That’s right. The Japanese phrase he uttered at the end, “Kaiju-O” (King of Monsters), was the subtitle used for the Japanese release of the American recut. I don’t think the original film ever referred to Godzilla as a “king” of anything — if anything, it portrayed Godzilla more as a divine force, worshipped as a god…

Good point.

Sure, Earth-1 has a different history from ours and that lets us excuse a number of things. Still, it seems an odd choice to build a story around a real historical figure and then play fast and loose with the facts around them. In the case of the Hedy Lamarr episode, I could understand why they changed her first Hollyw…

Yet it was very inaccurate in other ways. Honda was on the Chinese front when Hiroshima was bombed, and the original idea for Godzilla didn’t come from him, it came from producer Tomoyuki Tanaka in 1954, partly as an emulation of Harryhausen’s 1953 The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and partly as an allegorical protest of …

That’s just playing word games with individual words taken out of context, so that the actual meaning is ignored. As I said, the words “fop” and “dandy” have always been used to refer specifically to someone who is vain about their physical appearance, their clothing, and their status in society. Someone like Trelane…

It wasn’t just the costumes (though they were certainly part of it), it was the whole visual style — the camera work, the slow motion, the highly processed and unrealistic look typical of Snyder, the exaggerated fight choreography, all of it. I felt it should’ve been done in more of a cinema verite style, something…

What’s dumb about a power-enhancing drug that kills its users? That’s pretty plausible -- that forcibly pushing someone beyond their normal limits could burn them out fatally. And it reflects their contempt for the lives of the superpowered people that they’re willing to throw away their lives like that.

I thought Push was a terrific superhero movie. I didn’t find its worldbuilding confusing; I found it rich, coherent, and begging for a further exploration, either in sequels or in a TV-series spinoff. Although a series probably couldn’t have benefitted from the movie’s fabulous use of Hong Kong as a location.

“Newt Scamander, the foppish dandy of a protagonist...”

“This show really is Charmed-by-way-of-Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

This is my problem with the usual portrayal of the Joker as “insane” and unfit to stand trial, which is why he ends up in Arkham instead of prison. Legally, “insane” essentially means not being sufficiently aware of reality to understand the criminality of one’s actions or competently defend oneself in court. The…

Heck, I wish they’d downplay it just so I could understand what he was saying most of the time.

But how could Donald ever disguise his voice? That’s a concept that could only work on the page.

According to Don Rosa’s Duck family tree, Fethry Duck (a character created for non-US comics and never used in Carl Barks’s stories) is the son of Donald’s uncle Eider Duck and his wife Lulubell Loon. So I guess he’s half-loon.

Funny, I thought this was a stronger episode than usual. Perhaps because it did such a good job of really conveying an air of adventure and wonder for once rather than just paying postmodern lip service to the idea. The animation on the hydrothermal vents and the giant krill was beautiful, the music was almost as…

I expect the “deep dive” into the Republic/First Order stuff will come later. Keep in mind that Rebels didn’t begin tying its characters into the larger Rebel Alliance and franchise mythology until the end of season 1, after it had taken the time to establish its own characters and storylines (which made season 1…

Even though that song was basically just the same earworm refrain repeated 20 million times in a row, and oh hell now I’ve got it stuck in my head again make it stop! That repetition was almost as annoying as the sudden attacks of AutoTune. I was working in a bookstore when that song came out and I had to endure…

I find Auto-Tune unbearable. At least, that thing that’s done with it to distort a singer’s voice and make it sound robotic (the Cher song “Believe” is the earliest example I was aware of) is the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard to me — only much worse, since I don’t actually mind nails on a chalkboard that much. I…

Not at all. Rand’s philosophy may superficially appear to be saying “Full freedom for everyone,” but what it’s really saying is “Full freedom for the superior few, including the freedom to dominate and oppress everyone else.” Which is exactly the opposite of respect for individual differences. It’s contempt for those…

I never saw anything Randian in The Incredibles. I took it more as a pro-diversity message, that people should be free to be themselves and express their own individual strengths and cultures rather than being pressured to conform to a single societal norm. It wasn’t that some people are absolutely better than…