The dates for the U.S. home video release of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness have been announced. It comes earlier than expected. Paramount is also trying something other studios have been toying with in the last year or so by offering an earlier release date of August 20, 2013 for the digital download version, compared to the physical disc releases that come a few weeks later on September 10 , 2013.

Awesome! I will, of course, be downloading this via iTunes the instant this becomes available! And I love that they are doing the digital release first.

Also, here’s a clip from Yahoo!…

Another appetite wheter has made an appearance for Agents of SHIELD, and let me tell you, it’s very “Joss Whedon-y”. Consider this bit of dialog from the promo (embeded below):

“What does SHIELD” stand for Agent Ward?”

“Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division.”

“And what does that mean to you?”

“It means someone really wanted our intials to spell out SHIELD.”

That is Joss Whedon dialog if I’ve ever heard it, and that makes me very happy. Many people may not quite get the whole Buffy and Angel phenomenon, but that type of writing is why we loved those…

I have a confession to make: I am not a fan of the original Wizard of Oz. You know, the beloved classic featuring Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Billie Burke, and Margaret Hamilton. Additionally, I do not like 3D films. So I approach this trailer with a sort of “so what?” attitude.

But even so, I found myself wanting to see the film again — oh, not in 3D, but I realized it has been many, MANY years since I have seen this film. I grew up watching it, it’s part of my childhood. So even though I don’t care for it, I may have to watch it again. The trailer…

If there’s one upcoming show I’m excited for, it’s Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. Since Fringe ended, my life has had no meaning. I wander around listlessly muttering questions like, “Why did it end? What is my life about? Is anything worth it? Does it all make sense?”

Well okay, maybe not, but I’ve just had a hard time finding anything to really replace it. I’ve tried to get into Revolution, and it’s okay, but not the same. Here though, I have hope. I’ve enjoyed most things that Joss Whedon has done, and he’ll be involved to some extent, the show is set in his Marvel playground, and he…

It’s hard to imagine or remember a time when Boba Fett was not in the public consciousness, but this black and white video will help remind us. This video from 1978 is hosted by sound designer Ben Burtt, and it is basically a walkthrough of the character for the first time onscreen.

Boba Fett apparently made his first appearance in the Star Wars Holiday Special. I have never seen it, but apparently it is universally reviled. I just watched a few minutes of what I could find of it on YouTube and I can see why, it’s terrible (no really!). But apparently that was the world’s introduction to…

I’m finally getting the idea that Pacific Rim might be about people and not machines crashing it out. So much of the marketing material, trailers, promos and the like were geared toward big machines and mighty monsters crashing around, and there was no discernable evidence of a plot. More recently, the marketing has been shifting to focus on people and that makes me much happier. I didn’t want another mindless Transformers robot thing with different trappings.

Don’t get me wrong, the large scope, the machines, the crashing around is all still present, but that added human element to the…

I’m telling you, I need to scrape some money together and start buying these Blu-rays. Star Trek: The Next Generation is one of my favorite TV shows ever, and the remastered HD episodes I have seen thus far are incredible.

Season 5 is also a really good season of the show. Season 3 really set the show on the right course after the lackluster seasons 1 and 2, and had some of the show’s best episodes. And it’s not that season 4 was bad, but season 5 really brought us another round of really great episodes just like season 3 did. My favorites from season 5 are:

• Redemption, Pt 2…

In the discussion we talked about working around the constructs of the Frank Miller/Chris Claremont Wolverine story, the original movies, his trepidations about the project, how the superhero audience is changing, how Christopher Nolan’s approached influenced him, if he had to hand off to Days of Future Past, developing the bullet train sequence, marketing in the Internet age, meeting Mark Millar, the work of Darren Aronofsky and Christopher McQuarrie and more.

If you’re looking forward to The Wolverine, this interview is packed with insight and information. It’s a great long…

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I may have not liked the film as much as I wanted to, but one thing I really did like about the film is the visual style. Well it looks like a lot more blue and green screens were involved in achieving that visual style than I had even thought. I mean this video is just astounding. It reveals so much of the what we thought were real locations in the film were not at all.

I know I like to rag on films for employing too much CGI, and sometimes I lament the demise of Celluloid film. But let me assure you that this is the sort of thing I love. We really are living in a great time period for…