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I've been catching up with Spider-Man lately as the films come up on Netflix. Spider-Man was one of my favourite characters growing up. I wasn't hugely into comic culture, and ones featuring the web-slinger were some of the few I dipped into. A life-long animation fan, I devoured the cartoons in the 1990s , including retro re-runs of the 1960s show. As many others felt and feel, Peter Parker's encounters with school bullies, his social awkwardness, his outsider identity even when his alter-ego becomes a hero, his underprivileged socio-economic status, and his moral quandaries were all relatable. I remember in my later teens being so excited when I heard Sam Raimi was directing Spider-Man (2002). There had been attempts before in television movies in the 1970s, but special and visual effects technologies had to progress substantially before the web-slinging would be convincing. Even between the first and third Raimi films the development is palpable.  In my later teens and ...

Well, I've gone and fallen head over heels in love with Community and pretty much every character in it. It's a show I didn't see much of first time round, and since it released on Netflix last year it has received a new lease of life and a whole new fanbase, including me. One of the reasons its run on NBC (2009 - 2014) was dogged by low ratings (as well as being up against The Big Bang Theory in the US) was that internationally it was being shared and downloaded illegally. Oh the days when we had to wait up to two years in the UK for American shows! I'm sorry to say that this was how I ever saw the odd episode as I was seeing someone who downloaded it from bit torrents and it was part of a jumble with Parks and Recreation , Arrested Development and shows I didn't enjoy and can't remember the titles of. This was during my last PhD year so it's all a bit blurry, and if you know what I was researching, you'll know I needed escapism. And my goodness, is Co...

I've recently spent some time in the company of the good and not-so-good folk of Dreamland and surrounding fairytale/medieval territories. As a huge fan of Futurama I was dubious about getting into another Groening creation for fear it would not live up to the geeky heights of its predecesor. But Netflix had my number as a substantial amount of my watch list is animation, and I bit when Disenchantment was pushed at the release of part 3 in January 2021.  The show's serial structure is notable: it is presented in parts with chapters, not seasons and episodes, reflecting its continuous story-arc rather than episodic self-contained narratives presented across a series. Even the designated lands, countries and settlements in between throughout the diegesis align with litereary genres and sub-genres all with their roots in fairytale, fantasy and science-fiction. Each place and the microcosmic communities or groupings within have despots, with unease and social change brewing amongst...

Reaching the point in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) surrogates for Miles and Keiko O'Brien (Colm Meaney and Rosalind Chao) got me thinking about the ways that actors' real-life pregnancies are met with creative responses in television shows to the extent that whole story arcs reshape the series. Sitcoms such as Frasier and Brooklyn Nine-Nine found ways to re-dress the pregnancies of Jane Leeves and Melisa Fumero through Daphne Moon's stress-induced weight gain and Amy Santiago's love of bulky folders, undercover work as a pregnant prison inmate, and then later a pregnancy for her and Jake (Andy Samberg). It is in science-fiction, though, where the creative explanations for or concealment of a bump really shine. As I've mentioned many times on this blog, I spent much of my teens and twenties as a committed X-phile. In the show's lore, its whole structure and story arc underwent radical change when Gillian Anderson became pregn...