Meet the Mutants of The Gifted

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We’re mere days away from the premiere of Fox’s The Gifted series, the second live-action X-Men show to hit the airwaves after Legion and fourth overall after Generation X and Mutant X back in the ‘90s and 2000s respectively.  It’s a pretty big event, even if the show proper looks kind of far removed from the X-Men aesthetic and mythos and more grounded in the “hated and feared” narrative.  

I don’t mind them going that route- if ever there was a time for a show about government-sponsored violence and bigotry towards the marginalized it would be now.  Even so, I am intrigued by the collection of mutants they’ve cobbled together for the series an what it suggests about where things will be headed as the main heroes struggle to escape the Sentinels and find sanctuary from humanity.  With that in mind, let’s take a look at the mutants of The Gifted.

Amy Jackson cast as Saturn Girl on Supergirl

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One of the big additions to season 2 of Supergirl was Mon-El, a similarly powerful being to Kara that crash-landed on Earth from the planet Daxam, which neighbored Krypton.  Mon-El ultimately ended up eating up a bit too much of the show’s screen time for a lot of fans but his presence since left a lingering question over Supergirl: what about the Legion of Superheroes?  The Legion of Superheroes are a group of teenage superheroes from the 31^st century that were basically the X-Men before the X-Men. 

They’re a big part of the Superman mythos and their strongest has traditionally been Mon-El.  His presence on Supergirl season 2 combined with a cameo by a Legion flight ring on both The Flash and Supergirl has made it seem like CW has plans for the Legion at some point down the line.  Now, an additional piece has fallen into place with the revelation Saturn Girl will be joining the cast of Supergirl season 3, played by Amy Jackson. 

Static Thoughts - Cop Rock

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Today marks the return of Brooklyn 99, probably the last show we’re going to get for a long while that tries to be a cop comedy.  All things considered, Brooklyn 99 is a lot better than you’d probably expect from a show trying to sell the audience on a group of goofy, fun-loving cops but I really don’t think anyone else would be able to pull off what it does.  The bottom line is that in an age of seemingly endless and incredibly public police atrocities getting an audience to find police work “funny” has gone from entertainment bread and butter to a herculean task. 

Seriously though, cop comedy used to be a major moneymaking genre with massive franchises like Police Academy and Beverly Hills Cop.  The whole thing was so big through the ‘80s that things started to get pretty weird in the ‘90s to try and find new avenues for it.  In particular, 1989-1992 was a great time for just completely bonkers cop comedy genre fusion and as exhibit A in that case, I would present Cop Rock, the musical cop show. 

CW Announces Crisis on Earth-X Crossover

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I don’t think we really appreciate how genuinely good the CWniverse has actually turned out to be.  For a collection of series dramas with wildly variant budgets cooked up by the network that gave us One Tree Hill and 90210, the CWniverse is a staggeringly excellent achievement that I think will be looked back on the same way we remember Adam West’s Batman or Linda Carter’s Wonder Woman.  

It’s a great collection of adaptation that really understands that it’s the characterization and drama that have made superheroes so compelling for 80 years and counting, so it’s only fitting that they would do a wedding episode. 

Yes, this year’s crossover event between The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, and Arrow has been revealed as a wedding story about the marriage of Barry Allen and Iris West, the central romance on The Flash.  However, in the grand tradition of comic book weddings, this particular matrimony is to be interrupted by unwelcome visitors from the multiverse/CW Seed in the form of the Ray.  

Making his jump from animation to live action the Ray, CW’s first gay character, is set to appear in the wedding episode, hotly pursued by villain’s from Earth-X, a world where the Nazis won WW2 and Supergirl, Flash, and Green Arrow are all Nazi Supermen.  Let’s talk Crisis on Earth-X.

James Cameron's Terminator 6 Update

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By now you’ve probably heard that James Cameron is returning to the Terminator franchise for yet another installment of this moribund film series.  If you’re wondering how that happened after Terminator Genisys was both terrible and a financial disappointment the answer is the rest of the world.  While the film only made back half its budget in the US it took in 350 million dollars overseas, largely from China, so more Terminator films were pretty much locked in.  However, it’s come up now that this new film, which is being pitched as a reunion flick for Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, and James Cameron, won’t have anything to do with Terminator Genisys. 

That’s because even though ticket sales are important they aren’t the ultimate qualifier of the franchise age- that would be audience interest.  The way online engagement in fictional universe translates into coverage and speculation as a kind of free publicity and hype is what now drives the box office world, that’s why Marvel is still king, and Genisys did not manage to win anyone’s hearts or minds.  So, with the slate wiped clean and the franchise beginning again for its third attempt at a new trilogy what can we expect from the new Terminator? 

