I know that, as of this writing, you still cannot see the 25 screwattack-exclusive episodes of “The Game OverThinker” on ScrewAttack’s new site. I am sorry about that, it’s being worked on and will hopefully be fixed by early next week. For now… GOOD NEWS! Episode 57, the much-demanded “Supreme Court” episode, will (if all goes correctly) premiere on Wednesday, September 14th. So keep an eye out for it.

Here’s an announcement trailer…

ALSO! If you haven’t yet taken a look at ScrewAttack’s new site, you should – it’s quite excellent. They’re also offering something called an “Advantage” subcription, whereby users can sign up to not only get an ad-free version of the site but ALSO see new episodes of shows they’ve selected as well-liked faves. So, if there are any Advantage members (or prospective members) who’re also OverThinker fans… it’s REALLY good for BOTH of us (yes, this is NAKED self-promotion) if you make this show one of your “likes.”

Has Indonesia become the latest country to prove it can make better action movies than America at 1/10th the cost? Sure looks that way… (hat-tip to Devin)

Well, shit… that looks so good I don’t even care that they’re using “Music By That Linkin Park Guy” as their major Western market selling point. When does this come stateside?

Source: CBM

It’s been a pet theory of mine for awhile now that religious-outrage and fanboy-outrage are basically the same thing, psychologically, with societal-acceptance being the main difference. Taking the text of “Spider-Man” as the basis of one’s life and raging at those who don’t share your commitment? “Silly.” Taking the text of an English translation of a Latin translations of a Greek translation of a Hebrew/Aramaic translation of ancient Middle-Eastern campfire stories as the basis of one’s life and raging at those who don’t share your commitment? “Republican Presidential Candidate.”

With that in mind, I’d like to thank the proprietor of North Carolina’s “Comics Conspiracy” for making that point amusingly clear: He’s banned “Action Comics #1” – the “Superman’s first year in action” retcon-series of the “New 52” – from his store because The Man of Steel took the Lord’s Name in vain. Really.
To clear this up: The relaunched “Action” is set 5 years prior to the rest of the “new” DC Universe, and shows Superman’s early days on the job; so early he’s doing his crimefighting in blue jeans an a t-shirt, and has not fully developed his powers. Thematically, it’s writer Grant Morrison attempting to take the character back to his pre-WWII stature as a street-level social-justice crusader – a walking embodiment of the (then) new protections of The New Deal.

In the sequence that so offended this particular shopkeep, Superman is fired on by a tank and exclaims “GD!,” which he has taken as an abbreviation for “God damn!” Yeah, that’s really it.

Two things about this strike me as especially amusing:

1.) I haven’t read “Action #1” yet, but knowing Morrison’s eye for obscure character detail it actually wouldn’t surprise me if “GD!” is actually supposed to be Superman SAYING “GeeDee!” out loud as an intentional non-blasphemous curse word (see also “Gosh Darn,” “Geez!,” “Eff!,” etc) befitting the “Tom Joad with super-strength” morally-upright hayseed farmboy ‘social justice’ Superman initially was. In other words, Morrison could actually have intended the line to be IN FAVOR of this dude’s view on language.

2.) The fellow in question says he’s been in the business for 35 years – which means he’s been reading for longer than that, most likely – and that this is his “last straw” in liberal comic writers (he calls Morrison a “liberal scottish schmuck”) taking liberties with characters: “Superman would NEVER take God’s name in vain!” Uh… dude? Even putting aside that Superman isn’t real… he used to take god’s name in vain all the time: HIS god’s! People tend to forget this (it doesn’t come up much lately) but Kryptonians are actually supposed to have had their own religion based on worship of their red sun, “Rao,” and “Great Rao” was Superman’s go-to “holy shit!” proxy in the 70s. In the 80s, he flat-out confirmed that “Rao” is more-specifically the name of his God. Was this guy totally cool with Superman as a sun-worshipping pagan for the last three 40 years?

UPDATE: Grant Morrison has now publically stated that “GD” is actually just supposed to be Superman making a “grunt” sound because he just got hurt; which just makes this whole thing all the more hillarious. Morrison has a “thing” for stuff like this – when he was on “Justice League” the first time he popularized Batman constantly making a “Hh!” sound.

I reviewed it. Stop asking.

ALSO! Does Warner Bros. WANT you to think “The Dark Knight Rises” looks shitty?

Source: Crave.

No. No, he probably will not. That’s a sensationalist, nakedly traffic-baiting headline and I feel bad about it. Or, at least, I recognize I should feel bad about it. Anyway, keep reading because this is actually kind of fun…

IP rights can be a funny thing in the multimedia age. Case in point: The reason Spider-Man is NOT part of “The Avengers” movie/continuity – and that Sony is haphazardly slapping together a quickie “reboot” of the film series – is that Marvel sold the “movie rights” to his character to Sony back before they had their own studio (and then became part of Disney.) So, while Marvel still owns Spidey, SONY owns the right to put him in movies… so long as they keep making them, of course.

