As much as I love the Blu-ray format for the rich home theater experience it can provide, I’m extremely picky when it comes to older films.

While newer movies generally don’t need a lot of work when it comes to BRD mastering, older ones often have to be rescanned and restored. The problem is that many studios are often incredibly lazy with this process, and instead of hiring skilled restoration workers, they try to handle the cleanup via digital noise reduction (DNR).

DNR is the bane of my existence when it comes to home film viewing. It’s the absolute worst thing that can happen to an old film short of it being set on fire. See, DNR automatically scrubs out defects and damage…but cannot differentiate between actual defects or damage, film processes, or the filmmakers’ intent. For example, it might clean out obvious dirt and scratches, but it also tends to remove film grain. This is a problem because film grain is not a defect, nor does it detract from the viewing experience. Directors and cinematographers made very specific choices when it came to film stock for their movies. Scrubbing out the grain not only ruins that artistic and stylistic choice, but it also results in a colossal loss of detail from the film itself, such as in the infamous 2010 BRD release of the classic science fiction action film Predator. Why bother watching a movie in HD if the detail’s been washed away?

I do need to go off on a bit of a tangent here. There’s some serious misconceptions out there when it comes to high definition in general, and BRD in particular. I’ve lost count of the amount of times people have told me that BRD versions of older movies are pointless, because they weren’t “shot in HD.”

First of all, that complaint is utter nonsense; if it was shot on film, then it shot in very high definition, often much higher than what the average digital movie camera is capable of. Most films can be scanned at 5k or higher, which is five thousand lines of resolution. (Compare that to HDTVs that top out at 1080p, or one thousand and eighty lines.)

What people should say is “shot with an HD camera.” That’s a completely different process than film, but even then, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get a better picture. Cameras are still just tools, and they’re only as good as the crew behind them.

If an older movie that I enjoy is getting a BRD release, I always make sure to check the reviews on The Digital Bits and High Def Digest first. Those sites are staffed by hardcore videophiles and cinemaphiles who actually know what they’re talking about, so their critical analysis is extremely useful to me.

And if BRD transfers look like crap? Then I’ll stick with my DVDs. Upscaled proper DVD transfers blow DNR’d-to-hell high definition ones out of the water any day of the week.

With the recent cancellation of Stargate: Universe, the last of the science fiction shows to heavily feature a starship has disappeared. This is a trend that has been building since at least 2005, when Star Trek: Enterprise went off the air.

What has become more popular over the past decade is “blue sky” science fiction, where a majority of the action takes place on planets or other solid ground. (I did not coin the phrase. I saw it on a message board somewhere.) This kind of style has been around for quite some time; classic shows like Doctor Who, Quantum Leap, and The X Files, as well as more recent material like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Caprica all fall into this category. It’s always coexisted with space-based shows, but nowadays, it seems that all sci-fi television is blue sky.

It’s strange, because starships have always been ridiculously popular. Star Trek is a testament to that, where the various incarnations of the USS Enterprise are easily just as popular as the characters. Aside from Stargate: Universe, the last really good examples of ship-focused science fiction that we had were Battlestar Galactica and Firefly. Jeez, both of those series’ names come from their ships! (In Firefly‘s case, it’s the type of drive system, but the movie followup Serenity was named after the ship itself.)

The closest thing to a ship showcase we have now is Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but as popular as Star Wars ships are, they can’t hold a candle to the Jedi or other characters. They’re simply mass-produced vehicles like cars or trucks, albeit with much cooler designs; we don’t grow attached to any particular one. (Don’t bother bringing up the Millennium Falcon, as that’s not featured on Clone Wars. Which is a good thing.) Most ships in Star Wars are designed to be blown apart in space battles, anyway. Even then, a majority of Clone Wars episodes, and arguably the best ones, take place on planets.

So why the downturn in ship spotlights? Perhaps creators and networks are rooting sci-fi programs to the ground in order to make them more accessible to a wider audience. It’s easier for most folks to wrap their heads around a modern-day setting with a few sci-fi twists than future people and aliens working on highly advanced spacecraft, as there’s a natural point of reference.

You also might think that budgetary constraints would have something to do with it, but that’s never stopped creators before. Watch the original Star Trek, with its cardboard sets and whatnot. Or even Enterprise, when the franchise wasn’t doing so well; the sets and special effects were jaw-dropping.

I can only hope this trend will reverse itself, and we’ll start seeing memorable ships exploring the cosmos once again, with an intrepid crew at the helm. That’s always been my favorite genre of sci-fi, and there’s more to starships than just space battles.

The Battlestar Galactica prequel series Caprica has ended its paltry one-season run, and to be honest…good riddance.

