Here it is folks! The final theatrical trailer for Tron: Legacy before its release on December 17th!

Uwe Boll has brought us a lot of shit in his day. A lot. But all of his past work may pale in comparison to this “comedy” he is about to unleash on the world.

There’s not release date for this, and frankly, I couldn’t possibly care less. But in a few months, on some obscure friday, if you feel a cold chill run up your spine followed by a dark feeling in the pit of your stomach telling you something terrible has just happened – you’ll know Blubberella has hit a theater near you . . .

Synopsis: Uwe Boll wipes his ass with a roll of film and somehow gets it screened nation-wide.

There are a lot of big releases today, but no bigger than Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. With a Blu-ray, a DVD, and a digital copy (and a free bonus downloadable movie of your choice), there is really no excuse to not buy this. This is one of the best films of the year, hands down. Edgar Wright and his cast nailed the feel and look of the comic book and told a comic-book movie story in the style of a video game the likes of which the world has never seen. On Blu-ray, the sharp colors and fast action pop in a way I haven’t really seen in a Blu-ray. And I found myself watching this over and over and over again, both with and without my kids. This is one of their favorite movies now, too.

It’s infectious and much be watched repeatedly. This is honestly one of those discs, like Star Wars, where I’ll probably own multiple copies because I’ll have worn previous copies out.

This release collects a host of bonus features in addition to the multi-format copies, making it a must buy this week.

(You can read my full review of the film here. And check back tomorrow for interviews with Edgar Wright and Kieran Culkin)

Next on the list is Season Five of Doctor Who. This is Matt Smith’s inaugural season as the Doctor and I couldn’t be more excited to get to it. I’m a recent convert to Dr. Who and am this close to being caught up and this DVD set is going to get me there just in time for the Christmas episode next season.

If you haven’t jumped on the Doctor Who train, trust me, it’s not too late. Start with the first series from 2005 and you’ll be hooked.

DC Animation brings us their newest short this week, Superman/Shazam: The Return of Black Adam. Packaged on a Blu-ray with all the other shorts they’ve included on other releases (The Spectre, Jonah Hex, and Green Arrow) and four handpicked episodes of various DCU shows by Bruce Timm makes this disc a steal at less than $20. Androidika should have a full review soon.

Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fans have reason to rejoice with the release of another box set of films. This one includes Ed Wood’s classic “Bride of the Monster” whose financing was chronicled in Tim Burton’s best film (Ed Wood). They’re just as funny as you remember and this set comes with an action figure.

For all of you cinephiles out there, Cary Grant’s Arsenic and Old Lace is being rereleased today as well. There are few finer examples of comedy film ever made and I suggest you pick it up.

The Sean Connery/Michael Caine adventure classic The Man Who Would Be King is being re-released again today as well. This is welcome news since my originally DVD is double sided. Much like a laserdisc, you have to flip it mid-film. It’s not even that long of a movie. It is incredible, though, and any fan of adventure films, Sean Connery, or Michael Caine should pick up this John Huston classic.

The last movie on the list today is the Blu-ray release of the original (superior) Ocean’s 11, starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and the rest of the Rat Pack. This is a great film and works a lot better than the Soderbergh remake. It’s well worth picking up.

If there is one thing DC has been nearly flawless in lately, it would be their animated movies. And Superman/Shazam: The Return of Black Adam is no exception. It is based very loosely off of 2005’s Superman/Shazam: First Thunder mini series by Judd Winick and Josh Middleton. I say loosely in that while it does show the origin of Captain Marvel and the first time he meets Superman, the villains are completely different. In the comic we get Dr Sivana, Eclipso, and an evil cult. Here in the DVD we get Black Adam, who is possibly the best known Captain Marvel villain.

The animation in this movie is gorgeous! It is very close to the style of Josh Middleton, who penciled the mini series this was based off of. It has kind of an anime type feel to it, but not completely anime.

The story follows Billy Batson, a poor kid living on his own in Fawcett City. He meets up with Clark Kent who is doing a story on Billy’s situation. During their meeting Black Adam attacks because Billy has been marked to be the Wizard Shazam’s champion. And after that the movie is one long and awesome fight, which sees Billy get his powers and become Captain Marvel.

The voice acting was pretty good in this short. We get George Newburn returning as Superman. He had previously voiced Superman on the Justice League animated Series. We also get Jerry O’ Connell as Captain Marvel, Arnold Vosloo as Black Adam, James Garner as the Wizard Shazam, and Zach Callison as Billy Batson. I thought all of the voices were spot on.

Now you may be wondering why you should pick this up if its only a short. Well this disc also includes three other shorts that have previously been released with other DC animated movies, but the versions on this disc are extended versions. Included on this disc are the Jonah Hex, Spectre, and Green Arrow shorts. And for those of you that enjoy blu ray, if you get it in that format you will also get extra episodes from past DC animated series featuring the characters from the shorts.

