SEASON 2

The revised title sequence for Season 2 of The Transformers, featuring animation and events roughly a million times more dynamic than anything actually in the show.

THANKS BENEVENSTANCIANO

WALDO

WHITE BEAR

BE RIGHT BACK

Black Mirror returns February 11th.

DY-NO-MITE

When I first saw this I presumed Gonzo, the studio behind the Afro Samurai series, had been drafted to keep Black Dynamite's brand awareness chugging along. Turns out we have Titmouse Inc to thank for this instead. Titmouse's other work includes some 70s flavoured TV ads for Honda, and Motorcity, a charming little series with a visual design stuck half-way between Jamie Hewlett and Bill Peet. Motorcity has just begun its run on boy's own cable channel Disney XD. Check out an action reel for the series here. 

WEREWOLF BAR MITZVAH

101 Rap - Donald Glover and Danny Pudi

Over the Edge

Here's how the deathly angular Batman: The Animated Series (or more accurately, The New Batman Adventures) conceptualised a titanic rumble between Bane and Batman. We pick up events shortly after Barbara Gordon falls to her death battling The Scarecrow. Blaming Batman, a distraught Commissioner Gordon uses his daughter's funeral as bait, and hires Bane to break the Bat. Balls nasty! Not to worry, the whole episode is Barbara Gordon's fear toxin induced fever dream.

GOD GINRAI

MUTATION

Flirt length shill for Nickelodeon's upcoming CG Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. Immediately notable is the focus on making the Turtles weaponry that little bit more lethal. Michelangelo has ditched his BBFC worrying Nunchaku for what looks like a Kusarigama, a peasant weapon designed to kill armoured enemies (Shredder?), adapted from a farmer's sickle. Donatello get a Naginata, a weapon of the Samurai class, usually used by women - nice dig at the brains of the outfit Nickelodeon! The Turtles themselves are stocky and grumpy looking; besides the colour coded bandannas, each Turtle's skin colour appears to be patterned after their Playmates action figure incarnations, with Don noticeably darker than his brothers. No real details yet, other than a 2012 air date.

Leslie Nielsen

Invoking Phil Collins

Caught the Ashes to Ashes finale last night, wasn't Daniel Mays good as Old Scratch? I didn't keep up with the series, so discussing content would be a bit of a dead end. Instead, I just wanted to make a quick comment about the musical quotes littered throughout the show. They're a bit of a waste aren't they? Why feature a track like In the Air Tonight if you're only going to play a twenty second micro-snatch, then fade it null? Why risk conjuring up an audience comparison with the above sequence from Miami Vice if you're not going to do anything new or subversive with the piece?

Miami Vice moves entirely on image and a sonic thematic resonance. Phil Collins swallows this sequence, creating a protracted doom mood as the two leads drive towards an idea of extinction. Image and sound are combined to create a profound sense of desperation. Ashes to Ashes used the cue for a similar moment - the protagonist Alex risking her own life to discover the nature of her superior officer / love interest - but only spliced it in for a fleeting flourish then your standard fade down for dialoguing. It's anti-cinematic, and arguably anti-organic. It mugs audience attention away from a moment, creating a dramatic dead space where viewers internally remark about how much they enjoy the 'drum bit'. No mood is established, other than perhaps a kind of dreary nostalgia. At its worst, this kind of slight juxtaposition recalls the assembly of winsome holiday shows where a bored editor fades in something aurally peculiar as a kind of meta-wink to anyone paying attention. Yuck.

"Keep the rest for your time."

That plus 99 more all-killer, no-filler lines from HBO's peerless The Wire. If you ain't viewed series, expect spoils.

Рабочий И Паразит

Smallville 9.1: Saviour

Nine seasons in, and Smallville has barely developed. The show is still far more concerned with weaving dead-end romance elements round a licence frame, than examining pubescent superheroics. Clark Kent still hasn't developed a super-identity. Instead he's a hound dog sketch of Christopher Reeves' bumbling under-ego, a self-designed whelp fumbling with the strays around him. This viewer's priors with Smallville include an unusually patient patronage of Season 1, and occasional views sandwiched between better shows on afternoon E4. Back in its opening run, the show focused on throwing up increasingly convoluted Krypto-mutants to tax Kent's emerging powers. Heavily indebted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that infant serial flirted with the promise of a full-on abilities reveal, that even to this day, goes unrealised. Transcendence be damned! Smallville instead conspired to sink itself into sludge arcs of souring interpersonal relations, and baffling stupidity.