(Syfy will not be airing the remaining five episodes until a marathon block on January 4, 2011, but SPACE continued to air Caprica in its proper weekly timeslot until the series’ completion.)

As you might expect, MAJOR SPOILERS are ahead, people, for both Caprica and BSG.

While I enjoyed much of what the series had to offer — especially the exploration of mind-uploading and artificial intelligence, the badass character of Sam Adama, and of course the “original” Cylons — the plot moved along at a snail’s pace for much of the season, and Syfy’s splitting the season in half with an extra-long break in between didn’t help matters. But Caprica‘s real problems came in the form of shoddy plot development.

The second half of BSG‘s fourth season and eventual finale was rife with severe story problems, and Caprica sadly had some awful plot points of its own. For example, many fans (myself included) hoped that God’s “messengers” and the other deus ex machina nonsense seen in BSG wouldn’t show up. However, Caprica revealed that the messengers were the ones who told Zoe Graystone to create the avatar program. This led to Zoe-A leading the Cylons to rebel (which we’ll get to later), the Cylon War, and eventually the Fall of the Twelve Colonies. Other than that, the most prominent monotheists in Caprica are violent terrorists obsessed with resurrection, and guess who teaches the Cylons about God? It’s clear that God has no problem with the STO’s violent ways, as BSG revealed that this deity did plan the extinction of Colonial humanity over two thousand years before the events of that series. And so, Caprica further proves that this God is a very malevolent entity, as it was ultimately responsible for the Cylon uprising, and by extension the “cycle of violence” itself! Colonial humanity never had a chance.

Aside from the ongoing story problems, though, the last two Caprica episodes in particular featured some ludicrously bad moments.

The first is the death of William Adama. Yeah, you read that right. The punk-ass kid we were told would grow up to be the grizzled commander of the last battlestar was gunned down by Ha’la’tha thugs in the penultimate episode “Here be Dragons,” but it’s revealed in the final episode “Apotheosis” that he is not the same character who later led the ragtag fugitive fleet. Oh no, that William Adama was born a year or so later, and named in honor of his dead half-brother. I wish I was joking.

This was a silly bullshit retcon done strictly for shock value, and clearly was not intended from the start of the series. All of the marketing materials and other advertising for Caprica made it quite clear that the young William Adama seen in the series was the Adama that BSG fans knew and loved. He was specifically designed to be viewers’ link to BSG; even though he was a secondary character on Caprica, the prospect of watching William Adama grow from a rebellious kid into a military leader and protector of humanity’s remnants was fascinating, especially since the writers very specifically included scenes that foreshadowed events to come in BSG. Cripes, they even played the Adama leitmotif, “Wander My Friends,” during the Caprica pilot! “Here be Dragons” took all of that away, and made all of that character development utterly worthless.

While killing one William Adama and introducing the “proper” one may seem to solve a few continuity problems on the surface (such as Evelyn being his biological mother, as referenced in the BSG episode “Hero”), it actually introduces quite a few new ones that are considerably more serious. In flashbacks seen in the BSG feature-length episode “Razor,” the young Adama is in his twenties during the final days of the Cylon War. This squares perfectly with the William Adama originally seen in Caprica. However, with this new retcon, Adama would be seventeen, maybe eighteen during the “Razor” flashbacks. Aside from the fact that the actor portraying him appears far too old to be a teenager, it also creates an even bigger problem when we think about Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome, the next BSG spinoff being prepped as a backdoor pilot to air in 2011 or 2012. That series is set to focus on Colonial forces fighting the Cylons starting around the tenth year of the Cylon War. Adama is set to be a central character, but thanks to Caprica, this means he would be…fifteen or sixteen at this point in time. Even when you consider how devastating a conflict the Cylon War was, and how desperate Colonial forces may have been, fifteen-year-old soldiers fighting it is a colossal stretch. And the military certainly wouldn’t be giving a bunch of teenagers expensive fightercraft like Vipers! To make matters worse, the official Blood & Chrome press release directly states that Adama is in his early twenties during the war’s tenth year. So the retcon still doesn’t work!

But wait: there’s more. When the Graystones finally reconcile with Zoe’s avatar, they offer to research ways to build a new robot body for her, complete with synthetic flesh. What does Zoe-A call it? A “skinjob.” That line couldn’t have been more forced if they held actress Alessandra Toressani at gunpoint. Ugh.

Then there’s the finale, “Apotheosis.” Most of this episode was good, especially the Adamas getting their revenge and the Graystones using Cylon soldiers to stop the STO from bombing Atlas Arena. (We finally get to see Cylons in full armor plate!) The cheesiest moment was when Zoe-A was destroying the STO’s Heaven program, she shouted “I am God!” to the astonished Clarice Willow. That line was just awful. Some fans have panned Toressani’s acting ability, but this may not be her fault; even for a talented actress, this is just poor writing, and she seems to have gotten the short end of the stick with a lot of her character’s dialogue.

