That’s right, the long awaited follow up to Tim Kring’s tv series Heroes is actually going to happen.  Heroes aired on NBC from 2006-2010, and featured a very large cast of characters with a variety of super powers.  The show’s quality went downhill in the second and third seasons, but the fourth season saw some very interesting characters join the cast.  It seemed they’d run out of ideas for Claire, and that storyline tooks some rather odd turns, and is probably my least favorite for her in the whole series.  One of my favorite new characters was Emma, a woman who also happens to be deaf.  She begins to see music and sound in color, which has the potential to become a powerful weapon.

But that’s enough about the past.  If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about.  Where the series ends, however, is what makes me excited about where the mini-series will begin.  I’m guessing it’ll pick up five years later, in real-time, from the end of the series.

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Finally, after years of waiting, hoping, and beginning to think it was never going to happen, The Wonder Years is coming to DVD.  We wrote about it for one of our articles, explaining the difficulty in releasing The Wonder Years, and were hoping that they’d also consider releasing it on Blu-ray.  It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, even though the discs are more durable, can hold a higher capacity of episodes, and take up less room on our shelves.  But who knows?  Perhaps between now and the release date, they’ll also announce a Blu-ray release.  Now that it’s officially going to be released, we can hope for that, too, right?

Here’s the press release:

In 2014, StarVista Entertainment/Time Life – the premiere marketer of classic TV on DVD – will release THE WONDER YEARS: THE COMPLETE SERIES to the home entertainment marketplace. The most requested TV series never to be released on DVD, which ran on ABC from 1988-1993, garnered multiple Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe and a Peabody, and was named byTV Guideas one of the “Top 20 Shows of the ’80s” will make its very long-awaited debut in the second half of 2014. To best serve the numerous fans of the program, StarVista Entertainment/Time Life has launched WonderYearsDVDs.com, the official site for all updates, exclusive content and pre-orders.

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About a year ago, Disney made the ultimate purchase.  One that made my dreams of seeing more Star Wars films on the big screen possible.  They bought Lucasfilm.  It was this purchase that has actually completed a project that I am now convinced was the plan from the time they bought the Jim Henson Company back in 2004 for an undisclosed amount somewhere around $200 million.  It was actually a much longer journey as Disney had originally purchased distribution rights to all of the Jim Henson Company productions way back in 1991.  It took until September of 2008 before Disney finally rebranded the Muppets Holding Company as Muppet Studios, and placed it under new leadership.

With phase one complete, it was time to begin work on phase two: the acquisition of Marvel Entertainment.  This was a massive purchase costing $4.24 billion.  Disney needed to get control of Marvel Productions, and this was one way that they could do so.  They didn’t want to have any red-tape, even though they very likely had all of the rights they needed thanks to the acquisition of the Muppets.

Lastly, they needed the final piece of the equation.  They needed the footage that was used from both Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises.  And the best way to do that?  Spend $4.06 billion on the purchase of Lucasfilm.  That brought in both franchises.

With the total cost being about $8.5 billion, Disney is very close to being able to achieve their ultimate goal: the release of Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies on DVD and Blu-ray. I had been thinking about the overall purchases that Disney was making, and one day it dawned on me that all of these things were connected.  And with a little bit of research, I found that I wasn’t the only one to think of this.

From what I can gather, the only thing left standing in their way is a simple licensing of some footage from Ghostbusters from Sony Pictures.  Unless they plan on purchasing the rights to the Ghostbusters franchise (which I’d have no problem with, as they seem to just do everything right with the franchises they acquire).  There are also bits from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which belong to Paramount, among a few other things.  It seems to me that we’re as close as ever, and so is Disney.

That’s a pretty large investment so far, though, and I hope that the eventual release of this classic masterpiece of animation works out for them, and they make back the billions they’ve spent in gathering the exclusive rights to the series.

As readers of this blog may already know, I’m a pretty big fan of The Muppets.  I thought the last film, 2011′s The Muppets was a return to form, and the first that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed since 1999′s Muppets from Space.  With the sequel The Muppets…Again! in production now, they’ve been making more appearances.  It’s a great way to keep them near front of mind when the trailers for the new movie start to appear.

On April 28, 2013, at 7:30 PM ET/PT, The Muppets are going to make one of those appearances: stopping by the Duncan family’s home on Disney Channel’s Good Luck Charlie.

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Ed is another one of those shows that is being held up because of the music that they used in the show.  Over the years there have been some rumors about work being done on the DVD, but lately those rumors have become increasingly pessimistic toward any sort of release at all.

While everyone seems to want The Wonder Years, that is at least available on Netflix streaming.  The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of Ed, which is one of the best TV shows ever made.  It deserves a release onto home video.

Produced by Worldwide Pants, this show features Tom Cavanagh as Ed Stevens, a contracts lawyer at a high-profile New York City firm. Around the same time he splits with his wife (she slept with a mailman), he makes a single error in punctuation when going over a contract; and because of the resulting financial loss to the firm, he’s fired. Despondent, he heads back to his (small) hometown of Stuckeyville — ‘Anytown’, USA. There he realizes he’s been missed by a lot of friends whom he’s missed; and he sees Carol (Julie Bowen), the girl he’d adored in high school. Swept up in roiling emotions, Ed buys the local bowling alley on a whim, moves to Stuckeyville, and determines to win Carol’s heart. His horizons broaden as he settles once more in Stuckeyville, and the series itself settles into a charming, funny, often serious slice-of-life series focused not solely on Ed but on the lovable ensemble cast of people who live and work with him in Stuckeyville.

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I just read a blog on Cape Town Community called Please Don’t Spoil My Movies! which I found to be something that I agreed with wholly.  When it comes to movies that I want to see, I don’t want to know what is going to happen.  If I see a trailer, that’s fine, but knowing anything beyond what the studio wants to show is a rarity for me.

It’s also for this reason that I don’t read reviews.  I think most critics are ridiculous, and I have yet to find a single one that I agree with all the time (based on looking at scores after I’ve seen a movie).  As I haven’t found a critic whose reviews match my own point of view 100% of the time, or even 50% of the time, how can I trust any critic to really get how I’ll feel about any movie.  They might hate a movie that I’ll love, or love a movie that I’ll hate.  Critics hold no sway over my perspective, for this reason, and I’ve found that I love some movies that even the critical mass has hated.  If I had listened to them, I wouldn’t have found the movie.

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