Overall I really enjoyed this and would recommend trying it out!

It hits the streets tomorrow. You can order it from Amazon now!

Lost in all the bits about the possibilities of Sally Field and Martin Sheen being cast as Aunt May and Uncle Ben in Marc Webb’s Spider-Man reboot was this little nugget of rumor/information from The Wrap:

Meanwhile, an individual familiar with the project has told TheWrap that Mary Jane Watson will not appear in the film after all, as the character is not currently featured in James Vanderbilt’s screenplay, and apparently never was.

Back in September, Deal Central reported that Mary Jane would appear in the new “Spider-Man,” as the script featured two love interests competing for the affections Peter Parker. However, that wasn’t quite true.

Evidently, there had been some discussions about Emma Stone playing red-haired MJ, but once she was cast as Gwen Stacy, the filmmakers decided to trust their instincts and stick with one love interest.

Personally, I would love for them to just stick to the Gwen Stacy/Peter Parker romance for this first film. I’m not sure if they have plans to kill her off in future movies, but I always thought her death was just as big of an impact in forming Peter’s life as Uncle Ben’s. To build this up appropriately, I would really like to see them spend a whole movie and a half or so building up their relationship before even introducing Mary Jane. No matter their plans with her, I’m glad we finally have a film focusing on a different love interest for Peter and I hope they do the character justice with Emma Stone.

This one is a request from BigShinyRobot’s own Swank-mo-tron! Before the likes of Thunderstrike and the like got to wield the power of Thor like it was the flavor of the month, no one was deemed worthy enough to harness the power of mighty Mjolnir! That is until the great Walt Simonson introduced us to today’s featured character, so may I present the Secret Origin of Beta Ray Bill!

Bill’s story is so intertwined with Thor himself, that’s where we start our tale. Thor has been tasked by Nick Fury to investigate an object in space that tore through a S.H.I.E.L.D. probe and seemingly destroyed a star to refuel. (No asparagus people were harmed as far as I know.) Thor catches up with the ship, only to have it outpace him. Thor, being all godlike will have none of it and pours on the speed in pursuit. The ship identifies Thor as similar to the demon breed (we’ll find out what this means later). It opens fire on Thor, and this kind of ticks the God of Thunder off, so he flings his hammer at the ship and then casually tears open the hull like it’s paper.

"Mighty Thor has clipped toenails from a Frost Giant mightier than yon spaceship hold!"

Thor makes his way inside the ship and finds a room with a giant crystal chamber. Before he can really investigate, a klaxon within the ship sounds beckoning the ship’s ultimate defense mechanism. Thor gets a bit too close to the crystal, and his a mighty three-pronged hand crashes through the crystalline chamber and engulfs Thor’s thick Norse head! The battle rages and the shrouded figure is tossing Thor around like a rag doll. Thor wonders to himself who could possibly do this and we get one of the most badass character introductions ever.

A face only Sarah Jessica Parker could love.

Thor now has his bearings and the fight rages on. Bill is fighting because he thinks Thor is a demon, and Thor is fighting because he’s not keen on people just up and attacking him. The battle rages on and it seems the two combatants are pretty evenly matched, which is pretty impressive when you consider for all we know, Bill is simply mortal. During the course of the brawl, Thor is separated from Mjolnir and reverts back to Donald Blake at a pretty inopportune kind and Bill kicks him out with one punch. Meanwhile, Skuttlebutt (that’s Bill’s ship, by the way) is making a crash landing on Earth. Thor did a good amount of damage, after all. Nick Fury is on the scene and since for all anyone knows at this point, Bill is a viable threat he begins to attack. Unfortunately for Bill, he is seriously outgunned at the moment and is looking for anything to even the playing field. He looks for Thor’s hammer, but all he can find is a stick. In his frustration, he bangs it on the side of his ship’s hull and before you know it…

Just add a horn and Marvel could get that young girl demographic.

Well now it is obviously on, not unlike Donkey Kong. Bill easily decimates the forces of S.H.I.E.L.D. and it looks like the Earth is going to be destroyed by a misunderstanding. Until a literal Dues ex machina happens as Odin recalls who he thinks is Thor back to Asgard on urgent business. Before you know it, Bill is on the rainbow bridge of Asgard with all of its denizens hailing their hero in this, their hour of need. Too bad for them that Bill still thinks everyone is a demon and starts lashing out, demanding where the heck he is. Well, Odin doesn’t really cotton to this, as he’s just realized this isn’t his son. He demands to know where Thor is, and Bill is in no mood for explanations and does something that can only be seen as “rather foolish”:

Not a good idea to tick off a God there, Bill.

