Monday, we talked about the new ‘Transformers Animated’ cartoon, and the radical departures that it’s taking.  Michael from Forever Geek pointed me toward the first look we have at the show:

Set on Earth in the near future in Detroit, the alien TRANSFORMERS are thrust into a world populated by humans and automatons. As visitors to Earth, the TRANSFORMERS — OPTIMUS PRIME, BUMBLEBEE, PROWL, BULKHEAD and RATCHET– work in the human world, interacting with the ‘natives’ in exciting and humorous ways. TRANSFORMERS ANIMATED has been created to showcase the heroic AUTOBOTS working together to battle the evil DECEPTICONS and save Earth with kid-relatable plot lines filled with humor, distinctive character personalities, and dynamic action.

I can’t imagine this being good.  It just seems like they’ve taken what should be some bad momba-jomba Autobots, and turned them into Lilo & Stitch.  And Optimus’ face looks like a monkey.

I wish that ‘Sudio 60 on the Sunset Strip’ - The Complete Series would take up a whole shelf in my DVD collection, rather than a little two-inch portion, but, alas, it wasn’t in the cards.

On October 16, Warner Home Video will release the full first and only season of ‘Studio 60′.  The 6-disc box set will retail for $59.98, and will contain a new behind-the-scenes featurette and commentary tracks with creator Aaron Sorkin and producer Thomas Schlamme.

From the release:

What goes on behind the scenes of a nationwide late-night comedy sketch show? Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, answers that question with a must-see show within a show filled with engaging characters, ear-grabbing dialogue and a Hollywood hive of insider buzz.

Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford portray the likable hotshots brought in to revive NBS-TV’s sagging flagship comedy series and Amanda Peet plays their savvy boss in episodes exploring the lives and loves of - and the make-or-break creative pressures on - the show’s staff. Panic. Chaos. Fear. Sleep deprivation. Just make sure it’s funny by Friday. Because that’s when a nation tunes in to Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

The final episode of ‘Studio 60′, entitled “What Kind Of Day Has It Been”, will air tomorrow night on NBC.

(Source: TV Shows on DVD)

Just a quick word for all you Kimmel fans out there.  Jimmy’s been off the air since June 20 after undergoing an emergency appendectomy surgery.  Tonight, he’ll return to hosting ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’.

Don Rickles will be his guest tonight.

Chapter 39
Betty
Part 1 of 4

High school is about education, but what one learns often goes far beyond academics.  With cliques and the desire to fit in, the social pressures can be stressful, sometimes overwhelming.  But for those gifted with extraordinary abilities, a little advantage goes a long way…

The new story arc begins “not long ago”, and deals with Betty.  Betty is an outsider at her high school.  She’s overweight, has an acne- and piercing-covered face, and dresses in all black.  We open in the girls bathroom at her school, where three popular girls are gossiping.  Eventually, the conversation turns to Betty, and the girls proceed to bash her, saying that she’s in serious need of a diet and exercise, and that she’s an extreme makeover reject.  There’s even a rumor that she was going to try out for the cheerleader squad, which amazes all the girls.

As is usually the case in these circumstances, Betty happens to be in one of the bathroom stalls and overhears this whole conversation, becoming more enraged by the minute.  As the conversation turns to more mundane things like the theme of the prom, one of the girls notices that a zit has popped up, and begins to work on popping it.  Suddenly another blemish appears, then another and another, until her face is covered in boils.  They all run screaming into the halls, but when they turn back to look, the girl’s face is spotless again.  Betty is thrilled to see the preppy girls taken down a few pegs…until she realizes that they’re hallucination was brought on simply by her thoughts. 

Later that day in the school cafeteria, Betty is talking to her friend, Ren, who is an outcast like her.  As they walk through the cafeteria, a football jock trips Ren, who falls, spilling food all over himself.  Humiliated, they move to their corner table.  Betty comments on how much she hates those guys, and Ren agrees, but says that thinking about their home life puts a smile on his face.  He knows that they are all so afraid of their parents because they know if they don’t play well in the game, it’s an automatic beating when they get home.  Betty gets a mischevious smile on her face.  To be continued…

I’m assuming that this will be Candace’s backstory, since she has the ability to change what people see around them, and I’m excited to see her story.  But this one ended a little too abruptly for me.  It could have used another page or so to really flesh out Betty and Ren’s relationship.  Hopefully, next week’s installment will smooth out the edges a bit.

This weeks easter egg:  a behind the scenes shot of Sendhil Ramamurthy and Greg Grunberg.

Coming in January, expect to see ‘Transformers’ come back to the small screen, with a brand spankin’ new cartoon to show up on the Cartoon Network.

