Love, Victor (2020) Season 2 Review

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing very well. I was just sitting down to write a post for Josh's Nostalgia Corner, but I kept thinking about the second season of Love, Victor, the first season of Only Murders in the Building, the first three episodes of Star Trek: Prodigy, Hawkeye and movies like Super 8, David Lynch's Dune, and the upcoming MCU film, Spider-Man: No Way Home all of which I want to talk about, either because I have seen them, I'm planning on watching them in the near future, or they're new movies and shows that I'll be watching once they're out and available on Disney+ (I'm not going back to theatres quite yet) and I realized that I no longer have a platform to talk about those things. Also there will be spoilers for this season as well as some for season 1, so if you haven't seen the show yet, please do so before you read this review. With that out of the way, let's get into season 2 of Love, Victor.

 While season 1 was about Victor trying to figure out whether he was gay or not and then building up the courage to come out to his friends and family, season 2 is about the aftermath and consequences of coming out to his friends and family. Oddly enough though, Victor (I almost called him Simon) doesn't carry the show the way he did in the first season. I'll get into that a little later on, but many reviews that I saw online said that there wasn't enough of Victor's storyline in the first season, whereas I actually thought that season 1 had more of Victor and his storyline than season 2 did. Which isn't a bad thing because, unlike on many shows, there aren't any characters that I dislike or outright hate in this show. Well, except for Mia's dad at the end of the season, but again, I'll get into that later. And all of them have interesting storylines this season.

My favourite characters from season 1, Felix and Lake, get even better in season 2. At the end of the first season we found out that Felix's mother suffers from Depression. Well, that's the main storyline for Felix this season and it's pretty good. It ends up involving all of the other main characters as well, except for Mia and Andrew, because Lake tries to help, and Felix ends up staying with Victor, Pilar, and their parents after his mom is taken in for treatment due to Lake's actions.

Speaking of Mia she really didn't have much going on with her after the first four episodes. She kinda fell to the wayside for the rest of the season. It didn't help that episode 9 only featured Victor and the season's new character, Rahim, Pilar's friend, who is gay and wanted to talk to Victor about coming out and things like that. Kinda the way that Victor reached out to Simon at the beginning of the first season. Here's the thing, unlike many shows on The CW and big franchises like Star Trek or Star Wars, Love, Victor doesn't have a huge cast. In fact, aside from Rahim no new characters are introduced this season, and the side characters from last season carry over to this season. So I don't really get why Mia got shafted this season. She did have a decent cliffhanger to get resolved at the beginning of next season, so that's cool.

Likewise, Andrew really didn't have much of a storyline this season. He dated Lucy at the beginning of the season, but then they broke up in season 2, episode 5 and he immediately got together with Mia and basically served what storyline she did have through the rest of the season. Actually, Andrew was completely out of Victor's storyline too this season after episode 5. Once Victor was back on the Basketball team, he and Andrew had nothing to do with each other for the rest of the season. Which is odd, considering how involved Andrew was in the first season. 

I said at the beginning of this review that there weren't any characters that were unlikable. Except there totally are because both Victor's mom, Isabel, and Benji were unlikable this season. Benji wasn't unlikable to start out with but as the season went on he became more and more unlikable, acting like being Victor's boyfriend was a chore. Gee Benji, maybe that's how Derek felt being with you last season? At least Isabel being unlikable this season was somewhat understandable. I mean she was trying to figure out how she could honour her commitment to God and accept Victor at the same time and falls flat for most of the season, which REALLY sucks considering how close Victor and his mom were last season. 

I loved how Victor's dad, Armando stepped up to support Victor. In many shows like this, the father is usually the one to screw up in that regard. I mean look at how Simon's dad, Jack, reacted in Love, Simon, which he talks to Armando about during his appearance in episode 3. That was hard for Simon to take, but Jack finally came around. It's just this is a ten episode season of television and so they had to stretch out the drama between mother and son a little bit more than they had to between father and son in the movie. Which is fine, but some of the choices that Isabel made, particularly near the beginning of the season were...shall we say...problematic at best and leave it at that.

While Pilar also didn't have a major storyline now that she's grown used to living in Atlanta, but she and Felix got alot closer this season. As you know from my season 1 review, I love the Lake and Felix relationship, but the more I saw Felix and Pilar interact the more I thought they worked well together. The problem with it is that there didn't seem to be any indication in the beginning of the season that their relationship would go in a romantic direction because he was still with Lake at the time. I should've known anyway considering this is a teen drama and they almost always do things like this at some point during their run. The O.C. did it in the first three seasons of the series, making it three quarters of the show given it was a four season show. 

Overall this was a solid season of television. Seriously if you haven't seen Love, Victor yet, definitely give it a shot. It's really good. Season 3 is coming out sometime in 2022, probably sometime in the summer or early fall at the latest. So I am really excited for that. 

Alright my friends, I think that's gonna be it for me for today. I'm gonna try and have up reviews for season 1 of Only Murders in the Building and the first three episodes of Star Trek: Prodigy over the weekend, but we'll see how things go. I might be busy this weekend. In the meantime have a wonderful evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care. 

The End...Of The Review Basement?

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing very well. So you might be wondering why I haven't posted my review of season 2 of Love, Victor or my season 1 review of Only Murders in the Building right? Well, that's what I'm going to be talking about in this post today. So let's get into it!

For the last little while I've been just a tad unhappy about the way The Review Basement is going. Oh don't get me wrong I've had fun on this blog in the last year and a half since I moved The Review Basement over from Word Press and got alot of reviews and posts done that I never got to do because of the way Word Press is set up and how time consuming that made writing reviews and other posts. But, I haven't been able to settle on a focus for the blog. Which is why I created Josh's Movie Review Corner back on Word Press. The PROBLEM with that is that unless I actually posted something over there every day, my views didn't go up. A post would do well on the day I posted it but that would be it, until I put up the next post. Which is part of the reason I left Word Press in March of last year and deleted the original Review Basement blog. Blogger has been way better in that regard. But something still isn't right.

After thinking about it for the last week or so, I've realized that The Review Basement has become just another review site. I reviewed modern movies, TV shows, comic books, and video games (sort of), and those posts don't do as well as my reviews of things from my childhood or when I did Living With Disabilities, which I ended up abandoning because I also lost sight of what I originally intended for that to be in the first place. Which really sucks because when I began the blogger version of The Review Basement, I had big plans and big dreams for what I wanted it to be. And only some of it ended up happening the way I wanted it to. It didn't help that at the very beginning of the blog I ended up having to take a month off because I ended up getting sick with a very bad Urinary Tract Infection that, no joke, was very close to killing me. I know, that sounds hyperbolic coming from me, but it's true.

So, with that said, I am shutting down The Review Basement. However, I'm not going away from blogging. Far from it. I'm starting a brand new blog called Josh's Nostalgia Corner. It's here on Blogger and I am only going to be talking about the media and entertainment that I grew up with from 1986, when I was born, to just after my 29th birthday in 2015 though I'm still going to be talking about special stuff from after that, especially things where my friends and family were involved. I just won't be reviewing anything current or anything from the past that I have no interest in. The focus will be on my childhood and the things I experienced in the realm of entertainment which will be quite different. Here's the link for the new blog:

Josh's Nostalgia Corner

There's no content on there right now. But I'll be doing my first post on there tomorrow. So come join me on the new blog. Unlike with the original Word Press version of The Review Basement, I'm not deleting this blog. Once this post is up, I'll have 318 posts on here, so you can go back and read those any time you wish. I just want to do something different with my blog and don't want to have a third shift (or is it millionth???) in content on this blog. I also won't be posting on Josh's Movie Review Corner anymore either, but that will still be up for you folks to peruse if you so choose. Anyways guys I think that's going to be it for me for tonight. I'll be back on the new blog tomorrow though for a look at the very first two video games I ever played. So until then have a wonderful night and I will talk to you all later. Take care!

Love, Victor (2020) Season 1 Review

 I'm back! I bet you're probably wondering why I'm doing things this way right? I wanted to get the movie reviews up here as fast as possible, so I could put up the Love, Simon review before I did the Love, Victor reviews. So let's get into season 1 of Love, Victor!

