in the limited series “Return of The Lion.” Recently, Vixen’s origins were told in a DC Rebirth one-shot. Vixen has also made appearances in many television series, including “Justice League Unlimited,” “Batman: The Brave and The Bold,” “Arrow” and her own CW seed animated series, appropriately titled “Vixen.”

JOHN STEWART

A member of the Green Lantern Corps, John Stewart debuted in 1971, making history as the first African American character in DC Comics. Created by Dennis O’Neal and Neal Adams, he was originally chosen as a backup Green Lantern to then-current Green Lantern Hal Jordan. After Hal Jordan relinquished the title in the 1980s, he became Green Lantern full-time. Using the ring worn by all Green Lanterns, he can create anything that his imagination can drum up as well as the powers of flight and invulnerability.

During and after his time in the Green Lantern Corps, he has become the first mortal Guardian of The Universe, leader of the peacekeeping troop the Darkstars, as well as a member of The Justice League. Off the page, his character has become well known due to his appearances in animated series, including “Justice League,” “Justice League Unlimited,” “Static Shock” and “Young Justice.” He is set to appear as a main character in the upcoming film “Green Lantern Corps.”

STRIKE GUARD

Strike Guard is a character and comic book series created by Ayodele Elegba and published by the Nigerian based company, Vortex Comics. A superhero inspired by Yoruba spiritual traditions, Strike Guard’s main protagonist is a college kid named Abolaji Coker. After Abolaji’s love interest Chi Chi gets involved with the leader of a cult, Abolaji and his best friend Peter Antai are murdered.

After being thrown into the grave of an ancient warrior named Ajabeja, Abolaji’s soul makes contact with Ajabeja’s while in limbo. Abolaji strikes a deal to share his body with Ajabeja in exchange for returning to life. Gaining an open consciousness of the spirit realm and the opportunity to avenge his friend’s death, Abolaji becomes Strike Guard to protect people from spirits lingering in the real world. In this way, Strike Guard is a mythical superhero akin to Marvel’s Thor, providing a refreshing take on mythological superheroes through its creative use of the Orisha thunder god Sango.

CYBORG

Created by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, Cyborg is one of the most iconic members of the Teen Titans, as well as the Justice League. In his first iteration, Cyborg was a normal teenager named Victor Stone until his scientist parents conducted an experiment with an inter-dimensional portal that went wrong. A monster comes through, killing Victor’s mother and severely mauling Victor before his dad forces it back into the portal. In order to save his life, Victor’s dad inserts experimental prosthetics on part of his face and body.

Afterwards, Victor struggles to adjust to his cybernetic parts due to the fearful reactions from others and the fact that he can no longer participate in athletic hobbies. Once he stops a former friend from conducting terrorist acts, his sense of purpose is renewed and he decides to join the Teen Titans. Later on, when a new incarnation of the Teen Titans came together, he served as a mentor to them. Later still, in the New 52 reboot of DC Comics, his origins include the coming of Darkseid. In this version of the character, he was established as a founding member of the Justice League. Currently, he stars in his own ongoing series that has been published since 2015.

WALE WILLIAMS

Hailing from YouNeek Studios and created by Roye Okupe, Wale Williams’s story is set in a futuristic society known as Lagoon City, which is inspired by the real island of Lagos. Wale is a twenty-something young man who returns home to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his father, an inventor. He discovers that his home has changed drastically after the poorest areas have been overrun by corrupt leaders and robotic drones called DREDS.

At the center of this corruption is the masked leader Oniku, whose goal is to “cleanse” Lagoon City while manipulating the lower class. In order to combat this threat, Wale Williams dons an exo suit designed by his father and becomes the superhero EXO to protect his city. As a character, Wale Williams is a wealthy kid with integrity, defending the poorest of his community and his remaining family while searching for his father. Likened to DC’s Cyborg and Marvel’s Iron Man, Wale Williams is a Nigerian superhero for a modern and futuristic age.

MILES MORALES

The creation of Miles Morales by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli was inspired by Barack Obama and Donald Glover. Originally becoming Spider-Man in the Ultimate Marvel universe, the black-Puerto Rican teenager would come into the role after being bitten by a spider containing the experimental formula that gave Peter Parker his spidey powers. At first, he is unhappy with his powers, wanting to be a normal kid, until he witnesses the death of Peter Parker.

