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Godzilla & Rodan & Mothra & Alice: Destroy All Monsters on Blu-ray!

Godzilla & Rodan & Mothra & Alice: Destroy All Monsters on Blu-ray!

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destroy-all-monsters-japanese-posterLast month, the second Godzilla film to reach Blu-ray in North America made its thundering, skyline-flattening debut, courtesy of Media Blasters: the 1968 science-fiction monster mash Destroy All Monsters (Japanese title: Kaiju Soshingeki, “Charge of the Monsters” or “Monster Invasion”). The only Godzilla movie to beat it onto Blu-ray is the 1954 original, which will get a re-release as part of the Criterion Collection in January 2012. (The Criterion Collection! Godzilla has gained a well-deserved highbrow victory and sits on the same shelf with Kubrick and Bergman!) Later this month will see the third Godzilla Blu-ray release, 1973’s Godzilla vs. Megalon. This is arguably the worst movie of the long series, but I welcome it onto Hi-Def nonetheless: three cheers for glittering mediocrity!

But Destroy All Monsters is anything but mediocre: like Universal’s House of Frankenstein over twenty years before, it pulls together all the science-fiction candycorn goodness available to give audiences a mad monster party for the ages. The plot is simplistic, the characters even more so, but the movie pops with color and spectacle of a bygone age of entertainment without irony. It isn’t the best of the Godzilla series, but until 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars, no monster movie could boast a larger monster cast. Eleven of Toho Studio’s stable of big beasts crowd into its hundred minutes, and the result is a giddy confection no ten-year-old or ten-year-old at heart can resist. If geekdom has a defining film, here it is.

Destroy All Monsters was one of the first of Japan’s giant monster films to reach DVD in North America. At the time it seemed like a miracle to have a Godzilla film available in a letterboxed edition. However, the 1999 disc from ADV Films is the textbook example of a barebones release: the only language option is the inferior of the two English dubs (I’ll explain the dubbing situation later), the picture isn’t enhanced for widescreen TVs, and the disc doesn’t even have a menu. As better quality Godzilla DVDs came out in the 2000s, Destroy All Monsters became a black hole on collectors’ movie shelves. ADV re-released the movie to DVD in 2004 packaged with a soundtrack album as part of Godzilla’s Fiftieth Anniversary, but the movie disc is exactly the same.

The Media Blasters/Tokyo Shock Blu-ray fixes all these problems: not only is the film in glorious Toho Scope 1080p, but the disc contains both English dubs, the original Japanese mono soundtrack, a 5.1 lossless re-mix, and commentary from two Japanese fantasy film scholars, Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski, who have done informed and lively commentaries for previous Godzilla DVD releases.

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Art of the Genre: Maztica Memories

Art of the Genre: Maztica Memories

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Fred Field's wife? Only he can tell us...
Fred Field's wife? Only he can tell us...

After taking a moment to pull down the Dragon Mountain Boxed Set, I thought it might be fun to do the same with other lesser known boxes that came out of TSR around 1990. That period was actually the beginning of the end for the role-playing giant, Gygax ousted, sales flagging, and the need for fresh ideas and worlds seemingly all that the company could see as its savior.

As we are well aware, the next wave in the gaming industry wouldn’t come from the RPG table, but instead from cards, ala Magic the Gathering, but still TSR struggled to not only survive but come up with something fresh enough to gather new players.

It was here that we find various new titles rolling hot off their press, but many of the games in that period simply turned into boxed campaign settings along the lines of Maztica, which in itself is set in The Forgotten Realms.

This campaign was written by TSR staff author Douglas Niles, and although not as famed in novel fiction as Weis and Hickman, by 1990 Niles was pleasantly entrenched in the Forgotten Realms with his Darkwalker on Moonshae Trilogy. He also penned the Maztica Trilogy, including Ironhelm, Viperhand, and Feathered Dragon, but I’ve never read these three books so I can’t speak as to their worth for the purpose of supporting this setting.

Niles was challenged in this project to create a Mesoamerican world that mingles with the fantasy setting of the Forgotten Realms. In my opinion, after several so-so attempts at reading this set, he fails to deliver on what would make such a setting uniquely cool, ala demi-humans! The work tends to bog down in a kind of repetition of real-world conquistadors waging a campaign against indigenous peoples of the far south continents where the only change in the story line is that the priests actually had working magic.

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Game Review: The Paizo ‘Ultimates’ both Combat and Magic

Game Review: The Paizo ‘Ultimates’ both Combat and Magic

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ultimate-combat-300

Ultimate… by Websters the definition [d] reads: the best or most extreme of its kind. Thus, Paizo entails that two of its creations for 2011 are the very pinnacle of gaming mechanics gold.

After spending two years in the Pathfinder universe and plumbing the depths of the system with the Pathfinder Core Rulebook and then the Advanced Player’s Guide, I wasn’t convinced that there was an obvious need for any further bulk supplementation of the system.

