What Can We Expect From Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Who (Video)

YouTube user Peter Nottage has posted an excellent mash up of Peter Capaldi’s foul mouthed Malcolm Tucker of The Thick Of It appearing to negotiate his way across the the Doctor Who universe with companion Clara in tow. While it is highly unlikely that Stephen Moffat would actually write The Doctor in this manner, I think it would be a welcome change from having The Doctor babble on about that which is “wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff” for fuck’s sake.

And, for those of you who continue to prefer lighter DW fare, in the vein of fish fingers and custard, I have something for you after the jump.

No Fridges Were Nuked In The Creation Of This Video: Harrison Ford’s Indy Appearance In Young Indiana Jones

We don’t have a lot of time here today at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office – we are venturing out for a staff meeting with contributor Lance Manion which will consist of story conferences (translation: one of us will say, “Did you see the latest issue of Saga? Wasn’t it awesome?”), research (“Show me the cosplayer pictures you took at SDCC… dontcha have any Power Girls or Huntresses, for Christ’s sake?”), and a little social drinking. Or at least that will be the affirmative defense that we enter at the arraignment.

However, we did find this little thing I’d like to pass along: YouTube user 2ndMyMediaSource has uploaded parts of the early 90s episode of Young Indiana Jones where Harrison Ford appeared to reprise his role as Indy.

The video’s only seven minutes long, and spends even a little too much of that focusing on Indy as a teenager for my tastes, but it is a nice rarely-seen taste of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, considering it has been nearly a quarter century since the release of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, which means it has been far too long since we’ve seen Indiana Jones. Yup. 25 whole years since Ford has played Indy. Only three Indiana Jones movies were made. Just a trilogy. And I’d like to thank Lucasfilm for including, in their Indiana Jones Blu-Ray set, that extra disc that I could use as a coaster. That extra disc with nothing on it. Yes indeedy.

Anyway, you can get this extra taste of the real Indiana Jones after the jump.

…actually, you can’t. 2ndMyMediaSource has disabled embedded on the video. But it’s still worth watching, and you can check it out right on the guy’s YouTube channel.

Home Office Team Travel Day: Check Out Game Launch Rock

The Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office is currently in transist through the hinterlands of deepest, darkest Florida. While we make our journey back to what we hope will be air conditioned,  beer heavy climes, please enjoy this School House Rock inspired video that warns of the dangers of buying a new gaming console at launch.

Meantime, pray for us.

Via The Mary Sue

My Umpteenth Comic Con – A Boston Comic Con Report From A Jaded Convention Veteran

This was taken at 9:45am, when the line to get in was only curling around one side of the building.

Rob and I attended this year’s Boston Comic Con last weekend. We were pleased to have Pixiestyx and Trebuchet accompany us and not just because Trebuchet offered to drive on Saturday. It’s exciting to see a convention through the eyes of someone who hasn’t been to one before. And while we didn’t get to every creator or panel we had originally intended, a good time was generally had by all.

Rob and I have been attending San Diego Comic-Con for the past several years. It would be very easy to turn this post into a comparative study of Boston versus San Diego, but it wouldn’t be particularly fair. San Diego is the mega prom of all geekdom. Really, it is several conventions for fans of all stripes all crammed under one roof. You like movies? Go pack some Depends and hang out in Hall H. Like TV? Please direct yourself to Ballroom 20. Cosplay enthusiast? Action figure collector? Gamer? We’ve got panels for you, too. Oh, and there’s still programming for those who come because they love comic books. But, San Diego has taken on such a life of its own that it’s almost more like SXSW now. Alternative programming, such as Wootstock, Geek And Sundry, and Trickster, has spilled out into venues around Gaslamp and the surrounding neighborhoods. The number of options is mind boggling and, at times, overwhelming.

Boston Comic Con was a refreshing return to what a comics convention is supposed to be about: comics.

My First Comic Con: A Boston Comic Con Report From A Convention Virgin

For some time now Rob and Amanda have been trying to talk Trebuchet and me into attending San Diego Comic-Con with them, making their case with enticing details such as:

“You can’t really walk there. It’s more of a shuffle-step. Be prepared to throw an elbow.”
“The only place you might get trampled to death is the toy floor.”
and, most disturbing: “There’s no Dunkin Donuts.”

