Category: Television

justice is served, edo-style!

Posted on By Wil

I understand that SciFi Channel has just finished serving up a special kind of Justice.

From our first season on TNG, it’s full of growing pains, but it remains one of the most unintentionally hilarious we ever did, and if ever there was an episode worthy of a Riff Track, well, I think this one should get it. Hell, maybe I’ll do it myself.

Anyway, if you’ve just seen it for the first time in recent years or ever, I think you’ll get a kick out of the review/recap that I did for TV Squad:

After dropping some human colonists off in the Strnad solar system, the Enterprise notices a rather nice Class M planet in the nearby Rubicun system, called Rubicun III. Picard sends an away team down to the surface to find out if it’s a good place for some shore leave, and they return with some very good news: it’s clean, it’s beautiful, it’s populated with friendly humanoids . . . and they really like to do the nasty.

“At the drop of a hat,” according to Geordi.

“Any hat,” Tasha says, knowingly.

Picard sends a second, larger team down to the planet to see exactly how many hats they’re going to need. Because every responsible Starfleet parent would want to send their children down to the galaxy’s longest running planetary orgy, he orders Wesley Crusher to see if the planet is a good place for kids to hang out.

[…]

Down on the planet, Wesley is jogging around with his new friends. Unlike the adults, who are busy getting their freak on in Plato’s Retreat, the kids are busy showing off their gymnastic skills. One of the Edo boys walks on his hands! Oh! Wesley got served! But wait! Wesley serves back with some cartwheels and a roundoff, and IT’S ON!

In fact, it’s so on, the girl (who was played by a really sweet girl named Judith Jones, who played my girlfriend on an after school special called My Dad Can’t Be Crazy, Can He?) gets so hot for Wesley, she asks him if he’ll “teach her” how to “play ball.”

Oh, you bet, baby. Uncle Wesley will teach you how to play ball. Why don’t you just slip into this latex bodysuit and put on this wig first, and then we’ll play all sorts of ball, you dirty little bitch.

Uh. What just happened? Sorry about that.

Wesley tells them to get a bat. When they don’t know what it is, he describes Worf’s penis. It’s not awkward at all.

[…]

After extracting a promise that the Edo won’t kill Wesley before sundown, Picard takes Rivan with him back to the Enterprise. Once there, he shows her “god” (this is, quite honestly, a nice little homage to the original series. Whenever Captain Kirk took a hot babe back to the space ship, he showed her god, too. Sometimes, he showed her an entire pantheon of gods. And he never called her back, baby, because that’s just how he rolled, leaving broken hearts all over the galaxy. Awww yeah.) The problem is, god is pissed, and shakes the ship until Picard beams Rivan back down to the planet. Poor Picard, he brought her all the way home, and he didn’t get to drop a single hat.

This review will be in my forthcoming collection of first season reviews, Memories of the Future.

Bonus! If you want to listen to me perform this review, you can enjoy to this audio from the 2008 Phoenix Comicon. Double bonus: you can also hear me read Blue Light Special, from Happiest Days of Our Lives.

Shameless plug: You totally want the Happiest Days of Our Lives audiobook.

Man, that turned into a shameless plug really quick, didn’t it? I mean, it really got out of hand! Brick killed a guy.

“I stabbed a man in the heart with a trident.”

“I saw that!”

Um. Kids, when you start quoting Anchorman and then talk about it in Bob Saget’s voice, it’s time to end the blog entry and just hit publish.

boating our software

Posted on By Wil

Yesterday, I started writing a monthly column for Amazon’s End User Blog. For my first column, I looked at a really cool device that’s battling something I call Feature Creep:

…it’s increasingly difficult to find things that do just one thing, and do it very well. I blame this on something I call “Feature Creep” which I suspect comes from too many meetings, too much input from marketing, and not enough product managers and engineers who are willing to stand up and say, “You know what? I don’t think this coffee maker really needs an MP3 player in it. It’s fine just making coffee.”

Feature Creep is everywhere, bloating our software, lengthening our startup times, cluttering up our menus, and draining our batteries, so when I come across something that has successfully resisted it and stayed focused on doing one simple thing very well, I have a little bit of a pants party.

One of the best examples I’ve come across in the last year is the Netflix player from Roku. It’s a tiny little box that streams anything from Netflix’s on-demand library straight into your television, and that’s all it does.

So I’m pretty excited to have an opportunity to do for blog what I used to do for InDigital, and I’m looking forward to examining various gadgets and technology trends in the mysterious future. My column will update on the final Thursday of every month.

(If you missed this on Twitter and don’t know what the title of this post means: I put a really stupid typo into this column that snuck past me and my editor, and I was originally lamenting how feature creep is “boating” our software. Mmmm. Boating. It’s since been corrected, but I can’t help giggling about it.)

hit robots, make fall down

Posted on By Wil

I'm writing this on Wednesday afternoon, before I start packing for the Phoenix Comicon, where I'll be when this post magically appears on my blog, so please forgive me if there's some timely current event I should be talking about; I can't really travel through time, you know.

