firehose

Hoping to stave off any audience stranger-danger panic at seeing an unfamiliar face on their TV screens, Comedy Central has announced that comedian Jordan Klepper will be joining The Daily Show tonight as its newest correspondent, and he’s an all-right guy so be cool. Klepper will make his debut reporting on the crisis in Ukraine—which is sort of like the freshman quarterback starting against a team whose existence cannot be confirmed by referees at this time. 

Fortunately he’s had practice spinning comedy out of confusion, having come up through the Chicago improv scene at Second City and iO, where he starred in the news satire show Whirled News Tonight. He also co-created and starred, along with his wife Laura Grey, in the Upright Citizens Brigade web series Engaged and has been seen on IFC’s Bunk and MTV’s I Just Want My Pants Back, as one ...

Must Reads

Must Reads

The early ’90s were spoiled for choice when it came to comic book adaptations. Not only was Batman: The Animated Series on the air, but X-Men led Marvel’s push to get on the small screen, diving right into the often convoluted continuity of everyone’s favorite mutants, luring in a generation of fans, and paving the way for cartoons to follow. That’s why we’ve set out to review every single episode of the ’90s X-Men animated series. This week, we finally tackle one of the cornerstones of the X-Men as we continue with the Dark Phoenix Saga!

Previously, on X-Men:

Last week, we were dropped unceremoniously into the start of the Dark Phoenix Saga. Jean Grey, last seen heading off to the heart of the sun with a less-tearful-than-you-might-expect goodbye so that she could watch over the M’Kraan Crystal forever. For ever ever? For ever ever? Well, no. Turned out to be about three weeks before she came back with no explanation and was immediately put under the sway of Mastermind and the Hellfire Club — uh, excuse me, the inner circle. The X-Men have been soundly smacked around, and it looks like Jean is under there control, but for how long?

(Spoiler warning: 20 minutes or so.)

In our discussion of characters that were redesigned for animation, a lot of people brought up interesting new costumes that were made from the small screen, but it was reader Steve Rubino who reminded me of something I had completely forgotten about: Avengers: United They Stand, a short-lived cartoon featuring character designs by people who apparently thought Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee had some good ideas, but really should’ve put a few more pouches and straps on their characters. Seriously, Google it, I’ll wait.

Now imagine Clint Barton dressing like that in Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye.

I’m pretty sure United They Stand was canceled ten minutes into the second episode and replaced with a re-run of Power Rangers, but that might not be technically accurate. Either way, it’s a nice reminder that as bad as X-Men gets, it could always be worse. And boy howdy, do I need that reminder this week.

This week, the Dark Phoenix Saga is finally getting going courtesy of writer Steven Levi and Producer/Director Larry Houston, and it’s a pretty strict adaptation of X-Men #132 and 133, with a scene from 131 thrown in for good measure. Because of that, it’s almost not worth it to even recap what happens in this episode — if you’ve read five X-Men comics in your life, you have read this story, just as it appears here. So, you know, just imagine that, but with really, really terrible animation.

For the sake of completion, though, here we go. We actually open on Professor X, who has been out of the loop for a while and is now reaching out with his psychic powers to see what’s going on with the kids. Today, this takes the form of a first-person shot that’s slightly worse looking than DOOM on the Super Nintendo as his mind travels through the walls of the Inner Circle club, until he’s shut out by Emma Frost’s psychic defenses and pulls one of the most amazing faces we’ve seen in this show:

I don’t know how it’s possible for an animated character to overact, but here we are, and it’s pretty great.

We then cut back to the Hellfire club, where Sebastian Shaw, Donald Pierce, Mastermind, Harry Leland and the White Queen are gloating about their victory, with the X-Men all chained up in their lavishly appointed drawing room. Again, it’s just like we see them in the comic, except that Colossus and Nightcrawler has been replaced by Gambit and Rogue. This, for the record, is not exactly “trading up,” but Colossus didn’t really go full scumbag until Secret Wars, so I’ll forgive it this time.

With a whole lot of fanfare, we’re introduced to Jean Grey as the new Black Queen of the Inner Circle, and unlike Emma Frost, who got to keep her straight up lingerie costume, Jean has been modified. Some readers pointed out last week that Emma’ss drawn to look like she’s wearing a swimsuit under her corset, but she’s still pretty on-model — she’s still got the stockings, after al. Jean, meanwhile, has accessorized her Diana Rigg costume with a pair of blue sweatpants:

It’s a great look. Perfect for the dominatrix supervillain who’s just heading to the store to get a loaf of bread.

