Guest Essay- Merrill Barr asks: Is The CW about to take control of the television landscape?

The year was 1987 and the television landscape was dominated by three major broadcasting networks, CBS, ABC and NBC. Seeing an opportunity to take hold of a specific niche of the viewing public, young viewers to be precise, media mogul Rupert Murdoch took an investment $325 million to launch what is now known simply as FOX.  Through forward thinking innovation in programming like edgy sitcoms (Married… With Children), barrier breaking sketch shows (In Living Color), animated sitcoms in prime time (The Simpsons), young lead characters (21 Jump Street), reality television (COPS), prime time soap-operas (Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place), dark science fiction (The X-Files) and a first down line during NFL games, FOX has since become the biggest name on the Nielsen charts every season (American Idol).  

Celebrating the legacy of Batman: The Animated Series 20 years later: The unsung heroes of Batman:TAS.

This week will be the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Batman: The Animated Series. In its weird way, the show actually had three 'premieres'. The first episode, "The Cat and the Claw part I", debuted on Saturday morning, September 5th, as a quasi-sneak preview of sorts. The next day saw the official premiere, in primetime no less (Sunday night at 7pm) where Fox debuted the official pilot episode, "On Leather Wings". Then came the first official weekday episode, Monday afternoon at 4:30pm, which was no less than "Heart of Ice", which to this day stands as not only one of the best episodes of the series run, but a shining testament to all that Batman: The Animated Series did right both in terms of the Batman mythos and the entire medium of childrens' action shows. This will be the second in what I hope are a handful of essays detailing the long-term legacy of the Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski's groundbreaking animated saga. Today we discuss the people involved in the show whose names have been somewhat forgotten in the annals of Bat-history.  In short, the show is more than just the brainchild of Bruce Time and Paul Dini alongside the vocal talents of Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill.  Without lessening their accomplishments, let's take a moment to remember the others who made it the modern day treasure that it is.

Less is more. Why Marvel's decision to increase Iron Man 3's budget by $60 million may not be a net-positive.

This is old news, but it broke while I was busy and I suppose the release of the first official still is as good a time to discuss this as any.  Despite commentary running up to the release of The Avengers swearing that Shane Black's Iron Man 3 would be a scaled-back and character-centric affair, it now appears that the eye-popping success of The Avengers has changed the template over at Marvel.  The film's budget of $140 million has now been raised by a whopping $60 million, so that it will now cost $200 million assuming everything gets done on time and on schedule.  Instead of promising a low-key character drama loosely based on "Extremis", Iron Man 3 is now intended to be the biggest Marvel movie yet!  Iron Man 2 cost $200 million and still felt incredibly small-scale and the $140 million Captain America was the only pre-Avengers film that actually felt 'big'.  It's not that money can't buy quality or anything obvious like that, it's the idea that money wrongly applied and/or given to a film purely because it can be sometimes does more harm than good.