It’s at the end of “Apotheosis” where things really go downhill. Series creator Ronald D. Moore seems to love jumping forward in time to cap off a finale, and Caprica is no different. Instead of fast forwarding one hundred and fifty millennia as seen on BSG, we’re shown a montage called “The Shape of Things to Come” (another heavy-handed BSG reference) showcasing varying events taking place over the next few years. Some of the scenes were quite good, such as the Cylons being rapidly integrated into Colonial society after their success in stopping the arena bombing, but the rest were just dumb.

As mentioned before, we see the “new” William Adama, shown as a toddler. The camera seems to focus on his face, so that we see his noticeably blue eyes (colored by CGI, of course). Just in case that didn’t beat you over the head enough, his father makes sure to call him “Bill.” Apparently, the writers think we’re all a bunch of idiots.

We also see Lacy Rand as the new Mother, leader of the monotheists. A teenager who was conflicted about the STO, all of a sudden becoming their leader? Even if that scene is supposed to be a few years down the line, that’s like a teen questioning Christianity suddenly becoming the Pope.

Finally, the whole montage is interspersed with scenes of Clarice preaching to the Cylons about their sentience, and how they should demand rights from their human masters, by force if necessary. This part wasn’t too bad, though I don’t see why Clarice would suddenly give a shit about a bunch of robots. What ruined the sequence was how it showed that Zoe-A, sitting in church along with the other robots, was destined to lead the Cylon rebellion. I mentioned that earlier in my post, and it really throws things to the wolves. She was clearly back on the side of the “good guys,” and this is another abrupt about-face. The God cop-out from BSG was an absolute disaster, and this only makes it worse.

The final nail in the coffin? The Graystones complete a new, flesh-covered body for Zoe-A. The robot seen on Amanda Graystone’s screen looks much more human than a Cylon, however…Zoe-A rises out of a fucking resurrection tank in the Graystones’ lab. Yep, a glowing bathtub filled with white goo and everything. This was yet another attempt to browbeat BSG imagery into fans’ heads, but in this case, it just makes no goddamned sense. The Final Five brought resurrection technology to the Cylons at the end of the Cylon War; how the hell does that square with humans on Caprica creating it over a decade before they arrived? Even though the Graystones would certainly would have had to hide this technology and Zoe’s new body from everyone, it’s still a glaring problem.

See what I mean? These plots are just ridiculous, and really brought the show down. A few fans close to the production staff believe that the reason Syfy immediately pulled the remaining five episodes from their schedule after announcing Caprica‘s cancellation is because the powers-that-be feared another overwhelmingly negative fan backlash, just like what happened with the end of BSG. Given the steaming turds dropped on us as Caprica drew to a close, that theory certainly has merit. Airing the last batch of episodes in a single fell swoop in January really won’t change things for the better, as I doubt many fans will want to sit through five straight hours of this dreck. (Not to mention that Caprica‘s ratings weren’t so hot to begin with; putting it up against other popular programs across the entire 6-11 PM EST time slot is going to murder it.)

I loved BSG to death, right up until the end of the final season when things started going off the rails, culminating in that terrible finale. I had hoped that Caprica would learn from the other series’ mistakes, but it seems that was far too much to ask. At this point, I do not have high hopes for Blood and Chrome. Honestly, I think that the BSG franchise really needs a long break. And though I’m sick to death of them…in this case, a reboot is certainly in order, or at least a decanonizing of the objectionable elements. Other science fiction franchises such as Star Trek and Doctor Who have done this recently and handled it well, so it’s neither impossible nor without precedent.

While getting my weekly dose of Fringe via Hulu, I was treated to an ad from iRobot. You probably know them as the makers of the popular Roomba series of housecleaning robots, and this latest ad was for one of their newest products. I don’t recall the specific robot they were selling, because what really struck me was the commercial’s tagline:

“It’s time to let the robots do the work for you.”

The instant I saw that, I exclaimed “Holy shit, what the hell are they thinking?!” My roommate’s response was even better: “That’s how it starts!”

I love the fact that robots are becoming more prevalent in my lifetime, but now one of their manufacturers is making abundantly clear from the get-go that robots should function as nothing more than slave labor. Do they want to get us all killed?! Apparently, they’ve never seen The Terminator, or Battlestar Galactica, or The Matrix…or read the fucking book I, Robot! They even made a movie out of that one, so there’s really no excuse.

And here’s one last bit of nightmare fuel for you: in addition to their cute lil’ housecleaners…iRobot makes military robots. You’d think that the company would have better sense than to stoke the fires like this, but their arrogance will doom us all.

