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The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend: The Acolyte (Part III)
(This is absolutely the last one, I… I have to move on) Story. “A story succeeds for fails in the style of its telling.” You’ve heard me say that a thousand times. Less frequently, but just as important I often ask, “Knowing how the story ends, would you want to read it again?” No one wants to hear this story again. This story fails so drastically that I truly hope it gets sent to the Iron Vault of Tax Write-Offs. Supposedly, this cost...
The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend: The Acolyte (Part II)
(I really hadn't planned to make this a three-parter but I had to stop and put together a valedictory for Bob Newhart. The third part should probably be up tomorrow at the usual time.) The Star Wars Lore fifty-car-pile-up. Why make a prequel? There’s rarely a good reason for it. There are exceptions of course. The Silmarillion was a prequel that laid out just how vast the mythology of Middle Earth really was. It worked for the Godfather Part II where you...
RIP Bob Newhart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgdUWXf8jJk We were totally scammed and we loved it! It was easily the greatest ending to a television comedy in history. I never even heard the lines I was laughing so hard. It was without question a "you had to be there to understand" moment. There had been all kinds of rumors going around about how Newhart would end. Mostly they'd promised something really intolerable. That Bob, who had been a fixture in our lives throughout the 1980s was going to be...
The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend: The Acolyte (Part I)
(I have to break this into two parts, I can’t examine this much bad in only 1500 words) This is the LucasFilm project where the last of the superfans, The Star Wars Advocates finally walked away. The opposite of love is not hatred, it’s indifference. After this, they don’t care anymore. It’s not just that this show took Star Wars canon, rolled it up in a carpet, threw it in a dumpster, poured gasoline on it, and set it on...
2015: Disney’s Watershed Year
2015 was the year that Bob Iger made the decisions that set Disney on a course to oblivion. It was the year he made the choices that changed it irrecoverably from Walt Disney's company to Bob Iger's. Several factors converged that year that would turn Disney into the trainwreck it is today. A lot of people blame Covid but truthfully that just accelerated a process that was already in motion. These factors in no particular order were; the...
The Sons of Theseus – The Detective Heroes
It’s ironic that Batman’s boyhood hero was Zorro. The Mark of Zorro was the movie that little Bruce Wayne had talked his parents into taking him to the night of their murder. The irony is that Zorro is an Outlaw hero whereas Batman is every inch a Detective hero. The Detective hero is an American invention. During his time editing various magazines, Edgar Allan Poe would publish logic puzzles that were extremely popular with his readers. This appears to have led Poe to the creation...
Goodbye Shannen
Shannen Doherty has lost her fight with breast cancer. Given the events of the weekend, it’s all too easy to overlook the passing of one of the great genre actresses of Generation X and that would be a shame. Doherty started out as a child actress in the early 1980s. Her first appearance was in the Chariots of the Gods futureman hippie babble show, The Phoenix, where she played “Little Girl.” Her next three parts were in varied genre projects The...
The Acolyte is Officially in Trouble
Shill to the stars Grace Randolph, the most reliably pro-LucasFilm shill channel with almost but not quite a million subs, has suddenly done an about face and absolutely dragged the latest episode of the Acolyte across broken concrete. She could not dredge up enough bile and vitriol. It went from absolutely amazing to a blitheringly incompetent steaming pile of Star Wars. The Neilson's are out now so there is no hiding this disaster any longer. There is no way in...
Alec Baldwin Has Walked… Of Course
Oh, come on. You knew he was never going to do any time. Apparently, the prosecution concealed evidence. Mistrial with Prejudice. Clever for a DA who knew what was expected of her. https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1811887473997324589 Discuss on Social Galactic
Jon Del Arroz Is the Only One Left Still Covering the Neil Gaiman BDSM Scandal
UPDATE: https://twitter.com/jondelarroz/status/1812126790833643776 **** The suppression algorithms have been fired up. Open up a private browsing window and type in Neil Gainman on YouTube. Take a look at the results, you can see for yourself whats happening. Neil was a pioneer in Wokism, he was writing about mentally ill defectives long before they became a protected class. He is revered by the high lords of Clown World for his trailblazing. Gaiman is into the amazingly disgusting stuff. I mean we're talking the Marquis De...
