Ultimate Avengers and Neal Adams and fungus.
So I rented the Ultimate Avengers 2 animated movie, and…well, the first one was no great shakes, but it was watchable and moderately interesting. This new installment? Just bland, bland, bland, unfortunately. All the characters from the first film are back (with the addition of the Black Panther), and there’s a lot of running around and shooting aliens and stuff, but for a movie that’s an hour and some change, it sure dragged. The scenes that are supposed to be emotionally involving aren’t (something the first film generally managed), and the characters and relationships that are genuinely interesting (like the extremely damaged Bruce Banner and his attempts to make himself relevant to Betty) you just don’t see enough of.
Special features: thankfully, there is no “text commentary” this time, considering how badly they botched it on the previous DVD. You do get brief previews of the forthcoming Iron Man and Dr. Strange direct-to-DVD cartoons, and there’s a short “blooper reel,” consisting of redubbed scenes from the first movie, that’s so embarrassingly unfunny that it has to be seen to be believed. There’s also a nearly half-hour long featurette on the making of The Ultimates comic (containing interviews with Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch) that’s fairly informative, and concludes with this telling line from Hitch:
“My kids don’t read my comics, but they’ll sit and watch this.”
Pretty much sums up the comics market as a whole, doesn’t it? Kids, for the most part, won’t read superhero comics, but they’ll watch media based on them.
I didn’t get to listen to very much of Neal Adams’ interview on Coast to Coast AM last night/this morning. I don’t know if, like last time, he started off the interview talking about the comics industry, its history, and his place in it like the last time he was on the show…I did manage to catch how, according to his theories, the real reason the dinoaurs died out was because, as the Earth expanded in size, gravity increased to the point that the larger dinosaurs were no longer able to survive in their new heavier gravity environment. I don’t know how this explains the demise of smaller dinosaurs, but still…fantastic.
Don’t worry, Greg…I don’t get the Tom’s case-book meme either! I wasn’t intending to start anything, really…I just had that gag in my head, and, as I was looking at the blank version of that panel, I thought, just on the spur of the moment, “well, let’s throw it up on the site and see if anyone else can do anything with it.”
I have a long way to go to top pal Dorian’s internet fungus, however. I’m still getting traffic from that!