Two weeks ago I watched the 2018 teen romantic dramedy Love, Simon and reviewed it on Josh's Movie Review Corner. Last week I decided to watch the Hulu spin-off TV series Love, Victor. My original plan was to just watch two episodes a night since each episode is between 28 and 33 minutes in length. I did that on Monday night. Then on Tuesday night, I watched four episodes, and then on Wednesday I watched eight episodes. Each season is only ten episodes long so I'm actually finished season 2. See why I didn't watch very many movies in the last two weeks?

I knew of Love, Victor because here in Canada it's on Disney+ and both seasons dropped one episode per week during the time they were on. So whenever I'd go on to watch The Orville or a movie, I'd see it show up on the front page of the website. I hadn't watched it because I hadn't seen the movie yet. But after watching the movie and REALLY enjoying it, I decided to give the show a shot even though I was skeptical because I figured the show would be a rehash of the movie, but with different characters. It's not. In fact it's far from a rehash.

Season 1 of Love, Victor is anything but a rehash of Love, Simon. In fact in the first episode, Victor Salazar, played by Michael Cimino, reaches out to Simon, played by Nick Robinson, and tells him that he (Victor) isn't him (Simon). But not only is Victor not Simon, but Victor's friends aren't Nick, Leah, and Abby, his sister isn't Simon's sister, and his parents aren't Simon's parents. The character dynamics are different and storywise Victor's friends all have an equal amount of development and growth as the season goes on and each of them is interesting.

My favourite characters this season are Felix Westen, played by Anthony Turpel, and Lake Meriwether, played by Bebe Wood. Mia's great too, but there's just something about Lake in particular that draws me to her. And Felix feels like a familiar character because he's the best friend character that we see in every teen movie and show since the dawn of time. Lake on the other hand is different than the typical girl character that we get in these kinds of shows.

When we first meet Lake in the first episode, it looks like she's going to be the typical shallow, beautiful, cheerleader type character even though she's got curves, which I'm starting to see more of on shows like this rather than your typical Sophia Bush (who is also on Love, Victor)/Mischa Barton/Tiffani-Amber Thiessen type that were in teen dramas in the '90s and 2000s. But very quickly you realize that she's not that at all. Her character description on Wikipedia says, "Mia's social media-obsessed best friend". Except they don't really go into that past the first three episodes or so. She has issues with her mother, because of course she does. Beyond that though, Lake is very different and grows very quickly as a character. I think that might just be because of the fact that Love, Victor is ten episodes per season rather than 20 to 25 so it makes things alot tighter than past teen dramas. Especially when it comes to character development.

 I love Victor's family. They aren't perfect and I like that they don't pretend to be like the Coopers on both The O.C. and Riverdale. My favourite character of Victor's family is his sister Pilar, played by Isabella Ferreira. She kind of reminds me of Kaitlin Cooper, Marissa's younger sister, on The O.C. (played by Shailene Woodley in seasons 1 and 2, and Willa Holland in seasons 3 and 4) but less manipulative than Kaitlin was in the later seasons of the show. Still a very cool character though and I love what season 2 had in store for her.

As for Victor himself, I've seen some reviews on YouTube and a few of them have said that while everyone around him was fully developed, Victor wasn't. I honestly didn't see that at all. I mean Victor's whole arc this season is him adjusting to his new school, making new friends, and figuring out whether or not he's gay, and if he is gay, whether he can make it work with Mia or not so he won't have to come out to his parents. I guess, we could've found out more about him, particularly about his past in Texas, but none of that is really all that necessary to understand what he's going through in this season.

Overall season 1 of Love, Victor was a solid season of television. I'm used to watching genre shows with high stakes and unnecessary drama that holds the story back in alot of cases. So this was a nice change of pace. There isn't really a character I hated throughout this entire season. Mason Gooding's character, Andrew comes close a few times, especially in the first few episodes, but he redeems himself as the season goes on. I guess there's Benji's boyfriend, Derek, but he's not in it enough for him to be really noteworthy. If you enjoyed Love, Simon I recommend you check out Love, Victor.

Alrighty, folks, we've come to the end of the ported over reviews from Josh's Movie Review Corner. So I will be back later with my review of season 2 of Love, Victor. See you all later.

Love, Simon (2018) Review

 And I have returned! When I sat down to watch this movie a couple of weeks ago, I was super excited because I actually wanted to see this movie when it originally came out in 2018. So let's get into it, shall we?

When I first saw the trailer for Love, Simon back in 2018, I thought it looked pretty good. I'm a fan of Greg Berlanti's work as he's produced some pretty great shows over the years including Everwood and pretty much every comic book based show on The CW. But I didn't get to see the movie because I actually didn't have anyone to go see it with. Then I kind of forgot about it until I saw that it was on Disney+, since it was produced and released by 20th Century Fox. Love, Simon is based on Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli, because of course Berlanti would direct an adaptation of a book or comic.

Despite the fact that the movie is about a gay person who is struggling to decide whether he wants to come out or not, the movie itself is actually pretty relatable to anyone in that we all hide who we really are from the world around us, especially from those closest to us. When we reveal ourselves to the world, we run the risk of the world not liking us. But, hopefully, if we're lucky, we find people in our lives who will accept us for who we are, no matter how weird we might be. Simon says it better at the end of the movie, but that's the gist of what he said. Honestly, I am 100% onboard with that because as an autistic person, I'm not always liked by the world around me, but I'm lucky to have friends and a family who accept me for who I am.

The cast in this movie is amazing. Out of everyone, the only ones I recognized were Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Garner, Keiynan Lonsdale, and Katherine Langford. I mean Duhamel was in all three of the first three Transformers movies, Jennifer Garner was in Alias, Daredevil, and Elektra not to mention dozens of other shows and movies that I haven't seen, and Keiynan Lonsdale played Wally West/Kid Flash on The Flash for a few seasons. I only know who Katherine Langford is because of 13 Reasons Why. I haven't seen that show, but I've heard people talking about it and seen reviews of it on YouTube. Apparently she's also in the Rian Johnson film, Knives Out, but I haven't seen that yet, despite a friend telling me I need to see it.

I love the fact that there aren't any high stakes in this movie. The world won't end because of Simon being outed by Martin, aliens aren't invading the planet as a result of Simon's outing. All it is is a story about a boy falling in love with another boy, and whether he should come out or not. I laughed quite a bit. Not always because something was genuinely funny, though there were a few times where I did laugh at something genuinely funny. I laughed because of how deliciously cheesy this movie is. Despite the fact that he didn't write this movie, this is 100% a Greg Berlanti movie. The dialogue is cheesy enough that if I hadn't seen the writing credits for this movie, I'd think he wrote them. And just the way some of the characters behave reminds me of the shows that Berlanti produced. This really feels like a movie where, while other people wrote it, and it's based on previously published works, it became what it is because of the director's influence.

My favourite relationship in this movie, besides Simon's parents, is that of Simon and Abby. Abby is the friend that Simon hasn't known his entire life, unlike Nick and Leah, as she just moved to town, but it's because of this that Simon feels more comfortable coming out to because they don't have that history. Which somewhat makes sense to me, because there's at least one time where I told a friend something about myself, that I hadn't told the friends I've known longer, and it felt easier. It's still a weird choice, but it's one I understand somewhat.

I also like the friendship between Simon and Leah (Katherine Langford's character). It reminds me of a friendship in my life. Though oddly enough, I kind of figured out that Leah was in love with Simon before she told him after Martin leaked Simon and Blue's e-mails to the entire school. I don't normally pick up on things like that, but it's a Greg Berlanti movie and he always, or almost always, has an unrequited love friendship in all of his work.

Simon and Nick didn't really have that many scenes together without the girls, so it's harder for me to really grasp what their friendship is, outside of Simon telling us that he'd known Nick and Leah since they were kids. I do love how Nick and Leah live across the street from each other and Simon reverses his car out of Nick's driveway and right into Leah's. That was great.

The one thing I didn't really like about it, aside from the character of Martin, is the fact that technically, the movie ruined the reveal of who Blue is at the end of the movie, by revealing it to us near the start of it. I haven't read the book, so I don't know if that was in the book or just the writers, or Berlanti, came up with, but it kind of spoils the movie a little bit because you know who it is even though it's the first person that Simon thinks of and the one Simon dismisses after the Halloween party. I don't want to give it away though in case some people reading this hasn't seen the movie yet.