What is Marvel Doing to Captain America this Week?
REPOST: 7/11/24 There is zero interest in Falcon America Brave New World. But it does look like Disney/Marvel thinks they have something that won't look like a total joke if they put it in theaters. Since the Marvel brain trust was fired and replaced with DEI quotas there is very little hope for it. Feige has absolutely not gone back to formula that made Marvel a boxoffice juggernaut. He's hoping that a vaguely anti-Trump Woke-lite plot will put him back on...
Shelly Duvall RIP
Noted genre actress Shelly Duvall has passed today at the age of seventy five due to complications resulting from diabetes. One of acting’s little secrets is that it is mostly genetics more than anything else. What bag of tricks did fate leave in your cradle as an infant? Was it the emotional vampirism so necessary in driving a practitioner of the craft forward? Was it the ability to lift one eyebrow? Was it that indefinable quality called, ‘the magic’? Was it...
Disney Deathwatch (7/10/24)
The Acolyte There’s a number of things I’d rather do than get caught up on The Acolyte but given the interest around it I have little choice. It has managed the impressive feat of stirring up the kind of hatred that hasn’t surrounded a Star Wars project since The Last Jedi. While The Rise of Skywalker was certainly hated that was mostly because of its utter cinematic incompetence. As bad as it was, it was an attempt at course correction. The Last...
NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
I had no idea this was coming when I did my last RE:View Taika Waititi's Time Bandits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCA9jpc4R74 Discuss on Social Galactic
The Skydance/Paramount Merger is Back On
#TheDarkHeraldWasRight As I said, “Redstone is hot to sell and Skydance is hot to buy, so this is now just negotiating.” The walking away from the table was just another negotiating ploy. Turns out that Shari Redstone was trying to get to the price she wanted, and she appears to have gotten there. Skydance and Paramount have agreed to a merger. Shari Redstone’s worthless stock will now be turned into something valuable. Namely 8 billion bucks. At the time of their...
Kotaku Australia Has Folded
My heart! Oh, my poor wounded heart! Kotaku Down Under is no more! Won’t someone please think of the children? If I was a better person, I’d be trying to come up with some kind of emotion tangential to empathy. After all, Kotaku wasn’t always this steaming, radioactive pile. When it first launched this was its mascot, which tells you just about everything it used to be. Brian Crecente was brought in a month after Kotaku launched in 2006 and turned it...
The Star Wars Holiday Special Wasn’t That Bad
At least not by 1970s TV standards. Here is the first appearance of the Justice League on TV. It was in 1979, Wonder Woman was still in production and Lynda Carter wasn't in this. Lynda Carter felt she was too good to appear in this thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUTCePDSYy8 There is no part II. The guy doing this video gave up. Discuss on Social Galactic
What the Sandman Dreams Of
WARNING THE FOLLOWING IS GRAPHIC I really didn’t want to write this article but it’s clear that the media has been given orders to protect Neil Gaiman. It’s been so long since I first picked up a Sandman comic book that I honestly don’t remember which story I came in on. Preludes and Nocturnes had wrapped, which I remember because I had to buy the graphic novel. In my youth, I tended to think too highly of artists. I honestly, believed that...
Happy 4th of July!
Comedy is tragedy plus time and nothing I can say will make this any funnier. It was either this or piece of Neil Gaiman's sex life. Go enjoy the firework with your family and friends, America was never about musical theater.
RE:View Time Bandits
"Removing his helmet reveals himself to be none other than Sean Connery or an actor of equal but cheaper stature." This joke, made on a golf course is more or less how got Time Bandits got greenlit. The Joke was made to Sean Connery himself, and he liked it. It was the start of trend for him during the eighties. Highlander, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and a few others. Time Bandits is the most inexplicable kids’ film of all time. Possibly...
