1st Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Set Photos Debut

Edited by Robert Beach 

The importance of the Harry Potter franchise to the modern age of fantasy, blockbuster, and cinematic landscape cannot be overstated. This franchise is a pop culture phenomena second to none; a tremendously popular book series that was translated in something close to its entirety to the big screen in a radical cinematic experiment of letting the actors age through the films over the course of an entire decade.  

Modern pop culture, geek and nerd pop culture specifically, just doesn’t make sense without Harry Potter. Especially for Warner Brothers, the company that spent nearly 10 years dominating the entire fantasy genre thanks to the double barrel blast that was the Potter films and the Lord of the Rings movies. And now, with the fantasy power vacuum still unaddressed since the recession of Game of Thrones’ influence over the medium, and the Hobbit films having run their disappointing course, WB is returning to the Harry Potter well one more time for a prequel series all their own entitled Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and we’ve just received the first set photos.

New Doctor Who Spin-Off Announced

Doctor Who is an incredibly long running and very popular British sci-fi TV show.  It started in the ‘60s, running more or less consecutively till the late ‘80s when the show went on a decade long permanent hiatus.  There was a brief attempt to revive the series in the ‘90s that failed very hard.  Then, in 2005 the show returned to British television to massive success and, more recently, the show has found a major following in American audiences as the perfect confluence of 21^st centuries trends of globalism and increasing nerd culture dominance.  In that 50 year history Doctor Who has produced a number of spin-off materials, some of which I’ve already talked about at length.  Now, it’s been announced that a new spin-off is coming in 2016 called Class.

Movie Monthly - Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D.

And so we come to the end of another Movie Monthly, this month a bit more sparse and transitional than I might’ve hoped it’d be.  Next month things will ideally run a bit more smoothly but at the very least I can say I achieved my central goal of this month by getting to today’s film.  At the start of September in Time and Space I said the reason I chose time travel for this month was to celebrate the return of Doctor Who to television, today I celebrate Doctor Who’s rich film history with Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D., a film so nice they named it thrice.  Also yes, you read that sentence correctly; this is a Doctor Who feature length film, one of two produced by a major American studio in the mid ‘60s.  How?  Why?  Is it any good? Let’s dive in. 

Static Thoughts - Doctor Who Ranking

Edited by Robert Beach 

It’s Doctor Who time again with the show returning for its 9^th season under the new series banner.  This will be the second outing for 12^th Doctor Peter Capaldi and the final season for companion Jenna Coleman. At the time of writing, I haven’t watched the premiere, but all noises are pretty good, so I guess we’ll see.

Last season was intermittently decent, so I’m moderately hopeful about this latest season of England’s longest running show. So to mark the occasion, I came up with my list of the best Doctors, because this is the Internet and list making is what we do.  Here we go, every actor to have played the Doctor ranked from top to bottom.