Written PostNews Around the Net!

News Around the Net!

In recent months we got new installments of Parks and Recreation and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt... and tonight there will be more 30 Rock???  I can’t wait!!

The first trailer for the new Star Trek animated series, Lower Decks, has dropped:

I’m cautiously optimistic.  I am all for the idea of a humorous Star Trek show.  This trailer is pretty funny.  (The holodeck waste removal joke is gold.)  But Discovery and Picard both had great trailers, and look how they turned out.  As always for a new Star Trek show, I want this to be good.  But I just don’t have much faith that the people behind Star Trek these days have any idea what makes a good Star Trek show.  (Also: why can’t any of the designers working for the Trek movies or series these days design a decent-looking new starship?  Ever since the horrible-looking J.J. Abrams Enterprise it’s been one mess after another.  This new ship is no better.  The TNG-looking saucer looks great.  But what’s with those awkward, ugly pylons connecting the nacelles to the primary hull?  They look terrible — and also don’t make any logical sense.  How could a crew-person get from the saucer section into the engineering section when the two aren’t connected??  Sigh…)

In Star Wars TV news, they’ve announced a new animated series: The Bad Batch.  This will be a spin-off from the animated Clone Wars series, focusing on the group of Clones introduced in the final run of episodes.  I am super-excited for a new Dave Filoni executive produced Star Wars animated series, and the prospect of picking up story and character threads left hanging from the Clone Wars series is very exciting.  On the other hand, I wasn’t so wild about the “Bad Batch” four-part episode of The Clone Wars, and those characters don’t seem to me like such an interesting focal point for a new series.  But I have faith, and I’m excited to see what this will be all about…

Wow!  The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson has released his first new cartoons in 25 years!!  And they’re great!  Check them out here.

This is cool: a great deleted scene from Avengers: Endgame, in which Natasha gets to meet the Smart Hulk.  I’m not certain where exactly this scene would have fit into the movie (it looks like it takes place in Wakanda at the end of Infinity War, but Smart Hulk wasn’t around until after the time jump in Endgame) but it’s a great scene and worth watching.  (Why wasn’t this included on the blu-ray of the film?  The special features on the recent Marvel discs have been disappointing…)

Is there really a longer, more serious directors’ cut out there of Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever?  The idea that there is an alternate version that makes a better movie out of Batman Forever is probably pretty silly… but still, I’d love to see that longer cut if it actually exists!

Sad news of the passing of Grant Imahara at the too-young age of 49.  His obituaries all mention his work on Mythbusters, but for me I’ll always know him for his terrific work as Hikaru Sulu on the Star Trek fan series Star Trek Continues.  This is a sad loss.  Here’s one of my favorite Star Trek Continues episodes, “Lolani”, which guest-starred Lou Ferrigno(!!!):

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