Odin recalls Mjolnir and asks again about Thor’s whereabouts again, and Bill says he doesn’t know, but he won the right to wield the power fair and square. Odin senses that Bill is telling the truth, and decides not to obliterate out horse-faced friend but does encase him in a crystal prison even Thor himself would have a hard time breaking out of. While Bill cools his heels, Odin discovers Thor is on Midgard (Earth) and recalls him. Thor is all mopey because his hammer was claimed by someone else, and Odin is ready to get to the bottom of things. He faces Bill and asks for forgiveness for his behavior. Bill is finally starting to get it through his head that maybe these aren’t demons after all.

"Odin demands a group hug!"

Now that everyone’s all lovey-dovey, pleasantries are exchanged, Odin tells Bill of his beginnings and asks Bill to do the same, so here we are 800 words later finally getting to the actual origin, straight from the horse’s mouth, you might say. Bill’s race was decimated when the core of his galaxy exploded, and the planet got so hot that it was uninhabitable, so it was decided the race would emigrate to find another suitable home. Before that task could be accomplished, a defender was needed, and that’s where Bill comes in:

They rebuilt him, stronger, faster, uglier!

The rest of his race left in a plethora of ships, all in suspended animation. As the mass exodus was underway, it seems a bunch of demons emerged from the very core to pursue them. Bill fought valiantly, but some of his charges were killed in the skirmish. Bill managed to lure the demon horde away and then proceeded to speed ahead of his fleet looking for sanctuary, which leads us to the present. He will not give up Thor’s hammer because of the advantage it gives him and by extension, his people. Thor explains that Bill didn’t really win the hammer fairly because he didn’t defeat Thor, he defeated Dr. Donald Blake. Odin explains the whys and wherefores of the Blake identity and goes on to tell both Bill and Thor that the reason Thor was summoned to Asgard was because an unknown power was amassing coincidentally in Bill’s home galaxy. And let me tell you, when Allfather Odin doesn’t know about a power somewhere in the universe, that is big time bad. It’s deemed that the hammer issue is actually the more pressing problem because if Thor has no hammer he’s not going to be as effective. Odin gets both hammer-wielders to agree on a new one-on-one combat. So it’s on again and Thor and Beta Ray Bill have another knock down, drag out fight. I am not going to elaborate on it, because you should all read it firsthand. Anyway, the battle is indeed fierce, but ultimately Bill wins again, due to him being more resistant to the extreme heat in Skartheim, their battlefield. In a rare case of fighting not solving anything (this is a Marvel comic, after all) Both combatants are disappointed with the outcome. Thor feels disgraced and is going to renounce Godhood, while Bill senses a kinship in Thor and even though he’s won the right to use the power in Mjolnir, he can’t bring himself to so this to Thor.

Odin, respects the nobility of Bill and loves his son, Thor so he decides to solve the dilemma once and for all. How does he do that? Well it’s a long and involved process, so I’ll just say if both people are entitled to the same hammer, what’s the easiest solution? If you said “make a new hammer”, you are an avid comic reader! That’s exactly what happens, after a painstaking and lengthy ordeal, Stormbreaker is forged and enchanted! Odin presents it to Bill and you know what that means: Splash Page!

By the way, I love sound effects.

So what happens next? Does Bill save his people? Do we find out what is behind the mysterious power in Bill’s galaxy? If you want to find out (and you should, because it is awesome) might I suggest Thor Visionaries Volume I? It is well worth your time and money to read it. So until next time, may your hammer strike like thunder!

We’re starting a new weekly column here that will appear every Sunday. It’s called convention sketches, and I’m sure you’ve already guessed what it is.

We’ll feature a new convention sketch here every week. We’ve got a whole pile of our own, but we want to see yours, too. Email us convention sketches you want to show off and let us know what website you’d like credited for it.  (bigshinyrobot(at)gmail.com)

In the meantime, our first offering comes from Clobbertron’s collection.

Walt Flanagan (Batman: The Widening Gyre) did this zombie sketch in a copy of War of the Undead for Clobbertron’s son.

You can learn more about Walt on the View Askew website.

Star Wars has always worked best when it’s rooted in a tongue in cheek humour.  From the hilarious banter between all the characters in A New Hope and Threepio’s head-mixing hilarity in Attack of the Clones, to the Ewoks and Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, humour has grounded the saga and made us care more.  This is a humourous episode designed to make us laugh and smile, attaching happy feelings to this show, making the dark moments to come (remember, we still have Nightsisters!) even darker.

Evil Plans, a prequel to the season 1 finale (Hostage Crisis) and a sequel to the season 2 premiere(Holocron Heist), revolves around Cad Bane’s quest to get the plans for the Republic Senate building for the Hutts.  He’s chosen Threepio as his target, and abducts him while he’s out on an errand for Padme and Anakin with Artoo Detoo.

