Gotta get back in time

I don't know about you, but for me the shows I watched in my childhood are still among my favorites. Sure some of them don't stand up to the memories I have about them, but they just have a certain charm that I can't escape. Some of them are shows that most of you probably know but some were only around for a single season and still managed to get a place in my all time favorite collection.

The first an probably the most famous is the 1982 series Knight Rider. The police officer Michael Long is critically wounded by a gunshot wound to the face while investigating a criminal organization. After extensive surgery he wakes up in the hospital with a reconstructed face, not recognizing himself. He is approached by a special foundation, the Knight Industries under the supervision of Wilton Knight, to help them infiltrate the crime syndicate that wounded him in the first place. They provide him with a special car the Knight Industries Two Thousand (K.I.T.T.), fitted with bullet proof alloy and artificial intelligence, to help him with his crime fighting work. After Wilton Knight's death, Michael adopts his last name and becomes part of the Knight foundation. Together with his liaison Devon Miles and the technician Bonny Barstow he fights for good and for the protection of the innocent. The show ran for 4 seasons with a total of 90 episodes and established David Hasselhoff's career. NBC has recently filmed a remake pilot of Knight Rider and the show that has been picked up for the upcoming fall schedule.

"Knight Rider, a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Michael Knight, a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law."

I'm sure you remember these 4 maniacs all too well: The A-team. Four Vietnam vets, found guilty of a crime they didn't commit, establish themselves as soldiers of fortune known as the A-team. They are for hire and try to help the helpless anyway they can. Col. John "Hannibal" Smith was the leader of the group, the brain of the organization and an expert at disguise. Lt. Templeton "Faceman" Peck was the ladies man and the con artist, while Sgt. Bosco "B.A." Baracus was the muscle and a genius mechanic. The final member of the team was Capt. H.M. "Howling Mad" Murdock, the pilot and loony of the group; before they could accept a job they usually had to break him out of the mental hospital. The team was constantly on the run, pursued first by Col. Lynch and later by Col. Decker. Apparently the movie rights to the film have been bought and there is a new version of the A-team planned for the big screen in 2009.

"If you have a problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire, the A-Team."

Over the next few days I will add several posts on this topic so stay tuned if you want to go back in time with me.

Don't go berserk now!

Last week I told you about a few comics that are based on popular tv shows. This week I chose a manga, actually my favorite manga Kentaro Miura’s Berserk, to give you a small introduction into this Japanese art form. In Japan the manga has a much higher significance than comics have in our culture. They are read by every age and social group and are extremely popular. A broad range of topics are covered reigning from action to comic to romance and many more. Thus it does not have the “nerdy” image that western comic books have and plays a big role in Japanese culture.

Berserk tells the story of the fighter Guts, who as a baby is found by a mercenary gang, brought up by them and trained in the art of the sword. The mercenary group is however not composed by the most moral beings and Guts is treated like a slave and at the age of 9 he is even molested by his godfather. Ultimately he kills the leader of the gang in an attempt to defend himself and has to leave them. He travels from battle to battle. His fighting is so impressive that he is noticed by Griffith, the leader of the Hawks (a very strong mercenary group), and after a confrontation with him, Guts is proposed to join them. Here he finds friends for the first time in his life and faces atrocious battles and incredible evil with them. Later on the world seems to go crazy and everything that Guts believes in falls apart. His love interest for Casca (one of the female mercenaries) and his close friendship to Griffith clash and end in a “monstrous” tragedy.

I don’t want to spoil the read by telling you what exactly happened between Guts and Griffith. In 1997, the studio Oriental Light and Magic released a 25 episode anime of the series, which roughly covers the first 13 books. As of November 2007, 32 volumes of the manga have been released.

For those of you who have been intrigued, let me just put up a small warning sign: Berserk is not for the faint of heart. The Manga and the Anime are both graphically explicit and contain extreme violence, gore and sexual material. Still the storyline of the series is by far one of the best I have ever read.

The images used in this post are all courtesy of Berserk Chronicles

Web comics

As you might have realized up to this point I am into all kinds of geeky stuff and as such I'm also a comic fan. Most of you probably know Superman, Batman, Spider-man and the rest of the DC - Marvel universe. Nowadays comics are not exclusively released in traditional comic books anymore but you can read a lot of them on the internet by now.
Of course you have your traditional web-comics like Penny Arcade, HijiNKS ENSUE, Ctral+Alt+Del or Reallife comics but in the last few years a lot of Tv shows started to publish tie-ins on the web.

The popular scifi-drama Heroes is publishing small web-comics to show you different perspectives of their show. It is also used to keep the fans interested during the summer break. The stories are intense and the artwork is also exceptional and have been such a success that they are now released as paperback comic books.

All of Joss Whedon's shows (Buffy the vampire slayer, Angel and Firefly) are currently continued in comic book form. Buffy's season 8 has already developed over several magazines and it's a great way for the fans to find out what happened to the gang from Sunnydale after the impressive series finale in 2003.

The popular CW show Supernatural has also released several comic books that tell the story of the two protagonists' childhood.

Webcomic list

Just plain weird

Here is a video that I really liked and as with most things that I like, I want to share it with you. Enjoy:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

And something else you might enjoy:

And don't forget to read all about last weekends festival event over on MFG reviews!

