New Doctor Who starts this coming weekend! I'm excited, even if Torchwood has been doing a decent job of filling the Doctor-shaped hole in my life. I've caught some of BBC America's lead-up specials, doing the VH1-style talking heads thing. It's a little disappointing that these "Best of" showcases are limited to the last two seasons, because I kind of doubt that "the Siren who turned out to be a holographic nurse with terrible bedside manner" would show up on anyone's "best Doctor Who monsters" list. But it also has Natalie Morales and Mark Sheppard and Paul F. Tompkins, so there's that.
One thing that's become clear from these clip shows is how long Steven Moffat has been laying in the "Doctor is his own worst enemy" theme. I thought the twist of the mid-season finale, that the Doctor's "I'm super-badass and you all should be afraid of me" speeches have finally come back to bit him in the ass, was particularly inspired. But now I see that Moffat laid the same twist into "The Pandorica Opens," where the Doctor is seen to be the greatest threat in the universe, but we still side with him because the ones who think he's dangerous are his enemies. "Amy's Choice" gave us the Doctor's self-loathing made manifest, threatening his companions; meanwhile, "The Doctor's Wife" showed just what kind of danger the Doctor has put those companions into just by bringing them into his massive, insane time machine. Even "The Lodger" has what appears to be the Silence putting the world in danger by trying to imitate the TARDIS.
It'll be nice if this means that the series scales back a little; ending every season with the destruction of everything is going to get really tedious after awhile, if it hasn't already. I would love to see another "Black Orchid," for instance.
I finally got a Wii. It's not something I've been exactly itching to buy, but there are definitely some games I'd like to play on it--not the least of which are on the Virtual Console. I downloaded Super Mario World and Chrono Trigger--the latter of which I missed out on years ago--and I'm excited to get into those. The newest Mario Kart proved to be as entertaining and frustrating as previous iterations for me, and I got WiiFit because I'm really trying to get into shape.
But the reason I mention it here is Batman: Brave and the Bold, which I picked up the day I bought the system. I'd heard good things about the game, and the show is fantastic, so it was kind of a no-brainer. I haven't played much, and it's certainly no "Arkham Asylum," but it's a damn fun game. It's old-school action platforming similar to "Scott Pilgrim," which is still a great game, but Batman: Brave and the Bold goes one better by including Batman. So far, it's everything that I've loved about River City Ransom, the "Brave and the Bold" TV show, and the Animated Batman game for the Genesis/SNES era. The controls, animations, and collision detection are sometimes a little clunky, but otherwise I'm having a blast.
Siskoid's recent Superman post has me thinking about Super Friends again. The show was just a little before my time (an ad for the then-forthcoming series appeared in one of my Mom's comics that I read growing up), but I watched several episodes when it was on Cartoon Network while I was in high school. It's one of the few media incarnations of Superman that I haven't really looked into, and the relative dirt-cheapness of the DVD sets on Amazon has me thinking about giving it a shot.
There is one teensy problem, which is that there are an awful lot of DVD releases, with no really clear order--not surprising, for a show that ran for thirteen years in various iterations. That, and from my own experience and proclivities, I know I've liked the Wonder Twins and New Gods years than some of the others. Then again, I've more recently been getting more partial to the Silver/Bronze Age mentality that has been on-display in some of the episodes I've seen, so maybe the Wendy-and-Marvin years are where I should start.
So I put the question to my legions of knowledgeable readers: if I want to start watching Super-Friends, where do I begin?
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