I enjoyed this movie immensely. My sister had wanted me to see it when it first came out, but I just didn't get the chance. If you haven't seen it yet, I definitely recommend you check out Love, Simon.

I have three more posts to do today. The next one is my review of season 1 of Love, Victor which is the spin-off of this movie. Then the second is my review of that show's second season which I finished earlier this week. And the final post of the day is a look at the storyline of two characters across both seasons. So I'll see you shortly.

Free Guy (2021) Review

 Hey everyone! I'm back for my next movie review. This time I'll be reviewing the new Ryan Reynolds action comedy, Free Guy. Let's get into it.

Trailers can be very deceiving. As was the case with the trailer for Free Guy. The trailer only shows Ryan Reynolds's character and the world of the video game he lives in. So it tricks you into believing this is another over the top action comedy like Deadpool and Deadpool 2 are. Trust me, it's not. I've avoided the reviews of this movie, because I wanted to see it for myself so I don't know whether people like it or not. However, I have seen from the Wikipedia article on it, that people compare it to Ready Player One and The Truman Show as well as games like Grand Theft Auto and Fortnite. And I can definitely see some similarities. But, the entire time I was watching the movie, I keep thinking that the movie reminded me of Tron more than Ready Player One or The Truman Show. Mostly because the real story of the movie, finding evidence that a game development company's owner stole/plagiarized someone else's game(s), is similar though there are some massive differences. For example, this movie splits the time between the real world and the world of the video game more evenly than Tron did. Also this movie has characters I could connect with within the video game world, which, as you know from my Tron review, was my biggest problem with that movie since I am such a character guy.

Ryan Reynolds is one of those actors who is very hit or miss with me. And that's probably because I'm not interested in many of the movies he's in. While it's not a good movie, I really liked him as Hal Jordan in Green Lantern, and I enjoy him as Deadpool even though I generally don't like that character. But outside of those, I generally don't have much interest in the movies he's in. He was great in Free Guy though. I'm also not a fan of Taika Waititi, which is a hot take, I know, but it's true. I just don't get his sense of humour and I really thought his character in Green Lantern was pointless. Since then he's become really popular, particularly as a director, and I just don't get his films. That doesn't mean he's a bad filmmaker or a bad actor, I just don't get him. He was good in this movie though as the the film's antagonist, Antwan.

My favourite characters in this movie though are Millie, played by Jodie Comer, and Keys, played by Joe Keery. I almost didn't recognize Keery at first. I've only seen the first season of Stranger Things and I haven't seen Keery in anything else besides that, so I didn't recognize him because he wasn't in the '80s in this movie. Plus he wore glasses for much of the movie so that changed his look a little bit. I thought Keys and Millie had a good dynamic. Particularly later in the movie once they start working together against Antwan.

There were a ton of cameos in this movie. Mostly in the real world side of things. There were a bunch of video game YouTubers, who I don't know because I'm not heavy into the gaming side of YouTube and tons of celebrities like Dwayne Johnson as a bank robber NPC character in the game, and even Chris Evans shows up near the end of the movie. Which was funny. However, my favourite cameo was Alex Trebek on the set of Jeopardy!, which he filmed prior to his death.

I think I got into this movie because of the director. Greg Berlanti is a producer on the movie, but it was directed by Shawn Levy, who directed Big Fat Liar, Cheaper by the Dozen, and the Night at the Museum series, of which I've only seen the first movie of, as well as episodes of Animorphs. I love all three of the previous movies of his that I've seen, so knowing that he did this movie too just elevated it for me.

Honestly Free Guy is such a stupid movie but it's stupid in the best way possible. It's a movie that I probably would've watched had it come out when I was in high school. It's not the nostalgia fest that Ready Player One is, and it's not the technical masterpiece that Tron is. It's just a fun movie and I really enjoyed it. I highly recommend you watch it. Then again, I haven't watched any other movies from 2021 yet, except for Luca and I loved that.

Okay, one more movie review to go and then I'll have season reviews for a show that really sucked me in. The next movie review is for Love, Simon. So I'll see you in that review. Later.

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020) Review

 Hey everyone! Here's my review of Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. Before I start it, I have to say that my expectations for this movie were EXTREMELY low when I sat down to watch this with my sister a couple of weeks ago. And they just got lower and lower as the movie went on. As you'll see in the review, I like this movie, but it's not a good movie nor is it actually a Birds of Prey movie either. So let's get into it.

I didn't know what to really expect when I sat down to watch Birds of Prey with my sister at her place two Saturday nights ago. But what I got wasn't a Birds of Prey movie. I got a Harley Quinn movie where the Birds of Prey are superfluous at best. As I said to my sister after the movie, it was a good Harley Quinn movie but a bad Birds of Prey movie. I mean, it's not a great movie by any means, but it's at least a decent Harley Quinn movie.

I'm a fan of DC Comics, mostly Batman, so to see this many DC Comics/Batman characters in a movie together is great. Especially because, with the exception of Harley, many of these characters are unknown to the non-comic book reading audience. The problem is none of the characters are even close to who they are in the comics. Except for Harley Quinn, and Black Mask, played by Ewan MacGregor. Maybe Dinah Lance, but even she feels out of character. I love Mary Elizabeth Winstead and have ever since I saw her in Sky High (2005), but that's not Helena Bertinelli. Even her backstory isn't Helena Bertinelli's backstory in any medium, be it comics, movies or TV shows. I'm fine with adaptation, but this isn't adaptation, this is creating a completely new character and giving her the name of the character from the comics. The same thing goes for Cassandra Cain. I'm not a fan of that character, who was Batgirl in the comics from 1998 until 2009, but the version we see in the movie has nothing to do with the character from the comics.

Having said that, the cast is pretty good. The only cast members I am really familiar with are Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ewan MacGregor as I've seen them as various characters over the years outside of the roles I was introduced to them with. I've only ever seen Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn so I'm not overly familiar with her work.

The story on the other hand was extremely hard to follow and trying to include EVERYONE'S backstory made things way too slow and meandering. It wasn't bad, but I think the script could've benefitted from being tightened up more than it was. Almost as if someone wrote two drafts before turning it in for approval from Warner Bros. and that's it. The writer, Christina Hodson, had only written three other movies when she was hired to write Birds of Prey and that includes Bumblebee. Now I'd like to believe that the way Birds of Prey turned out is due to studio interference from Warner Bros. but there's no indication of that in any source I can find online, unlike with Suicide Squad (2016). So I think it's as I said before. Hodson wrote the script and gave it a single pass before writing the next draft, which ended up being the final draft. I hope that's not the case, but the way the story is, doesn't exactly give me reason to think otherwise.

Honestly, I can't really recommend this movie. If you're a fan of the comics, you're going to be annoyed as hell that they changed so much in the adaptation. If you've never read the comics, you might enjoy it, but it all depends on whether you like meandering storytelling or not. I gave it a watch because I'm a fan of the comics.

And that's it with this review. Next up is a movie I was interesting in seeing, but had very low hopes for before I sat down to watch it. So join me in a little bit for my review of Free Guy, the most recent movie I've reviewed so far on either of my blogs.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (1995) Review

 Hey everyone! Happy Friday! I'm back with another review! The next several posts that I'm putting out today are ones that I'm porting over from Josh's Movie Review Corner so bear with me as I get everything moved over. The first post is the only standalone movie review I have on that blog, which I did before I started doing the TV and Movie Wrap-Up series, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie. So let's get into it.

I've been a fan of the Power Rangers franchise for almost 28 years. I first discovered Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in early 1994, near the end of the show's first season. The earlier episodes were on in reruns constantly, so I never actually missed an episode, but late first season is when I started watching the show. So when 20th Century Fox and Saban Entertainment announced that the Power Rangers were coming to the big screen in mid 1995 I was stoked.

I didn't get to see Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie in theatres, but I remember seeing the trailers for it on TV during the first half of 1995, and I remember seeing the toys in the various catalogues we used to get, but seeing it on the big screen was not in the cards. I did see it on home video though. I had it on VHS and I really enjoyed it.