The Moral Choice

I have played many games on almost any possible medium since my early youth and as a gamer, you are constantly confronted with people talking about “the next best thing”. Most of the time however these hypes don’t come through and you end up with a mediocre game and a foul aftertaste of wishing you had spend your money on something else. It is therefore even better, when once in a while a game comes along that not only lives up to the hype but manages to surpass every expectation. One of these games is the new GTA IV. Every blogger who has only the faintest interest in gaming is writing about the new Grand Theft Auto game by the developers Rockstar and so I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and talk a bit about my recent source of sleep deprivation.

What makes GTA IV so different from its predecessors is not that it redefines gaming in any way. It does not include any extreme game play changes, nor does it change the way the story progresses. It still is and feels like a part of the previous installments. You have to pass missions for different NPC characters to advance in the story and gain money, power and become infamous amongst the different gangs and law enforcement agencies. The difference with GTA IV lies in the details and this is where the game really shines. You don’t feel like you drive through a computer generated city anymore with polygon characters that just populate the sidewalks, but you feel like you are in a real breathing metropolis. The pedestrians have conversations, talk on their sidewalks, look at shop windows, react to abrupt weather changes, scream for help when an accident occurs and react in a genuinely realistic way to foreign influences. If a murder occurs on these streets the other pedestrians won’t walk idly by as if nothing had happened, but they will react with horror and fear.

Rockstar improved almost every negative point of the previous game series. They have included a virtual cell phone that lets you plan activities with the friendly NPCs, you can take a cab to any location in town (which saves an enormous amount of time), and the radio stations don’t feel as unreal anymore due to the frequent news broadcasts that are introduced into the shows to talk about the recent happenings in Liberty City. Animation details like the way you break into cars, reload weapons and jump over fences are big plus sides of the game. The aiming system has also drastically improved and the characters new ability to take cover behind pillars and boxes makes it easier to survive in this world of crime and corruption. Which takes me to my next point: in-game violence.

Due to the realistic animations and lives of the population of L.C. you feel genuinely inclined to not harm any of them. They are for the first time really innocent bystanders and your conscience will prevent you from plowing through a populated sidewalk with your car. Furthermore the protagonist of GTA IV is not a cold hearted criminal anymore without any remorse or ideals. Nico Bellic does not come to America to live a life of crime, but to escape a violent past of war and poverty. The game also gives you the opportunity to spare the people that cross you and therein lays the key to a more likeable hero. Nico is not a dumb criminal anymore who does everything to gain power, he does what he has to, to help his family and to find the people who destroyed his life back home. The story telling fits in with movies like The Goodfellas or The Godfather and could also be compared to shows like The Sopranos or Rescue Me. The game includes strong language and violence and is therefore not available to minors and the responsibility lies with us adults to keep it that way. So if your teenage kid at home cries about how much they want to play this game, don’t give in. It really is not the right kind of entertainment for them!

IGN.com Review

Edward Albee

This newest blog entry is comprised of the introduction of my last term paper on Edward Albee, a contemporary American playwright. I enjoyed the work on this paper because I like Albee's plays and have a deep respect for his person and work. If you have never read (or even better) seen any of his plays, you should keep your eyes open for performances near you.

Edward Albee is probably one of the most controversial, misunderstood and underestimated playwrights of the twentieth century. He landed enormous hits with his works Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The American Dream but a lot of his later plays have not re-established this early success, which is not to say that he is not a highly decorated writer. In 1967, Albee received his first Pulitzer Price for A Delicate Balance, and eight years later his second for Seascape. It took him nearly twenty years to receive another Pulitzer Price for Three Tall Women in 1994. Furthermore the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters awarded him with the Gold Medal in Drama in 1980 and in 1996 he received the Kennedy Center Honors as well as the National Medal of Arts. In 2005 Albee received one of the biggest honors in show business, the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.[1]

Already at a very young age Albee had an unusually high interest in writing and tried himself in different genres like poetry and prose fiction with nearly no success. Thornton Wilder, the American playwright and novelist, was a close friend of the Albee family at the time and suggested early on to Edward to become a playwright. Albee remembers: “He’d read my poetry and tell me to be a playwright, to save poetry from me.”[2] For the first thirty years of his life his writing was fruitless until he decided one day, in dire need of money, to write a drama. After several weeks of hard work Albee emerged from his apartment with The Zoo Story, his first play to have a major impact on his career as a writer. The playwright commented this event himself by saying that “something very, very interesting happened with the writing of that play. I didn’t discover suddenly that I was a playwright; I discovered that I had been a playwright all my life, but didn’t know it because I hadn’t written plays... And so when I wrote The Zoo Story, I was able to start practicing my ‘nature’ fully.”[3] As an infant, having been abandoned at birth, Albee was adopted by the millionaires Reed and Frances Albee of Larchmont, New York, a family with theatrical background. He was often surrounded by writers and other people from show business making him familiar with the theatre at an early age. Albee’s youth can best be described as “troubled”. He got expelled from multiple preparatory schools and then graduated from Chaote, a prep school in Connecticut, where his first literary works – short stories, poems and a play – were published in the Chaote Literary Magazine. Even though he later attended a college, he never graduated. Between 1948 and 1958 Albee worked a lot of different jobs which left him unsatisfied and without a career. Albee then once again took up writing by borrowing some paper from a Western Union office where he worked and finally came up with The Zoo Story. “Three weeks later, some fifty sheets of yellow paper had become a play, and I had become a playwright.”[4] Up to today he has written 31 plays.

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[1] The Edward F. Albee Foundation: http://www.albeefoundation.org/Welcome.html

[2] Edward Albee: A Casebook. p.141

[3] Understanding Edward Albee. p.4

[4] Understanding Edward Albee. p.5-6