“Take a look; it’s in a book-a Reading Rainbow!” Kids from 1986-2006 knew that iconic song by heart. For those that might be unaware, those lyrics come from one of the most beloved children shows of all time, Reading Rainbow.
When I was a wee little lad, I was able to go on amazing adventures in my home. How did I do this? Well, with the power of reading of course! With my imagination, and a little narration provided by LeVar Burton (Star Trek: The Next Generation), I was able to learn valuable moral lessons, and travel to distant lands that only existed in books.
I remember sitting in my living room after school watching the latest episode of Reading Rainbow on PBS. I always had so much fun watching Burton not only narrate the book on-screen, but also be genuinely funny. I even remember going to my local library in Buffalo, New York and constantly visiting the “Reading Rainbow Room,” where the librarians had recorded old episodes of the program on VHS. They even had the books available from those original episodes for read along. Good times.
Reading Rainbow played a huge role in my childhood, and is probably one of the reason why I continue to read so much today. It pained me to see Reading Rainbow go off the air in 2006, but a Kickstarter campaign created by Burton in May left me with some hope that the show might be resurrected in a new form.
With Reading Rainbow’s cancellation in 2006, Burton, who hosted the show for two decades, bought the name and rights to the series. In 2012, he launched a free Reading Rainbow tablet app.
Burton, while please with the creation of the app, was unsatisfied that it could only reach a limited audience. By starting the Kickstarter campaign, Burton hoped to have the app be available online, and available to schoolchildren and teachers free of charge. The app will also be available on numerous Apple devices. Even games will get the chance “to go anywhere,” since the app will be available on Xbox and PlayStation consoles.
Well, after creating a massive amount of nostalgia, and a massive amount of money, Burton closed his Kickstarter campaign on June 2 after reaching $5,408,916 (not counting an additional million donated by Seth MacFarlane), more than five times its original goal. The Kickstarter campaign also broke a new record on the crow funding site by being the most backed campaign in the site’s five years of existence.
After only one day on Kickstarter, Burton’s campaign achieved its goal of $1 million in less than 24 hours. Originally conceived in May, the campaign started to receive ample media attention and started to receive assistance from several celebrities, including Donald Glover, Seth MacFarlane, Patrick Stewart and William Shatner. The cast of Veronica Mars, along with some of Burton’s Star Trek: TNG co-stars have been donating as well. MacFarlane’s contribution was a pledge to match every dollar of the last million needed to reach the fundraiser’s stretch goal. The other celebrities committed to join Burton at many of the live events that were rewards for Kickstarter contributors. All of these additional perks greatly contributed to the smashing success of the Reading Rainbow team’s efforts.
This is a truly amazing thing that Burton is doing for children across the United States. Not only is the man actively trying to get children to read, but he’s working with multiple schools across the country to do it.
Even if you weren’t able to donate, just take the time to check out Reading Rainbow. It’s an amazing and entertaining educational show, and it is the perfect program to encourage your kids to read.
What do you think reader? Excited the Reading Rainbow is alive in a new form? Let us know in the comments below.
FIFTY EPISODES. That’s right, the big FIVE-OH. Ok, counting the old Remote Viewing, it’s technically 111 episodes, BUT THAT’S NEITHER HERE NOR THERE…we’re celebrating anyway BY….
….doing what we always do: giving you lots of good reviews.
This week Richard and Chris examine the Masters of Sex (which neither of them have ever been referred to as), go deep in The Jungle (but reluctantly), examine What Richard Did (which was say publicly he still likes the Star Wars Prequels), tell a Winter’s Tale, and much more. And all they ask from you is, to tell them a rhyme to Rob the Mob and win a free copy of this week’s Pick of the Week on blu-ray! Is that asking so much? We’re giving YOU a present for our 50th birthday.
Please do consider using our links below to make all your Amazon purchases! Much appreciated.
