There's just one episode of "The Original Series" on one of the Blu-Ray discs in the second season Star Trek collection. A partial explanation for this might be that "The Trouble With Tribbles" is augmented not just with "bonus content" but two follow-up episodes from later series. Before I bought the Blu-Ray sets I had watched my way through two " ( Read more... )

People did seem to like Avatar: The Last Airbender, but when I bought its DVD sets I was also aware Dave Filoni had worked on that series before taking charge of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. More than that, hearing the series also cross-pollinated anime and "western" animation certainly didn't hurt either, even if this did continue to point out how I ( Read more... )

When, a while ago now, I reached what I'd decided would be an adequate stopping point for watching DVD sets of The Simpsons, I pondered a few other options for watching North American animation and wound up returning to Batman: The Animated Series. Some years before that, I had bought the first DVD collection of that show, part of a general mix of ( Read more... )

"Man cannot live by anime alone" seems just about self-evident to me. There are also times, though, when it begins to feel a bit like a reproach. I suppose that where some move on to an interest in Japanese or East Asian culture that doesn't need to involve "drawings" and others now find long-format stories of the fantastic told in "live action" ( Read more... )

In the summer of 1985, my family bought a VCR. It wasn't long before we were recording programs from the handful of channels our antenna picked up out where we lived, and that came in handy as autumn arrived. One of the local stations had long shown cartoons at noon, but now, instead of waiting for rainy lunch hours and obliging teachers providing ( Read more... )

Out on a long drive yesterday, I was stopped at a traffic light near a grey Volkswagen Beetle (the "especially old" kind now, I suppose) with a personalised license plate. I read "PUTITINH" and started trying to sound through it, and then after a second or two I remembered the Simpsons episode where Homer is trying to replace the family cars and he ( Read more... )

It took me a while to watch through and listen to the commentaries on the ninth season set of The Simpsons, but during that time the thought seemed clear in my mind that this would be the last set I got of the show whether bought myself or asked for as a Christmas or birthday present, in a sense a second, perhaps more definite farewell to it after ( Read more... )