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This week’s episode is all about television, as Jose and I go over a huge chunk of the networks’ pilot pickups, renewals, and cancellations. This year seems to be a little light on genre-related stuff, and everyone knows we (okay, maybe it’s just me) hate comedies, so it’s a bit of a wasteland. You can check out some video for all of NBC’s new shows (except Hannibal and the pirate show) right here. The Revolution trailer is basically a four and a half minute summation of the entire first episode, which is a strange strategy. Also be sure to watch the 1600 Penn interview with Bill Pullman, who really didn’t want to be talking about this show and would rather have been talking to his agent to find out what he’s going to do once NBC cancels it.

We also go over the latest records Avengers broke this weekend, and Jose lovingly discusses yelling at his television in made-up dragon language. Oh, and here is the Hulk-out list that we promised you last week, in which every single thing that made Bill Bixby turn into the Hulk in the original TV series is listed. Some of them are pretty hilarious.

Finally, here’s a link to our appearance on last week’s Ready Room podcast on TrekFM. Jose and I joined Trek guru Larry Nemecek to talk about the current state of Star Trek and what we may see in the future. We’re in at around the 43 minute mark, and proceed to talk for 90 minutes. Many thanks to Greg and Chris for having us on.

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I think there’s a lot of good reasons for The Avengers runaway success this weekend, but none were nearly as important or as vital as Director/Writer Joss Whedon’s contribution to this film.

While one could argue that he may not be the best FEATURE film director, it is the combination of both writer AND director that made The Avengers what it is. The ability to singlehandedly shepherd a script to screen through a singular vision is something that payed of to the tune of 600+ Million dollars worldwide. No small feat, for the guy who’s best known work was Buffy,The Vampire Slayer.

We talk a bit on the show about the film (spoiler : we loved it) and one thing I mentioned was that while Jon Favraew did a great job on Iron Man his involvement was not crucial to the success of the film. The complete opposite is true here. There are great talents in front and behind the camera, but the real star of this film was Whedon.

To Marvel Studios. Make sure that you sign this guy tomorrow for the next one. I’m not sure if there’s another talent on the planet right now that can do what Avengers accomplished.

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BEES! We apologize for the delay in updating the blog (and doing the most recent podcast episode), but work has been busy for both of us and the weekends are a nonstop party. This week catches us up on the past two weeks of news with a new writer for Daredevil, a 48 frames-per-second debacle of Hobbit proportions, and a whole bunch of other stuff we gloss over in anticipation of Avengers this weekend. We’ll be back to our regular schedule next week, unless our brains explode because Chris Evans is so dreamy.

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Things are changing in the gaming space. We cover a little bit of that on the big show this week, with the new iPad and Kinect voice controls coming to Skyrim. I think this is all great. I know a lot of people have issues with giving up their precious controllers (and the mice and keyboards before those), but I’m not one of those people. I want to try as many different ways to game as we can come up with. Not all of them will be ideal, but it’s all just baby steps towards the obvious larger and ultimate goal….Holodeck.

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Welcome to another exciting new episode of The Zero Room! Here’s a link to Gary Goddard’s excellent detailing of his group’s proposed full-scale Enterprise that almost got built in Vegas. As we discussed in the show, it’s an extremely bold idea that would have been pretty amazing to see in person. Unfortunately, Paramount didn’t agree. Elsewhere in the episode we discuss Lego (here’s a link to the moon buggy with minifig astronaut I talked about), box office, and Marvel’s new infinite line of digital comics (which is right here on Comixology for just ninety-nine American cents).

I like brie a lot but I don’t like the rind, which means I don’t usually eat it at a party because I have to sit there and carve out the cheese bits from inside. So then there’s this discarded cheese rind sitting around and I look like a jerk.

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It’s one of the iconic images of the original Total Recall movies, it was such a good reveal for us that had never read the story before hand. I’m really looking forward to see how he’s represented in the new movie. We talk a bit about the new Total Recall trailer on this weeks show and a few other things. I know some think it’s sacrilege to remake the Verhoven flick but I’m now really looking forward to this new take on that story. Hopefully they will be able to keep all the layers that are built into the story.

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It’s Nora Dunn. She was on Saturday Night Live a while ago. I think she got really mad when Sinead O’Conner tore up that picture of the pope, back when that was one of the worst things you could see on TV. Now she does a lot of small parts on different things, and I think she had a recurring role on Entourage as like a therapist or something. She may be the one who’s a super-conservative crazy person now. No, wait, that’s Victoria Jackson.

This week’s new episode brings discussion of James Cameron’s voyage to the bottom of the sea, as well as Dorito Tacos. Both of these things are evidence that although the world map contains no more blanks spots, there are still new frontiers for mankind to conquer. And that’s just the first five minutes! From there it’s on to the box office juggernaut that is The Hunger Games, as well as a look at the recent furor surrounding Mass Effect 3′s ending. Lots of Bests this week as well, and not a single Worst.

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This week on the show we invite our good friend Reuben on the show to help us decode the language used in the new Japanese “Avengers” trailer, which is probably the best trailer that they’ve shown us so far, since it’s more about the team (The Avengers) rather than the individual (RDJ’s Iron Man). I suppose it’s all about marketing. Foreign audiences don’t know who the Avengers are so they need a more comprehensive description of who these people are. Here in the U.S. we know a little more so they lean very hard on RDJ’s popularity for marketing.

The optimist in me wishes that we could do the former kind of marketing hers. Sell the story you have with the characters you have, rather than selling the star. Still, I get it. RDJ sells tickets. Doesn’t stop me from wanting more “selling up” to the audience rather than “selling down”. Anyways we have a good time, thanks to Reuben’s knowledge of Japanese, in dissecting the trailer.

Oh, and I complain about MS Xbox Live’s gold account. Again.

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I promise this week’s episode is not nearly as long as last week’s episode. I also promise that I am not in this picture of the 1999 Phantom Menace line, although I am probably off to the side on the pay phone or maybe in the tent doing some heroin. Anyway, this week we’re back to two dudes and two microphones (each pointed in the correct direction). It initially seemed like there wasn’t much news to talk about, but we went in depth on a few stories and managed to talk for over an hour. I’ve had two people at work tell me to ignore the critics and go see John Carter, which I will try to do very soon, but apparently no one else really agrees with them because it didn’t make very much money. We’ll see how much it drops next week. Strong word of mouth might help, but our chances of seeing a second film in the franchise are not looking good. Russia really liked it, though, so there’s that.

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This week we finally did something I’ve been looking forward to on the big show…talk about Star Wars and the fans hate for the prequels and everything George Lucas stands for now. We’re lucky to have our good friend Jay Holben on the show as well, who’s a big a Star Wars fan as I know. We had a really great talk and I’m glad that we had it. Now if only I could get Doug to talk about the Master…