This week on the podcast, there was Lego Talk, Marvel/Netflix talk, Choose Someone’s Own Adventure Talk that could have made the podcast suitable only for mature listeners despite the fact only truly immature listeners would enjoy that portion but probably came from Watson watching Anchorman recently, and then there was a sword spelling bee.
This led me to wonder…why do so many swords have names?
Age of Ultron came out last week. Like many geeks and fans of the Marvel movies, I saw it that weekend.
And, to be completely spoiler free, I was also a little disappointed. I won’t really go into why here. The problem for many sequels, and Age of Ultron was no exception, is that its hard to meet expectations. The Matrix sequels were highly anticipated, and were a major letdown. Big budget action sequels often do stuff like go back to what came before and seemed to work, and then doing more and more of that. Meanwhile, the novelty has somewhat worn off. Take, as an example, the big fight in the middle of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. No one really saw it coming, and it was full of amusing cameos from recognizable actors. Naturally, when the sequel was made (a movie I mostly enjoyed, truth be told), the fight was expanded and made even crazier, as befits a sequel. Was it better? Not really.
But every so often, a movie comes out that is a sequel that is just plain better than the original. It doesn’t happen often, but below the cut are some of my picks for sequels better than the originals.
This is probably one of my favorite videos on YouTube. Someone took tons of clips from tons of movies and TV shows and made a rather good techno-kinda tune out of it. I’ve seen lots of stuff, but even I can’t name all of them here. I tend to skip to this whenever I want a quick smile at someone else’s cleverness.
Gabbing Geek 