You see, this is the crux of ‘old gamers’, a belief that what they’ve pre-built into their own world is ‘enough’ and they can just coast on their own imagination thereafter. Now I’d never say this is a false statement, but with many Grognards, they fail to take into account that the more information you have, the better your personal worlds and systems will be.

Do you need to implement every detail of every supplement ever written? Absolutely not, but the opportunities involved in finding different wrinkles, classes, items, etc can only help to make a world richer for both players and game-masters alike.

This brings me to Paizo’s two Ultimates, those being Magic and Combat. Now make no mistake, when Paizo chose the word Ultimate they weren’t kidding around. These books are chocked full of the kind of stuff that truly needs unearthing.

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The Walking Dead Season 2: Stop and Smell the Dessicated Roses

The Walking Dead Season 2: Stop and Smell the Dessicated Roses

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the-walking-dead-season-2Warning: Some spoilers follow

Season 2 of AMC’s The Walking Dead is nearing its midseason point, and apparently it sucks, at least according to a vocal minority of viewers. Why? Too much talking and not enough action. With a name like The Walking Dead, each episode should be wall-to-wall flesh munching zombies and humans gunning down undead with head shots on the wing. Or so the detractors say.

Me? I’ve been enjoying the heck out of the series, and think it’s pretty darned perfect as far as serialized television goes. The Walking Dead isn’t just about zombies. It’s also a human drama, and I’m hooked.

But I guess characterization and engagement with philosophical and moral questions aren’t what the zombie diehards want. Here’s a real sampling of some of the comments I’ve found:

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Art of the Genre: I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Roleplaying Part One, Gail B McIntosh

Art of the Genre: I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Roleplaying Part One, Gail B McIntosh

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isengard

Yes indeed, I bring you another tale of art before you attempt to burst the buttons off your jeans with a hearty Thanksgiving feast. All winter holidays are something strange here in L.A., and it’s hard to think about turkey, snow, and roasting anything when the sun is bright and ocean breeze carries the promise of white-tipped surf and meditative tranquility.

Art, however, never takes a holiday [nor do we here at Black Gate L.A. since John O’Neill thinks days off are a grand waste of time]. That being said, I began a project some time ago that is very dear to my heart, so much so that Ryan Harvey doesn’t even argue with me about it which is saying something.

Below, I’ll lay the groundwork for my argument in case you who read this would like to contradict me, but I warn you, my passion is unmatched, and without vacations I’ll simply outlast you. Today, then, begins Part One of a small series dedicated to this topic, and I hope you’ll take the time to read them and educate yourself.

Part One:

I would argue that the prettiest role-playing game ever produced was Iron Crown Enterprises the Middle-Earth Role-Playing. Certainly the game’s popularity in the RPG boom decade of the 1980s was only rivaled by the gorilla in the room of TSR’s AD&D, statistics from the time indicating MERP was second in sales totals for the decade behind the RPG giant.

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Let’s Play White by Chesya Burke

Let’s Play White by Chesya Burke

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lpw_smallChesya Burke’s new short story collection newly out from Apex Publications provides a take on the horrific and strange from, as you might expect from the title, an African-American perspective. The title comes from the opening story, “Walter and the Three-Legged King,” in which the down on his luck protagonist is advised by a talking rat, one that he’s maimed by tearing off its leg, that “let’s play white” is the only way for him to get a job and avoid getting thrown out of his apartment.  The notion that you have to “play the game” in a job interview is hardly the province of any particular race, however; moreover, the no-doubt low paying  job of doorman the protagonist hopes to land might actually have less to do with “playing white” than “playing subservient,” which is why ethnic minorities probably hold a larger percentage of these kinds of positions.

Of course, sf and fantasy have been a natural home for ethnic writers to explore the state of “otherness” in which alien creatures and societies symbolize the psychology of oppressed racial and sexual minorities.  Burke’s stories are more grounded in the everyday realities of the disenfranchised, realities that are disrupted by cultural myths such as the actually benevolent but of course misunderstood village witch (“The Teachings and Redepmtion of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason”), zombies (“Cue Change”) voodoo (“Chocolate Park”), diviner-healers (“The Unremembered” and “The Light of Cree”)  and the evil eye (“I Make People Do Bad Things”).  Some of the scariest, however, are the most realistic.

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New Treasures: The Legend of Drizzt

New Treasures: The Legend of Drizzt

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legendofdrizztI love board games. But after collectible card games and computer games pretty much swept the market clean of them in the mid-90s, it seemed the era of the board game was over.  I put away my copies of Dragon Pass and Divine Right, and pretty much accepted the fact that I’d be explaining the quaint concept of “board games” to my grandkids. Assuming I could get them to put down their Xbox controllers long enough.