But Sony ONLY owns the movie rights – TV, video games etc are an entirely different set of contracts and arrangements. Did you see the “Planet Hulk” animated movie? Did you notice that during the quick shot of “The Illuminati” from the comics only two of them did any speaking and the other figures were hidden in shadow? Same issue: The ‘shadowed’ characters were guys whose movie rights (since PH was a movie) someone other than Marvel Films owned.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, Disney/Marvel have a new cartoon series on deck for their DisneyXD cable channel: An adaptation of “Ultimate Spider-Man” headed up by Paul Dini. Early images and trailers for the series have already revealed that what appeared to the be the “Ultimate” version of Nick Fury (which is, of course, also the movie-verse version) playing a role in the series… but in a (really fun) interview with CraveOnline, actor Clark Gregg – who plays the omnipresent “Agent Coulson” in the majority of the Avengers tie-ins thus far – confirms that HE has a part in the show, too… as Coulson!

According to Gregg, “Agent Coulson” appears on the show as the principal of Peter Parker’s high school… or, rather, Coulson is undercover at the school posing as the principal but actually acting as a S.H.I.E.L.D. “handler” keeping tabs on various super-powered teenagers in attendance. Heh.

Clever fanboy gag, to be sure, but is that all it’ll be? No, Marvel (probably) can’t loophole Spidey into “Avengers 2” by claiming that he’s “Ultimate” and therefore a different character; but can anyone imagine Marvel/Disney, who’ve already pushed all their chips and then some onto the shared-universe gambit, NOT dropping even more slivers of reference and/or callbacks to “Avengers” or other films and declaring this series part of the “canon?” It’d be remarkably easy to do, an IronMan/Cap/whoever walk-on here, a line about “that time Loki showed up” there, and it’d likely pay big dividends as fans of the films tune in to hunt for clues as to who (or what) else might be showing up in the future.

I think that’d be kind of cool, so long as they don’t overdo it, and I bet the younger fans it’s aimed at who may only just be getting into the movies would get a real charge out of it. I remember watching the “Ghostbusters” cartoons as a kid and getting a big kick out of every time they offhandedly mentioned Gozer.

Oh, incidentally: In the same interview, Gregg jokingly “reveals” The Skrulls as the other big-bad of “Avengers”… only to immediately walk it back and instead claim he meant The Kree. Which makes me wonder… is he a fan, or are The Kree actually in there somewhere and thats how he knows them?

As a sidebar… I really think people underappreciate just what Gregg brings to the movies. He gives a great deadpan “suit” reading of his dialogue, and I think having a guy around who A.) moves between films without needing an explanation why other than “government agents get around” and B.) always appears somewhat “level” about it – as though reaffirming that the Marvel Universe is so big and strange that even THIS mid-level field operative has seen enough to not be all that “fazed” by Viking Gods and aliens or whatever – is a major part of why this should-not-work continuity experiment is actually working.

Thinking back on it, I really wish he’d been around to liven-up some of the dryer expository scenes in “Hulk;” and the fact that we only see him break his disaffected rigidity ONCE, when he finds a Captain America shield among the junk pile in “Iron Man 2,” now feels like kind of a big ‘this is how important the legend of THAT guy is – even Coulson is impressed’ moment when you see it after having seen Cap’s movie.

Anyone looking to avoid politics and/or general bitterness should stop reading at this point.

Sarah Palin is RIGHT about “Crony Capitalism.” Well… okay, that might be going a little too far. EDIT: Whoever on Sarah Palin’s not-a-campaign staff got the memo requesting something that could be seen as a swipe at both Obama and the current GOP frontrunners, came up with “Crony Capitalism” and taught her to sound it out phonetically is RIGHT about “Crony Capitalism.”

If a given industry is directly contributing to making my water less-drinkable and my air less-breathable, it is difficult for me to care how many people it employs. I’m as sensitive to the plight of the jobless and potentially-jobless as I can be, but the fact is that, however burdensome it may be for the  good men and women of the Sludge Dumpers Local 140 to retrain in some other field, said retraining is at least largely possible. Me “retraining” my lungs to breath soot and smog? Significanly LESS than possible.

The reason so-called “conservatives” consistently have a fighting-edge over so-called “liberals” in American politics is that the emotional “default mode” of modern conservatives is HATE, while the default mode for modern liberals is FEAR. And while these are both negative emotions, hate is at least an emboldening emotion, while fear tends to produce cowardice. (This particular nugget courtesy John Lukacs)

President Obama’s fatal flaw is NOT that he is willing to compromise, but that he views “compromise” or “the middle” as GOALS in and of themselves as opposed to something you temporarily settle for on the road to wearing your enemy down.

I do not object to people and things that stand in the way of social/intellectual progress – they are, after all, only adhering to their basic nature. My objection is to the all-too-frequent unwillingness of social/intellectual progress to simply shove past them.

