Sci-Fi Storm

This year’s Christmas Special, “The Runaway Bride”, is in the can, and filming has begun on the third new Doctor Who series. As previously mentioned, Freyma Agyeman is joining full time as medical student Martha Jones. No word if any other classic bad guys will return, but we will see William Shakespeare, and travel to New York circa 1930…

Sorry this is a bit late…been busy…anyways, the release date for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince movie has been set for November 21st, 2008. Ambitious, considering there is no director attached yet, or cast signings. Order of the Phoenix is due out next July. In the meantime, American authors Stephen King and John Irving “opened” for J.K. at a story reading ay Radio City Music Hall, pleaded with her to not kill off her boy wizard…

Actress Helena Bonham Carter (Planet of the Apes, Merlin) has signed on to join the cast of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix as the Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange. Have you noticed more characters in the later books are getting astronomical names? Remus, Sirius, Bellatrix, Luna, Regulus…

20th Century Fox Television and UHD have announced that the short-lived but well-loved series Firefly has been remastered from the original prints into 1080i high-definition, and will debut on Sept. 24th on the UHD channel.

The SCI FI Channel has announced a deal with CBS Paramount for rights to a number of properties, including Star Trek: Enterprise, Haunted, Jake 2.0, Threshold, and a number of other series, miniseries, and made for TV movies.

The SCI FI Channel’s “broadband channel” site SCI FI Pulse is now offering original webisodes of its new series Eureka, with its own plot line. Read More for the press release.

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I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I had the opportunity to listen to the soundtrack for A Scanner Darkly. Again, music reviews aren’t my thing, but here is an overview.

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Superman Returns honcho Bryan Singer will develop three series for ABC, with at least one guaranteed to be given a pilot. Unusual in the deal is that there is nothing tying him to a specific studio – he can get writers from anywhere. One wonders how much deeper the Logan’s Run remake is in the pile now…

Well, not really. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (better known as NORAD) has announced that they are standing down the facility at Cheyenne Mountain and moving operations to Peterson Air Force Base, while keeping the facility available in a “warm standby” state. The change in likelyhood and manner of attack is the primary reason, so there is no need to continue modernizing and fully manning the facility.

Time to regress…reports are out that not only the long-awaited (and long-lambasted) Star Trek: The Animated Series will be released on DVD in November, but a whole host of other Filmation shows, including a few live-action shows I remember well from my childhood – Ark II, Space Academy (which had Lost in Space‘s Jonathan Harris), and spin-off Jason of Star Command (which had the late James Doohan, who is finally getting to go where few have gone before).