In Season Nine opener Saviour, Clark still cannot fly. Likely a sop to budgetary concerns, and fears that the teenage target audience will revolt at any practically realised effect not bristling with computer generated after effects. Wires just don't cut it anymore! In-fiction, Terence Stamp, having graduated from Superman 2's Zod to this series' Jor-El phantom voice, persuades his son that the flight lack revolves around sublimated sexual urges. Cosmic misogyny dictates that a desire for female attention drags you down. It's a detail that's given a cack-handed superiority twist by Jor-El's constant needling: there's always an insinuation from Daddy that Clark's dealings with our 'lower' species has narrowed his horizons. Naturally, this all exists as excuse, and isn't explored in any more time than it takes to say.

The rest of the premiere ep sees Clark making brief headway in developing his Kryptonian vitality. He's cut himself off from society, and spends his evenings zipping around in a black trench coat, halting disaster. It's uniquely dispiriting to see an originator character of superhero fiction kitted out in clone ensemble. Kent actor Tom Welling is an ill-fit for neo-goth stylings. He's too squared and browned, the polar opposite to the Wachowski's palid insect agitators. It makes this embryonic Superman a gimmick chasing phony. Perhaps that's too harsh? Maybe the tailoring has less to do with decade late populist urges, and more to do with on-going ownership disputes? There's no excusing the execution though: repeated interludes see Kent grimly manning nose-bleed architecture, framed like Christopher Nolan's Batman. The kids have got their 'dark' Superman.

Keith Floyd

A Fistful of Context

When preparing A Fistful of Dollars for its first television screening in the late 1970s, the ABC Network discerned that something was lacking from Leone's grubby little masterpiece: moral context. "Why, that no-good Eastwood stranger just wandered into town and had himself some murder. Why did he do it? He's too unkempt for altruism!" perhaps crossed their minds. This pop New Wave western amorality was simply too vague for mainstream televising sensibilities, so the network had Two-Lane Blacktop director Monte Hellman shoot a piecemeal introduction sequence. Presented below, this dreadful little addition recasts Eastwood's most iconic character as a collaborating fink, prepared to work for Harry Dean Stanton's shady government lawman to save his neck.



Designed to answer a question no-one was asking, this prologue raises an even more mind-bending predicament: who in hell caught The Man With No Name?

The only good to come out of this sorry mess is that the clip further aligns the Dollars hero with that other stalwart of 60s pulp punishment: James Bond. Both are in-pocket G-Man murderers with cruel streaks a mile wide.

Kamandi!

With the demise of Bruce Timm's DC animated serials, I gave up any hope of seeing a motion take on Jack Kirby's Fifth World survivor Kamandi. What were the chances of any subsequent team being as infatuated with the lesser known DC ensemble? I needn't have worried. Guest star extravaganza Batman: The Brave and the Bold to the rescue!

Apprentice 5: Judgment Day

The dying weeks are my favourite part of The Apprentice. For the majority of the show's twelve week runtime we are treated to brief impressions of each of the cast. Contestants are reduced to one note caricatures: there's a loud one, a boring one, a funny one. The list goes on. There also seems to be an editorial policy in place that favours idiocy in the moment-to-moment rolling recap. Since the majority of the show is illustration and context for the eventual boardroom showdown, this makes a sense. What has been lost though is any notion that any real candidates exist for King Alan's job. They're all fools. This is what makes the last few weeks so enjoyable, they ditch the pretence and instead begin to focus on why the producers actually did cast this rabble.

During Wednesday's interview special, we started to see some real contenders emerge. Just in the nick of time eh? Thanks to a last minute push mandate, Kate finally emerged as Michelle Dewberry 2, a collected smile-face that has long since ditched emotions as surplus to requirement. Boring she may be, but her droning robo-thing speaks to methodical achievement. Just keep her away from Phillip. He's a bad influence. We finally got explanation word that Yasmina is already deep in business with a restaurant, King Alan lapping up her entrepreneurial instincts, a quality sadly lacking in the other candidates. Those two are heading off to Sunday's rescheduled final. I was sorry to see Debra bow out, her bellowing impertinence was a treat quite frankly. She was always deeply in game-mode. Willing to argue over everything. She's not colleague material, but certainly an entertaining watch.

It also became apparent rather early on that James and Lorraine were to be the fluffy comedy stuffing that keeps this show on an entertainment even keel. Achievements be damned! James had written an attention seeking CV, exactly the sort of bolshy big bollocks that gets you cast, but ends up getting you laughed out of real contention. His exit was actually rather touching, a personable exclamation rather than a boring reconsider jab. Lorraine suffered the same Mad Aunt angle Lucinda failed to weather last year. Her intuition dressed up as tea-leaf reading nonsense. Out they went. Hopping over to BBC 2 for a well earned make-over.