Okay, so remember last week when I noted that there’s a creator credit in this episode, but only for writer Chris Claremont, and not for co-writer and artist John Byrne? Here’s why that’s so frustrating: After the big reveal of Jean, we cut down to the sewer to catch up with Wolverine, presumed dead by the Hellfire club. In the comics, this is my pick for the single most important moment in X-Men history, and I’d even make a case that it’s one of the most important moments in comics history, particularly for how it ushered in the modern era. The impact is a little lessened in the show since we’ve seen Wolverine as a grumpy badass for the entirety of the series (the first thing that dude does is stab a robot four times his size until it explodes), but they obviously know they’re dealing with one of the great classic moments. It makes sense, then, that when it comes time to show that moment, they stage it exactly as it’s presented in X-Men #132:

You know, in the panel drawn by John Byrne, the guy who didn’t get a credit? And just to make matters more hilarious, there’s actually no dialogue in this shot — they left Claremont out of it and just took the Byrne bit. It’s just so weird.

They do, however, lift Claremont’s dialogue from #133, however (along with Byrne’s staging), when Wolverine fights the Inner Circle’s witless minions in the next scene:

They even keep that weirdly specific reference to “vanadium steel.” The only real change is to rephrase it slightly so that they’re riffing on the “do I feel lucky” bit from Dirty Harry.

The next bit, though, is completely original to the show, and just to balance out all the negativity of the past few minutes, I’ll go ahead and confirm that it’s amazing. While the Inner Circle starts bickering over an internal power struggle (and while the X-Men are doing what the X-Men do, which is standing around waiting for something to happen), Wolverine is making his way back up to the top floor for his rematch. As the camera pans through a kitchen full of similarly sweatpantsed French maids, a member of the Circle Club who is holding a giant meat clever for some unknown (but no doubt extremely decadent) reason, is on a phone complaining about how his bottle of “Chateau Calamari” is late in arriving.

Now, “Chateau Calamari” was undoubtedly dropped into the first draft of this script with four nanoseconds of thought on what to call a fictional wine (CALAMARI ISN’T EVEN A FRENCH WORD), but I will forgive that, because this dude hangs up the phone, opens up the dumbwaiter, and GETS HIS STERNUM BUSTED TO HELL by Wolverine coming out holding a bottle by the neck:

Wolverine then walks over to the dude, looks at the bottle, says “Lousy year” and then drops it right on his junk. Then he casually grabs a turkey leg on his way up to go murder people. It is… the best thing.

While Wolverine is cold beating ass through the last level of Final Fight, Cyclops finally decides try making himself useful for once, and tries connecting to Jean through that psychic bond everyone keeps yammering about. I’ll give you three guesses how effective he is. The White Queen notices what’s going down, and lends her power to Mastermind so they can put the kibosh on that, and Cyclops finds himself wandering through a foggy emptiness surrounding an antebellum plantation, because that’s what his girlfriend’s brain is like now.

When he heads to the house, the door opens and the second best thing in this episode happens when Jason Wyngarde strolls out holding a cavalry saber and asks Cyclops what the five fingers said to the face:

Mastermind has officially challenged Cyclops to a duel to the death (sadly, it does not deliver on that promise), and they start battling it out in Jean’s brain with cavalry sabers while dressed up like Ichabod Crane. Surprisingly, Cyclops gets the upper hand for the moment and Jean herself appears, telling him that she’s been “set free from the constraints of morality” (hello) and that “the Phoenix force inside me aches for sensation” (hello). Cyclops tells her that she’s just not herself, and when she laughs at him, it occurs to me that this is seriously Jean’s only actual character development ever on this show.

Like, its literally the easiest thing in the entire world to see the Dark Phoenix Saga as a metaphor for the patriarchy trying to suppress female sexuality, since Jean’s “evil” side is manifested as wearing sexy clothes and smooching a guy who isn’t her pathologically repressed and sexually frustrated fiancee (with whom she spent her honeymoon strapped down to a table with khaki shorts firmly in place). You could wallpaper Versailles five times over with the number of senior theses that have been written about that very subject over the past 30 years, but in the show, it’s especially noticeable because it’s literally the only thing Jean has ever done that didn’t involve shouting “Scott!” and then falling down because her power — which is quite literally thinking for herself — is just too darn hard.

Or maybe I can only really relate to her when she’s openly mocking Cyclops. That could go either way, really.

Jean and Mastermind blast Cyclops with a heavy duty psychic hoodoo with the idea of killing his mind and letting the body sort itself out, but he just ends up laying on the floor moaning, or as Cyclops calls it, “Tuesday night.” Turns out that he can’t be psychically murdered, because he’s still linked up to Jean and the Phoenix.

Now, they say this as though they’re just going to have to shrug and not kill him, but I would remind you that there are SEVERAL OTHER PEOPLE IN THE ROOM WITH CUTLERY AND BLUNT OBJECTS, at least one of whom is AN ACTUAL CYBORG. If they want Cyclops dead, there are ways. Sometimes I count them just to make myself crazy.

