Good news everyone! Futurama will be back:

20th Century Fox TV plans to produce 26 new episodes of “Futurama.”

Comedy Central will begin airing the new episodes in mid-2010. Voice actors Billy West (who played Philip Fry), Katey Sagal (Leela) and John DiMaggio (Bender) have all signed on to return.

Created by Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, “Futurama” originally aired on Fox from 1999 to 2003.

[Via : At 20th TV, it's back to the 'Futurama' - Entertainment News, TV News, Media - Variety.]

I still laugh when I watch an episode from Futurama, and I’ve seen some episodes many times now. It seems, too, that with each viewing I pick up on more of the humour.

My favourite joke is Bender’s apartment number:

… 00100100. This is a binary representation of the ASCII character ‘$’ or 36 in decimal.

[Via : Bender Bending Rodríguez - The Infosphere, the Futurama Wiki.]

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Oh, excellent news: one of my favourite TV shows, Futurama, is making something of a return.

Cult cartoon Futurama is coming back later this year as a full-length film. The movie, Bender’s Big Score, will be available to buy on November 27 as a high-definition DVD, and will be followed by three other feature-length movies.

[Via Gizmodo: On A Bender: Futurama Back in November as a Feature-Length HD DVD.]

And on another topic — Amazon informed me yesterday that a DVD I ordered a couple of months ago is on its way: Babylon 5 – The Lost Tales. It’ll be good to see something new from the B5 universe again.

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Spoilers below. Be warned.

I like watching Sci-Fi on TV, and have long enjoyed Stargate SG1. After seeing most of the first 7 series on TV I gradually bought the DVD sets. Then about a year ago I bought Season 8. Somehow between being busy and temporarily going ‘off’ Stargate I hadn’t got around to watching them until this last week, when I’ve watched almost all the S8 episodes over 3 or 4 viewing sessions.

At the end of S7 the team locate the Atlantis stargate, opening the way for the Stargate Atlantis series that was presumably filmed at the same time as Season 8 of SG1. There has to be something that explains the incredibly patchy nature of S8, along with its strange plots that seem to reflect budget problems.

At the beginning of the Season O’Neill is promoted to general, so the lovely Samantha Carter is promoted to lead the SG1 team. Her team goes off through the gate to do something I don’t recall, but they promptly fall down a hole or something and get ‘lost’, which leaves all the action to their ‘backup’ team. Not a good start for Sam.

Then, for no apparent reason, the SG1 team spend the nest few episodes doing not a lot, hanging round the base. Not a good follow-on for Sam, though occasionally she gets to wear some really great gear.

Presumably the budget was being spent on Atlantis. Finally there’s some action. Cool! Explosions, gun fights and all that. The lovely Claudia Black appears too. Apparently in later Seasons she will be a recurring character.

Then we have several weird do-nothing episodes, a couple of them nothing more than clip shows. Yawn. I haven’t season the two-part season ender yet, but let’s hope it shows off Sam’s leadership skills.

Oh, along the way we’ve seen Carter’s evil twin: Replicator Carter. She’s pretty cool, although most of her evil ways involve plunging her hand into people’s foreheads to extract their thoughts and memories.

Still, for all its flaws, S8 has reminded me that I do enjoy Stargate SG1, so I’ve bought S9 too. I won’t be waiting so long to watch that. In fact, I foresee a fun weekend of DVD viewing ahead.

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I’ve always been a sci-fi fan. In my youth I read my way through a lot of sci-fi until it seemed only bug-eyed monsters were left, and then stopped for quite a while. I definitely read Arthur C Clarke, and indubitably 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I dimly recall really enjoying. I’m sure I also watched the movie, but didn’t remember any of it, nor my reaction at the time.

On New Year’s Day the movie showed on TV, and I thought I’d watch it to refresh my memory on why Hal said his famous line: “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave”. Sigh, that’s 3 hours of my life I’ll never get back again. What a load of junk! I should have just checked Wikipedia.