Static Thoughts - Beauty and the Beast (2012)

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Back in March, I took a look back at the 1987 Beauty and the Beast live action TV show.  If you need a refresher on that I said that it had some charming elements but was ultimately too much of a product of its time.  At the end of that article, I mentioned that there was a reboot of the show in 2012.  Well, now seems about the right time to tackle that particular piece of bizarre TV ephemera, especially given it’s the anniversary of the release of the animated Beauty and the Beast adaptation. 

However, the show itself has left me a little stymied.  It’s not exactly a bad series it’s just not interesting enough on its own to actually discuss so this will be less of a review than the previous article.  Instead, think of this as a retrospective as I think the way Beauty and the Beast (2012) actually happened is way more interesting than the show itself.  It’s a strange one-shot of a series that embodies the last moment in time when its various trends could come together in this way. 

Cover Story - Top 12 Star Trek: The Next Generation Covers

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And so we come to year two of the Star Trek celebration.  If you haven’t been following along, 2016 was the 50^th anniversary of Star Trek’s first airing, an event I celebrate with a whole bunch of articles.  2017 marks both the 30^th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation as well as the premiere of the all-new ongoing series Star Trek: Discovery.   

As both of those events are in the upcoming week I’ve elected to honor them the only way I know how: a deep dive into cover art.  I already dedicated a whole Cover Story to Star Trek covers last year but the great thing about Star Trek is they keep giving you options so while last year I looked at Original Series related covers this year will be Next Generation related covers.  Presumably, come 2021 we’ll mark Enterprise’s anniversary the same way- assuming we make it that far.  And on that oh so cheerful note let’s dive into the top 12 Next Generation comic covers.

Netflix' Punisher Gets Full Trailer

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I don’t think it’d be unfair to say that it’s been a difficult year for Marvel Netflix.  First, there was the costly disaster of Iron Fist, then the shocking news that Marvel would be relocating its streaming rights to a Disney-centric new platform, and finally the very disappointing Defenders, which no one really tuned in for.  A lot has gone wrong or Marvel’s streaming service division, continuing the theme of Marvel having a lot of trouble finding lasting success outside the cinematic arena.  However, the year isn’t fully over yet and the house of ideas has one last release up their sleeves- The Punisher. 

Introduced to the MCU in 2016’s mixed bag of Daredevil season 2, Jon Bernthal’s Punisher is one of the real standouts of Marvel’s Netflix foray alongside season 1’s Kingpin and Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones.  He pretty much single-handedly made Daredevil season 2 worth watching so his solo series has been long in the anticipation, especially given the cult status afforded to Frank Castle’s previous adaptation Punisher: Warzone.  Now, we finally have our first real look at the upcoming series and boy does it leave one wanting. 

Tomb Raider Trailer Breakdown

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I think it’s fair to say video game movies are at a crossroads.  Video game films have had a weird, long, unrewarding history despite coming from a medium that’s in its relative infancy.  After making a big splash in the ‘90s with the likes of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter the genre was more or less banished to the realm of direct-to-DVD for the majority of the 2000s and even the early 2010s.  Basically, we spent the decade in which games became a snowballing phenomenon slogging through flicks like Blood Rayne, DOOM, and Hit Man. 

Lately, though, the video game film has come cautiously crawling back to the mainstream blockbuster scene, most pertinently with last years Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed films.  Neither of those were a big successes stateside but the ongoing Hollywood scramble for viable IP and the growing global market seems to have translated to renewed interest in this moribund genre, with a new standard bearer emerging for this new age of video games and women-oriented genre flicks- Tomb Raider, now finally coronated with a shiny new trailer for next year’s film. 

Jamie Lee Curtis Joins the Cast of Halloween (2018)

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One of the curious trends of the 2010s has been the stealth “return” of horror as a dominant force in cinema.  I use air quotes there because horror, as a genre, has never really gone away as it’s fundamental to storytelling as a craft, same as drama or romance.  However, horror has undeniably changed in how it’s perceived and how its made in the 2010s versus previous genres.  

There are a lot of factors to this like the rise of indie art-house horror hits like Babadook, It Follows, and The Witch as well as the return of summer horror blockbusters like The Conjuring and Purge franchises.  The biggest changeup, though, is in the spread of horror influences and how we’re making new films. 

Despite the 2010s as an age of franchises and cinematic universes horror has doggedly rejected those trends, settling more into a ton of very individualistic and different films between one or two actual franchises.  There’s not a lot of common ground between stuff like Lights Out, IT, You’re Next, and Krampus but they were all sizeable horror hits.  

Even among the heavily sequalized horror series like Insidious, they don’t have the same spread and impact as predecessors like Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, or Saw.  Now, in the waning days of the 2010s, that seems like it might be on the road to change with the coming of Danny McBride’s Halloween reboot, which will see the return of series star Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode.