Tonight Spike TV premiered Blade: The Series in a 2 hour “limited commercial interruption” event following UFC 937 or someting.

The premier holds much promise for this series which follows the style of the world of Blade as we see it in the movie so well that it almost seemed as if they were reusing some of the sets. The action is certainly there and is helped by effects, while understandeably not of a the calibre of a high budget Hollywood movie, are great for a tv series.

The story appears solid though it remains to be seen if it can keep us interested for weeks to come. Blade’s backstory is the same as the one we already know with some minor changes. It’s unclear where this movie takes place with respect to the movies though I get the impression it starts off around the same point as the first movie did and will evolved differently. The premier story, which is setting the scene for the TV series, centers around the character of Krista, played by smokin’ hot newcommer Jill Wagner, who in tracking down the death of her brother gets caught up in the world of Vampires.

Most of the cast including the star, rapper Sticky Fingaz, is composed of relatively unknown actors with the obscure exception of screen legend Randy Quaid as Professor Melvin Caylo. The cast delivers a solid performance and shows that you don’t need big names to get a good story across.

A preview for next week’s episode as well as things to come in the future of the series were shown. The only other star I reckognised from the bunch was The Big Hit star Bokeem Woodbine. It’s looking like the rest of the season will offer the same fun action packed story and amazing visual style we’ve gotten a taste of. I’d certainly recommend checking this series out if you have a chance.

The premier episode will be rerunning this Saturday, July 1st, at 4pm. The show’s regular timeslot is Wednesday night at 10pm.

I’d have to say that “Blade: The Series” is surely the best comic based motion picture to be released on June 28th 2006.

Good news for French Canadian Anime fans! We could be seeing the return of some of our favourite old school Anime shows.

Le journal de Montréal has this article discussing plans for 2 new Canadian TV stations “Teletoon Retro” to debut in English in Spring 2007 and “Télétoon Rétro”, the French equivalent, in French in Fall 2007.

The channel will be featuring animation dating from 10 years back and older. It’s mentioned that they are attempting to secure the rights to old classic Anime such as Albator and Goldorak.

Albator is the French dub of Leiji Matsumoto’s Captain Harlock (or Herlock as the Japanese insist on calling him). It came in 2 series. Albator 78 is a 42 episode series translated from the 1978 series “Space Pirate Captain Harlock”. “Albator 84” is a 22 episode series translated from “Endless Orbit SSX” from 1983. The numbers denote the year of their French dub rather than their Japanese release.

Goldorak is the French version of Grandizer (Grendizer to the Japanese) and aired starting in 1975.

Both shows were wildly popular among French Canadians in the late 70s and early 80s.

It needs to be mentioned that Teletoon in both it’s English and French incarnations is notorious for horrible programming due mainly to the fact that they’re incapable of affording to pay for anything the least bit desireable. They generally get the scraps that better channels like Comedy and YTV don’t want. Whether or not this goes through really depends on the financial feasability of securing the rights to these shows.

Anime News Network mentioned this story on Friday but claimed the rights to the series had already been optained. This confusion was probably just lost in translation.

Thanks to Powet antagonist Dave aka Soundowaivu for finding this article.

Buffy and Firefly creator Joss Whedon answers the question “Why do you create strong women characters?” for Equality Now, his favorite charity, and the benefactor of Can’t Stop The Serenity, a theatrical charity re-release of the big screen continuation of Firefly.
After watching this, is it any wonder he’s one of the most popular writers/creators in movies, tv, and comics?

Al Gore has more news about our climate crisis, but he’s been interrupted in this video by an obnoxious heckler.

He-man.org has announced that the original He-man series will be seeing its next DVD release in September with Season 2 Volume 2. This volume will complete the series allowing for 2007 to bring us The New Adventures of He-man. While not the favorite series of the fandom, its good to see that more than just the original series is coming to DVD.

After a week delay in it’s release we finally get the much anticipated first book of the Gargoyles comic. There’s not much to say about this as it’s pretty much just a retelling of half an episode of the TV show. Waiting for some new material which we should be seeing in book 3 according to some liner notes in this issue. Still I managed to put together a 6 minute review so do enjoy it!

Check out this page for some older info on the book and some samples of what the art looks like.

I don’t make a habit of watching G4, but I caught a little bit of an old show about the history of the NES, and during the commercial break, they were advertising floor coverage of San Diego Comic Con, not unlike their floor coverage of E3.

Anyway, they said on July 21st (or sometime that week) they’ll have some kind of major announcement about the Transformer movie. Phil Bond sarcastically remarked its probably just the trailer, but considering Dreamworks put that big truck on the floor last year, theres still a chance they’ll do something to surprise us.

According to this article, Futurama is returning to Comedy Central. Fox will supposedly get the chance to air new episodes first, but most likely will not. The primary voice actors signed this week sealing a deal for 13 more episodes. Katey Sagal broke the news on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, which was later confirmed by sources of Don Kaplan of the New York Post.

We heard rumors of this before, but they were quickly quashed.