I never really saw the 5YL Legion as shooting for angst. Quite the opposite, really. While the situations are darker and more serious than ever before, few of the core cast themselves are given to despair. I mean, the first couple of issues contain some of the most powerfully heroic moments many of the Legionnaires…

That can be done with a registry/policy tweak. A pretty simple one, too. Which, granted, is still much more work than it should take.

Here in the Baltimore/Washington area, the “cheap” matinee showings run around $11, with the full price evening tickets at $15 for non-3D/non-special event showings.

This is my concern, as well. I thought the ending was effective within the context of this movie, but that it basically upended the whole toybox for everything coming after it (well, until the next Avengers film, anyway). I don’t know how the TV shows are going to be able to plausibly avoid dealing with the fallout…

I suspect it will do decently well commercially, but not amount to much long term. Something along the lines of Wii Fit, or even Super Mario Maker. Nintendo will support it well enough to ensure that it doesn’t flop in the short term, but likely don’t have any real plans to follow it up with a second generation or…

Yeah, I think it’s entirely possible Apu could have introduced racist stereotypes, beliefs, or behaviors to people. Racism doesn’t have to be malicious in intent, after all, and by perpetuating and reinforcing stereotypes about Indian Americans that real life Indian Americans don’t want to be saddled with or have been…

That, I think, is the core of the complaint. The producers of The Simpsons don’t get to pretend it’s still the 1990s, any more than octogenarian racist business owners get to bar African Americans from their establishment as if it were still the 1950s.

Because it’s not a product of the ‘90s. Or, rather, it’s not just a product of the ‘90s. You might justifiably give something a pass for being a product of its time, but implicit in that is the fact that it was produced in that time.

I remember that one! Or one very like it, at least. I don’t know if I found it myself or if it was something I saw in a magazine or was given to me by a friend, but it was certainly one of the better ones. Best as I can tell, it was somehow giving regular Mario the properties of Tanooki Mario when he was in statue…

I poked around a bit, but it never really captured my interest. Too much resetting for not enough reward, really. But, weirdly enough, I loved the idea behind it even though I didn’t have the patience myself.

In a sense, yeah. Although I don’t really believe that Nintendo of America intended it that way. My suspicion is that it was because Birdo was intended to be female all along (and the egg spitting thing is even stranger otherwise, really) and NoA was simply uncomfortable having Mario and company fighting a “real”…

There’s a fair bit of nostalgia involved, certainly, but I tend to find the redone graphics for the All-Stars versions a little too busy. They’re not terrible by any means, but there’s a simplicity in the original art that I find both aesthetically appealing and less distracting from the game itself.

Semi-related, but when I was young and really, really bad at most games (I mean, I’m still bad, just not as young) I was a fairly early adopter of the Game Genie cheat device. So was my best friend at the time, though he didn’t get as much use out of it as I did. But while I had the standard Galoob- published US…

It’s definitely got one of the more memorable instruction booklets the NES ever graced us with. Some (okay, a lot) of it is a bit silly, but I love the fact that it does its damndest to give every random enemy their own backstory, from Birdo being trans to Ninji being in a gang (called the 8-Bits, no less, who “haunt…

There has typically been a degree of... snootiness, I guess, surrounding the game because of how different it was to other entries in the franchise, and especially the fact that it’s a Doki Doki Panic reskin rather than the “real” SMB2j. But it’s never been without its defenders (myself included), and I haven’t seen…

I agree in the more general sense... but I don’t think that the costume depicted here is supposed to be a long-term outfit. It looks like a temporary getup designed to resemble Jack Kirby’s New Gods’ usual togs, and I doubt it’ll stick around after this story is finished.

Oh, I definitely agree. I just have my doubts they’d go all-out on girls’ toys because of the perceived audience for this kind of show. The retro toy scene skews heavily male and towards boys’ toys, and I fear the showrunners won’t want to risk (rightly or wrongly) alienating that crowd. I would be thrilled to be…

I’d be surprised if Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles don’t show up in the second season. Part of me doubts they’d go so heavy on “girls’ toys” to do MLP, Strawberry Shortcake, Rainbow Brite, and American Girl all in one season, but, given that I found the Barbie episode to be the most interesting of the first batch, I’d…

Disney’s respect for its heritage certainly leaves a lot to be desired, at least these days. Their “Treasures” DVD sets have basically trickled down to nothing and the ones they did release, while very nice in terms of content and presentation, were produced in such low numbers that they’re next to impossible to find.…

Frank Oz is a damned fine puppeteer, and his creative instincts were at least decent when paired with the other minds behind the Muppets, like Henson and Jerry Juhl. But his solo directing career is a mixed bag at best, with the only genuinely great film he’s done being a fairly flat adaptation of a stage musical.…