Realizing that he could’ve helped Peter, he decides to take up the mantle of Spider-Man and later dons a new black-and-red costume given to him by S.H.I.E.L.D. After the Ultimate Marvel Universe is destroyed, Miles takes over Peter Parker’s patrol of New York in the mainstream Marvel Universe when Peter decides to take a global approach to his Spider-Man duties. Miles would also become an Avenger in Marvel’s “All New All Different Avengers” series and a founding member of Marvel’s newest team, The Champions.

THE MANTIMAJI

Elijah Alexander is a rising district attorney who has been dealing with cases involving a mysterious group of criminals known as the New World Knights. When his work collides with the agenda of the New World Knights and a personal speaker named Brother Hope, he discovers that he is the descendant of a race of mystical knights called The Mantimaji. After suffering a tragic loss, Elijah trains to become a Mantimaji in order to get revenge.

As he strikes out against Brother Hope, Elijah learns more about his legacy as a Mantimaji and his potential to become a hero and save the world from Brother Hope’s twisted plans. Although he starts off as an entitled person, Elijah Alexander’s love and appreciation for his family causes him to be a great hero in the making. Using a magical ankh that can change into armor and any weapon imaginable, as well as the aid of women warriors known as The Sanctuants, Elijah Alexander comes into his role as a superhero legacy that has protected the world for generations.

BLACK LIGHTNING

One of the first black superheroes to appear in DC Comics, Black Lightning debuted in 1977 by Tony Isabella and Trevor Von Eeden. With the power of electro-magnetism, he can generate and manipulate electricity using a variety of methods. In addition to working as a solo hero, Black Lightning has been a member of Batman’s group, The Outsiders, as well as a member of the Justice League. He has also been shown to have some serious martial arts skills.

RELATED: Black Lightning: 15 Powers You Didn’t Know He Had

When he isn’t performing acts of superheroism, he is known as Jefferson Pierce and has been an Olympic decathlete and a high school principal, not to mention a father. Black Lightning’s daughters, Jessica and Anissa, have also become heroes themselves. Anissa took the name “Lightning” and became a member of Outsiders like her father, while Jessica became “Thunder” and a member of the Justice League. Last year, it was announced that Black Lightning and his daughters will appear in a new Black Lightning television series currently in development.

THE FALCON

Featured in Marvel Comics, Sam Wilson is the first African American superhero in mainstream comics. Debuting in 1969, he was created by Stan Lee and Gene Golban and introduced in “Captain American” #117. After becoming friends and partners-in-crime(fighting), Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson would eventually come up with the persona The Falcon after the Nazi villain Red Skull fuses Sam with a falcon named Redwing in order to manipulate him.

As The Falcon, Sam Wilson has a physic link with Redwing that can be used to literally get a bird’s eye view of things. He also has a cybernetic uniform designed by Black Panther that allows him to fly, be resistant to small firearms and see things via infrared lenses. While working as The Falcon, he managed to become an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. In his most recent comic book appearance, Sam Wilson became the newest Captain America and leader of the Avengers after an aged Steve Rogers passed the mantle onto him.

BLACK PANTHER

Created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee for Marvel Comics, Black Panther premiered in 1966 and is the first African superhero in American comics. The Black Panther is the title given to the chief of the technologically-advanced African nation of Wakanda. By establishing a connection with the Panther God, the Black Panther gains abilities that include heightened senses and reflexes, enhanced strength, speed, durability and healing. The current Black Panther is T’Challa, who has served not only as king of Wakanda, but also represented the country during times of crisis and peace.

In addition to his superhuman abilities, T’Challa is one of the smartest people in the world, having an advanced degree in physics and technology and great knowledge of Wakanda’s metallic ore vibranium. In certain comics, he has cleverly used the portable supercomputer Kimiko to solve problems and escape sticky situations. Besides being a solo hero, T’Challa has been a member of the Defenders, a temporary member of the Fantastic Four (alongside his former wife Storm), and is currently a member of The Ultimates.

Obviously, we couldn’t fit every black hero on this list, so we want to hear your favorites! Sound off in the comments!

The post Black History Month: 15 Influential Black Superheroes appeared first on CBR.com.

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