To be accurate — the GOP of his own day eventually disowned Teddy because he was way too progressive for them. It's just that the GOP of his day had a substantial enough progressive wing for TR to split the party (rather than go rogue by himself). But it was very much an intra-party war at the time, and it wasn't the…

Don't get me started on the design of the map. Some of it makes sense, but some of it really clearly doesn't. So you can tell that some of it was at least partly thought out — "given Texas as its own country, what are its likely borders? why?" — but some of it just looks like the mapmaker said "the heck with it" and…

Thank you! I have that reaction EVERY TIME I see that picture. I keep wondering if they did it on purpose.

Thanks! I remember the scene (I kind of caught up with the latter half of last season all in a rush), but I hadn't really examined the doors. And at the time, I missed any discussion about them, since I wasn't watching as they were aired.

Good point! Sometimes I forget what Disney shorts have covered and what they really haven't.

No, I do agree; if Dr. Whale was Monstro, it would be the most obvious reference they've made so far. Not that their references are that obscure, but they usually aren't quite so straight-up.

Frankenstein isn't really part of the Disney pantheon that they've been drawing upon, though, is it?

Stephen Collins: tsk. Tales of the Gold Monkey was AWESOME. A straight-up Raiders of the Lost Ark rip-off type of thing, but still (or perhaps, because of that), great fun.

No, of course not. But what scifi/fantasy elements do you see on display in the Lone Ranger trailer? Aside, as I said, from Depp's "fantasy Indian".

I keep feeling like Dr. Whale ought to have something to do with Pinocchio's story. But maybe that's too obvious. If you were trying to come up with an allusive name for Peter Pan, though, I don't think that's what you would reach for.

Hah! No, I agree, HOW recaps would seem kind of out of place here. But that's partly my point, I guess. The trailer looked less "historical fantasy" than I initially expected. Not very steampunk. Just... steam.

It's a good point. But the Lone Ranger isn't actually a pulp character; he doesn't have his origin in print, but rather in early radio. I wouldn't really expect to see io9 covering a Little Orphan Annie movie, either (although perhaps you could make a case for that, given that it might have had more of a touch of…

If a Lone Ranger movie is "genre" enough for io9 to be covering it, then I want io9 to start covering "Hell on Wheels". (If you need an actor-related reason, then just say it's because of Colm Meaney's and Chris Heyerdahl's extensive SF acting backgrounds.)

The thing is... I agree that her character on Community doesn't seem like it would fit in with the CA:WS film. But, I also haven't seen her ever play anything else. And prior to CA:TFA, a lot of people were dubious about Chris Evans as Cap, just because they had seen him in roles where he came across as kind of an…

I cannot BELIEVE that nobody has done this yet... I had to search around a bit to find a good representative picture from an era in which ol' Kurt was FUN and SEXY rather than angsty, but there you go.

People who grew up on Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy representations of elves in the U.S. had already encountered "big-eared" elf designs well before Record of Lodoss War came out in the mid-80s. Obviously, you're correct that the common early visualization of Tolkien-like elves featured pointy ears about the…

Agreed, mythologically. ;-) But in the Marvel comics, they appear to use "Gaea". I don't really know why.

Take this with the usual grain of salt, but I have heard from... a source, that we should not necessarily expect the set-up in the MCU to precisely follow what we expect from either the comics, or other sources such as actual Norse mythology.

He isn't forefronted in every episode, but he's an extremely major character and gets a lot of plot devoted to him. And he seems to have a ball with the role.

But both Akira and Iron Sky seem to be defacements, no? They don't appear to completely destroy the Moon either.