Then an interesting thing happened in the middle of the last decade: The board game experienced something that almost looked like a resurgence. Enticed by Settlers of Catan and a series of popular titles from Fantasy Flight, gamers began to cautiously put down their controllers and cluster curiously around kitchen tables again.

Wizards of the Coast took notice and tossed their hat in the arena with several very well received games, including Ikusa and the epic Conquest of Nerath, both of which Scott Taylor reviewed for us here.

With just a few titles, WotC has become a heavyweight in fantasy board games — and they show no signs of slowing down.

Earlier this month a box landed on my doorstep (with a resounding thud) containing a review copy of their latest entry: The Legend of Drizzt, a massive 7-pound contender that has every appearance of being another winner.

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Art of the Genre: Wizardry, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

Art of the Genre: Wizardry, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

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This twisting dragon was a genesis for me in so many ways...
This twisting dragon was a genesis for me in so many ways...

I guess my string of nostalgia continues here at the Black Gate L.A. offices. You see, it was ‘bring you son to work’ day last Friday and I decided even though it might come back to bite me, I’d expose my 5-year old son Ash to Ryan Harvey and Kandi. I figured if worse came to worse, I could just skip out and spend a few hours on the beach with him, but a few stars aligned and that wasn’t the case.

Luckily for me, unlucky for him, Ryan had left the office for the opening of Immortals, and Kandi took a personal day for a casting call in some new Roland Emmerich blockbuster so Ash and I sat in my office and had Starbucks as I tried to explain to him what it was I did exactly. The conversation quickly devolved into a justification for all things fantasy before he lost interest and asked if he could play Angry Birds on my iPhone.

This, for all you scoring at home, was a turning point for me. I had one of those ‘when I was a kid’ epiphanies. I mean really, when I was a kid there were no iPhones, heck we had a corded rotary phone in my house until the phone company demanded my mother remove it a decade ago, and that phone was even on a party line if anyone remembers what that is.

Yeah, I just turned the big 4-0 a couple of months back, and as I sat looking at my little pixie-faced boy with his Bieber hair and Quicksilver surfing attire I tried to remember what I was doing when I was getting ready to turn 6.

Well, I guess I was going to Star Wars, playing with action figures, enjoying platter meals at Burger Chef, and reenacting Smokey and the Bandit with my Hotwheels. In that year, 1977, the Atari 2600 would be released, but I’m sure I didn’t see it until I was 8 or 9, and probably didn’t own one until 1980 or 81. Yep, there were no video games for the first decade of my existence, but we somehow made due with our imagination.

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Immortals Sucks. Sorry I Don’t Have a Funnier Title Than That

Immortals Sucks. Sorry I Don’t Have a Funnier Title Than That

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immortals-posterlImmortals (2011)
Directed by Tarsem Singh. Starring Henry Cavill, Stephen Dorff, Mickey Rourke, Freida Pinto, Isabel Lucas, Luke Evans, Kellan Lutz.

Relativity Media and Rogue Pictures should be thankful that they released Immortals the same week as Adam Sandler’s Jack and Jill, which has turned into the One-Stop Shopping place for hilariously negative reviews. The Adam Sandler beat-up took the attention away from Immortals’s poor reviews, and likely helped push the film to its #1 spot at the box office for the weekend. I can imagine the scene at the multiplexes:

“So, honey, what do you want to see?”

“Anything but Jack and Jill.”

“Okay, how about that thing that looks like Clash of the Titans?”

But even though watching Immortals meant that I wasn’t watching Jack and Jill and therefore helping the betterment of global society, I ain’t letting Immortals off the hook for a moment. Except to praise the wacky headgear.

In a development so startling it may upset the balance between Law and Chaos, Immortals manages to be a worse fantasy movie than the recent Conan the Barbarian. If you understand how much I loathe the Marcus Nispel Conan fiasco, you know that I do not make that statement lightly.

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Fantasy TV Update – Nov. 14

Fantasy TV Update – Nov. 14

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rumplestilskin
Robert Carlyle as Rumplestiltskin takes the place of the fairy godmother, by making a deal with Cinderella (Jessy Schram).

Miss some network fantasy over the last week? We’ve got you covered:

Once Upon a Time – “The Price of Gold”

The fairy tales diverge more and more from the traditional ones, as we learn the backstory of Cinderella. Just as her fairy godmother is about to help change her life, she is instead incinerated in a burst of flame … by Rumplestiltskin, who steals her magic wand. Cinderella, he says, is better off without magic anyway. But, of course, if she really wants to change her life, he’ll be willing to help out. For a price.

The “reality” tale is based around Ashley, a pregnant teenager who has agreed to put her child up for adoption, using Mr. Gold as the person handling the adoption. This brings up a lot of guilty baggage for Emma, in relation to her own decision to give up Henry all those years ago. …

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