While we haven’t quite worked up the enthusiasm to fly cross-country and spend five days in the middle of a mob, we did think it was time to check out the much closer (though still two hours away) Boston Comic Con. If you have read Rob’s and Amanda’s recaps, this was not the tiny regional con we anticipated – but as it turned out, in spite of the growing pains, the unexpected crowd actually made the event more exciting.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster: Boston Comic Con, Day One

Jesus Christ, I wasn’t expecting that.

In the times that I have attended Boston Comic Con in the past, it has been a nice little regional convention. Sure, in the past few years, it has attracted some A-List talent like Tim Sale and Geof Darrow, but generally, those guys have stayed at their tables on the floor, and while some of them might have attracted a decent individual line or two, it didn’t affect the little regional convention as a whole. Which meant that you could walk in off the street, wander up and buy a ticket at the door within thirty seconds on a whim, comfortably wander the floor at your leisure to see everything you want, spend a bunch of quality time with every creator you could make eye contact with, and leave within a couple or three hours, comfortable you’ve seen everything there is to see.

And frankly, that was what I was expecting this morning, when we got to this year’s delayed opening of the Boston Comic Con. Sure, the convention had picked up one or two more high-toned guests like DC Comics’ Publisher Dan DiDio and Batman writer Scott Snyder, but thanks to the delay created by the Marathon Bomber, the convention was being held at the Seaport World Trade Center – a much bigger venue than the originally-booked Hynes Convention Center – so there should have been plenty of room to handle the expected demand for a little regional convention, right?

Yeah, right… except it seems that 2013 was the year that Boston decided that it no longer wanted a little regional convention. By noon today, the main floor of the convention, even at this bigger venue, was like walking the floor at San Diego Comic-Con on any given Saturday, and every volunteer on the floor – who thought they were signing on to wrangle a nice little regional convention – looked like they had suddenly realized that they had signed on to be the local intern guide for Galactus.

At least for today, Boston Comic Con was not a nice little regional convention. It was a major convention with world-class talent and a comparably excited and enthusiastic crowd that could hold its head up with any convention short of San Diego and New York…

Even if the people running the convention weren’t completely prepared for it.

Falling For Another Con: Boston Comic Con Coverage Starts Today

We are posting this as we are preparing to leave to attend the first day of Boston Comic Con 2013 – a smaller convention than San Diego Comic-Con to be sure, but I’ve seen a couple of estimates on Twitter that 15,000 people are expected to attend, which means it has grown hell and gone from four years ago, when it was still being held in the function room of a local hotel. But there’s a lot to be said for attending a smaller convention, particularly when it it being attended by A-List talent like Scott Snyder, Joe Hill, Gabriel Rodriguez, Colleen Doran, Dan DiDio, David Mack, and a pile of other exciting creators… and when attendance requires only a subway ride as opposed to a cross-country flight. Besides, after a week of leaving a convention and then begging and scraping for the odd spare Internets, it will be nice to have a pre-paid multi-megabit pipe to post pictures of people in Wolverine outfits.

We will be attending and covering both days of the convention (but if you’re local to southern New England, you don’t need us; tickets will be available at the door at the Seaport World Trade Center at 200 Seaport Boulevard in Boston, or you can preorder them through Eventbrite), including as many panels as we can get into (including a Batman panel featuring Snyder that has just been announced), but please be sure to follow us on Twitter, as we will be live-Tweeting panels and photos right from the scene. In addition, we will be uploading videos from the convention to our YouTube channel both tonight and tomorrow evening (and honestly, probably on into next week).

But if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to make our way to the convention. Being a trip via the subway system, I will just as forbidden to smoke as I was on our flight to San Diego… but the good news is that, being the Boston subway system, I will be allowed to urinate.

Electra Woman and Dyna Girl and OMIGOD IS THAT MARKIE POST?!

So it’s been a while since I’ve contributed anything of value to the site. In my defense, I was trapped under something heavy and had to gnaw off a foot to escape. Fortunately, it wasn’t one of my feet. Long story, but now I’m here and and Spam will never taste the same again.