The fantastic “Intergalactic Nemesis” live action graphic novel show has toured all around the world, and up until now, the only way to see them was to hope they would come to your town. Having been supporters of Jason Neulander and the Nemesis for so many years, we here at oneofus.net want nothing more than for EVERYONE to get a chance to experience the Nemesis (especially now that we’re exclusively hosting a spin-off podcast of the show, “Salt” on the site). And now, there are multiple ways to do so:
1- They have partnered with Comixology to release the comic book versions of the entire series on their platform. At 99 cents a pop, what’s not to love?
2-They have a new PBS digital web series version of the show that will be launching on Monday! The Behind the Scenes and Teaser videos are already up on their own YouTube web channel. You can subscribe now and you’ll get notification of each weekly installment of the Nemesis formatted especially for TV.
3-Check out their touring schedule including the launch of The Intergalactic Nemesis: Book 3: Twin Infinity, right here!
4-Last but not least, we’ve got to reiterate, starting this Monday, oneofus.net will be exclusively hosting the Nemesis spin-off show, “Salt”. Check out our page for more details here.
Make sure to spread the word about The Intergalactic Nemesis to your friends and family, and ESPECIALLY tell everyone you can, SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS, about “Salt” right here from Oneofus.net.
The summer of 1997 was a game changer for me. I was six-years-old and I had discovered Batman for the first time. My first experience with the Caped Crusader wasn’t with the comic books, movies or live-action television show. It was with Batman: The Animated Series.
I was cheering when I first saw Batman being pulled across the dark crimson skies of Gotham by Man-Bat. My mouth hit the floor when Harvey Dent’s face was revealed after his tragic accident. I had tears in my eyes upon learning why Mr. Freeze pursued a life of crime. It was the thing that made me a lover of geek culture today.
That’s why it pains me to report that Bob Hastings, the voice of Commissioner James Gordon on the beloved animated series, passed away yesterday at the age of 89.
Hastings, who spent a decade voicing Gordon on Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series, left behind a career in acting and voice work that goes back decades.
Originally finding work on radio dramas, Hastings wouldn’t make the move to television until the 1940s. He managed to gain recognition on McHale’s Navy, a popular 1960s sitcom focusing on a ragtag group of American soldiers in the South Pacific during WWII. Playing the part of Elroy Carpenter, an inept and dimwitted lieutenant, Hastings was recognized as a talented slapstick comedian for the show’s 138-episode run.
Eventually applying his past experience in radio dramas, Hastings voiced characters in many animated shows, including The Batman/Superman Hour (1968), Scooby Doo (1973) and The Amazing Spider-Man (1977).
People tend to remember Kevin Conroy’s Batman and Mark Hamill’s Joker when thinking about Batman: The Animated Series, but Hastings’ role in the show was just as important. He provided audiences with a more grounded character. In many ways, he was the voice of Gotham and its people. He was the cop who was in the thick of it and one of the normal people who had to deal with the consequences of Batman’s actions each day. Because of his non-superhero viewpoint, he was able to provide Batman with both wisdom and subtle criticism. Hastings’ Gordon was also the best interpretation of the character at that time. He didn’t spend his days dialing a red phone or hanging out with supermodels. His Gordon was actually involved in the drama, and played a vital role in Batman’s war on crime.
To see the level of dedication that Hastings brought to the series, watch Season 4’s “Over the Edge.” The episode presents Gordon as a man stricken with grief after the tragic death of a person very close to him. The death creates a wedge between him and The Dark Knight. Blaming Batman for the death, Gordon declares war on the Bat family, and even learns that Bruce Wayne and Batman are one in the same. Though the ending can be disappointing for some, it’s a fantastic episode that shows just how perilous and complicated the Gordon/Batman relationship really is.
While I may not have been familiar with everything that Hastings had accomplished in his storied career, I still want to thank him for being part of a world that brought pure joy to a six-year-old kid.
Travelling is always an adventure for me, and not necessarily for the reasons one would hope for. Things tend to go wrong, especially when I decide to leave the country. The good news is all my experience makes me much calmer than most in the face of travel adversity. This skill came in VERY handy during our two weeks in Brazil.
