While I will always adore this movie, it shows how badly the Sherman brothers needed Walt to edit them. Beautiful Briny Deep is a cute song, but grinds the whole narrative to a halt. Portobello Road likewise could seemingly have 20 minutes shaved off of it and still be perfectly entertaining. Substitutiary Locomotion…

Heh - “We know you bought this expecting George Perez, but Mark Bright can meet a deadline”

A pretty good point. I remember thinking something similar after watching Age of Ultron. It was visually spectacular, but after original Avengers, Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy, it was like we all had the luxury of saying, “Meh, that could have been better”.

That delay was nearly all on Brad Bird’s reluctance to even do a sequel. That wait put a lot of pressure on the sequel to be amazing, and it just basically wasn’t.

Indeed, retheming/renaming Rise would be a monumental undertaking. When first announced, I thought the whole land could be fairly quickly re-themed to whichever era was popular that year. Smuggler’s Run could relatively easily be set any time between Solo and Rise of Skywalker (I love Hondo, but a Donald…

Yup, if I have one gripe about the show, it’s that I wish they would display the planet/place names like Rogue One did every time we moved from one planet to another. I knew that first desert planet wasn’t Tatooine if only because there was mud in the second episode. 

You and Robyn P. over at Wonkette have my gratitude for these kinds of write-ups. I can’t emotionally deal with following these trails on my own, but I feel like I should know the basics of the various “conspiracies” making the rounds. These write-ups are an essential resource for me. Thank you.

Our local Beef Villa still has gravy bread on the menu, and Portillo’s will do it if you ask (I’m honestly not sure if it’s still on the menu). In the before-times when we could have gatherings, one of my family’s go-to menus was Portillo’s catering. 5 lbs. of beef, gravy and rolls go a long way for company, and their…

Yes, that would be tacky. Hilarious. But tacky.

Mental note: add “Drunk-watch Virtuosity” to New Year’s Day To-Do list.

I also really like this movie. The visuals are brilliant eye-candy, and that soundtrack is a techno love letter to fans of both Daft Punk and the original Tron. Olivia Wilde is entrancing (I keep wondering if her large, almost-Anime eyes are a special effect, or just the way they did her make-up), but unfortunately,…

Indeed, Rangers aren’t exactly unique to B5 (especially since JMS has been consistently clear that B5 was always supposed to be “LotR In Space”). I’m just always happy when the things that Star Wars helped inspire seemingly come back to inspire new Star Wars stories.

I’m trying to figure out how I’ve never known about this before now. It’s a confluence of any number of my historical interests - post-Revolution American military history combined with four gallons of whiskey. My only excuse is that I tend to gravitate towards naval occurrences. What a great story.

I will tell anyone who will listen that Walt would have just absolutely LOVED National Treasure. American history lore and buried treasure? That’s Disney’s jam. It’s exactly the kind of movies they were making throughout the 50s and 60s, only with more money and less Haley Mills and/or Bobby Driscoll.

Yeah, I think they’ll be based out of this huge space station in neutral territory. A quarter of a million beings wrapped in two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night...

Yes to these. I finally went back to Fallen Order in the last couple of weeks, and I’m kind of amazed at how good the character development is. I have a bit of a droid fetish, so Cal’s relationship with BD-1 has been delightful to watch unfold.

Kind of the exact parallel I thought of too. Yes, Sabine found it in Maul’s cave, but then later defeated Gar Saxon in combat, which really did make her the rightful owner.

THAT’S what it reminded me of. There was a Game of Thrones vibe too, but I knew it was a direct lift of another piece of fantasy fiction, but I could not draw it from the dank and stagnant well that is my old fanboy brain. Thank you!

I did not find it anywhere near as distracting as Rogue One’s Leia. I still maintain that Rogue One’s Tarkin isn’t any more angular or disturbing than Peter Cushing’s actual face in Star Wars.

Does anyone know if it was actually Mark Hammill on set, or if it was a double the whole time?

I didn’t even notice that - I was too busy FREAKING OUT that Luke Skywalker was standing there.