There's a nice review of the forthcoming dvd of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on this BBC page. It sounds good to me. The dvd comes out March 7. Still a bit of time to wait. It won't seem like anything, 4 weeks of the same old same old. Work, tv, more work, more tv. I'm actually watching tv while I work on this. I know, Iknow, this isn't much like work, although some of my regular day job work involves wasting time sitting at a pc. I'm looking forward to seeing Goblet of Fire again, especially the dragon bit. GoF was one of the few movies I went to see in the theater last year. I'd rather watch stuff on dvd at home, where it's more comfortable, and you can rewind. In your underwear.
I've been going through more old tapes and dubbing the old vhs onto DVD+R. Yesterday I finished up the 6 episodes of Dynaman. This was some of the oldest video that I have, taped in 1988. I don't have many tapes of stuff that I recorded before 1990. I purged my collection regularily. A few things I kept. Dynaman was one of them. There were 6 episodes that played on Night Flight, which ran on the USA cable network back in the mid to late 80's. Night Flight had lots of weird short stuff and occasional odd movies. Dynaman was a Japanese tv series that was re-scripted and re-dubbed with a new story. A story full of jokes. Here's a good page with the real story of the Japanese series. It dosn't seem to have many jokes. Dave Foley and Bruce McCulloch of the Kids In The Hall were writers on this Toronto produced series. It was fairly funny and I enjoyed watching them again. It's doubtful that anyone will release a real dvd but I found some on eBay that had even more material than I have. That's the nice thing about the internet and eBay, they bring people together to swap money for bootleg dvd's. It's nice not to have to drive over to criminal town and take the risk of winding up face down in a parking lot. Some lady got shot in the eye the other day. The bullet went through the back window, bounced off the front window post and put her eye out. Driving through a crappy part of north Minneapolis. That can happen anywhere, I guess, anywhere where assholes hang out anyway. Dynaman is all silly and funny and nice to watch and filled with bad jokes that occasionally made me laugh. I still use the wonderfully descriptive phrase, Comic Relief Machine, now, here in the 21st century.
Even older than the two Dynaman tapes is the tape that has three Star Wars documentaries on it. One for each of the first three movies. I taped these some time after the third movie came out in 1983. Looks like they were on PBS at one time or another, I found a PBS logo and there aren't any commercials cuts. They don't look too bad for something recorded at ep. These documentaries haven't been released on dvd and probably won't. Some guy in Portugal is currently selling the set of three and the Star Wars Holiday Special on two dvd's for 16 bucks. Some of the material has turned up in other documentaries, especially the little pieces of behind the scenes video and film clips. Unfortunately, no matter how you repackage it there are only so many stories you can tell, and pictures you can show, about the making of Star Wars. Fortunately, I haven't gotten that tired of hearing, and seeing, them again. I must have a dozen different documentaries on Star Wars. And I don't have nearly all.
It's kind of fun going through the old video collection, seeing that stuff again. I hadn't seen the documentaries for several years, and the Dynaman for 8 or 10. I have always enjoyed going back and re-visiting the things I liked in the past, books, comics, tv, movies, all that crap. It's either really good and really re-watchable or there is some sentimental or nostalgic attachment. Falling in the later catagory is the DC Showcase reprint of The House Of Mystery. 21 issues, 174 to 194 running May 1968 to Sept 1971. I used to have some or all of those original issues and remember them fondly. I don't really remember any of the art or the stories, it's just a vague fond feeling. DC has just started to reprint some of their older material in cheap black and white reprint books. This one has 552 pages, all but 6 of which are comics, for the cheap price of $16.99. There's a bunch of Berni Wrightson in here and a few othere artists that are ok. I'll be finding out sometime in the future what the stories are like. I have bought, but not read, the Metaporpho collection. Again with the fond memory. There are a few things over at DC that would be nice to re-read but the cost of getting old issues is prohibative. It's expensive enough collecting old Disney comics and those are still around and often reasonable. Some of those old DC comics I read as kids are much more expensive than the Disneys that were published the same years. DC Showcase has a Haunted Tank collection coming in May, which might be good, and a Superman Family collection next month, which collects the first 22 issues of Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen. I was always more of a DC fan than a Marvel fan, and of course, no one was more liked than Disney.
There was a headline on this guy on MSNBC. It said the CIA waterboarded this guy 183 times. You'd think he'd be cleaner looking. I like the way the hair is creeping up over his shoulder. It's like it wants to take a look at what's going on at the front. Not much, someone's puttin' your ass in jail.
I tell ya, just after I made all the dvd's from the laserdiscs I had of the Thin Man series they finally issue them on dvd. I bought them, it's too nice a set to pass up. Of the six films in the series, only the first The Thin Man has been out on dvd. I have a nice boxed set of 6 laser discs that I bought for 15 bucks on clearance at Suncoast. This was sometime ago, back at the end of the laserdisc age. The only extras on the laserdiscs, the trailers, nice box though.