As you know if you’ve been reading Ash & Fern, we spent the last 2+ weeks following the US through the group stage at the World Cup. We’d been talking (and daydreaming) about this trip for the better part of the last 4 years. The plan survived multiple job/career changes, moves, and even a wedding. We were SO HAPPY it was finally time to leave, and personally I can admit to being incredibly relieved that I didn’t end up with an injury or illness would prevent me from going. (Again, these things tend to happen to me.) In hindsight the fact that we left Indy on Friday the 13th should have prepared us for what was about to happen.
Ash when we thought it would be a smooth trip.
The specifics of how and why we got separated from our group of roughly 500 American Outlaws (AO) aren’t important, but we ended up in a brave group of 14 headed into the unknown. While everyone else was somewhere in the air on their way to Brazil, we spent Saturday night in a Houston hotel being eaten alive by mosquitos and creating the @AOmazingRace twitter handle to entertain ourselves and stave off depression. (Dinner at Kung Food also helped. Seriously, Kung Food. Great stuff Houston.)
Our Sunday started with a lovely flight from Houston to Trinidad where we were theoretically going to meet a charter plane to take us to Natal, the site of the US vs Ghana game and our home base for the trip. Word of advice, don’t ever try to get through immigration in a foreign country with just a hypothetical idea of a plane that’s supposed to be meeting you there. They don’t like that. It was quickly determined we weren’t getting to Brazil Sunday night after all and would need to fly to Guyana instead. The only thing any of us knew about Guyana was to not drink the Kool-Aid. So off we went, again with the understanding that a plane would meet us there and get us into Natal by Monday morning, well ahead of the Monday evening game. We were golden!
Until we weren’t. Sitting in the Georgetown, Guyana airport for hours on end wouldn’t be that fun under any circumstances, but it’s even less fun as the hours tick by and you are counting the minutes until it becomes impossible to make the game. There is no way to describe the feeling of being so close to something you’ve been dreaming of for so long and knowing that there is absolutely nothing you can do to make it happen. I was devastated. Then, a plane! We may never understand exactly what happened or where that plane came from, but maybe the soccer gods are real. After one more delay (because apparently the plane needed ice, as if we really cared if our beverages were cold at this point) we were on our way to Natal. 14 of us on a plane that seats 250+. The environmentalist in me was doing her best not to think about that part. It still makes me cringe.
We landed in Natal, ran through immigration and customs, and hopped on a bus to go straight to the stadium. No hotel, no shower, no idea what would happen to our bags. And we didn’t care AT ALL. After running through the streets of Natal, yay traffic, we took our seats in the stadium. There were tears during the national anthem. And in a moment that was 72 hours (and 4 years) in the making, Clint Dempsey immediately made us forget everything. The game itself is another story entirely, but there were more tears at the end after JOHN ANTHONY FUCKING BROOKS cemented himself in American soccer history. We were the picture of exhaustion and relief, and I don’t think I’ve ever been happier.
Celebration after the win against Ghana. (AKA what people look like when they’ve been traveling for 48 hours and haven’t showered.)
At this point, you might assume that things got better for us. And for a while they did. The hotel in Natal was great (once they found our room and our luggage, another long story) and a swim up bar can cure most anything. We also quickly discovered that Brazilian beer doesn’t cause hangovers as it apparently contains almost no alcohol, and that the cuisine is essentially deep-fried bread and cheese. So that was awesome.
Things started to go south again when it was time to head to Manaus for US vs Portugal on Sunday. We knew going in that the logistics of getting to a stadium in the middle of the Amazon were going to be…complicated. We forgot to take into account my absolutely TERRIBLE travel luck. Getting there was bad enough, a discrepancy between the flight manifest and the actual count led to hours of sitting on the tarmac while they did a roll call. Seriously it was like taking attendance in school. But once again, we made it to the game, and that’s all that matters. Then of course we got punched in the stomach at the end of that game, but still, we made it.
