Christmas/Hannukah Score!

[sinanju]

Yours Truly and the lovely and talented snippy have done quite well on the DVD front this holiday season.

We received Batman Begins, Fantastic Four and War of the Worlds from another couple we know.  Batman was a fun movie, though I found the master villain's plot overly complicated and implausible.  He really should have read the Evil Overlord's checklist.  I know Fantastic Four was mostly panned by critics and didn't do very well, but I liked a lot of it.  As for War of the Worlds, I haven't seen it.

Twoson gave me the DVD of Serenity for Hannukah.  Go me!

Snippy gave me the first (and only) season DVD set of Wonderfalls. Yay!

I gave Snippy The West Wing, Season Five.  Alas, the very first episode displayed some of the skipping that--from what I could dig up online--is far from rare on TWW DVD sets.  That doesn't make us happy, but Snippy really loves the show, so we'll deal with it.

I also bought myself Dead Like Me, Season One.  I already owned the second season package (I bought it after renting the first season and liking it, when the second season was for sale but not yet available for rental) and recently watched the whole season's episodes again.  So I wanted to see the first season again.

I also watched the deleted scenes on the pilot episode disc, which I don't recall seeing when I rented it.  It has a lot of extra material.  Some, of course, was edited from the final episode for good and obvious reasons--slightly longer versions of existing scenes that didn't add anything, or additional snippets of dialogue that didn't pull their weight.

Others could have been left in; I think they make clear points that weren't especially clear in the final cut.  We see Rube take George to the DMV, where another Reaper who works for the DMV in his "day job" provides George with a new identity and the paperwork to back it up.  Ah ha, so that's where her identity of "Millie Hagen" came from.  This made it much clearer that the Reapers were far more numerous and well-infiltrated into society (and thus able to assist one another) than it turned out in the series as aired.  In canon, George, Daisy, Mason and Roxy were answerable to Rube, but otherwise seemed almost completely autonomous.

And a few, had they been left in, would have completely changed some of the background of the series.  George learns that all Reapers can instantly recognize one another, which does not appear to be the case in the series as aired.  She also encounters a group of Reapers assigned to take the souls of plague victims--they've been out of work for centuries.  George also learns in this scene that "you reap what you sow," meaning that she died by violence, therefore she takes the souls of accident/murder/suicide victims; the plague Reapers died of plague.  (This doesn't carry over into the series as aired; one Reaper who works a hospital, taking people who die of natural causes mentions that she died on the Titanic.

It's also interesting to see how characters and series evolve as a series goes on.  The biggest change is in Mason.  Our first glimpse of Mason is when he shows up escorting two souls.  When he shushes one of them and the guy objects to being shushed, he tells them, "You two just murdered one another in a crack den.  You do not have my respect, hence--shhhhh."  He seems far more competent and level-headed than the perennial screw-up and loser he turned out to be.

Another change is Betty.  The character is only in the first half dozen or so episodes before she leaves, replaced in the next episode by Daisy.  Daisy mostly fills the same role in the series--somewhat shallow, a fashion plate, etc.  Which leads me to believe that the original actress didn't work out.  She was also the first choice to play Inara on Firefly, but was replaced by Morena Baccarin (who I think was a far better choice--certainly far more elegant and beautiful).

There are other differences, but some of them I ascribe to lack of continuity.  As much as I enjoy the show, I'm fully aware that the producers/writers did not pay the kind of attention to continuity and consistency that SF fans (those like me, anyhow) want to see.  Nonetheless, I really like the show.  I'm not always willing to overlook that kind of thing, but in this case I am.

Comments

[beccadg.livejournal.com]

Heh, the Fantastic Four made $155 million domesticly. $329 million worldwide. There's talk of a sequel. You don't need good critics reviews when you make money. What can I say I liked the movie. :D