WonderCon 2018 is a wrap…

What a weekend! My wife and I (along with our friend/longtime-partner-in-crime Ali) spent last Friday afternoon through Sunday evening in the fair city of Anaheim (a half hour away at maximum warp and home of Disneyland) attending WonderCon.  I’ve heard WonderCon described as ‘Comic Con Jr.’  It has many of the same elements that comprise Comic Con…

“The Walking Dead”; where rigor mortis set in for me…

*   Nights of the Living (and thriving) Dead. AMC’s “The Walking Dead”, based on the Robert Kirkman graphic novel series, used to be must-see television for me.  When new episodes aired I ignored my phone, rescheduled most socializing, and basically put my life on hold for that one hour on Sunday nights when a new…

Star Trek: The Animated Series 45 years later…

14 years before  “Star Trek: The Next Generation”  debuted in 1987, there was an earlier Star Trek spinoff series; the often (unfairly) maligned animated Star Trek series, which debuted on Saturday morning television in the fall of 1973. Star Trek The Animated Series (TAS), a Lou Scheimer/Filmation production, was, in essence a continuation of the prematurely cancelled original…

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018); a brief tribute…

Just need to preface this post by sheepishly admitting how woefully inadequate I am to the task of summarizing one of the greatest minds of the human race, so I’m going to just skip the late Stephen Hawking’s full biography. Hawking’s life has been well-documented in media (the book & documentary “A Brief History of Time,” as…

Alex Garland’s “Annihilation” creates something new from borrowed DNA…

Writer/director Alex Garland (“Ex Machina”) has a new science fiction movie in cinemas now that will probably not be a giant crowdpleaser/moneymaker, but it is also one of the most thought-provoking, intelligent and genuinely interesting movies I’ve seen since “Blade Runner 2049.”  And it’s not a sequel or a prequel, nor is it based on…

Finding “Lost in Space”…

Past Prologue. When I was a kid, “Lost in Space” was one of those shows that I watched in afternoon reruns in the mid-1970s (I was a few years too young to have watched it in first-run from 1965-1968).  My earliest impression was that it felt like a wonderfully goofy hybrid of “Star Trek” and…

Sci-fi and diversity do well at the 90th Annual Academy Awards…

First, I want to say upfront that I’m not big on the idea of pitting art (and artists) against each other in competition.   Personally, I am one of the least competitive people on Planet Earth.  The Academy Awards ceremonies in particular bring to mind the apples and oranges analogy:  Is “2001: A Space Odyssey” any…

“Black Panther” strikes out from the Marvel pack…

A few things I need to start this post off: *  First,  I’m a little late to this party; my wife and I only saw “Black Panther” last weekend.   The opening weekend of the movie we were having a blast in Los Angeles at the Gallifrey One Doctor Who convention , so … sorry-not-sorry (hehe). *…