Even though it's not a good movie, I can't help but love it. Not even because I'm a Power Rangers fan or because it's nostalgic. I like it because it's a fun movie with cheesy special effects. And by cheesy effects I mean really horrible CGI, and practical effects that are only slightly better than what I saw on the TV show around that same time. And yet, it works.

One of the most memorable elements of this movie is Paul Freeman as Ivan Ooze. I mean he took out the Rangers and Zordon, AND Rita and Zedd in one fell swoop. I'm pretty sure I didn't see Raiders of the Lost Ark until after Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie so I didn't recognize Ivan Ooze as Indy's nemesis Belloq. Nor did I recognize Belloq as Ivan Ooze when I saw Raiders five or six years later. The thing about Ivan Ooze is that he's a cheesy, over the top, comic book villain, which Power Rangers is full of, but he's funny which is why I like him. If he weren't funny he'd be no better than Rito Revolto or any other villain who temporarily succeeded against the Rangers, only to be defeated by them once they got new powers and new Zords.

I love the soundtrack for this movie. While I don't have the full score album, I do have the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers The Movie: Original Soundtrack Album which contains songs like "Higher Ground" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Dreams" by Van Halen, and "SenSurround" by They Might Be Giants. My favourite songs on the album though are "Trouble" by Shampoo and "Ayeyaiyai (Alpha Song)" by Power Jet. "Trouble" plays at the beginning of the scene where Fred Kelman (played by Jamie Croft) tries to convince Bulk, Skull, and the other kids that Ivan Ooze is evil and he's going to kill their parents and plays during the closing credits after the mid-credits scene where Rita and Zedd return to the Moon Palace following Ivan's destruction. "Ayeyaiyai (Alpha Song)" is the final song played during the closing credits, and it's basically a song about Alpha's role within the Power Rangers.

Critics at the time said that the movie was just a longer episode of the TV show, and I can't actually agree with that. TV shows are very different from movies and are paced differently too. On a show like Power Rangers, you only have 20 to 30 minutes to tell each part of a multi-part episode, whereas with movies you're telling the story all at once mostly without the need for cliffhangers and the occasional time jump after the initial resolution of the cliffhanger at the beginning of each part. Which is why it's a bit jarring to watch movies that are just edited together versions of multi-part episodes of a TV show. They often don't edit out the cliffhangers.

My favourite sequence in this entire movie is the morphing sequence. I always get chills when I hear the usual "Dragonzord/Tigerzord!", "Mastodon!", "Pterodactyl!", "Triceratops!", "Saber-toothed Tiger!", "Tyrannosaurus!" morphing call on the TV show because it's basically their call to action. But it's an 8 sec sequence, because you only have half an hour to tell a story in the TV show. The movie version however is 32 seconds long. Which doesn't seem like that much of a difference. However, because the Rangers took so long to morph, Ivan Ooze's henchmen walked away. I always thought that was funny, because in shows like Power Rangers, Sailor Moon, and Digimon the bad guys always just stand there and wait while the heroes transform. Not in this movie though. They walked away even though they had the Rangers cornered.

One thing that puzzles me about the movie is that despite not having their powers while on Phaedos, the Rangers were still able to do things that they couldn't do before they had powers. I figured that Dulcea gave them limited power when she gave them their Ninja Ranger suits, which is how they were able to defeat the Stone Warriors guarding the monolith. But when they first arrived, they're struggling with the Tengu Warriors sent by Ivan to destroy the Rangers and one point a Tengu picks up Kimberly and lifts her into the air. After a bit, it drops her from a pretty decent height, but she lands on her feet without any broken bones or physical harm, like she'd have done if she'd had her Ranger powers. Yet in the next movie, Katherine and Tommy jump off a waterfall and Katherine twists her ankle, and her Ranger powers were intact...What?

Speaking of Kimberly and Aisha, I love both characters and both Amy Jo Johnson and Karan Ashley did such a wonderful job on the show and in this movie. However, they are the most useless Rangers in this entire movie. On the show Kimberly and Aisha are pretty strong characters, and very rarely get into the kind of trouble that they need the boys to help them get out of. There's only three examples I can give off the top of my head for Kimberly. The first was in "Calamity Kimberly" where she was trapped in another dimension and the other Rangers had to save her. The second was in the second season episode "Forever Friends" where she's kidnapped by Goldar, along with Aisha's friend Shawna, and can't morph because Shawna is there and Kim has to keep her identity as the Pink Ranger a secret. The third example of this was in season 3 in the three part episode, "Changing of the Zords" and that was because she was weakened from the loss of her powers, was unconscious when Goldar captured her and was kept in stasis by Lord Zedd basically the whole time. But in most instances where Kimberly is captured or in trouble, she's pretty good at getting herself out of it. Aisha is no slouch either on the TV show. In fact, the only time she'd really been captured was in the season 2 two parter "The Ninja Encounter" and that was BEFORE she was the Yellow Ranger and had no Ranger powers. Not to mention the amount of screaming both girls do in this movie is annoying. I get that the writer and director were new to Power Rangers when they made this movie, but they basically reduced the only two female leads to screaming, helpless, '90s movie female characters, when that's not who either of them are at all.

Overall while Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie is far from the best superhero movie ever made, even by '90s standards, it's still a fun movie to watch. It's your average quest movie, similar to The Wizard of Oz, The Empire Strikes Back, and more recent films like Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle where the heroes have to gain new abilities and end up discovering things about themselves before defeating the bad guys by the end of the movie. Having said that though, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie is definitely not a movie you'd put on for date night. It's not that it's a guilty pleasure movie by any means. But this movie is so very rooted in the '90s that unless your partner grew up in the '90s, or is a fan of the franchise, they're not going to appreciate it as much. Though I'd definitely recommend putting the soundtrack on because, like I said, it's got some great songs on it.

Alrighty, that's going to be it for me for the time being. I will be back for my next imported movie review, where I'm going to bring over Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. See you in a bit.

Super Mario 3D All-Stars First Impressions

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing well. So I don't have a Comic Book Wrap-Up for you today, because I didn't have time to read any comic books this week. Instead I binged the first two seasons of Love, Victor, had a fairly busy Thanksgiving weekend, and watched alot of YouTube. I think this is why I had decided against doing wrap-up posts like Comic Book Wrap-Up for so long. I said in my first Comic Book Wrap-Up that if I don't read enough books over the course of the week for me to have a solid post, then I'm not going to do that post. Which is exactly what happened this week. But I wanted to get a post out for The Review Basement this week, so without further ado let's talk about Super Mario 3D All-Stars which I bought yesterday while I was out doing groceries. So let's get into it.

I'm going to talk about these three games more in depth in a separate post later on, but I wanted to get my thoughts on the presentation of the compilation as a whole as well as my history with each of these three games.

The original Super Mario All-Stars for the Super Nintendo is how I played Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, Super Mario Bros. 2, and Super Mario Bros. 3 when I was a kid, though I did play Super Mario Bros. 3 on the NES at the hospital one time. So when Nintendo announced earlier last year that they were doing a new Super Mario All-Stars compilation for the Nintendo Switch and that it was going to include three of the 3D Mario games from the Nintendo 64, the GameCube, and the Wii, I was really excited. Mainly because I had never actually owned Super Mario 64 when I was a kid and had never played Super Mario Sunshine before since my brother had a GameCube but I don't think he ever owned that particular game. We had Super Mario Galaxy for our Nintendo Wii so that was the only one I played at home. 

What's really cool about this compilation is that it includes the complete soundtracks for all three games on the cartridge. Yes, I have a physical copy of the game. I listened to a few tracks from the Super Mario 64 soundtrack and I love it. The menu screen is also alot better than the one for the SNES Super Mario All-Stars because it includes information about each game when scroll through them. So that was really cool.

I played the game for an hour as soon as I got home and had put my groceries away. The game I spent the most time on was Super Mario 64 because of the three games that are included in this compilation, this is the one that is the most nostalgic for me. My family didn't get a Nintendo 64 until Christmas 1999. By then Super Mario 64 was no longer the game that came with the console, and my parents never found it for us individually. However, I did play it at CHEO when I was there for something in late 1996 or sometime in 1997. There weren't any walkthroughs or anything like that when I was a kid, because the internet didn't exist the same way it does now, and I didn't have access to Nintendo Power. So I had no idea what to do. I ended up just playing around Peach's Castle the entire time I played it, which wasn't long because I had an IV in my right hand and I couldn't manage to use that hand for very long. I think my buddy Cam had it up at the cottage, because I remember being at his house and watching him play it when we weren't playing Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart 64.

