by Robin Reed
…so I don’t have to be the entire crew any more.
When I was a shuttle bus driver on the graveyard shift at a parking garage near LAX, one of the valet parkers was a tall, goofy guy who liked to run around making monkey noises.
Author: Rreed423
Robin Reed is a writer and cartoonist. She has been published in a number of publications and has novels and short stories online at every possible ebook site.
Robin Reed: “A Good Storm”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Using her secret identity of “Robin Morris,” TVWriter™’s Robin Reed came in 2nd in the recent KillerCon 5 Flash Fiction Contest. Not that we’re biased or anything, but it should’ve been first.
Oh, yeah, it’s a horror story contest.
See for yourselves:
Robin Reed: The Disney/Marvel Shows You Don’t Know About
by Robin Reed
While the Marvel movies and the upcoming “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” show get the headlines, if you flip channels enough you will find that Disney has not wasted any opportunity to get a return on their investment in Marvel. These under-the-radar shows are animated and appear on Disney-owned cable channels. I knew about (and hate, for the cutesy comments by a cartoony Spidey) “Ultimate Spider-Man.”
I have also come across shows that are set in Japan and seem to be sub-contracted out to a Japanese animé studio. One featured Iron Man and another the X-Men. (I don’t know if Disney can use the X-Men in animation when another studio owns the movie rights. What the corporate relationships are behind the Japanese shows I couldn’t tell you.)
Yesterday, on an early Sunday morning cruise through the desolate wastes of cable TV, I stopped on a show I hadn’t seen before. “Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H.” is the title. It has a fully talking and thinking Hulk teaming up with other iterations of himself, including Red Hulk, She-Hulk, and A-Bomb. A-Bomb, you say? It’s Rick Jones in blue armor. If you don’t know who Rick Jones is, I don’t have time to tell you.
Robin Reed Reviews BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: BLOOD & CHROME
by Robin Reed
I was glad to see that the new Battlestar Galactica movie, based during the first Cylon war and starring the young and enthusiastic Bill Adama, later to be the older and wearier Admiral Adama of the other SyFy series, was not a jingoistic rah rah war movie. It was more in the tradition of Vietnam War movies in which the reasons for the war are unclear and the motives of the leaders who order young people into battle are murky.
And yet, this movie is a jingoistic rah rah war movie, because as someone said, you can’t make an anti-war movie. War is exciting, and addicting. It is more interesting than getting a job and having a family. For many people, once they have experienced it, they want to go back to it. You can call it meaningless and question why it happens all you want, but just showing it is attractive to many people.
This movie takes place after the Cylons, robots created as warriors, then used as servants, have rebelled against the humans of the Colonies. (Ask colonies from where, and you get into the never-explained backstory of the original 1980’s Battlestar Galactica. They seem to be colonies from Earth, but when did they leave Earth? In the original show, the viper pilots had helmets that looked Egyptian. Did ancient Egypt have space flight? The show never said. Oh, and the Cylons were an alien race in the original show, they weren’t created by the colonies.)
Robin Reed: American Borer Story – zzzzz
I finally caught up with “American Horror Story” season one via Netflix. I heard a lot of good things about it, and the ads made it look like it was a new kind of horror story, something innovative and original. As a horror buff, I keep hoping that movies and TV will break out of the old and hackneyed ideas that are endlessly repeated.
Unfortunately, AHS starts with the oldest and most hackneyed idea of all. A family buys an old mansion for a lot less than market value because a murder occurred there. Do they do any research about what actually happened? No, they blindly get themselves into a mortgage without even looking the house up on the internet or going to the library and looking at old newspaper stories. They buy a house that is so notorious that it is a stop on a bus tour of murder sites in L.A. and everyone calls it the “Murder House.” The place probably has a Wickipedia entry. How hard would it be to find out that the murder the realtor told them about is just one of many?