Archive for June 12th, 2009

Some people go to SDCC each year to attend panels. Others go to meet their favorite creators. But many attendees are interested in only one thing - the SDCC-exclusive merchandise. Exclusives are big business these days, with hundreds of unique products being offered by dozens of companies. We were recently given a glimpse of the items being offered by Previews and their parent company, Diamond.

Green Lantern fans listen up - DC is going to be offering a very limited item this July at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con. For the first time, fans will be able to collect Hal Jordan not only as a Green Lantern, but as a member of the Red, Orange, Blue and Yellow Corps as well.

At first glance, the 80s kitsch classic Xanadu certainly seems harmless. It opens with classic images of a frustrated artist – in this case, a graphic artist and draftsman, scribbling and crumpling up drawings of a mysterious woman. Surely, we say, this well-intentioned movie won’t go on to become one of the most gleefully bananas – and completely fabulous – movies of the decade? Surely there’s no way that musical luminaries Olivia Newton-John (fresh off her performance in the triumphant Grease) and living legend Gene Kelly would be caught dead or dancing in a movie where no less than the gods of Olympus get actively involved in the opening of a maverick roller disco in southern California?

But no, as we watch, the frustrated artist – future books-on-tape regular Michael Beck – throws some of his crumpled-up rejects out his window, where the wind carries them to a mural near the Santa Monica pier that depicts nine muslin-clad babes in tasteful airbrush. The crumpled-up bits of artistic frustration then activate the nine babes, who leap out of the mural in neon-bright, multicolored halos of light and kick off the movie’s first musical number – Electric Light Orchestra’s “I’m Alive” – a shower-singing, dance-in-the-privacy-of-your-home, uplifting winner of a song.

OK, stop. ELO? Am I really defending a movie whose soundtrack is the sole product of gooshy techno-trance-mavens ELO?

Yes. Yes, I am.