Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Please call the listener line at 1.888.508.4343,
Email us at scifidinerpodcast@gmail.com
or visit us on Twitter @scifidiner.
Tonight’s Diners: Scott & Miles
Welcome to the Diner.
Download this iPod friendly episode (right click and save)
Download this MP3 episode (right click and save)
If you have listened to the show for sometime, we would love to have you leave feedback on iTunes. We know not all of you use iTunes, but for those that do, it helps us become more visible. If you don’t use iTunes, your feedback is still valuable. Visit our webpage at https://scifidinerpodcast.com and leave a comment on the show notes or email us at scifidinerpodcast@gmail.com We want to know what you are thinking about what we are saying and what shows you are watching!
Jason’s question: How do you feel about big name actors/actresses in scifi/comic movies?
Our Question: In regards to the Matrix, what are your thoughts about how it has held up, religion and philosophy in the movie, and your favorite moments and quotes?
A Shameless Plug: The Gatecasts SG1 Season 4 Favourite Episode via shameless plug Mike Crate
Question: Name two actors from BSG the Guest Starred on Big Bang Theory.
Prize: Signed Tahmoh Penkett photo
You will have until April 19th to answer this question. Please include the Code Word located in the first ten minutes of the podcast. Send your answer with your mailing address to scifidinerpodcast@gmail.com, call us at 18885084343, or DM us on Twitter at @scifidiner. Make sure you include your e-mail with all entries! Only one entry per person. The SciFi Diner is not responsible for any injuries occurring if you secretly decide to go all shiny and dress in a browncoat and walk into your local bar.
Trek New: News Reviews and Culture @ Treknews.net
New ThunderCats trailer sells the savage scope of combat felines
At this past weekend’s WonderCon la-di-da, Warner Bros. Animation and Cartoon Network unveiled a deeper look into their updated ThunderCats series, which has an distinct Avatar: The Last Airbendery vibe. And that is not a bad thing in the least.
Given that Avatar is the best—and perhaps only—recent example of long-form storytelling for a young audience, I’d would be thrilled to pieces if these new adventures of Lion-O and his aides de camp managed to approach the depth of emotion and awesomeness of action that Nickelodeon’s long-running series had.
Trerry Pracheet, Terry Goodkind, and Terry Brooks
Holy frak! BSG’s Katee Sackhoff joins Star Wars: The Clone Wars
We love Katee Sackhoff. We loved her stogie-smoking, hard-drinking portrayal of Starbuck in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, and we loved her brief appearances in the short-lived Bionic Woman reboot. This geek love is about to go to the next level when we “see” her in her next appearance.
Because Sackhoff will be voicing a role in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
Entertainment Weekly spoke to supervising director Dave Filoni, who was tight-lipped about Sackhoff’s actual role, except to say that she was going to portray “a memorable character.”
But Filoni did dish about the influence of Battlestar Galactica on The Clone Wars:
EW: Actually, there’ve been a number of BSG references on the show lately, like how a Separatist tactical droid said “By your command” a la the old chrome-domed Cylons.
DF: See that’s me being old, because that’s classic Battlestar. The Separatist tactical droids have a similar sounding voice to old Cylons. In fact, the inspiration I had for those tactical droids was a Cylon in the original series called Lucifer. He was Baltar’s adviser. I always like the idea of this really smart droid that could calculate all these possibilities. I thought the Droid Army should have these brainiac droids that could wage battles based on calculations of probability whereas the Jedi are fighting out of heart and commitment to each other.
Interviewer Christian Blauvelt was quick to recall that, once upon a time, 20th Century Fox sued the makers of the original Battlestar Galactica for copyright infringement. “[I]t’s amazing to see how it’s come full circle, with Star Wars referencing Battlestar,” Blauvelt said.
Sackhoff’s role only cements this amazement.
Read the full interview, which includes Filoni discussing why season three is so much darker than previous seasons, here.
Movie News
Can Will Smith and son get M. Night Shyamalan back on track?
Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan has had a rough few years lately, with his three most recent films getting scathing reviews and struggling at the box office. Yet that’s not stopping one of the world’s biggest movie stars from working with him. According to Deadline, Shyamalan will direct an “untitled futuristic science fiction adventure film” that will star Will Smith (I Am Legend). Smith’s son Jaden will star in the picture alongside his dad, and just to make it a complete family venture, Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith is listed as one of the producers, along with her husband. Shyamalan has co-written the script for the movie (with Book of Eli writer Gary Whitta), which was reportedly titled One Thousand A.E. when he first began talking about it late last year. The tale, set in the far future, involves a young boy and his father whose spaceship crashes on Earth 1,000 years after it has been abandoned. Shyamalan said in a newly released statement, “The chance to make a scary, science-fiction film starring Jaden and Will is my dream project.” Will and Jaden Smith have acted together before, in The Pursuit of Happyness, while Jaden also appeared in the ill-conceived remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. His dad, of course, has starred in sci-fi blockbusters like Independence Day, I, Robot and Men in Black (the third MiB entry is now filming again after script problems shut production down for a couple of months). As for Shyamalan, his last two original films, Lady in the Water and The Happening, were both critical and box-office disasters. His adaptation of The Last Airbender did reasonably well at the box office but was panned almost across the board by critics, moviegoers and fans of the TV series. There’s no word yet on when production will begin. Do you think this is a good team-up? Does Shyamalan deserve yet another chance, and can working with Smith bring out the best in him?
14 wild and crazy secret government programs from sci-fi flicks
April 1, 2011 Source Code’s shadowy organization, the one with the technology to send Jake Gyllenhaal bouncing around through time, got us thinking about all the crazy-cool government initiatives that the movies would have us believe aren’t real—but I’m positive that someone’s building giant arks in case of a Mayan apocalypse.
Secret Program: The Source Code The Purpose: To allow agents to inhabit another person’s body and relive the same eight minutes as many times as necessary to avert potential disaster. Unfortunate side effect: falling in love.
Secret Program: Men in Black The Purpose: To liaise with the alien population on Earth and monitor extraterrestrial comings and goings in the immediate galactic vicinity. And to make sure that the world at large knows nothing of anything of this. Hey, look at this flashy-thingie.
Secret Program: The Virgil The Purpose: To drill to the center of the Earth in a penile ship called The Virgil—made of the wonderfully titled Unobtanium—set off a bunch of nukes and get the core of the planet spinning once more.
Secret Program: Pax The Purpose: To eliminate aggression in humans, to make them more docile, more controllable, the Alliance dosed the entire planet of Miranda with G-23 paxilon hydrochlorate. It didn’t work. It killed 99.9 percent of the population. The 0.1 percent of the population that did survive? Well, they got nasty.
Secret Program: Area 51 The Purpose: To study the aliens that landed at Roswell in 1946—and hopefully find some useful applications of their technology. Namely, repelling an invasion by those very same aliens.
Secret Program: Universal Soldier The Purpose: To take newly dead soldiers, preserve them and then reanimate them for use in combat situations—sort of like zombie terminators. Of course, nothing could go wrong.
Secret Program: Giant boats The Purpose: To house the members of the human race who’ve been pre-selected to survive a world-engulfing flood. And a decent amount of dogs.
Secret Program: The Machine. No, the other one. The Purpose: After decoding a signal from deep space and finding that it includes plans to build a massive machine, the world’s governments come together to construct what’s revealed to be an interstellar transport device. And then some religious extremist blows it up. Good thing the U.S. and Japan had built another one that no one knew about.
Secret Program: Snow White The Purpose: To open a time window into the past so that detectives can see every aspect of a crime as it happens. And travel back in time as well, though that bit isn’t recommended.
Secret Program: Project X The Purpose: To train chimps to fly Air Force flight simulators and then expose them to the same amount of radiation human pilots would receive after a nuclear strike.
Secret Program: The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense The Purpose: Well, it’s kind of right there in the title: Fielding agents who, themselves, are rather paranormal—Hellboy, Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman among them—the BPRD protects the world from the things that go bump in the night.
Secret Program: War Operation Plan Response The Purpose: To run simulations of various military scenarios and learn from the outcomes. Taking control of NORAD and bringing the United States to the brink of Global Thermonuclear War was just an unfortunate bit of downloadable content.
Secret Program: The Stargate Program The Purpose: To uncover the secrets of the Stargate itself—a relic that serves as a dimensional door—and explore what’s found on the other side. Namely, alien hotties and androgynous despots.
Secret Program: Colossus The Purpose: Colossus is a massive supercomputer designed by one Dr. Forbin to control and oversee all of the nuclear weapons in the possession of the United States and its allies. In Dr. Forbin’s defense, he was “born” too early to have seen Terminator.
Science News:
Of all the many amazing things about sci-fi, one of our favorites is that it sometimes comes true. Fictional tech, concepts that once represented the extreme limits of the imaginations of our greatest sci-fi writers, can become real—but often the reality puts the dream to shame. With that in mind, take a look at some classic sci-fi devices that were once considered unfathomably futuristic technology, but which are now amazingly archaic.