Unfortunately getting back to Natal was the stuff nightmares are made of. It turns out Ash and I are now international criminals! Apparently it was illegal for us to be on the plane that morning. (Something about traveling on a different charter than the one we came into the country on, not the most glamorous of criminal activity perhaps, but still pretty badass.) We were going to have to fly commercial back to Natal. This would be fine if we weren’t in the middle of the Amazon on the one day that EVERYONE is trying to leave. Not exactly a ton of open seats on flights out. Luckily I had Mary Poppins-ed my bag and we had quite the interesting stash of stuff to help us survive this new speed bump.
Our Manaus survival kit.
Somehow our AO saviors (seriously they worked their asses off to figure out solutions to these problems and I am eternally grateful) found us seats on a plane that could get us to Recife late Monday night. We made stops in what seemed like every airport in northern Brazil and made it into Recife around midnight, more than 24 hours after the end of the game. After a TERRIFYING 5 hour bus ride back to Natal, Ash and I took a quick nap and miraculously made it to the Italy vs Uruguay game, where we got to see Mr. Suarez have a little afternoon snack.
Thankfully the US vs Germany game was slightly less of an ordeal. We had to leave Natal at 2am and repeat the awful bus ride back to Recife, but for the first time the whole trip we actually arrived in time for a pre-game party. We knew there was flooding but judging by the texts and tweets I was getting from home it was even worse than we could see. After following our journey to that point on twitter our friends and families were very worried that this would be the game we would actually miss, but in the end the only casualties were my shoes and socks. Obviously we wanted to end group play with a win (or even a tie) but the moment when we heard Ronaldo had scored and we would advance was amazing. This might be my favorite picture of the whole trip, soaking wet pure joy.
While our boys would continue on (albeit temporarily), our World Cup was unfortunately over. Of course there were more flight delays on the way home, but it was almost sentimental at that point. Sleeping on an airport floor had become second nature. I knew the trip was really over when I emailed my boss from the Houston airport Saturday morning saying “by the way, I’m going to need Tuesday off.”
I hope you’ve been watching what has been an amazing tournament so far. For me, it’s time to start getting ready for Russia 2018. Maybe I’ll see some of you there?!
A bunch of suburban kids who are about to lose their neighborhood to a highway development go out on one last adventure together and discover alien life. Earth to Echo is a throw-back to E.T., The Goonies and even Super 8 but in the found footage format.
….
IE: really, really inexpensive version of those movies.
Chris and Ed make the call on whether to watch or bail on this not-really-a-nostalgia-piece-so-much-as-a-cheap-redo.
Melissa McCarthy is on top of the world, so of course to maintain her position she has to play another character at rock bottom with Tammy, a white-trashy loser who embarks on a road trip of self-discovery and extreme alcoholism with her troubled grandmother, played by Susan Sarandon.
Ashley, Chris and JC take a look at this comedy written by McCarthy and co-written and directed by her husband, Ben Falcone. Does that bode well? All I can tell you is, the Unusual Suspects don’t see eye-to-eye on this one. Check it out…
If you’ve listened to Brian and Chris in their previous online existences, you’ve probably heard of, if not experienced, Intergalactic Nemesis.
Partially a throwback to the radio days of yore (or at least yore grandparents’ radio days), and partially a dazzling display of comic book art, Intergalactic Nemesis quickly became an Austin institution, playing at The Alamo Drafthouse.
But then, as the show toured the country, its fanbase spread nationwide, making creator Jason Neulander a superstar in the geek firmament.
But Jason is not content simply resting upon laurels, he’s already put into the works a brand new show that will in effect be a spinoff of Intergalactic Nemesis. That show? A multi-part historical science-fiction tale entitled Salt.
Salt follows Jean-Pierre Desperois, a character you may remember from Nemesis, a man who was born a slave in Haiti with the power to travel through both time and space. Salt begins 1931 Tunis, where Jean-Pierre is a salt smuggler. As Jason himself put it, “sci-fi meets pulp meets noir in an epic thriller that spans centuries.”
We are proud and so so excited to announce that Salt will be a member of the OneOfUs family of shows! The bi-weekly story installments, produced by Jason and his team, will premiere on July 7th.