Super Mario Sunshine is the exact opposite. I played it for the first time yesterday morning. Like I said earlier, my brother had a GameCube in the mid-2000s, but we never owned one as a family so I never had the opportunity to play the game. Plus by the time this game came out in 2002, everyone I knew who played video games had moved on to the original Xbox, the PlayStation 2, or had left console gaming entirely and gotten into PC gaming. So I didn't know anyone who had a GameCube when I was in high school. I'm going to go through the game eventually, but I wanna try to beat Super Mario 64 first before I take a full dive into the GameCube game.

Super Mario Galaxy is a game I've played only once in my life. We had a Nintendo Wii in the early 2010s and this was one of the games we had for it. I found the Wii to be an awkward console for me to play because of how the controllers were with the nunchuks, so I didn't play it very often. But I remember wanting to give this game a try after a session of Disney Epic Mickey, which is probably my favourite game on the Wii. I liked it, but again, because the controllers were so weird for this console, I found it really awkward so I had no idea what I was doing and ended up giving up on it after only a few minutes. I've heard the game itself is pretty great, but it's not one I'm going to end up playing very often on this compilation.

Because of the limited nature of this game, I was really surprised when I found a physical copy of it at Shoppers Drugmart when I went in with my mom to get some things I couldn't get at the grocery store a month ago. I didn't get it that day, and two weeks ago we didn't need to go into Shoppers, but yesterday was the day and I'm thrilled that I was finally able to get a copy of the game so I could finally play Super Mario 64 on a console that I owned.

They didn't try to "fix" the graphics or anything like they had for the versions of the three Super Mario Bros. games on the original SNES Super Mario All-Stars cartridge. The only thing they changed for this game is the controls, because obviously the Switch controller is very different from the old N64 controller. As a result, the game looks exactly the way I remember it looking when I played it on the N64 at the hospital 24 or 25 years ago. Which is really cool.

That my friends is it for me for today. I'll be back later this week, probably on Friday, to post my reviews of the first two seasons of Love, Victor as well as my review of Love, Simon, porting them over from my TV and Movie Wrap-Ups on Josh's Move Review Corner. So until then have a great afternoon and I will talk to you all later. Take care! 

Comic Book Wrap-Up #2: Hawkeye and Bryan Lee O'Malley's Graphic Novels!

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm pretty well. This week's edition of Comic Book Wrap-Up is going to be a bit shorter than last week's was. I didn't read any single issues this week, just a trade paperback collected edition and two graphic novels. There also aren't any DC books this week either. Just Marvel and independent. So without further ado let's talk about this week's books.

Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon isn't a great book or anything like that. It's pretty fun though. I've actually read it before, but at the time I actually didn't like it very much. Most of the story was taking place under the surface, and all I was seeing was the non-stop action which I don't care about at all. But I decided to give it another shot in preparation for the Disney+ series coming up next month since many of the action shots seem to be taken directly from this volume of Matt Fraction's comic book run. I still don't really know (or care) what was going on with SHIELD during this period, but I had fun reading this book.

My favourite part of it was the dynamic between Clint Barton and Kate Bishop. There's a banter between them that practically borders on flirtation, but it's not creepy in any way. Obviously they're going to play it a bit differently in the series, at least on Clint's side of things, since Clint is married and has children in the MCU. Though he does avoid Kate's flirtations in this book, if they keep that aspect of their relationship in the show, they'll have to change Clint's reason for rejecting Kate's flirtation. Or they'll just eliminate that whole aspect altogether. Which is fine with me.

Overall the story is okay, but I'm there more for Clint and Kate's fun dynamic and the way Clint finds a solution to the problems he faces in the book. The art for the book, by David Aja for the first three issues, and Javier Pulido for the final two issues collected in this volume, is pretty solid. I know Pulido's work from Robin: Year One and it's pretty good. I'm not familiar with Aja's work aside from the first three issues in this volume. This is the perfect way to get acquainted with Clint and Kate before the series starts next month. 

 If you feel like Bryan Lee O'Malley's name is familiar but you can't quite place it, he's the writer, artist, and creator of Scott Pilgrim and did all six volumes of that series. Lost at Sea is his first graphic novel, that he did before he did the first Scott Pilgrim book, Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life. It's an okay book. Not alot happens in it, but the artwork is good and I like Raleigh, the main character of the book. Many of the themes that O'Malley deals with in this book were honestly dealt with better in Scott Pilgrim, but this is O'Malley's first graphic novel and I did take that into account when I read the book. I also took into account the fact that Scott Pilgrim is six books, while Lost at Sea is one book, and a fairly short one at that. I liked the book, but there's not much to it. I'd still recommend picking it up though if you have the chance.

The final book that I read this week is another Bryan Lee O'Malley graphic novel. This one is called Seconds and I have no idea what it's about. I mean I get the general premise of the book, but when I read it I was REALLY confused. The art is spectacular as always, but the story felt more convoluted than the entirety of Scott Pilgrim. Maybe it's because I wasn't connecting to the main character, Katie, the way I connected to Scott Pilgrim, despite Scott being a terrible person. Or maybe it's because the story is just so bonkers that I had a hard time following it. Then again, messing with time in any story usually confuses me. Especially at the end when the timeline is restored, there's always some alteration to the original timeline that ends up confusing the situation even more and...you know, I think I'll just end that trail of thought with saying that I understand why Captain Janeway hates time travel on Star Trek: Voyager. It's confusing as hell. Lol. Definitely pick up Seconds if you're interested in reading it. It's pretty good, even if it was confusing.

I think that's going to be it for me for today. Like I said, just a nice, short Comic Book Wrap-Up as these three books were all I had time to read this week. But I'll have more single issues to talk about next week so stay tuned for that. Meanwhile, join me over on Josh's Movie Review Corner on Friday because I have lots of movies and shows to talk about this week. So until then have a great week and I will talk to you all later. Take care. 

Comic Book Wrap-Up #1: Archie, The Orville, and Lots of DC Stuff!

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I know it's been a minute since I've posted something on here, but that's because I've been re-reevaluating how I'm running both this blog and Josh's Movie Review Corner. I'm cutting back to two posts a week, one here, and one over there. However, rather than do one review a week for each blog, I'm going to do this wrap-up style. So over here, since The Review Basement is now a comic book centric blog, I'm going to talk about however many comics that I read each week. Which means if I don't read any, there won't be a post here for that week. Over on Josh's Movie Review Corner I'm going to be doing the same thing, but with movies and TV shows. With one being the primary focus of the post. For the comic book side of things I was inspired by Ed Gosney II's Cool Comics in My Collection blog. However, while he decides which books he's going to read each week ahead of time, I'm not going to do things that way. At least not for the single issues. Yes, I will be talking about collected editions in Comic Book Wrap-Up, though I don't have any for this week, so that will be starting next time. I've got nine single issues, and an Archie digest size collection, to talk about today, so without any further ado, let's dive into this week's comic books.

The first book of the week is the oldest one that I read this week. Archie #656 was published in 2014. As you can see from the front cover it shows Archie with a girl who's in a wheelchair. Her name is Harper and she's Veronica's cousin. I got this issue on Monday when I went to do groceries. It's collected in the recent anniversary collected edition, The Best of Archie Comics; 80 Years, 80 Stories, which I'm going to be talking about on it's own shortly, and when I saw that this story was in it, I knew I had to talk about it as the Feature issue of the week. 

I admit that when this issue came out in 2014 I wasn't reading Archie. I was reading the Digests, but not the ongoing monthly series. So I missed the debut of both Harper, and Kevin Keller, Archie's first openly gay character. Sadly, unlike Toni Topaz, Kevin Keller, and a few others, Harper only had two appearances in the comics before Archie Comics rebooted everything and Mark Waid took over writing duties on Archie in 2015 and unless she's appeared in more recent issues, which Nick Spencer has been writing, Harper hasn't been seen since then. And she certainly hasn't appeared on Riverdale.

