So, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog will be unveiled in mid-July. Here is the plan, in the words of my Master:

“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” will be streamed, LIVE (that part’s not true), FREE (sadly, that part is) right on Drhorrible.com, in mid-July. Specifically:

ACT ONE (Wheee!) will go up Tuesday July 15th.

ACT TWO (OMG!) will go up Thursday July 17th.

ACT THREE (Denouement!) will go up Saturday July 19th.

All acts will stay up until midnight Sunday July 20th. Then they will vanish into the night, like a phantom (but not THE Phantom – that’s still playing. Like, everywhere.)

You can read the full Master Plan by clicking here. If you want to help spread the word about the show and have a MySpace, Facebook or Twitter account, you can use these links and help Joss and everyone get the word out.

• Dr. Horrible on MySpace
• Dr. Horrible on Facebook
• Follow Dr. Horrible on Twitter
• Dr. Horrible Resources (Banners and Buttons)

And if you don’t mind a few spoilers, TV Guide’s Matt Roush got to see all 42 minutes of it, the lucky sonofabitca, and has some details about it as well as plans for DVD extras that should, you know, rocks and stuff.

Sweet!! Joss Whedon’s little side project written during the writer’s strike and filmed shortly afterwards, starring Nathan Fillion, Felicia Day and Neil Patrick Harris is coming soon!

I will now take a moment to say to everyone who’s been on my case to watch BSG, “Thank you for your persistence.” I do like it. A lot. More than I thought I would considering I went into it grumpy and not looking for another fandom to be sucked into. I think I’ve leveled up my geek cred as well now that I know what “Frak” means and nearly said, “Thank the Gods” this weekend.

Some thoughts so far:

• Every time they mention the planet Kobol, I think of Cobol and it feels like a little mental speedbump.
• The Cylon raider ships are the wickedest (and by that I mean evil) looking ships I’ve ever seen.
• I love the sound the ships make when they fire their weapons.
• I want to live on Cloud Nine.
• Starbuck is a badass who should figure out who the hell she loves and quit jumping into bed with every guy BUT the one I think she really loves.
• I’ve had to call my grandfather twice for Navy rank advice (I didn’t know what an ‘X-O’ was.)
• I can’t look at Colonel Tigh’s manipulative, power-hungry, slutty wife without seeing snobby, slutty Benny from “Pretty in Pink.”
• Bridget Jones best friend Dr. Baltar does an amazing job keeping the crazy from leaking out.
• I’m a little put off by all the religion, but I’m willing to deal.
• It took me a while to work out the “human” looking Cylons and what their deal was, but I think I’ve got it now.

I’m watching a few more episodes tonight, and thanks to a coworker, I’ll have the season 3 DVDs to devour soon.

I really am enjoying the show and am preparing to be pissed off that the rest of season 4 won’t be airing until next year with the rest of their legion of fans.

These are in seasonal order, not order of my faves:

10. “Innocence” Season 2

I love me some Angelus. There’s just something alluring about the deliciously evil demon wreaking havoc in Sunnydale. His obsession with Buffy in this story arc is fascinating to compare to other incarnations of Angelus that we get to see throughout the series and on “Angel.” In “Innocence,” Buffy and Angel finally hook up - Buffy unaware that this act will ruin everything and Angel seemingly unaware himself of the consequences, and when Angel experiences that moment of “perfect happiness” (Read: orgasm - albeit an O with the woman he truly loves) his gypsy curse kicks in and he loses his soul, letting loose his inner demon and bringing forth Angelus, the Master Vampire who terrorized Europe back in the day. David Boreanaz brings on the snark as Angelus and while I do love this episode, I think my favourite Angelus he does is Season 4 on “Angel” when the gang raises Angelus to try and stop the Big Beastie.

9. “Becoming, Part 2″ Season 2

The grand finale to the Angelus story arc in season 2. Angelus has plotted to awaken a demon that will destroy the world and of course buffy must stop him. The angst factor was really ratcheted up in the previous episodes which makes the payoff at the end really worth it. The video above shows the final fight sequence between a heartbroken slayer and her former lover. At the last moment, Willow is able to restore Angel’s soul but too late, and Buffy - knowing her true love has returned, must still kill him to save the world. *deep sigh*

When I first saw this episode, it slapped me in the face with the angst and as we all know, I love the angst. Sarah Michelle Gellar displayed her ability to wrench emotion from you when her big old eyes fill with tears and David, once again, pulls off a difficult feat of switching characters mid-scene. That happens a lot on Buffy and I really dig watching the actors do that.

8. “Lovers Walk” Season 3

The Magnificent Spike (James Marsters) returns to SunnyD after the love of his unlife, Drusilla, leaves him for a chaos demon. Spike is drunk, heartbroken, and feeling bitey. He wants Willow to do a love spell on Dru and bring her back to him, so he kidnaps her and Xander to force them to do it.