This episode is a lot of entertaining fluff and I loved every minute of it.  Threepio and Artoo are, in their own right, one of the classic comedy pairs in the history of film, right along with Laurel and Hardy and Abbot and Costello, and this episode reinforces that beautifully.  In fact, I could see bits of those guys in this episode.

Another thing I liked about this episode is that it sees the return of one of my favorite characters from season 2, Todo 360, voiced by Seth Green.  He’s a techno-service droid and a very funny foil for a villain like Cad Bane to have.  Apparently, he’s been rebuilt since the last time we saw him he exploded.

There isn’t a lot of substance to this episode, the Hutts have hired Bane to steal the plans for the Senate (which come in handy since that’s what Bane uses to bust Ziro out of prison) and then they hire him to bust out Ziro.  That’s pretty much the story.  There’s a side story involving cake toppings for a dignitary banquet that Artoo and Threepio need to retrieve by a street vendor.

While Threepio is abducted by Bane, Artoo finds himself at a brightly colored droid spa for a massage and cleaning.  Sure it sounds ludicrous and some of you probably hated it, but everything about the droid spa was great.  The lighting and colors were vivid and fantastic, the female droids were incredibly cool, and Artoo gets treated like a king before he too gets abducted by Todo and an IG droid.

Bane is pretty ruthless when it comes to torturing droids, and makes EV-9D9 look like a saint.

Bane gets what he needs and Bane tosses them back into the street, having wiped just enough of their memories so that no one is the wiser to his plot.

This episode served a small, modest function, but was incredibly entertaining.  My son and I were both laughing hysterically through it and agreed that this was almost as good (in the humour department) as Bombad Jedi.  But really, can you get more hilarious than an episode scripted by Kevin Rubio? Probably Not.

The other big thing I was glad to see were more classic trilogy locations.  Jabba’s palace popped on screen and looked incredible.  This season seems to be making leaps and bounds toward tying the prequels in with the classic trilogy in a way a lot of fans are eager to see.

Overall, I think this is a pretty good episode.  Not great, but really fun.  In fact, it’s probably as much fun as you can have with an episode half devoted to simulated torture of a humanoid droid.

Next week sees the sequel episode to this and Hostage Crisis, and sees Obi-Wan and Quinlan Vos tracking down Ziro the Hutt.  (You can watch an exclusive clip of that episode here.)

(It’s probably also of mild interest to note that the cake-baking Too-Onebee droid was a cameo appearance by the guy from that Ace of Cakes show.  See?  Mildly interesting…  Right?)

Who doesn’t love the Muppets ? Well, it looks like the old gang will be reunited in an all-new adventure due in theaters December 2011.  The last Muppet movie to receive a theatrical release was 1999’s Muppets from Space.

Geek Tyrant shares some photos from Entertainment Weekly, and they warm my ice-cold heart. Visit the site to see the two-page spread, but I’ve included just a glimpse below.  Beaker, Dr. Bunson Honeydew, Sweetums, Swedish Chef, and of course lovable Kermit the Frog are all there.  Though Miss Piggy is noticeably absent, she is mentioned in the article, so rest assured the porcine diva will also make an appearance.  (Though Frank Oz stopped voicing her long ago, and she’s never sounded the same to me.)

I hope Pepe the Prawn will also appear; he’s my favorite from the post-Muppet Show years, okay?

Some of the humans appearing in the film include Jason Segel (“How I Met Your Mother”), Amy Adams (“Enchanted”) and Chris Cooper (“Remember Me”), and a new Muppet named Walter (seen below).  Walter is a huge fan of Kermit and the gang, and he and his friend Gary (played by Segel) help the Muppets put on a show to save the Muppet Theater.

This movie could turn out to be one of the greatest movies ever or an insult to Jim Henson’s name.  Only time will tell, but I am glad that these iconic characters are hitting the big screen again.  Their zany antics have entertained kids and adults for decades, and so long as Muppets exist, I know all is right with the world.

It’s the 12th Podcast/Vidcast in a row! That’s one whole year! Thanks to all of you who have downloaded and listened over the last year and we hope you will stick around for more!

This month we wax-philosophical about Walking Dead, the Superman movie that never was, loads of Marvel movie news, video games like Castlevania and Sonic 4, Superman Earth One in comics, and of course we couldn’t have Swank on a podcast without spending some time talking Star Wars! All the while being derailed here and there by Arse-bot’s newfound love for Battlestar Galactica and Kill-tacular-tron wanting to debate which movie was worse, The Matrix or The Phantom Menace.

Remember, you can always go back and check out our previous podcasts over on iTunes and replays of the Vidcast over at Ustream!

Featuring: Zombietron, Swank-mo-tron, Kill-tacular-tron, and Arse-bot

*Note: We are still being plagued by Ustream and it’s touchy-feely audio. Please excuse the audio for the first 5 min or so of the vidcast. We should have this fixed for next month!