Harper is a great character. I love how she stands up to Veronica, when her cousin tries to dictate her life, and I love her attitude about her disability, because there are times when it's hard to think about things that way if you're disabled. My problem with Harper is her disability itself. She wasn't born with anything. She was injured in a car accident. The most generic and easy thing to do when you're writing a character who's in a wheelchair. Look, I get it's hard to write a good disabled character when you yourself aren't disabled, but not every disabled person was in a car accident. Some have diseases that cause them to be unable to walk, some are born with deformities that take away their ability to walk. I also get that Archie Comics is an all-ages book, and more heavy on the comedy, particularly back in 2014 before Mark Waid helped to revamp the series, but the least Dan Parent, who wrote and did the pencils on this issue could've done is been more creative when it came to Harper's disability. Especially since she was only in two issues before disappearing forever, because apparently Archie Comics isn't interested in disabled people as potential characters for their books. But THAT's a rant for another time, given that it isn't just Archie Comics that has this problem. 

There really isn't much to say about the story, since this was your typical Archie story. Though there's a twist concerning Reggie that is pretty cool, and very off brand for him. And again, having Harper be so positive and asserting herself toward Veronica is pretty cool. Veronica has been really hit and miss in the series before 2015. For the most part she was pretty unlikeable before the 2015 revamp, though she did have moments where she did nice things for her friends. But again, she was generally unlikeable and you never really knew why Archie would date her over Betty, who was sweet, helpful, and an overall nice person. But he did, and it frustrated me when I was a teenager. Can you tell that I like Archie Comics? 

 So the reason I wanted to talk about The Best of Archie Comics: 80 Years, 80 Stories this week is because unlike previous Best of Archie collections like The Best of Archie Comics: 75 Years, 75 Stories and the four volume 70th Anniversary series from 2011-2014, is that the stories are backwards in this edition. No, I don't mean each story is printed with the endings first. What I mean is that while most anniversary collections start from whatever year the first issue featuring a character was published in, this book starts in the present day, 2021 and goes backward until 1941, the year Archie, Jughead, and Betty debuted in Pep Comics #22. So it's kind of like travelling back through time rather than going back in time and then moving forward back to the present day. And this Archie collection has a number of issues in it that aren't in the previous collections that I own, so that's pretty refreshing.

 Over the last few months my sister and I have been watching The Orville on Disney+. She hadn't seen season 2 before, so it was fun watching her reactions to each episode, particularly as we towards the end of the season and episodes like "Identity" came up. Last night we watched the two part season finale. I'll be talking about that over on Josh's Movie Review Corner on Friday, but the reason I mention it here is because Brad showed up last week with some comics for me. Two of them were both issues of The Orville: Digressions, which takes place in the alternate timeline created when past Kelly turned down a second date from Ed due to the memory wipe Claire performed on her at the end of episode 13. It basically tells the story of what happened in this timeline leading up to where we see Ed and Gordon at the beginning of episode 14. Issue one starts with the ending of episode 13 and continues through the first season of the show, with differences in the crew of the Orville. I'm not going to go into spoilers here since that's not the point of this post. It was a good start though.

Issue #2 starts from the point of "Identity, Part 1" and continues right through until the point where Kelly has gathered the main timeline's crew of the Orville aside from Bortus, Isaac, Ed, and Gordon before the beginning of episode 14. If you've watched the show then you know the ending of this comic, so there's a scene where Ed and Gordon are on Epsilon Eridani Station, which Ed mentioned in episode 14, covering the station's personnel's evacuation and over the comm you here "Kaylon troops have entered the station! Kaylon troops have entered---" and then Gordon says to Ed, "Come on, that's it. We gotta go. You did your job" and they leave. Kinda sounds like in The Empire Strikes Back where Han, Leia and Threepio are still in the command center of Echo Base and you hear, "Imperial troops have entered the base! Imperial troops have entered---" and Han says to Leia, "Come on, that's it" and they leave. It's not surprising since everybody working on The Orville are a bunch of geeks and David A. Goodman, one of the show's writers, writes these comics. So there was bound to be some homage to Star Wars either on the show or in these comics.

I already did a review of Titans United #1 so I'm not going to talk about it much more here. But, it was a good issue and I read it again after I posted my review of it last week. There's just something about these characters that just draws you into their story, no matter how old you are and no matter what era you're reading them in. I've always loved the Teen Titans. At least, ever since the animated series was on TV in the mid 2000s. So it's just fun getting to read the comics, even the ones being published in 2021.

 I Am Batman #1 was a completely didn't experience. I was so confused by the end of it because I had no idea what was going on and so I felt like I was missing something. It turns out, I am. This is another comic that Brad bought for me last week but he didn't realize, and neither did I, that there was a Zero Issue that came out before this and this issue isn't written for people to pick up if they haven't read the Zero Issue. I'm not a big fan of what DC has been doing with Batman these days. It's been so convoluted, especially since Batman didn't get a complete reboot like most DC characters got at the beginning of the New 52 back in 2011, that I just can't keep up with all of it. And this issue didn't really help with that either. I do like Olivier Coipel's artwork in this issue though. It's pretty decent. I just don't have much to say about this new Batman since, well, I don't actually know who he is.

However, later in the week I read the Batman Free Comic Book Day 2021 issue that Brad dropped off for me a few weeks ago. It had a preview of I Am Batman #0 in it and it explains that the new Batman is actually Lucius Fox's son, Jace. It's also a spin-off of Batman: Second Son, a four issue mini-series that just ended a month or two ago (the final issue's cover date is September 2021 and cover dates are usually two months ahead of the actual publication date). Which is fine, I don't mind that. But I should've been able to pick up I Am Batman #1 and read it without any sort of confusion. I shouldn't have to go digging for information that SHOULD'VE been in the issue itself. But that's comic books for you.

I absolutely love Superman: Son of Kal-El #1. Particularly that cover which is homaging the cover for the original Superman #1 that was published in 1939, a year after Superman's debut in 1938's Action Comics #1. I admit that I've never read any of Super Sons nor have I read alot with John Kent in it. But I've enjoyed what I've read of the character so far and I love that he's Superman in this new book. It just feels better than having Batman being Lucius Fox's son, who has no ties to Batman whatsoever. At least not in any of the Batman comics I've ever read. And I love that the new Superman is learning the ropes despite being the son of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, and has been a superhero in his own right alongside Damian Wayne in Super Sons. Despite the fact that Damian Wayne is far from being my favourite Robin, mainly because most of the time it feels like he's trying to be Red Hood Jr, rather than Robin, I actually really like him in this issue as well as the conversation between him and John that takes place WHILE they're fighting ninjas who are after Damian (no surprise there). It's just a fun issue and one I highly recommend you pick up if you haven't already.

I've never played Fortnite and I don't know much about it. And this special Batman Day issue doesn't actually tell me anything about the game either. Batman somehow finds himself in that world, with basically no memory of who he is. That's the issue. Not the whole issue as this is just a preview issue for the longer graphic novel, Batman Fortnite: Zero Point. I know the title isn't actually referring this, but the title sums up how I feel about this book. There is zero point to it. I'm sure fans of Fortnite will enjoy it, but if you don't know these characters, this is just another pointless DC crossover with another property similar to Justice League/Power Rangers or Star Trek/Green Lantern. Just from this issue's front cover I see there are alot of weird looking characters in Fortnite.

The final issue for this week, and the second Batman Day issue, is actually a pretty cool concept, Batman: Knightwatch. It's basically Batman, Nightwing, and Batgirl fighting crime in Gotham City based on tips they get on the Knightwatch Network. like a neighbourhood watch, but citywide and keyed directly to the Batcave and the Bat Family's cell phones and other technology. Kind of like Oracle's pre-New 52 network of contacts all over the world. It's alot lighter than most Batman books tend to be these days, which makes it refreshing. I'm sure it's just a goofy little one off but I would love it if they actually did an entire series based on this premise. The story is cool and the artwork is pretty great. In fact it actually reminds me of the artwork in the Batman comics of the late '90s and early 2000s. So that's fun. 

Honestly the only comic I can't really recommend of the ones that I read this week is I Am Batman #1 as it does a poor job of explaining who the new Batman is for people who didn't read the Zero Issue, and you basically need to have kept up with the last two years of Batman comics to really follow what's going on. The rest though are definitely worth checking out though. Including the Batman Fortnite book.