I’ve written at length about A Charlie Brown Christmas in the past, but I never did devote an entire post to the criminally underrated Peanuts Thanksgiving special from 1973. The closest I came was ranting about ABC’s poor scheduling of the special last year, despite airing it twice in 2008. This year, however, things have improved: the special is airing at 8:00 PM EST on ABC this coming Thursday (November 18). Now people will actually be able to watch the damned thing instead of being passed out from too much food and drink! Let’s just hope ABC doesn’t pointlessly edit it for time like they have with their recent broadcasts of A Charlie Brown Christmas. (I guess that’s what DVDs are for, but it’s still a damned shame.)

Anyway, it’s high time I got down to brass tacks and take a look at what makes A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving so great.

The special opens with Charlie Brown being tricked into kicking a football held by Lucy. She claims it’s a Thanksgiving tradition, but as usual, she pulls it away at the last minute causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back (but not kill himself). As Charlie Brown mopes around near the mailbox, he grumbles about Thanksgiving to his sister Sally and his friend Linus. Sally’s also bitching about having to do extra classwork because the holiday, and then Linus schools ‘em both with a bit of a history lesson.

Later on, as Charlie Brown and Sally prepare to go to their grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, our hero gets a phone call from the always-annoying Peppermint Patty. She wants a Thanksgiving dinner of her own, and she manipulates Charlie Brown into providing it. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she also invites Marcie and Franklin! Charlie Brown is shit outta luck, but Linus drops by and suggests that he prepare an early meal for his peers so he can still go to his grandmother’s house later in the day.

Of course, to seat a large group, you need a large table. This task falls to Charlie Brown’s faithful beagle Snoopy and his sidekick Woodstock, and they raid the garage for supplies. Snoopy has the brilliant idea of using a ping pong table for the feast, and fetches lawnchairs to seat everyone. One of the chairs has apparently gained sentience, and engages Snoopy in a vicious battle. The dog overcomes his foe, and returns to the house to help cook dinner.

See, Charlie Brown has to feed a group of kids…but he can only make cold cereal and maybe toast. Good thing Snoopy is once again up to the task, and the canine chef takes to the kitchen. While many people are apt to forget A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, they’ll often remember its unique Thanksgiving “feast.”

Instead of the usual turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie, Snoopy opted for buttered toast, jelly beans, pretzel sticks, popcorn, and what looks like parfaits. Once he’s done whipping up all of this stuff, Snoopy dons Pilgrim garb along with Woodstock as the guests begin to arrive.

The gang heads to the backyard to be seated, and Linus quotes a prayer from the original Thanksgiving before Snoopy serves the food. Everyone’s shocked by the odd culinary choices, of course. Peppermint Patty loses her shit, and chews out Snoopy and Charlie Brown for their poor excuse for Thanksgiving dinner. Charlie Brown skulks back to the house in shame, but Marcie calls Peppermint Patty out for being an uppity bitch; after all, she invited herself and her friends without asking first. Peppermint Patty kinda-sorta apologizes to Charlie Brown, and all is well. Even better is the fact that everyone has been invited to dinner with Charlie Brown’s grandmother! After they all leave, Snoopy and Woodstock cook up a proper Thanksgiving feast for themselves at Snoopy’s doghouse. Humans be damned.

There’s so much to love in A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. My favorite scene is Snoopy’s chair-fu fight; it’s ridiculous, but cleverly-animated and fits with the overall whimsical nature of the Peanuts holiday specials. Woodstock arguing with Snoopy over their Pilgrim costumes is great, too; even though since neither of them speak English, you can clearly tell what’s being said. (I like to think that Woodstock is cursing his little yellow head off.)

Then there’s the music. As expected, this special’s soundtrack was composed by the legendary Vince Guaraldi. In fact, it features my favorite song of his: “Little Birdie.” All people think of when asked about Peanuts music is the great but vastly overrated “Linus and Lucy,” but “Little Birdie” kicks its ass down the fucking street. How can you not love that amazing bass line? The early-1970s jazz influence permeates the rest of the soundtrack, too, with lots of flute and electric piano work.

Speaking of the early 1970s, this was a time when blaxploitation was all the rage. So when Franklin, the lone black Peanuts character arrives, he gets a dap greeting. It was fairly innocuous and simply a reflection of the times, of course, but it’s hilarious in retrospect. (I should also point out that Franklin only gets a single spoken line in the entire special.)

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving may not get the accolades heaped upon the other Peanuts holiday heavyweights — It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and A Charlie Brown Christmas — but it’s full of great moments nonetheless, and definitely worth watching every year.

(Shit, I just realized I’ve never done a writeup on Great Pumpkin! Better make sure I take care of that next October…)