Check out the video below for more information about this fantastic new show and keep checking out OneOfUsNet for your opportunity to join Jean-Pierre on his inter-temporal adventures!
Greendale rejoice! Community, the beloved cult-favorite comedy has found a new home on Yahoo. Partnering with Sony Pictures Television, Yahoo’s streaming service, Yahoo Screen, has ordered a 13-episode season of the former NBC series. Not only will the majority of the cast return, but Community creator and showrunner Dan Harmon will write the series for Yahoo.
For those who might be unaware of the comedy, Community centers on the students and faculty of Greendale Community College. This collection of weird, but well-meaning misfits typically deals with zombie outbreaks, paintball wars and parallel timelines. Nothing is out of bounds for Harmon’s creative series.
Less about what a student may face at college, Community’s real focus is on the deconstruction of American pop culture. Disregarding the typical antics and canned laugh tracks that continue to plague many American sitcoms, Harmon’s show dared to be different, and it often paid for it. Beset by low ratings, Community always seemed to be a breath away from cancellation. Well, with its cancellation by NBC in May, it felt like the doors would close at Greendale for good.
Harmon himself was more than happy to share his thoughts on Yahoo’s buyout.
“I am very pleased that Community will be returning for its predestined sixth season on Yahoo. I look forward to bringing our beloved NBC sitcom to a larger audience by moving it online. I vow to dominate our new competition. Rest easy, Big Bang Theory. Look out, BangBus!”
As Harmon points out himself, a move to an online format might bring in the audience that Community so desperately deserved while on television. As a member of a generation that receives the majority of their entertainment content from the internet, this change is more than welcome by me.
The viewership of online media eclipses most network television shows today. Shows like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black might have struggled to survive on television, but by being online, they have a greater chance of being seen. With an ever increasing online population, the possibility of Community receiving even more viewers is greater than ever before.
As thrilled as I am about the return of Community, the question needs to be asked: Is Yahoo’s resurrection of the show a good thing?
Community will be getting a sixth season, but a long series doesn’t always equal success. A show rarely continues to stay great for so long, even with the original creative team at the helm.
I loved Community’s first two seasons. They felt so original, and they really appealed to people immersed in geek culture. Everyone I knew was talking about it for a time. However, Season 3 felt off. It still had the humor, but the writing wasn’t as sharp as it had been. After the critically panned fourth season, Season 5 felt like a solid, though slightly underwhelming return to form.
With Harmon writing Season 6 of Community in the fall, only time will tell if he can deliver the same quality of content. I’m still waiting for another episode like “Dungeons and Dragons.”
More importantly, is Yahoo up to the task of taking on a series like Community? With only one show under its belt, Burning Love, Yahoo is still untested when it comes to delivering original content. Getting Harmon to write and watch over the creation of a sixth season can be seen as step in the right direction. Yahoo, whose only option right now is to play it safe, might take a hands-off approach to their recent acquisition. By allowing Harmon and company to do what they do best, they’ll receive goodwill from the fans, and more importantly, viewers.
Will Community be able to go beyond its sixth season? At this point, it’s in the hands of Yahoo. Yahoo is nowhere near the level of a steaming service like Netflix, or even Amazon. They got the attention of Community fans and those familiar with online streaming, but whether they can be successful with this particular program is another matter entirely.
If Community does get that coveted sixth season and a movie, fans of the show will have to create a new hashtag.
What do you think reader? Excited about Yahoo’s acquisition of Community? Let us know in the comments below.
The creator of the Irish indie hit “Once” comes to Hollywood to try something suspiciously similar with “Begin Again”.
Chris, Ed and Elliott all decide whether this tale of a rock-bottoming-out record exec (Mark Ruffalo) who discovers life, love and all that gooshy stuff through his promotion of a new talent (Keira Knightley) hits all the right notes or is tone deaf. The film also has the first theatrical acting performance of Adam Levine, and also features Cee-Lo Green as more or less himself. So, you know, there’s that. It is possible that this is much better than it sounds, I realize, as I read my own words and see that they aren’t exactly making a great case for the film. You’ll have to listen to find out…