That's it for this week's comic book wrap-up. Next week I'll have a better mix of old and new(ish) comics as well as a trade paperback collected edition. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime please pop over to Josh's Movie Review Corner on Friday where I'll be talking about the movies and shows that I watched this past week. So until then have a great week and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Titans United #1 (2021) Comic Book Review

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I'm back with a comic book review. This week I am going to be reviewing a brand new comic book, Titans United #1 by Cavan Scott with pencils by Jose Luis and inks by Jonas Trindade. So let's get into it.

Titans United #1 is a great issue to take a peek into modern comics again, after not being able to keep up with comics on a regular basis in about four years. It brings memories of reading Devin Grayson's Titans from the early 2000s as well as some classic issues of Marv Wolfman and George Perez's New Teen Titans because of the tone. And while the team in this book has some similarities to the teams from both of those books, this team is actually the team shown in the third season of the TV show, which I've only seen the first episode of season 1 so far. Trust me I will be getting to it ASAP. You have Dick Grayson/Nightwing, in his classic Nightwing costume from the late '90s and the 2000s, Jason Todd/Red Hood who is a jerk, Donna Troy with no code name, Rachel Roth/Raven, Koriand'r/Starfire, Conner Kent/Superboy, and Garfield Logan/Beast Boy, with Henry Hall/Hawk, and Dawn Granger/Dove appearing at the end of the issue.

The basic plot of the story, without spoilers, is that a dude spontaneously starts using the powers of the Titans on the streets of San Francisco. But when the Titans try to stop him Superboy's powers fizzle out and the rest of the team is outmatched by their own abilities. Which isn't new since we've seen it with the Avengers, the Power Rangers, the Justice League when they've fought Amazo, when Spider-Man has fought Venom, and when Superman has fought other Kryptonians. So it's nothing new in comics or in superhero fiction in general. But it's interesting because I don't think the Titans have ever faced that sort of threat before in their long history. To be fair, I haven't read EVERY Teen Titans comic ever published, but I have read a decent amount of them over the years and I haven't read an issue where this has been done before. So it was cool to read.

Oh man, Jason Todd is unbearably annoying with his attitude in this issue. It's funny in a way, because that's how I remember Jason being all the way back in the comics from the '80s when he was Robin in the post-Crisis continuity. Of course it's that unlikeability which led to people voting to kill him off in Batman #'s 427 and 428. But you know, DC's not going to do that again when he's been a popular character since he returned as Red Hood in 2005. Not to mention from what I've heard about it, Jason is a major character on Titans. 

This is a great issue. Like I said at the beginning it felt like I was reading Devin Grayson's Titans or Wolfman and Perez's New Teen Titans because the tone is so similar. I haven't kept up with much of what DC has been doing recently because alot of it hasn't been stuff I've been interested in. Particularly since Green Arrow is not being published right now, and the stuff they've been doing with Batman has been ridiculous. But I did enjoy this issue and I hope to get the rest of this series. Titans United is a seven issue limited series, so I should be able to either pick up all of the issues or at the very least get the trade paperback when it comes out, because this was great. 

Alright my friends that's going to be it for me for today. Stay tuned for alot more comic book stuff coming your way because The Review Basement is becoming a comic book centric blog. Comic book reviews, comic book based movie and TV show reviews, and discussions about comic books will all be here. So stay tuned because I'll be back next week with another comic book topic. Until then, have a great week and I will talk to you all later. Take care. 

My Favourite Fictional Couple of All Time (Who Aren't Riker and Troi)

 Hey everyone! How're your weekends going so far? Mine's actually been pretty good so far. Tonight I was sitting at my laptop, checking out Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the stats on Josh's Movie Review Corner, and for some reason I began to think about my favourite fictional romantic couples. Riker and Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Uncle Jesse and Becky from Full House, DJ and Steve from Fuller House, and Emma and Sean from Degrassi: The Next Generation are some of my favourites. However, apart from Corran Horn and Mirax Terrik from the Star Wars: X-Wing novel series and Frank Hardy and Callie Shaw from The Hardy Boys, I don't have alot of favourite romantic couples from novels. However there is one fictional romantic couple that is my all time favourite and that is Rachel and Tobias from Animorphs. Both the book series AND the short-lived late '90s Nickelodeon live action TV show adaptation. So let's talk about why I love Rachel and Tobias, and why I love their romantic pairing. There will be some spoilers for both the books and the TV show, so be aware of that. Also, apologies for using an image of the TV versions of the characters, but there really aren't any images of just Rachel and Tobias together that are from the books and I didn't want to use fan art for it either.

One of the things that makes Rachel and Tobias's relationship so unique is that, unlike Riker and Troi and Corran and Mirax, who all met during the course of their careers in either Starfleet or the Alliance Military, depending on the couple you're talking about, Rachel and Tobias met before they were thrust into a war against alien invaders. They met when they still just ordinary kids. The TV show makes it a little more obvious than the books do that there's an attraction between Rachel and Tobias from the very beginning. Mainly because Jake is the narrator of the first book and he wouldn't necessarily have picked up on it. Though books 2 AND 3 begin to hint at it slightly as Rachel narrates book 2 and Tobias narrates book 3. While the TV show doesn't allow you to get into the characters's heads like the books do, there are a few visual cues and cues within dialogue that show, at least on Rachel's side, there's an attraction between them. Particularly in Episode 3, "Underground" which has a cute scene between them as Tobias walks home with Rachel after the group's meeting at Jake's house. After Rachel's sister Sara takes a picture of them together, they give each other this cute little smile, which is pretty adorable.

In the books though, Rachel and Tobias don't really get together until Tobias regains his morphing powers and gains his original Human form as a morph in book 13 The Change. They hang out before that and fly around with Rachel in her Bald Eagle morph, but they don't actually acknowledge it as dating until The Change. Regardless though, Rachel and Tobias kind of act as anchors for each other. Rachel acts as Tobias's anchor so he doesn't lose himself in his trapped Hawk body. Tobias acts as an anchor for Rachel so that she doesn't lose herself to her more violent tendencies that were brought to the forefront in the early days of the war with the Yeerks. In a way they need each other to tether them to the world they came from and to allow each other to still act like ordinary people from time to time.

You can see the progression of their relationship as in pretty much every Rachel book and every Tobias book, starting with book 13, the book starts and ends with a Rachel and Tobias date scene basically. Mostly in the Tobias books, but the Rachel books seem to end with her going to see Tobias, after book 22 The Solution. It's been a long time since I read Animorphs beyond the first six books so I don't remember for sure if what I just said in this paragraph makes sense or if I pulled it out of thin air.

While the TV show hints at an attraction between them in the very first episode, it isn't until Episode 16, "Tobias", that we see just how deep their bond really goes. In the episode we see that Rachel is the first person Tobias met when he arrived at school, not long before the kids meet Elfangor. And then later, when it shows offscreen moments from the second episode it shows that Rachel and Tobias confiding in each other about their fears concerning their roles within the Animorphs. Which we really don't see much of in the books, because we're already getting the narrating character's thoughts in each book. It's almost a plot device for the audience to be able to get some exposition about how the characters feel, but in a way it inadvertently builds the relationship between the TV show versions of Rachel and Tobias, who are slightly different characters there since the show never delves into the darker aspects that the books explored. Particularly with the books after the first fourteen had come out.

The question I would like to ask is, would Rachel and Tobias have fallen in love with each other and gotten together if the war with the Yeerks HADN'T happened for them? Actually, the answer is simple. No, they would not have. As we saw in Megamorphs book 4, Back to Before, as well as the episode, "Not My Problem", if the war with the Yeerks hadn't happened for them, Rachel and Tobias wouldn't've interacted as much. 

In the book, which actually came out after the episode had aired, Tobias would've ended up as a Controller as he would've joined the Sharing and been infested not long after, and Rachel would've ended up with Marco instead. In the TV episode, Rachel is the one who became a Controller, while Tobias is the only one to meet Elfangor and get the power to morph, becoming an Animorph. I think trying to answer the question of, would they have gotten together if the Yeerks hadn't invaded Earth at all? is a bit more difficult. For the books, I honestly don't think so, because, while they knew of each other prior to the events of the first book, they didn't really interact with each other before joining Jake, Cassie, and Marco at the mall to go home through the construction site.