It is perfectly reasonable for anti-abortion crusaders to promote their agenda via the calculus that a given fetus has the potential to become the next Einstein, Ghandi or Mother Theresa… providing, of course, that they allow for the equally-valid calculus that it could just as easily be the next Hitler, Stalin or Osama bin Laden. Likewise, laws requiring women seeking abortions to view an ultrasound first should ONLY per permissable if said viewing is followed by forced-listening to an audio track of a roomful of screaming brats – you know, “both sides” and all that…

Suggesting that the world would be much better off with a significantly smaller human population and significantly-reduced human population-growth is NOT some horrible statement in support of “population control” or “Eugenics.” It doesn’t become that UNTIL you start talking about how to accomplish it by sinister and/or unethical force – prior to that, it is merely a statement of fact obvious to anyone who has to commute to work.

Given that, in retrospect, he was amenable to enivormental and social-justice causes, a supporter of a social safety-net, globally-minded and a domestic-policy pragmatist in addition to being a ruthless political street-fighter willing to grind his opponents’ bones into powder to accomplish his ends… I would gladly vote for Richard Nixon’s cyborg-retrofitted head a’la Futurama were he/it running today.

The notion that both political “sides” in America are equally “bad” is a fallacy that does nothing to help anyone. The problem with Democrats is that they spend too much money and lack mangerial fortitude. The problem with Republicans is that they want to burn down the planet to make their Invisible Friend happy – these are NOT comparable flaws.

“Evolution” versus “Intelligent Design/Creationism” is not a “difference of opinion” – it is an argument between a proven-fact and a debunked-myth.

MovieBob vs. The DC Reboot.

Also, yes, I’m aware you can hear my real accent in this. You should hear what all the “OverThinker” characters sound like before I re-tune their voices…

Don’t even start. Yes, there will be posts about political stuff in an election year. Welcome to the world. Don’t wanna read it, don’t go past the jump…

Mike Lofgren, a GOP political staffer, has ended his 30 year political career. Upon his exit, he has published a lengthy “get this off my chest” piece about what he thinks has become of his own party. Spoiler: He ain’t happy.

You should really read the whole thing. It’s long and dry, as from-the-inside political business always is, but picture he paints is stark yet altogether unsurprising: A party that’s gone from champions of practical small-government to what he calls an “apocalyptic cult” cynically willing to destroy and undermine the very bodies they serve in in order to have a “broken government” to run against, with a side-helping of unreasoning religious insanity and a blinding hatred of gays, foriengers, “intellectuals” and anyone different.

He also pulls this quote from Jon P. Judis, which seems especially insightful:

“If there is an earlier American precedent for today’s Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery.”

WARNING: I’m running this because the circumstances of it’s silliness are kind of hillarious, BUT if any of it does turn out to somehow be somewhat true it would constitute damn near the biggest “Avengers”-spoiler since the announcement that they were MAKING “Avengers” in the first place. So if you’re committed to 100% non-spoilage, you should not only NOT read the rest of this but also avoid clicking the links or even hovering over them as the headline itself would even qualify.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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ComicBookMovie.com will pretty much run any story, even high-unlikely or obviously-fake. On the up side, that means they actually average out a genuine scoop once in a blue moon. I don’t think this is one of those times, but there ya go.

Short version: A “scooper” for CBM got hold of a shooting-schedule that described scenes wherein The Avengers do battle with something called “Leviathan.” Now, that in and of itself would be potentially cool movie-gossip – “Leviathan” is the name of the Beast of The Sea in The Bible, and is frequently used as a shorthand for “Sea Monster” and/or “Giant Monster” in general, and the prospect of a Kaiju of some kind showing up to make “The Avengers” just that much geekier would be pretty awesome on it’s own.

In any case, CBM’s guess is that “Leviathan” is actually going to be a less-silly-named version of Giganto, a perennial Marvel Universe sea monster. Why didn’t just jump to Fin Fang Foom, Marvel’s most famous monster (and associate of Iron Man foe The Mandarin as a bonus) instead? Well, because he ALSO thinks this plus a bunch of background details in “Iron Man 2” equals the answer to what is either the source of Loki’s yet-unidentified army OR a surprise secondary Big Bad…

…Namor. The Sub-Mariner.

Now, to be fair, the circumstantial evidence that Marvel has Namor on it’s “to-do” list has been solid for awhile – mostly notably, Nick Fury’s big map of “hot sites” glimpsed in “Iron Man 2” had a spot circled in the middle of the ocean. Plus, he’s also pretty popular in his own right, and it’d be fun to “punk” Warners/DC out of the chance to make “Aquaman” first. CBM, however, thinks the have another piece of the puzzle: The Stark Expo in IM2 included multiple references to “Oracle,” the name of a company that Namor ran during his “I’m also a Turner-esque activist CEO” phase. Whoa. How did we all miss that?

Well, probably because the “Oracle” stuff in IM2 was actually the real-life Oracle Software, who had a tie-in product-placement deal with the film. Oops.

So… a giant monster in “The Avengers?” Maybe, would be awesome. Loki and Namor leading an Atlantean army in “The Avengers?” also awesome, but probably not going to happen – and definitely not because a real-life software company has the same name as a made-up company at one point related to a character that Marvel Studios may not currently own the movie-rights to.

Sure would be something, though…