The Next Reviews

I do The Prisoner reviews, because I want to let people know if a cultural artifact is worth checking out. I botched The Prisoner reviews (big time), but I learned a lot, which is a secondary goal here. I’ll do some broader commentary on The Prisoner once I figure out how to review the last episode, which won’t be for another month or so (sorry). After that, I’ll probably be picking up some other sub-cultural artifact to review on a weekly regular semi-regular basis. 

While it’s taken me over six months to review The Prisoner, I’d like my next project to be weekly feature that I could finish in less time than that. I could review anything, book series, webseries, comic books, TV show, movies, video game, etc., as long as whatever I could partake could give me something different to write about each week.

I’d prefer to look at something I don’t know much about. I’ve seen the original Neon Genesis Evangelion. It was great, but I don’t think I could do a review of the first few episodes, knowing how the rest would turn out. I could, but I don’t know if that’s what I want to do. Having a ‘fresh viewer’ approach is important to me as I think it allows veterans and other neophytes of what I’m reviewing to fondly remember/contrast their first impressions.

I also need something controlled; I can’t talk about the hot new sci-fi series “Alphas” because it comes out on network television every week. I don’t have cable at home and I can’t watch those things while I’m on the boat. So, at best, I could borrow someone else’s DVR and catch up six episodes at a time whenever I’m in and just spread the reviews out while I’m offshore. I’d much rather have something I can bring out here on DVD. In addition, I need to be able to get screen caps of it to post up with the blogs. If people can’t see it, they won’t want to read about it[1].

It has to be self-contained. I’d love to take out Fluxx and Chrononauts and Whos’the Traitor and King of Tokyo and review them while I’m offshore, but again, I need another player for that. I can’t just play against myself and have any content worth sharing.

I’m thinking of a few options, but I'd love to hear some others:

-the cult-classic/series-that-just-won’t-die Firefly 

-Star Trek: The Original Series, Season 1. So many of my friends are completely uneducated on this point. The adventures of Kirk and crew, complete with ridiculous premises, cultural differences of the sixties, and the early episodes that land in contrast to the stoic, static, thing that Star Trek became later are all worthy of sharing with the internet. Of course, there are also great episodes as well, which are twice as worthy.

-A comics creator, an idea obviously not related to my recent acquisition of a metric fuckton of Warren Ellis material.

-"The Fall of Sam Axe," a direct to DVD feature film about the character played by Bruce Campbell on Burn Notice. Might be good. Might be a Bruce Campbell movie.

-Season one of NCIS because it's a terrible show that I hate to my bones. 23 episodes is a lot of ground to cover, but I could easily break it up into chunks of four to five episodes to deride and impregnate with my venom in bulk.

-Top 10 Geek Movies. As decided by...I don't know, gross revenue, popular vote, most sequels (Hello, Scanners) or my own estimation of quality (Hello, Groundhogs Day).

[1] Numbers show people don't want to read about it anyway, but that's no reason not to try.