The amazing device from which the classic book got its name, the Guide has everything an intergalactic traveler could need. (Except a towel!) Just type in pretty much anything in the known universe, and the guide will present sassy, pretty accurate observations. The sheer scope of research involved was often the butt of jokes and scope of subplots. After all, this invention had everything anyone had ever heard of. How could such a device exist, yet still fit into one’s back pocket? Fast-forward a mere 25 years, and the Guide has become reality. From the Internet, one can immediately get sarcastic, semi-accurate information about anything and everything in the known universe. All in a variety of handy portable devices. Plus the level of interactivity far surpasses the capacities of the Guide, which couldn’t even be used to order Chinese food. Based upon the progression of the novels, it would be reasonable to assume that the next-generation PDA will probably turn into some kind of quick-witted bird.
This one comes from our friends over at treknews.net…
By TrekNews Staff | March 30, 2011
According to Deadline, Paramount Pictures has “scrapped a tentative plan” to reboot the Jack Ryan franchise which Star Trek’s Chris Pine was set to star in. Instead, Paramount will focus on the sequel to the 2009 Star Trek film. The sequel, according to Paramount, is still set for a June 29, 2012 release.
While Chris Pine is a lock to return as Captain James Kirk, Star Trek 2009 Director, J.J. Abrams is still uncertain whether he’ll return to direct the sequel. With Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Damon Lindelof currently working on the script, the film is set to begin production this fall to keep on track with the summer 2012 release date.
In 2009, J.J. Abrams’ thrilling Star Trek reboot drew positive reactions from critics and fans alike, but the film wasn’t perfect and there were some issues that bugged fans down the line. But writer Roberto Orci promises that he’s listening to them and that they will be addressed in the upcoming sequel.
Speaking at Wonder Con over the weekend, Orci revealed that having spent time reading fan criticism of the first film (in fact, Orci was a frequent participant in those heated discussions over at Trek Movie while the film was playing in theaters) was beneficial to his thought process for the upcoming sequel, and that he plans to address some of the pesky issues that arose in the first Star Trek film.
As an example, Orci addressed the general fan complaints that Kirk (Chris Pine) became captain of the Enterprise a little too fast for their taste. As you may recall, Kirk conveniently became first officer when Capt. Pike (Bruce Greenwood) had to go over the Narada—when Kirk wasn’t even a member of the Enterprise crew in the first place—and then de facto captain when Spock (Zachary Quinto) was relieved of his command in a matter of what could be guessed were mere hours. Kirk was then offered official command of the Enterprise soon after.
Roberto Orci hypothesized a situation where a character goes up to Kirk and says, “You sure became captain fast!”
“I do see what fans think online, very much in Star Trek, it is a sequel that you can genuinely say that the fans are consultants on. Now they’re caught up with us, they know exactly what the first movie was, and any one of them could go out now and generate a couple of story ideas for what this could be. So it’s a fun guessing game, and you do get to incorporate some of the complaints; you cannot just answer them, but voice them in the movie. I enjoy that – I enjoy seeing what people say, even if it’s super nasty.”
CBS Vegas Con Sweepstakes
Set your phaser to “stunned”! CBS Consumer Products and Creation Entertainment are teaming up to offer Trekkies the chance of a lifetime with the ultimate Star Trek getaway sweepstakes.
The contest will give two lucky cadets a chance to win “Gold Weekend” tickets for the most important Star Trek event of the year: The Official Star Trek Convention 2011 along with a $4,000 prize package that includes:
To enter into the contest visit www.Facebook.com/StarTrek
For 2011 Creation is celebrating the 45th anniversary of Star Trek at the big Star Trek con in Vegas. This year the con, which runs August 11-14, is in a new location (the Rio) and the guest lineup is very impressive, including Star Trek stars William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Sir Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, Tim Russ, Kate Mulgrew, Connor Trinneer, Dominic Keating, Nana Visitor, Terry Farrell, and many more. There is also an impressive list of guest star actors, including John DeLancie, David Warner, James Darren, Robin Curtis, Clint Howard (Tranya!), and many more.
This one comes from the Daily
Trekkers’ field of dreams Sunday, April 3, 2011
Our SciFi Five In Five tonight comes from Miles. He shares the top five movies he is looking forward to this summer:
5. Green Lateran
4. Thor
3. Transformers 3
2. X-Men First Class
1. Captain America
The SciFi Diner Podcast Ep. 466 - The 3 Body Problem
The SciFi Diner Podcast Ep. 465 - Cal Dodd (X-Men: Wolverine) & Are Remakes and…
The SciFi Diner Podcast Ep. 464 - The Final Countdown Movie
The SciFi Diner Podcast Ep. 463 - The Biggest Star Wars Villains and an interview…
The SciFi Diner Podcast Ep. 462 - Rebel Moon - Part One/ A Child of…
The SciFi Diner Podcast Ep. 461 – Looking Back: 2023 In Science Fiction