Appendix N: A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum
The year was 1989. Young Idiot College Student Herald was nosing through The Merchant of Venus when he came upon a shrink-wrapped paperback that was at least twenty years old judging from the acid rock cover art. The title was The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum. I snatched it off the shelf greedily. I had to sacrifice that week's Prizzao fund to buy it. No regrets it's still sitting on my library shelf. In that day and age, luck was...
Tiana’s Tunnel of Terror
"WE ARE SORRY BUT WE ARE UNABLE TO CONTINUE OUR ADVENTURE ON TIANA'S..." Tiana’s Biayu Adventure is now officially a black eye for Disney. The beloved Splash Mountain has been reimagined into a ride that is, to put it mildly, “troubled.” It’s breaking down constantly. Emergency evacuations are now a daily occurrence, the animatronics, what few there are, simply do not work reliably. Now the screens are failing. What has gone wrong? Honestly, the reason is pretty simple. The DEI Imagineers have no idea...
Kalki 2898 AD: I’m In
I didn't understand a word of this trailer and I was more entertained by those three minutes than I was the entire five hours of the Acolyte I've had to sit through. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1-w1kUGuz8 Discuss on Social Galactic
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all. We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turnThat Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,So we left them...
Disney Gives Up Without a Fight
In 1990 Universal Studios Orlando opened up. The idea was to use it as a combination of movie studio and theme park attraction. Michael Eisner immediately set about making MGM/Disney Studios in Walt Disney World. Both were a failure. at least as far as the movie studio thing went, it turned out to be a wildly impractical idea, there weren't that many people from Hollywood who were willing to work in Orlando. It's hot enough in LA, why add muggy...
Hump Day Dump 6/26/24
I was counting on the new James O’Keefe leak to provide me with material tonight. I’m afraid he let me down in a pretty serious way. The Indian guy O’Keefe nailed is so low-level he may as well have been interviewing a gate guard at Disneyland. My typical reader has a more knowledgeable opinion about Disney’s leadership than “Steve from Tech Support” here. I guarantee this dude is too low-level to have an NDA. If he hadn’t been dumb enough to...
The LucasFilm Heathers
I was honestly kind of surprised when Brett Cooper spoke up on Leslye Headland's behalf. It turns out she had worked for Headland on a show called Heathers that Paramount buried for political reasons. It was only loosely based on the 1988 movie. In this TV version, the Heathers are "body-positive queers," and they are the ones that bully the entire school by simply threatening to destroy anyone who opposes them with accusations both online and IRL. Now that is...
The Iger Succession
I know it seems like Bob Iger is never going to leave but that is only because he hasn’t. So why do I think he is? Being the CEO of Disney used to be the best job in the world so far as he was concerned. Being the popular boss of the most beloved company in America which is also the number one company in movies, theme parks, and even sportscasting, is the dream of every business major in Hollywood. ...
The Six Best Doctor Who Stories From the Tom Baker Era (Part II)
(Part One) I was honestly, surprised by last week's episode of Doctor Who. It actually evoked an emotional response from me. Hatred. Disney Doctor Who dragged the Pyramids of Mars through the slime just by them touching it. That is what kicked off this list in case you are wondering. 3. Seeds of Doom This is the last of the Third Doctor stories, or at least it may as well be because it very much feels like one of the Jon Pertwee...
Why the Old G4 Was Great
This would have been a stoning offense in Frosk's day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x0jrp34jaU
The O’Keefe Disney Bombs (Chapter One)
How does O’Keefe do it? Well, actually that’s pretty easy. First, you study the senior executives and try to determine who is the most vulnerable to what bait, and likely why they might be loose-tongued. A white male executive at Disney who appears to be overdue for promotion and is single, works nicely. By now someone at Disney has told him, “Look, my dude, it’s not happening. Taniqua is getting that job instead of you. Don’t make me say why, because...
The Six Best Doctor Who Stories of the Tom Baker Era
Source Radio Times A friend recently asked about Doctor Who stories for his son. While the current Doctor Who is unwatchable pig vomit, there was a time when the BBC made a deliberate effort to overcome any of the shortcomings of a production budget by concentrating on the quality of the story and the actors’ performances. The Tom Baker years of Doctor Who produced some of the best stories in the sixty-year history of the show. There's a reason some of...