By and large, I enjoy Australian movies, and Happy Feet was no exception. Of course you have to overlook the heavy anthropomorphism of the penguins, but the music is great, there’s some good humour, and some very dark scenes. The leopard seals are ultimately scary, and the wonderful bull elephant seals genuinely Strine, with the lead voiced by the late Steve Irwin. The broad Australian accents hearken back to Bruce the shark in Finding Nemo. This is a movie with a bunch of morals around what we’re doing to our planet. The whole thing was a bit patchy, and too darned long, but still, I’d recommend it.

A note on long movies: there seems to be a tendency these days for longer movies — well more than 90 minutes. I think in general, it just makes the team self-indulgent and sloppy. I prefer tighter storylines and tighter editing. Bring back the 90-minute movie!

[Spoiler alert] As for Babel — we made the mistake of attending an 8.30 pm showing. This is another long movie, that would have benefited from tighter editing. It was worthwhile, in a rather earnest way, but what we hadn’t realised was that it is a disaster movie. One scene followed the next of inevitable tragedy. Just when things couldn’t get worse, they did.

For a couple of hours we see how women and children, in particular, are the powerless victims of men. The one woman who does claim her power does so by shooting herself (not on screen). Other themes include guns, cultural ignorance and misunderstandings, racism and language barriers.

There was one small relief: the young woman who was putting herself in the way of every imaginable harm was not abused by the men around her.

This is not a movie to see late at night. Go in the afternoon and have the bottle of scotch ready for afterwards, or at least a strong beverage of choice for the alcohol-free amongst us. I’d say a cautious Yes to this one — its themes and execution are interesting and worthwhile.

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As a kid I watched Star Trek (The Original Series) and loved it. I’m still very fond of the various Star Trek series and sci-fi in general.

This year is the 40th anniversary of Star Trek and with no new series in production it seems they decided to auction off a whole lot of props. A 6 foot model of the Enterprise fetched over half a million dollars:

A model of the Starship
Enterprise used in the pilot and title sequences of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” sold for $576,000 Saturday at an auction of costumes, sets and props from 40 years of the “Star Trek” sci-fi franchise.

The 78-inch-long (198-centimeter) miniature of the “Enterprise-D,” built by Industrial Light and Magic, debuted in 1987 in the episode “Encounter at Farpoint,” and then was used in many subsequent episodes, as well as the film “Star Trek Generations.”

[Via SPACE.com.]

Cor! Blimey!

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The upside of the current dearth of decent programmes on TV is that I’ve turned to my collection of DVDs for entertainment. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been reacquainting myself with random episodes of Xena and Voyager, and finally making a start on Season 5 of Babylon 5. Ahhhh.

The fun of Xena: Warrior Princess

Xena and Gabrielle are fun — apart from a few, rather grim, episodes. I really enjoy the two strong women finding friendship together, of course, but also the fact that as a TV show they generally didn’t take themselves too seriously and were happy to genre-hop: adventure, sci-fi, mystery, comedy, opera, musical, horror, western — they did a bit of everything.

Renee O’Connor and her character Gabrielle both developed enormously over the six years, from the rather naive and idealistic, soft and rounded young woman, to the strong, sculpted, fit, experienced warrior.

It’s also hard to resist those moments when Xena is so clearly utterly overjoyed to have the opportunity to beat up the bad guys. And so often, both actors were clearly having great fun together — it would be hard not to be engaged. Then there are those moments when you see that enchanting smile from Xena / Lucy that you’d crawl over broken glass for.

The idealism of Star Trek: Voyager

I grew up watching the original Star Trek: Kirk and Spock, Uhura and Chekov, Bones, Sulu. One of the things I love about sci-fi is that it can break away from reality and show us futures where the world can be a better place. In the universe of sci-fi all beings can be equal; all things are possible.