If I've done everything correctly, my episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold has just finished airing on Cartoon Network in the Eastern time zone, and even though I'm at a con and can't participate for another 24 or 48 hours, I'd love to hear what you thought of the show, and my performance as Ted Kord.

I'd avoid the comments on this post until you've seen the show, so anyone who wants to be the captain of the SS Spoiler can take a turn at the helm without upsetting anyone else.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the episode, and that all the build up this week paid off.

one last fistful of Ted Kord interviews

Posted on By Wil

Part deux of my interview with Trekmovie.com is online, so you don’t have to avoid spoilers any more:

TrekMovie.com: The first season can be be brutal.

Wil Wheaton: Yeah. That is why the first season is kind of fun. Some of the episodes are really really bad and a few of the episodes are extremely good, even if you are not grading on a curve. For the most part — we are awkward — we are trying to figure out what our show is about. And you can see how we had so many different writers and creative power struggles while we figured out what we were going to be. We were really lucky we got a chance to do more than one season. If it wasn’t for the incredible cast and writers like Sandy Fries and Tracy Torme, we probably would not have gone past the second season.

TrekMovie.com: I am in the camp that thinks that Michael Piller, and writers like Ron Moore, really saved the show in the third season.

Wil Wheaton: They absolutely did.

TrekMovie.com: I know some don’t like to hear that Gene [Roddenberry] didn’t save the show. I love Gene Roddenberry, but for TNG I think the Michael was the best thing for the show.

Wil Wheaton: Gene had the presence of mind to know he was getting old and he knew that someone who loved Star Trek as much as he did could step in to take the reins. He hand picked Michael. He begged Michael at the end of season three to come back. Michael didn’t want to at first, but Gene said to him “I need you to make this show great, I can’t do it without you” and Michael agreed. And Michael had the open submissions policy, which is how Ron [Moore] came on, with “The Bonding.” I don’t think it is inaccurate or unfair to give Michael a great deal of credit for making Next Generation great, but at the same time I think it is also fair and accurate to acknowledge that it was Gene Roddenberry who had the vision and presence of mind and the foresight to keep Michael Piller on and put him in a position to do what he did.

I also talked to buzz focus about playing Ted Kord, and that’s online, too:

So…. Brave and Bold Batman vs Frank Miller Batman – who would win?

W. Wheaton: (laugh) I don’t know that’s like asking which fruit will taste better an apple or an orange.

Are you also a fan of 70s/80s cartoons?

W. Wheaton: I remember getting up really early on Saturday mornings to watch the old Super Friends cartoons. It was really Challenge of the Super Friends and those old battles of the Legion of Doom that I loved. And I’m exactly the right age for GI Joe, Transformers, Thundercats and He-Man.

Thundarr the Barbarian is my favorite cartoon in history. That was before they were allowed to do marketing and merchandising in cartoons. So these guys were like, “let’s tell some cool stories.” And, they did.

You’re involved in so many things, what’s your passion these days?

W. Wheaton: Honestly, it’s spending as much time as I can with my family. My boys are getting older. My oldest son is in college, his brother is a senior in high school and is going to college next year. I am keenly aware how 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week isn’t that much time. More important than anything else is providing for them financially and emotionally.

Finally, I talked to Media Blvd., and got to deliver what ended up being my favorite one-liner of the whole series of interviews (unplanned). See if you can spot it:

Shaun> That’s cool, I grew up on Challenge of the Superfriends. Don’t start me going down that memory lane.

Wil> Are you a Wendy and Marvin kind of guy, or are you a Zan and Jana kind of guy. Wendy and Marvin were lame.

Shaun> I was glad though when Zan and Jana took off, and that damn monkey Gleek, that was always screwing things up.

Wil> I was the right age for Zan and Jana, so I thought that was really funny. They always turned into something. They could have defeated their adversaries, like they were way overpowered for what they actually did with their superpowers. I was exactly the right age, I was born in ’72, so I was like 8 when I was watching that. I thought it was awesome, then I grew up a little bit and there was Wendy and Marvin and Wonderdog. I thought, “They’re dumbing this down!” I was like 11, “They’re dumbing this down for the audience, and they’re insulting my 11 year old intelligence. This is awful, worst episode ever!”

Shaun> I hated the way the Superfriends treated Batman. The only thing they’d show of Batman is the car stopping and picking up Wendy and Marvin, but the dog doesn’t make it into the Batmobile.

Wil> I know, like you’re going to make Batman the chauffeur? Are you serious? I can promise you that that does not happen in Batman: The Brave & The Bold. In Batman: The Brave & The Bold, Batman is awesome, and he is not a ridiculous chauffeur. Batman is nobody’s bitch in Batman: The Brave & The Bold.

Maybe I could have said “Batman: The Brave & The Bold” a few more times in that last answer. I think I really dropped the ball there.

So … I thought there were more, but I’ve either closed the tabs, or I was hopped up on old Foreigner albums and had double vision. I know that three isn’t really a fistful, but I have small fists. So there.

And with that, my friends, I am off to Phoenix for the Phoenix Comicon. I don’t know what kind of internets I’ll have while I’m there, my friends, but if history is any indicator, I’ll be Twittering the hell out of everything, my friends.