What We Watched LIVE!- CENTURIONS, DINO RIDERS, DINOSAUCERS

The second part of my Con-G 2013 updates!

So most of you are familiar with a little show I produce called What We Watched. Well, back when I was invited to Con-G as a guest, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and perform the show live as a panel. To fit it into the time slot, I decided to talk about not one, but *THREE* shows!

THE CENTURIONS!

DINO RIDERS!

DINOSAUCERS!

So sit back and watch this two part video, and learn the amusement of power armour and robot battles, dinosaur-riding telepaths fighting aliens, and idiotic dinosaur shapeshifters.  Yee haw.
 

GODZILLA: THE SERIES (What We Watched)

Yeehaw, kids! Its Saturday morning, and this is Derek the Bard back with another episode of What We Watched, the show laser-targeted at your brain's nostalgia gland! Well, I've got a new episode up this week, and its just in time for that most important day for all cartoons...SATURDAY MORNING! Ok, at least its Saturday morning where I am right now, holed up in the manly yet somehow also awesome Bardcave.

Back in 1998 there was a terrible Roland Emmerich movie starring Matthew Broderick trying to deal with a giant monster that people kept inexplicably calling "Godzilla", despite the fact that at no point in time did it ever breath radioactive fire or get into a fist fight with Gigan. Well, it was Adelaide Productions to the rescue with its cartoon tie-in! Not only does this series create a whole new Godzilla mythos for an American audience, it captures the power and majesty of the original Japanese films while still paying subtle homage to them.

So sit back with your bowl of Captain Crunch and a bottle of Yoo-Hoo, because for the next 25 minutes I'm going to (re-)introduce you to...GODZILLA: THE SERIES!

Lets talk Space Marines

Reposted from Facebook, so we can continue this discussion in private.  If I continue to get more and more annoyed, I may just vlog it and be done.  Or...shit I may just do a video on space marines.  I have a web series.  I can do that.  

ANYWAY.

[original post from February 7th, 12:44am]

OK, so lets chat about the Space Marine debacle. The first appearance of the phrase appears in an issue of Amazing Stories from 1932. EE "Doc" Smith (aka Dr. Edward Smith) used them in the Lensmen stories. They appear in stories by Robert Heinlein. And in Doom. The "Space Marine" conjures immediate images of an elite fighting force...in space. Adding "space" as a prefix to any title or word has long been a way to create a powerful association with science fiction, and "space marine" is no different. Most of the writers of these stories were American, and the US Marine Corps has a proud, longstanding, and very notable place in American pop culture when it comes to thinking of absolute badasses. So when you want to kick ass and take names in space, you want some Marines with you.

...of course this is ignoring that its kind of silly to call someone in space a "Marine", but authors have long associated space travel with sea travel (space ship, naval ranks, etc.), so...sure.

Games Workshop did not invent the term "space marine". They may have created one of the most notable images of the word, but they by no means can hold copyright on a word first created over 50 years before their first use of it. This is not unlike Todd MacFarlane's threatening to sue Palladium over the title "Nightspawn" (which he felt infringed on his copyright of "Spawn"), and MTV threatening to sue White Wolf over the title "Aeon" (which they felt infringed on their copyright of "Aeon Flux").

Were this taken to court, I would be interested in seeing the documentation for the trial because I suspect it would be one of the only times where the majority of evidence was taken from pulp magazines.

I'm very unimpressed with Games Workshop right now. For what its worth, I think their aggressive pursuit of TWO WORDS strung together, a common science fiction phrase, is both ridiculous and counterproductive towards the goals of good public relations. Its silly, pointless, and doesn't GAIN them anything. We'll see how this plays out.