Tuesday, April 27, 2021

Mighty Med Retrospective

We know that superheroes save people, but who saves the people who save people? Well, if you’re unlucky enough to be injured in the Lab Rats Universe, your first port of call is Mighty Med. I’ll let you decide which bit of that’s the bad luck.

Mighty Med was the Brainchild of Jim Bernstein, a producer who’d worked on Phineas and Ferb and American Dad and Andy Schwartz, who’d been a writer and editor for Scrubs and had worked on Drake and Josh prior to that. The show ran for 44 episodes across 2 seasons, a relatively short run and not a well acclaimed one, with an average 6.5/10 on IMDb. This is not dissimilar to the score of Lab Rats either, so let’s not jump to conclusions there

The main stars of the show are Bradley Steven Perry, who has Disney Channel Experience playing Gabe Duncan on Good Luck Charlie, and having a role in Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure; Jake Short who’d played Fletcher on A.N.T. Farm, and making her television debut, Paris Berelc.

Other actors involved are Devan Leos, I briefly mentioned how he attempted to murder a homeless person in my Austin and Ally retrospective. Seriously, f*ck him. And he won’t be last controversial figure I’ll mention unfortunately. Carlos Lacamara is also a pretty significant cast member, he was in Independence Day.

Much like with the Austin and Ally and Lab Rats reviews, I’ll cover the opening episodes, and any important developments through the rest of the show’s run. I won’t cover every episode in-depth because this is a sitcom and that would just amount to explaining the jokes. I’ll also be covering the Lab Rats vs Mighty Med crossover.

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Friday, April 16, 2021

Pixar Playlist #17 - Finding Dory

Ladies and Gentlemen, whether you like it or not, the Pixar Playlist

When it comes to sequels, Pixar have a mixed history, it tends to be that longer the wait for a sequel, the better it ends up being. The Toy Story Sequels came out better than the Cars sequel and it’s quite impressive that of Pixar’s 16 movie line-up so far, only 3 of them have been sequels. For #17, we’ll add a 4th to that family, a sequel to Finding Nemo, Finding Dory.

It’ll be no surprise to you that a sequel to the highly successful finding Nemo had been in the works for some time, originally a project given to Circle 7, but shelved after Disney bought Pixar outright. It seems in their creative culture, they wanted a timetable for sequels so they could have time to come up with creative ideas, which is something I appreciate but then we still ended up with Cars 2 and the short gap between the Toy Story sequels didn’t exactly diminish their quality so…

None-the-less, the announcement of this movie in 2012, a full 9 years after the original came out. Obviously, some recasting was required for Nemo, if he was to play a role. But that’s small fish (get it?) compared to the most interesting feature, this one was going to put more of a spotlight on Dory.

Now, Pixar putting a spotlight on their comic relief has had bad results in the past but I think Dory is a better choice than Mater was as her comic relief had a more tragic undercurrent (ha) that is easy enough to mine to tell a story. So, without further ado, let’s take a look

Tuesday, April 13, 2021

Netflix Retrospective: Dragons: Race to the Edge Season 6 Episodes 1-3

I think I’ve done my bit of dark gritty stuff for the time being, so we’re going back to lighter stuff for this retrospective, let’s bring Dragons: Race to the Edge to a close.



Where we last left off it was revealed that Trader Johann had secretly been part of the Dragon Hunters and is looking to unlock the key to the King of Dragons through the recently recovered Dragon Eye.

Friday, April 9, 2021

#83 - Titans Season 2 Episode 1 - Trigon

Yes, I’ve ranting about Titans for 5 weeks now, this is the last one, I swear this is the last one I’ll be doing for a while, even I need a break.


So, let’s talk a little about my history with the Titans. Teen Titans by Geoff Johns was the first superhero team book I ever read. I wasn’t collecting monthly issues at the time but I bought every trade of the series until the travesty that was Felicia D Henderson’s run on the book. No iteration of the Titans since has come close to the book’s peak quality and whilst recent events make this statement unfortunate for many reasons, Geoff Johns’ writing deserves credit for that.

I was a late bloomer to the Teen Titans animated series but I very highly enjoyed it. The show has a unique style that no-one’s managed to fully capture since, although there have been imitators, it has a unique blend of comedic and serious stories. And because of its popularity, I understand why Robin, Starfire, Raven and Beast Boy were chosen as the main Titans for this show. Cyborg regrettably gets left out, though he apparently is in the Doom Patrol series, despite Robotman basically serving the same role. It’s understandable given that Cyborg has been ‘elevated’ to the Justice League.

But the Titans has been a comic aimed at a younger audience, it’s kids and teens that are supposed to aspire to these characters. But it seems like they wanted a tone akin to Arrow but without the restrictions of being on the CW channel. This was always a bad show to go for this tone. Doom Patrol actually probably would be a better fit, though I haven’t seen that show.

But I can forgive a lot when it comes to this show, but Dick Grayson has been royally screwed over by it. I get him and Batman parting ways on not-so-great terms, that’s definitely happened in the comics but Dick Grayson is usually the upbeat one, it’s such a shame to have him so moody and miserable in this. And do I have to go over the whole debacle with Zucco again?

Titans was originally conceived as a 12-episode series, but just as the show was about to premiere, the episode count was dropped to 11, with the final episode now becoming the opening episode of the then recently announced second season. I’ll get to my suspicions as to why this came about later but for now, let’s dig into the season finale and discover why I felt this was worthy of a Rage4Media review.

Sunday, April 4, 2021

Thursday, April 1, 2021