Anyway, if you’re anything like me, you are a child of the seventies and watched the Krofft Superstar Hour.  If you’re a whole lot like me, you had vaguely inappropriate thoughts about two characters on that show – Electra Woman and Dyna Girl. They were your standard 70’s-issue crime fighting duo. But did you know that there was an attempt to resurrect those characters in 2001? Well, you do now. The WB (back when there was such a thing) ordered a pilot of Electra Woman and Dyna Girl starring none other than TV’s Markie Post. Yep, Christine from Night Court played Electra Woman as hard drinking, easy skanking, and washed-up living in a trailer park. She’s brought out of retirement by a hero-worshiping college student who eventually takes on the role of the new Dyna Girl.

Now, if Crisis on Infinite Midlives stands for anything, it’s for beer and sideboob. But if we stood for three things, that third thing would be the weird ass flotsam and jetsam of comics culture. And I warn you, it gets pretty weird up in here. With that, I give you Electra Woman and Dyna Girl – the lost and unaired pilot.

Check it out, after the jump.

Last Gasps From SDCC 2013 – Best Of Cosplay From Comic-Con Video

The Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office received a giant package via UPS yesterday containing all the books, action figures, t-shirts, games, and other assorted loot we acquired at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. It’s a fairly large haul, too large to have wanted to hump it back on our own through the airports. You try explaining what a “reversible baneling/zergling” is to the TSA and see if they don’t decide to put you through an “enhanced pat down”. So, it was nice to open the box and relive the very recent memories of the past week. In particular, I thought this delivery was well timed because I had been spending the morning going through my photos from the con and noticed that…I hadn’t taken very many. My photo ratio from SDCC seems to lean more heavily on the side of fish tacos, beet agua fresca, and blurry Brian Michael Bendis photos (don’t ask), than on one of the backbones of the San Diego Comic-Con experience, the cosplayers. This was disappointing to me, but not entirely surprising. With all the spectacle with which you are constantly bombarded, you reach a certain point where you stop snapping pictures and go, “Oh, cool. It’s Deadpool and Supergirl together. Sure. That makes sense.” And you let it wash over you. You shuffle step forward against the tide of people trying to get into the Hasbro merch booth to get the most recent Boba Fett and Han Solo in carbonite, or Derpy Pony, or whatever it is this year that is making attendees nutty and just keep trying to take it all in until you eventually pop out on the other side of the convention floor. And it’s good. After 7 years of snapping photos and giving yourself whiplash to swivel around and catch the latest in Hello, Kitty! Darth Vader costuming, sometimes it’s nice to just give in and get carried along with the festivities.

But, that doesn’t help you, the Crisis On Infinite Midlives readers, who depend on us to bring you pictures of the Nerd Prom To End All Nerd Proms, to document the spectacle that you could be there to see. Fortunately, that’s where the good people at Sneaky Zebra come in. They’ve created a video that showcases some of the best cosplay from this year’s convention, from steam punk Batman villains to Transformers to, well, maybe you should just see for yourself. Check it out, after the jump!

Convalescence

San Diego Comic-Con is a hell of a thing. It is something that any genre geek working a job that coughs up two weeks vacation and pays enough to allow you to drink anything higher-end than Country Club Malt Liquor aspires to attend. Attendance requires almost a full year of planning – if last year was any guide, then the presale for next year’s passes for this year’s attendees will be in two or three weeks, and we’ll be booking our backup hotel room by the end of August – and attendance, which is something that one ostensibly does for fun, is completely and utterly physically crippling.

I am writing this at 6:14 a.m. Eastern time. This time yesterday, I was sleeping through 3:14 a.m. Pacific time. Today, however, I have been up for an hour, having awakened with a terrible stitch in my side from sleeping in my own fucking bed. I have a recurring, rolling fever that is giving me something that feels remarkably like the douchechills, and my lower body, after five days of almost nonstop walking, feels like I forgot to keep up on some Winter Hill Gang bookie’s vig. I have the remainder of the week off of my day job because I have long since learned that five days at Comic-Con plus two days travel requires six days of recovery time – two weeks would really be better, but I want to keep that job that allows me to take off for two weeks at a time – in the middle of a crunch delivery time, no less – to gawk and cosplayers and buy odd comic books, exclusive action figures and t-shirts that the the mechanics of the video game Portal to make off-color jokes.

And make no mistake: I obtained all of those things… and they are being shipped to me via a very expensive UPS transaction. Because if I’d had to physically haul all of that through the airline system yesterday, I’d have shattered like old carnival glass.