Hollywood Reporter has the scoop on some of the…creative departures that the show will be taking:

Cartoon and Hasbro execs said the new series, “Transformers Animated,” will be significantly different than the others, adding humor, never-before-seen characters and a new premise in which the Autobots fight evil humans in Superhero fashion much more frequently than they battle the Decepticons — the traditional “Transformers” lore since the property launched as a toy in 1984.

“We’ve used the basic Transformers and characters as a springboard, but then we’re pretty much reimagining the whole thing,” said Bob Higgins, senior vp programming and development at Cartoon Network. “What we’re doing with it is basically turning it into a superheroes story. We’re really excited that we’re able to take this decades-old property and hopefully turn it into something that kids haven’t seen or expected from a Transformers series before.”

Now, I’m probably the only guy in my generations who didn’t watch Transformers.  Don’t ask me why, and don’t take my geek card…I just never got into them.  But even I can see how such a radical departure of taking the Decepticons away as the main antagonists would be something that would send fans into a frenzy.  And, come on…fighting humans?  A well placed step would send any pesky human the way of a cockroach.

Sounds like a stupid, stupid idea to me.

If you’ve never checked out Sideshow Collectibles, I urge you to do so.  They specialize in movie and television memorabilia, and their products are some of the highest quality pieces you can find.  I’ve got a couple of Star Wars pieces myself, and they’re the highlight of my collection.

Sideshow Collectibles announced today that they would be distributing 12-inch figures from the FOX show ‘Prison Break’.  There’s nothing more than an image of the prototypes on the site, but it looks like they live up to the standard that we can expect from Sideshow.

This is getting ridiculous.

After his firing from ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, Isaiah Washington has been fighting a war of words with the show.  It all started with his “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” comment, which many thought was just a little bitter humor.  It then progressed when he made a statement saying that he really was upset, and was even considering legal action.

Today, TVGuide reports that Washington is turning this back around on T.R. Knight, saying that he has used the controversy surrounding his outing as an excuse to beef up his character.  It’s undeniable that George has definitely transformed this season…from the affable, somewhat goofy guy to the smooth charmer that he is now.  In the statement Washington said, “I can freely say this now, because I am no longer a Disney employee and I am no longer gagged…Everyone [from] the producers all the way up to [the studio] is very disappointed in the behavior of T.R. Knight.”  He even pulls costar Patrick Dempsey into it, quoting Dempsey as saying that if anyone should be fired because of this, it’s Knight.

Now at first, I felt bad for the guy.  I mean, sure, what he said was inexcusable, and, even if he was going through the motions of rehabilitation for the wrong reasons, he did what he was asked to do, and he still got fired.  I could somewhat sympathize with him.  But now he has the jilted lover complex…the “if I can’t have you, no one will” attitude toward Grey’s.  Not content to merely go his own way, he seems to be trying to drag the whole show down with him by throwing names around and seemingly trying to cause a lot of infighting around the set.  So whatever sympathy I had for Washington is effectively gone now.

Every week there are some news bits here and there that don’t always warrant a whole news post.  So to that end, we’ve got the TV Jab Roundup, a recap of the news that came in over the week.  While there’s nothing major revealed, since I know that many want to remain spoiler-free, we’ll continue this after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Hollywood Reporter has the scoop that “Very Funny” cable network TBS has scooped up the right for reruns of NBC’s ‘The Office’ and ‘My Name is Earl’.

TBS probably gets some of the most “background noise” play at our house, since there’s almost always a rerun of ‘Friends’ or ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ on there.  It’s great to see the funniest comedies on TV already becoming immortalized in syndication, just a couple of seasons into their runs.

I was pretty confident that the report yesterday that said that David Anders would be taking up the role of Takezo Kensei on ‘Heroes’ next season was false.  I was expecting all day yesterday and all day today that NBC would put out a correcting press statement…but it’s been almost 48 hours, and nothing.  So…okay, we’ll go with that.

So what does that mean for the character next year?  Word on the street for the past few days was that he would be playing an 1,000 year old, ageless womanizer(I know, how can someone who’s 1000 years old be ageless?  I deal with what I’ve got) named Kane.  The names of Kane and Kensei are somewhat similar, I guess, so maybe there’s some kind of name changing going on in the show.  And if he really is ageless, he could have existed in feudal Japan, and in today’s world.  It just seems like, in the countless stories that Sulu Nakamura told Hiro, he might have mentioned, “Oh, yeah, and he was a white dude.”

Between the online novels and this, the creators are doing a fantastic job of keeping the ‘Heroes’ brand out there, and keeping it on everybody’s lips.