I love this ep because A. I love Spike and B. It’s just funny. It’s full of little moments and bits of dialogue that crack you up. (”I bought her beautiful dresses with beautiful little girls in them..”) I think this episode gave James a chance to portray more than just the Big Bad and we see that Spike is more than just a typical minion-like vamp.

7. “Doppelgangland” Season 3

This was Allyson Hannigan’s episode to shine and she just rocked it. EvilVamp Willow is fantastic and I wish we could have had more of her. In a previous episode where Cordelia wished everyone into an alternate reality in which Xander and Willow are Vampires, this one brings EvilVamp Willow into the normal reality causing much confusion for all.

Willow is my favourite female character on the show and so whenever the show focuses on her, it’s a great time.

6. “Hush” Season 4

The beasties in this one (The Gentlemen) are truly creepy. They come to Sunnydale to steal the hearts of residents (literally) and they cast a spell that steals everyone’s voices so they can’t scream when they tear out their hearts. Buffy and the scoobies have to find a way to defeat them. With the help of Giles’ hilarious transparencies, they do in the end of course.

The show won an Emmy for this one which features almost no dialogue throughout. It’s a testament to the strengths of the show - it’s actors, directors, creators, and writers that they can pull something like this off and make it so weirdly wonderful.

5. “Fool For Love” Season 5

In this episode, we learn a great deal about Spike - his past and we get to see his battles with the two slayers he’s killed. Buffy is injured while on patrol and it scares her enough to want to research past slayers and find out why and how they died. But there’s very little info about that in the Watcher’s Records because when a Slayer dies, their watcher finds it too painful to record. So Buffy has to turn to Spike for answers. She grills him on how he did it and in turn, Spike teaches her a lesson about being a Slayer.

We travel back and forth between the present and Spike’s past and it’s surprising to learn that Spike was not quite such a badass before he was turned. In fact, he was a bit of a priggish young man named William who was in love with a woman who disdained him and he wrote bad poetry. Really bad poetry. When Drusilla turned him, he became influenced by Angelus and his ruthlessness and adopted the working class accent and swagger that we all know and love.

This was just a beautiful episode from the ground up. The way the stories about Spike’s past served to mirror the present as Spike grappled with his discovery that he is in love with Buffy and Buffy learning Spike’s theory about the deaths of slayers hit home with her (and pissed her off too.) The whole thing was just woven together so beautifully that I think this is probably my most favourite episode of them all.

4. “Tabula Rasa” Season 6,

This is an episode that is both hilarious and sort of sad. Willow casts a spell that goes awry and makes everyone forget who they are. The deductions they make regarding their identity (Spike is Giles’ son Randy, Willow and Xander are dating, Anya and Giles are married??) are most amusing and the shenanigans that ensue are enjoyable to watch. But when the spell is broken, everyone goes back to being as miserable as they were before - Buffy depressed about being yanked out of heaven, Spike dealing with his unrequited love, Tara realizing Willow’s using the magicks again and leaves her.. It ends on a such a down note.

Season 6 is meant to be the year when Life is really the Big Bad for everyone. An interesting concept for the show and I thought they handled it very well. Relationships begin and end badly, death is everywhere (not that it isn’t usually, but this time death hits close to home and leads to EvilWitch Willow) and the characters are dealing with real life scary - rape and murder as opposed to demon scary.

3. “Beneath You” Season 7

Spike’s living in the basement of Sunnydale High and he’s a little… off his head. He’s dealing with a shiny new soul that he fought to regain (after attempting to rape Buffy in Season 6, Spike went through the demon trials to regain his sould so she could have “what she deserved” - a good man who would never hurt her.) He didn’t count on the soul racking him with the same guilt Angel suffers. Couple that with the First Evil manipulating him in the basement and well, he’s a little crazy.

In this episode a woman is being terrorized by a giant worm that Anya created after she became a vengeance demon again. The scoobies try to help her but Spike turns up, seemingly sane for now and offers to help. The gang is reluctant but eventually they accept his help. It doesn’t take long for him to lose it though and by the end of the episode, James Marsters delivers the most powerful scene (in my opinion) of the series in which he confronts Buffy in a church and through his mad ramblings she learns he has a soul now. I’ve watched this scene over and over and it gets to me every time.

2. “Storyteller” Season 7

Andrew, a former member of the evil trio from season 6, now a peripheral scooby who’s not quite accepted by everyone is the subject of this terrific episode in which he tries to document everything the Slayer is doing and everyone involved in her life. Tom Lenk is magnificent in this episode - hilarious and touching all at the same time as we learn the reason he’s such a storyteller - it’s so he doesn’t have to “deal” with his past crimes (namely the murder of his best friend) and by the end of the episode, he’ll have you crying as Buffy forces him to confront himself over everything he’s done.