For the TV show it's a little bit harder to tell. As we saw in the episode, "Tobias", Rachel and Tobias did interact with each other before they helped Jake, Cassie, and Marco find Jake's dog, Homer, who'd run away from the mall, with the kids giving chase in the first episode. So who knows, maybe they would've eventually, but maybe not as quickly as they did in the show itself.

I have two favourite scenes between Rachel and Tobias. The first is at the end of the first episode of season 2, "Face Off, Part 3". The Animorphs and Ax are at the Cyber-Cafe at the mall, after their major battle in the Yeerk Pool. As Rachel had morphed a Yeerk and had gone into Tobias's head, Tobias asks her if she'd learned anything about him while she was inside there, meaning, he wanted to know if she discovered his feelings for her. After they talk about how scared Rachel had been being morphed as a Yeerk, she asks him what the thing was he didn't want her to know in that late '90s/early 2000s way that we've seen on TV hundreds of times. We never get Tobias's answer because it cuts to commercials, or the next scene if you're watching it on iTunes, but it's still a cute scene between them.

The second scene, which I took this post's image from, happens at the end of the series finale, "Changes, Part 3". The Animorphs and Ax are once again at the Cyber-Cafe, though this time it's because their school dance was ruined due to the Yeerks. Tobias shows up, as he'd been occupied learning about his father, turns on the jukebox, because a Cyber-Cafe in the year 2000 had a jukebox, and asks Rachel to dance. She accepts, of course, and they dance. That's it. That's why I love that scene. It's just a romantic couple dancing. I love scenes like that in TV shows and movies. Particularly ones like Power Rangers, Animorphs, and other shows where teenagers have hidden extraordinary tasks, like being a superhero or working on a Federation starship (still salty about Wesley Crusher not getting enough normal teenager stuff on Star Trek: The Next Generation).

When it comes right down to it, the reason Rachel and Tobias are my favourite fictional couple of all time is because they're ordinary kids, with extraordinary circumstances and despite the dark turn their lives take by the end of the books, Rachel and Tobias love each other and find solace in each other's company which is all too rare when you're fighting an army of aliens bent on your enslavement and destruction of your planet. 

That my friends is it for me for tonight. I will be back on Monday where I'll finally be doing my overview of the various trade paperback editions I've had for Batman: Knightfall. So until then have a great rest of your weekend, and a great night and I will talk to you all later. Take care. 

Star Trek's 25th Anniversary...30 Years Later

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing quite well. Please excuse my absence from The Review Basement this last week, I've been busy establishing the new movie review blog, Josh's Movie Review Corner. To all of you Trekkies reading this, Happy Star Trek Day! Today I'm going to take you back to 1991, when Star Trek was celebrating it's 25th Anniversary. I'll be talking about where I was in 1991 and where Star Trek was as a franchise. So let's go back in time and talk about Star Trek's 25th Anniversary, 30 years ago.

This logo was on everything in 1991. Posters, books, comics, videocassette boxes, toys, and video game boxes all had this logo on them throughout the entire year. I actually had several items with this logo on them. Including a set of trading cards from Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. I actually still have those cards in a binder down here in the basement. I might do a separate post on them at another time, but right now, I had them and that's all I'll say about them. I was in and out of the hospital at this point in my life. With more and more time being spent in the hospital again than out of it. Which meant I was spending alot of time watching TV and movies. However, during the summer of 1991 I had a very special visitor at the hospital. Nichelle Nichols was in Ottawa for a Star Trek convention, celebrating the 25th Anniversary as well as the release of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Anyway, I wasn't able to go so they brought the convention to me instead. I got my Nintendo Game Boys, the Star Trek 25th Anniversary game for said Game Boy (more on that and Star Trek VI in a bit), and some TNG figures from Galoob that came out in 1988 from Nichelle, and she showed me the final trailer for Star Trek VI as well as a reel from TNG's first four seasons that was shown to promote the fifth season, which was just about to start. Now, let's talk about what came out for Star Trek at the time to commemorate the event.

Star Trek: The Next Generation was going strong on TV at the time of Star Trek's 25th Anniversary. Not only did it air it's 100th episode at the beginning of 1991, but went into it's fifth season in September, 1991. In my opinion the fifth season is the show's strongest season and the one I remember seeing the most episodes of as they aired in 1991 and 1992. Commercials for the show were everywhere, people had posters all over the place, there were stickers, trading cards, books, and comics available for the series as well. TNG was everywhere.

As mentioned earlier, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was released in 1991 as a farewell to the cast of the original Star Trek as the vast majority of them would be retiring from those roles though Leonard Nimoy would return as Spock in the two part TNG episode "Unification", which actually aired before Star Trek VI came out, and again in 2009 in Star Trek and 2013 in Star Trek Into Darkness, James Doohan would return as Scotty in the TNG season 6 episode "Relics" and in the 1994 feature film, Star Trek Generations, William Shatner and Walter Koenig would return as Kirk and Chekov respectively in Generations, and George Takei would return as Hikaru Sulu in the 30th anniversary tribute episode, "Flashback" during the third season of Star Trek: Voyager.

1991 was also the year that Paramount requested that Rick Berman and Michael Piller put together a TNG spin-off series to begin airing in January, 1993. That series would become Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and would go on to do things that very few, if any, TV shows did at the time. Particularly if they were airing in first run syndication as both TNG was doing and DS9 would do. I don't think DS9 was announced to the public until 1992, or very late 1991 at the earliest. I'm pretty sure that that's when it was.

In celebration of the 25th Anniversary the first five Star Trek feature films were re-released on home video with new packaging. They were sold individually as well as in the Star Trek: The Movies - 25th Anniversary Collector's Set box set that I talked about in a previous post. Of course this is how I saw these movies for the first time. They re-used the packaging for the 1993 box set that included the home video release of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which is the set my dad would eventually get.

Star Trek: The Next Generation would also start coming out on home video in 1991. The first releases were the initial Columbia House Video Library releases that contained two to three episodes per tape. After that Paramount Home Video began releasing the series on home video with one episode per tape, starting with "Encounter at Farpoint" on September 5th 1991. Of course I had the first two volumes of the Columbia House releases as well as most of the first season of TNG in the Paramount Home Video releases when I was a kid. TOS had previously been released on home video, but this was the first time that TNG was being released.

Star Trek - The Astral Symphony was an audio collection of select tracks from the soundtracks of the first five Star Trek movies that was released on CD and audiotape in 1991. The cover art was designed to match the box art for the Star Trek movie VHS releases. I never had this collection. I knew about it because of a preview for it on some of the latter season 1 TNG VHS tapes before the episodes. 

The aforementioned Game Boy game was released too. There were versions for the Nintendo Entertainment System as well as versions for the computer. I have the Game Boy game still, but I remember playing one of the computer versions. I think it was the DOS version that I played at the hospital. I don't remember for sure though. 

Finally, on the week of September 28th 1991, Star Trek 25th Anniversary Special hosted by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy aired on TV. It would get a VHS release in 1992, but this was a TV special that celebrated Star Trek's 25th Anniversary and went behind the scenes on Star Trek VI. I have the special on VHS and it's a pretty fun watch. I did a review of it either late last year or early this year on this blog, so go check it out if you haven't done so already.

It's amazing to see how Star Trek was 30 years ago. Back then there were five movies, with a sixth one on the way, two live action TV shows, with a third one on the way, and a barely acknowledged animated series. There was no internet, no streaming services, and no DVD or Blu-ray box sets. The only way you could watch Star Trek is either on TV or if you were lucky and were able to get either the Collector's Edition or Paramount Home Video VHS releases of each series. Or if you were REALLY lucky you were able to tape each episode of TNG as it aired. Nowadays you have every series on DVD, you have all but two of them on Blu-ray, you have all the movies on Blu-ray, all of the shows and movies on streaming services and the classic shows from the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and 2000s are still being shown on TV. Plus there's the internet. Not to mention you have 13 movies (with a 14th and possibly a 15th on the way), you have a total of nine Star Trek shows to watch, with two more on the way, and over 800 episodes to watch. I don't think I can name another franchise that has that much to watch.

I think that's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back tomorrow over on Josh's Movie Review Corner with a review of Cruella. So head on over there tomorrow for that. Until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.