In Voyager we see a strong woman at the helm of a starship finding her way home against the odds. Torres is a good strong character, and Kes, in her own way, but it’s interesting to see how the series really took off once Seven, part human, part Borg, arrived.

As with Xena and Gabrielle, the relationship between Kathryn Janeway and Seven is a delight. More than once Janeway goes right to the heart of the beast to stand up for Seven: even into the den of the Borg Queen. Yup, true friendship!

Babylon 5: black, white and grey

[B5 spoilers below.]

B5 remains one of my all-time favourite TV shows. I’ve watched almost every episode half a dozen times and still enjoy watching. It’s a darn good story, well-crafted and well put together. Unfortunately, although there are several good, strong women: Delenn, Ivanova, Lyta, Talia, Lockley, each stands essentially alone in the series, and it’s the men who take more of the centre stage.

Nevertheless, each of the women exhibits courage and strength, sometimes in abundance. Who can forget Ivanova’s “right hand of vengeance” speech¹, or Delenn’s bringing the White Star to stand between Sheridan and Earth Force²?

And as for that “almost every episode” — I was so moved by the final episode of Season 5 when I first saw it several years ago that I’ve actually never been able to watch it again. I keep rewatching B5, from beginning to end, but so far have always come to a standstill in the later episodes of Season 5. This time I’m determined to make it through to the end again.

Perhaps the main feature of Babylon 5 is its refusal to draw characters, any of the characters as simply black and white. JMS forces us to consider shades of grey. Even major bad guys like the Shadows have a philosophy behind their actions. They do what they do as a means to progress and improvement.

So, Xena, Voyager, Babylon 5: good friends who bring me great pleasure.

¹“Who am I? I’m Susan Ivanova, Commander, daughter of Andrei and Sofie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengeance, and the boot that is gonna kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth, sweetheart. I’m death incarnate and the last living thing that you’re ever going to see. God sent me.”
– Ivanova in Babylon 5:”Between the Darkness and the Light”

²“Only one human captain has ever survived battle with Minbari fleet. He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, be somewhere else.”
– Delenn in Babylon 5:”Severed Dreams”

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Recently, for the first time in a very long while, I had the urge to do some dead-tree reading. I wanted quality writing, space sci-fi, strong female lead character. I haven’t really read any sci-fi for years, apart from some Babylon 5 and Voyager novels, based around the TV series. Some of them have been fairly good and some very trashy, but it was time for something a bit different.

Knowing there was no point, I first visited Whitcoulls. My initial instincts were quite correct and it was a waste of time. Dymocks and Unity books were further away than I had time for, but as I headed along Courtenay Place I realised that Arty Bees was nearby and stopped in there.

I scanned the endless shelves of sci-fi books, noticing that huge numbers of them were in the fantasy or vampire genres: not for me. I was also trying to keep my distance from an iPod fool nearby — I was deafened by his music; it won’t be too long before he’ll be deafened for real.

Feeling somewhat defeated by far too many books, and not being current with the genre I asked the incredibly knowledgeable assistant for help. I was eventually pointed to a series by David Weber about a character called Honor Harrington. Volume 1 was only $12, new, for 458 pages so I took that and the next two in the series too, though they were more expensive.

I’m more than half way through that first volume and am thoroughly enjoying it. The writing isn’t perhaps quite as innovative and inspiring as I would have desired, but it’s perfectly good. The bookseller had warned me about the high technobabble quotient, to which I had replied that I wanted that. I’m disappointed though and still waiting for the technobabble to start.

It looks like this phase of reading fiction on paper might be setting in. If you can recommend any good fiction for me, I’d be happy to see your comments. What I want: futuristic sci-fi, set in space, one or more strong female characters in lead roles. I’m not into fantasy, vampires, horror, alternate universes (eg, what say Germany had won the war), historical. Technobabble is good. Science is good. Quality is good. Old-fashioned bug-eyed monster space aliens is bad.

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