So that’s when Wolverine busts in grappling with a couple of dandies.

You know, the first time I watched this episode, I was really down on it because I know the story beats by heart and the animation has gotten really awful in the past couple of episodes, but going through it again, everything involving Wolverine here is gold — especially the part where he effortlessly kicks ass through a private army and is then immediately smashed against a wall and put through a table by Jean. ECW! ECW! ECW!

With that settled and the revelation that Wolverine wasn’t actually killed in the earlier fight, the bickering about the power structure finally hits critical mass, and they decide that they need to hold a vote to decide the new Black King of the Inner Circle right then and there, and that’s so frigging badass. Like, straight up pausing to participate in democracy while your enemies are standing there in chains, with one of them half dead on the floor and the other just having been knocked through furniture by a cosmic being bent on destruction? That is a baller move.

The motion passes, but while Jean is burning Wolverine to death with cosmic fire, she suddenly has a flashback of all the scenes they’ve shared over the years, and suddenly breaks free of the influence of Mastermind. One more time, just so we know where we stand: attacking Wolverine triggers emotions that make her personality reassert herself. Attacking Cyclops, to whom she was married and is still engaged, nothing. Haha, f**k you Cyclops.

And your dumb jacket.

The Phoenix breaks the X-Men free from Mastermind’s control, and they start handily trouncing the Hellfire Club during their rematch, as they tend to do. It’s a pretty bland fight, but it’s worth noting that after Cyclops blasts Donald Pierce through the floor, Gambit turns to Emma Frost and says “tanks, mon ami! Leave the others to Gambit — I hang onto this one!”

And then she blasts him right in the penis.

Nobody has tried to have sex with a computer yet, but this might actually end up being my favorite episode.

After a mildly entertainng sequence where the Beast is used as a weapon and Rogue tears a dude’s arm off (relax, it’s the cyborg), the fight spills onto the roof. Mastermind attempts to regain control of Jean, but it’s too late by this point. The Phoenix is in complete control, and in retalliation for being manipulated, it drives Mastermind insane by revealing its true nature to him. That’s actually really awesome, an amazing bit of truly Lovecraftian horror at the nature of cosmic destruction that pops up in this goofy and frequently terrible X-Men cartoon.

Scott shows up and tries to talk Jean down again (shockingly, he does not request that she cover her legs since there are unmarried men present), but the Phoenix tells him that Jean doesn’t live here anymore, and OHHHH SNAP, WE HAVE A COSTUME CHANGE!

S**t just got real.

Discussion Question: I honestly wonder how hard college professors roll their eyes here in the year 2014 when they pick up a term paper and read “Dark Phoenix And Patriarchy: The Sexual Liberation of Jean Grey.” Let’s give them some better material to work with, shall we? What’s a better title for a scholarly thesis about the X-Men? Here, I’ll get you started: “Check Please: How The Devaluing Of Wolverine’s Adamantium Skeleton Reflects A Changing Economic Model.”

Next Week: Going to go out on a limb here and say Jean Grey probably won’t kill a billion people as the Dark Phoenix Saga hits Part 3!

Netflix added several new films to its lineup on Sunday, including Capote, starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dr. Strangelove, The Silence Of The Lambs, and Robin Hood: Men In Tights. Meanwhile, Hulu has acquired the streaming rights to four more Carsey-Werner shows, including The Cosby Show, Cybill, A Different World, and Grace Under Fire to further enhance your ‘80s televisual experience. (Carsey-Werner is the production monolith that’s also behind That ‘70s Show, 3rd Rock From The Sun, and Roseanne, which means it owns some percentage of everything you ever watched growing up.)

The list of notable releases from Netflix:

• The Silence Of The Lambs
• Robin Hood: Men In Tights
• Capote
• Dr. Strangelove
• Dirty Dancing
• Das Boot: Director’s Cut
• Men In Black II
• The Blair Witch Project
• True Grit (1969)
• Night Of The Living Dead
• Roman Holiday
• Serpico
• Vanilla Sky

Hulu is also adding Silence Of The Lambs ...

Twitter is erecting two log cabins originally built during the late 1800s inside the company's San Francisco office space. Once booths are added, each of the 20-by-20-foot cabins will be used as dining areas for Twitter employees. The 19th century relics actually came to Twitter thanks to a Craigslist posting; Lundberg Design — an architecture firm that works with the company — came upon a listing from Karl Beckmann, who salvaged the cabins from ranches in Montana. When the call from Lundberg came in, Beckmann initially thought he was being taken for a ride.

"At first I was concerned it was a scam," he told the Marin Independent Journal. "How often does it happen that you get a call to install two log cabins inside a building?" He described the request as "a once-in-a-lifetime-type job." Once he was convinced the sale was legitimate, the cabins were broken down and transported to Twitter's Mid-Market office, where they'll soon be reassembled as century-old dining rooms for staff members.