I really enjoy Tom Lenk’s character, Andrew. I think he got the best lines and this episode really showcased Lenk’s talent.

1. “Lies My Parents Told Me” Season 7

Spike’s been hypnotised by The First and is being manipulated into killing humans but the gang needs to figure out the ‘trigger’ that sets Spike off. Giles and Principal Wood team up behind Buffy’s back to deal with Spike. Giles feels Spike is simply too dangerous and Wood is dealing with a darker purpose: His mother was the second Slayer that Spike killed. So while Giles keeps Buffy busy patrolling, Wood brings Spike to his garage (filled with crosses) and sets off Spike’s trigger. They battle, and eventually the trigger is broken.

What I loved about this episode was again travelling into Spike’s past and finding out what he did to his mother (and what she did to him. Eeesh) namely, he tried to save her from death by Consumption and instead he unleashed a nasty demon who tried to have sex with him and he ends up having to stake his own mum. This is something Spike’s buried deep so as not to deal with it. Wood’s forcing him to confront it is what broke the trigger.

The fight between Wood and Spike was stupendous and very moving really, for both men. Wood actually had to confront the fact that he didn’t come first with his mother who was stuck with the Slayer mission - something he always denied.

So there you have my top 10 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes Of course there are many more episodes I love - including the fantabulous “Once More with Feeling” musical episode that usually makes everyone’s top 10 list. I do love that episode as well. The whole ‘Angel’s back from Hell and can he and Buffy reconcile’ arc of S3 was fun - Spike and Buffy’s twisted relationship, the scene when Tara gets shot, anytime Spike tries to hurt a human after he’s chipped, The Gift… There’s just so much to love.

The premise actually changed after the first year of the show. The producers decided to focus on four of the boarding school girls rather than a plethora, hoping to cash in on that 80s staple of afterschool special-type episodes. Tough girl on scholarship, Jo, was introduced, got the girls in trouble which resulted in the school punishing them by making them bunk together as well as help Mrs. Garrett in the cafeteria.

By doing that though, we lost Molly Ringwald as a character. I heard she did all right for herself after that

Facts of Life ran for nine seasons and saw our core four girls: Blair the blue-blooded snobby socialite, Tootie, the one with the weird name, Natalie, the effervescent, bubbly chubby girl, and Jo, the tough chick from the Bronx face a lot of issues such as pregnancy, hurricanes, reading disorders, alcoholism, censorship, and even teenage prostitution!

They all eventually graduated from Eastland Academy and went on to continue living with Mrs> garrett in her gourmet shop in the Peekskills until Mrs. G got hitched, and Frau Blucher - I mean Chloris Leachman joined the cast.

I feel like I grew up with this show. Natalie was always my favourite character, but I like Jo and her no-nonsense, hard knock approach to life, and how she often took Blair down a peg or two. Tootie was fun, and always getting into scrapes. The show was your typical sitcom with silly situations that would never happen IRL but FoL made them all seem believable. Or maybe I’m just looking back with my rosey glasses and the show was really dreck. But dreck doesn’t usually make it nine seasons (not a word from you Survivor haters out there.)

Bit O’Trivia: Kim Fields was only nine years old when she started playing Tootie, who was supposed to be twelve. In an effort to make her appear taller (and older) her character was always in roller skates for the first year of the show. - from the IMDb

I may be just a *tad* bit overdramatic I promise not to embark on my Battlestar adventure with a negative attitude. I have heard good things, and what I really need is one more fandom to be passionate about I will say that if I should get sucked into this fandom, I am notorious for having marathon sessions of viewing because I have no patience to wait for the the next disks to arrive from Netflix. And I may end up spending my hard-earned cash buying the DVDs myself. If that happens, I will passing the hat around and taking up donations from every single person who has old me I need to watch this show, and they can fund my daughter’s college education.

So as I make my way through these disks, I may occasionally report my findings so that BSG fans I know and love will see that I’m finally doing it, and they can get off my back about it now

Some might say that Remote Control set a precedent for the suckage that MTV has become today. And by “some” I mean me. Sure the first few seasons of “Real World” were shiny and cool, but if you compare MTV today to what it started out as, there is a world of suck.

BUT, this is about Remote Control, and MTV suckage aside, Remote Control was a great concept - it still was music-oriented mostly, and a lot of fun to boot. Wikipedia has the best summary of the show’s premise:

The show’s premise was that Ober desperately wanted to be a game show host and set up his basement (at 72 Whooping Cough Lane) as a television studio. The opening theme song sketched the scenario out: “Kenny wasn’t like the other kids (Remote Control) / TV mattered, nothing else did (Remote Control) / Girls said yes, but he said no (Remote Control) / Now he’s got his own game show (Remote Control!)” Shows were sometimes interrupted by the disembodied voice of “Ken’s mother,” and the studio was indeed set up to resemble a basement, complete with a washer and dryer, cheesy bric-a-brac, and a giant PEZ dispenser that resembled Bob Eubanks.