Dining rooms older than any employee

"We're very excited about this project, not only because it's beautiful, but also because it's another great instance of how we continue to re-use materials as we build out our presence," a Twitter spokesperson told the Journal. Lundberg echoed that sentiment, saying, "One of the nice things about reusing old materials it that there is a story that comes with them."

The cabins are also in keeping with the office's wood-heavy design motif. "We've used the notion of the forest as a nice tie-in with Twitter and its bird logo," Lundberg said, pointing out that the long history of these cabins is evident when looking at them. "The guys who built them are long dead, of course, but are sort of still here. I kind of like that," he said. The cost of the cabins isn't being disclosed. But even with the company using reclaimed wood, such a lavish buy isn't likely to help its image with locals as tensions between Silicon Valley and San Francisco residents continue to rise.

Three phases of an attack that changes a router's DNS settings by exploiting a cross-site request vulnerability in the device's Web interface.

Team Cymru

Researchers said they have uncovered yet another mass compromise of home and small-office wireless routers, this one being used to make malicious configuration changes to more than 300,000 devices made by D-Link, Micronet, Tenda, TP-Link, and others.

The hackers appear to be using a variety of techniques to commandeer the devices and make changes to the domain name system (DNS) servers used to translate human-friendly domain names into the IP addresses computers use to locate their Web servers, according to a report published Monday by researchers from security firm Team Cymru. Likely hacks include a recently disclosed cross-site request forgery (CSRF) that allows attackers to inject a blank password into the Web interface of TP-Link routers. Other attack techniques may include one that allows wireless WPA/WPA2 passwords and other settings to be remotely changed.

So far, the attacks have hijacked more than 300,000 servers in a wide range of countries, including Vietnam, India, Italy, Thailand, and Colombia. Each compromise has the potential to redirect virtually all connected end users to malicious websites that attempt to steal banking passwords or push booby-trapped software, the Team Cymru researchers warned. The campaign comes weeks after researchers from several unrelated organizations uncovered separate ongoing mass hacks of other routers, including a worm that hit thousands of Linksys routers and the exploit of a critical flaw in Asus routers that exposes the contents of hard drives connected by USB.

In her 40 years as a global icon, Hello Kitty has been involved in some pretty strange business ventures. That’s probably why her reach in the market goes far beyond just stuffed animals and pencil cases and into stuff like a rocket fist-firing robot, that toaster that burns her face into your bread and the theme park attraction where she leads Noah (of Ark-building fame) back from “the far edge of the galaxy” in a parade of animals. This week, though, her latest business venture was announced, and it’s teaming up with New Japan Pro Wrestling for a line of merchandise.

It seems the world is finally reshaping itself according to what I want. Check out the t-shirts below!

I’ve been wanting a New Japan t-shirt for a while (mostly because the standard model declares NJPW to be KING OF SPORTS), but the Hello Kitty crossover merchandise, announced on New Japan’s Facebook page along with their upcoming events, have pushed that want into a need. Seriously, if this continues to its logical conclusion of an animated short where Kitty has to enter the ring and teach the NJPW lion mascot about the true meaning of friendship, I will know for a fact that there is goodness and light in this cruel world of ours.

Incidentally, the gentleman modeling the shirt above (the one that is not in a suit or a gigantic anthropomorphic cat) is New Japan star Tanahashi Hiroshi, a six-time IWGP World Heavyweight Champion and the current IWGP Intercontinental Champion, best known for celebrating his victories with an elaborate air guitar performance and being super into Kamen Rider. Here he is with Kamen Rider V3 and the Kamen Rider Girls, an all-girl pop group who singtokusatsu themed songs about jumpkicks with names like “The Heart’sHenshin Belt.”

Basically what I’m saying here is that, having met Hello Kitty, Tanahashi is officially living my ideal life.

No word on whether the NJPW x Hello Kitty merchandise will be available in America, but rest assured that we’ll keep you posted.

Hello Kitty And The TMNT Together At Last

Though Sunny Day Real Estate had a brief reunion run in 2009, its attempts at new music “fell apart,” according to bassist and Foo Fighter Nate Mendel. But one song from those abandoned recording sessions survived, and now it will finally be released on a split 7-inch with Circa Survive this April 19, otherwise known as Record Store Day. “Lipton Witch” will be the first new Sunny Day song since the release of 2000’s The Rising Tide, and given that the band’s 2009 line-up was its formative one, it will also be the first recording with that original unit since 1995’s LP2.

All signs point to this likely being the last piece of new music from Sunny Day, as the band’s activity stalled in 2009 while its members again focused on separate endeavors, such as guitarist Dan Hoerner’s current attempts to save Spokane, Wa. club ...