The basement was a mainstay of the show throughout its run; however its cheesy decor was “rearranged” slightly every season. The contestants sat in leather recliners with seat belts (their purpose explained below), complete with retro kidney-shaped tables and scoreboards, facing host Ober and his retro-styled Zenith television. Behind Ober were autographed pictures of his idols, game show hosts such as Bob Barker, Monty Hall, and Tom Kennedy. Musician Steve Treccase set up his keyboard behind a cluttered bar, at which Quinn and the hostess usually sat for the duration of the show. More clutter could be found around and behind the audience, very frequently including props used in previous seasons. Finally, the contestants’ chairs were placed in front of breakaway walls, through which they were pulled if they were eliminated.

The questions were sometimes acted out as skits, often with recurring characters such as The Laughing Guy who would laugh the theme to TV shows and the contestants would have guess it, and Stud Boy (played by Adam Sandler no less) who would describe women he had, uh, “conquered” and the contestants would have to work out who he, uh, did.

Jeopardy, it ain’t.

But it was fast-paced, funny, loud, a little silly - ok a LOT silly - and the perfect gameshow for 80s kids. I believe all three seasons for it are out on DVD now, which would make an excellent present for your hipster parents who remember this crazy show

It should be on the internet. We don’t know how - We’re literally just finishing it. Then we’re gonna show it to people at CAA and a bunch of other people and sort of discuss, “How do we go about this? Where is the venue for this?” - Link to the full interview.

Why not just Youtube it? I think I read somewhere else that they’re hoping to find a way to monetize it a little - I’d pay for it on iTunes - so maybe Youtube would not be the best option. Or release it as a web series like Dr. Horrible star, Felicia Day does with her popular series The Guild.

Other reports I’m finding are saying that it will most likely be released right before San Diego Comic Con (no plans are finalized yet) and Sci-Fi Wire reports that it will probably be released on the web in some way (I’m guessing via the official site eh?) and then through iTunes and eventually DVD.

However it gets released, I’m really excited to see it!

The other day my daughter and I went to see Indiana Jones and the Stupid Alien Thing and one of the previews was for a movie version of Get Smart starring Steve Carell. I’ve never been sure of the wisdom of making movie versions of old 60s TV shows, but I will pretty much see anything Steve Carell is in

The show, for the uninitiated, featured Agent 86 (Smart) who worked for CONTROL whose job it was to periodically foil the plans of KAOS whenever they attempted to take over the world. Because the show was a comedy, inevitably Smart would get in trouble and his infinitely more capable partner (or assistant, since these were the 60s and the women weren’t quite all liberated and equal yet), Agent 99 (played by Barbara Feldon) would have to bail him out.

I wonder if Get Smart and his gadgets were a sort of parody to the smooth and suave James Bond. I’m almost sure it was.

Anyway, this was a gem of a show, with wonderful dialogs and jokes. Here’s hoping the movie will be a gem as well. But it might miss Gem status “by *that* much.” (Oh come on, I had to work the tagline in somehow :))

Bit o’trivia: Agent 99 was originally supposed to be named Agent 69; NBC censors nixed the name after deeming it to be too “sexually suggestive”. Also, in the 1930’s, a group of women pilots formed an organization called the “99’s”. They called it that because at the first meeting, 99 women showed up, one of them was Amelia Earhart. - From the IMDb.

Here’s a rundown of sets, buildings, and footage that went up in smoke:

• The courtyard set from Back to the Future - you know, the clock tower struck by lightning that sends Marty McFly back to 1985? (1.21 JIGOWATTS!)
• A streetscape used in numerous films and TV shows such as Seinfeld, Bruce Almighty, Monk, The Sting, NYPD Blue, and Crossing Jordan.
• The cheesy but nostalgically popular King Kong exhibit:

• 40,000 to 50,000 videos and reels in a video storage vault which includes footage from I Love Lucy and Miami Vice - but don’t worry, Universal says it has duplicates of all of them, so PHEW! I’d hate to think of a world without multi-colored rolled up suit jackets and loafers with no socks.
• Key exterior sets for the show Ghost Whisperer were destroyed

Damages are going to be high, but according to the LA Times: “Fire is nothing new to the studio. Seven significant blazes have hit the lot along the Cahuenga Pass in the Hollywood Hills since 1932. New York Street, in particular, burned to the ground in 1957 and 1990.”