More than two years since filming and it was well worth the wait. Stranger Thingsat last fulfilled its mash-up pop culture promise in its fourth season. Hidden inside a mix of a B-movie style homage to low-budget horror and Steven Spielberg movies of the E.T. and Goonies vintage, the story finally came full circle in nine big hours over seven episodes. What do you get when you take 1980s pop culture, a haunted house, a superman lab, more Upside Down, more D&D, not-rabid mynocks, a monster to rival Freddy Kruger, and a huge cast of characters you’ve grown to love (and watch grow up)? The best season of one of the streaming era’s best series.
It’s been a long road, getting from there to here–that is, getting from Stranger Things′ third season to a final trailer and a fourth season beginning a long six weeks from now. It may not seem like it, but it’s been more than two years since we first saw a glimpse at what lies ahead on Stranger Things. At last the breakout hit retro-sci-fi-horror series finally has a full trailer and a coming go-live date for part of the next season.
Dungeons & Dragons fans may notice the new oogy threat to be Vecna, an undead sorcerer last seen in your weekly D&D game or the 5th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide (discussed here). With Freddy Krueger actor Robert Englund joining the show, and the Creepshow vibe in its new creepy baddie, Stranger Things Season 4 looks to lean more on darker monster horror than previous seasons.
At last here’s the trailer for the fourth season of Stranger Things:
After pandemic delays and 32 years since the story left off, Ghostbusters: Afterlife finally arrived on home streaming platforms this past week. Not only is it a worthy follow-on to the first two 1980s films, it’s thoughtful and nostalgic in the same way as a vintage Steven Spielberg supernatural adventure (think E.T. or Close Encounters or Super 8). It provides something for all its potential audiences: fans of the original films, fans of the animated series, and anyone young or old looking for a mild, enjoyable family film. It balances many things well: first and foremost the real-life death of original Ghostbuster player writer/creator and comedy master Harold Ramis, the need to bring back past characters in a way that is believable and even heartwarming, something for 21st century kids to find some fun with, and a horror comedy someone with no background in the franchise could just step into. That last part is helped by the addition of the always amiable and relatable Paul Rudd as a scientist and teacher in the story’s improbable setting of rural Oklahoma, and the successful casting of kid actors who can hold their own against everything else going on.
If you grew up with Star Wars in the late 1970s, you read everything you could about the movie, everything about the making of the movie, and everyone related to everyone who made the movie. So everyone knew that Luke Skywalker actor Mark Hamill was sent one of every item–every toy–that was made as a tie-in for the series. That’s every Kenner toy made for Star Wars, and Hamill mentioned in interviews he didn’t keep these things in their boxes, but let his kids play with them, and we all saw photos of his son Nathan with these toys (or we just dreamed we did). Good luck finding a Star Wars fan that didn’t wish they had that deal. Time moves on, Star Wars had a big lull with a bit of a resurgence thanks to tie-in novels, then Lucas makes the prequels, then Disney buys Star Wars, then Mark Hamill comes back as Luke, and there’s even more Star Wars! Among other things, Nathan Hamill has been creating a web comic strip called2 Dumb Dinos.
In the vein of When a Stranger Calls and I Know What You Did Last Summer, two new Netflix films are borrowing that throwback vibe with titles that have been synonymous with more than a century of American cinema. Both in the weeks leading up to and during its TUDUM promotional event, Netflix unveiled an unprecedented volume of trailers for coming movies and series. Here are two that should help get you primed for fall, October, and Halloween season. First, don’t look now, There’s Someone Inside the House. But you might as well take your time, because No One Gets Out Alive. (You could write an entire book in movie titles).
Below check out trailers for these new movies, both with a Stranger Things vibe, coming to your television screen over the next two weeks.
Darth Vader, Flash Gordon, The Incredible Hulk, Ariel from The Little Mermaid, characters from Supernatural, the CW Arrowverse, Stranger Things, Star Trek, Laverne & Shirley, The Brady Bunch, The Karate Kid, RWBY, My Hero Academia, your favorite writers and artists, and more are heading to Kansas City this week
For twenty-one years Planet Comicon Kansas City has been one of the Midwest’s biggest comic book and pop culture conventions and that was no less so in 2014 when it became the largest attended event in the history of the Kansas City Convention Center. And it’s only gotten bigger. The last show featured guests including Henry Winkler, William Shatner, John Wesley Shipp, Cary Elwes, and Joonas Suotamo, and this year more memorable names from TV and movies from the past and present are scheduled to attend. Leading things off is Misha Collins and a slate of actors from Supernatural (and one of the Winchester brothers’ cars from the series), the series making its biggest ever regional fan appearance at the annual event, which takes place at Kansas City’s convention center at Bartle Hall, August 20-22, 2021.
Making their second appearances at the event are Darth Vader actor (and Guardians of the Galaxy and Harry Potter universe actor) Spencer Wilding and Star Trek legends–Dr. Crusher herself Gates McFadden and Worf’s brother Nikolai Paul Sorvino (…and The Firm, Goodfellas, Law and Order, etc.). They’ll be joined by Gaten Matarazzo and Gabriella Pizzolo from Stranger Things, The Doors and Entourage star Kevin Dillon, The Karate Kid and Cobra Kai stars Martin Kove and William Zabka, and a host of superhero performers from past and present, including CW Arrowverse actors Stephen Amell and Katie Cassidy plus original The Incredible Hulk actor Lou Ferrigno and Flash Gordon actor Sam Jones.
There’s something for every TV and movie fanboy and fangirl at this year’s show.
It may not seem like it, but it’s been an entire year and a half since we last saw a glimpse at what lies ahead on Stranger Things. Check it out here if you need a refresher. It seems a little… strange… but here we are again and the best that Netflix has for fans of its breakout hit retro-sci-fi-horror series is… another teaser. It’s so brief that you probably can’t recall how much of it you’ve seen before, and how much is actually new. So we pulled some images so you don’t have to. In the meantime, you could travel to Kansas City to get your Stranger Things fix later this month for Planet Comicon to meet Gaten Matarazzo, who plays Dustin on the show, and Gabriella Pizzolo, who played Dustin’s friend Suzie, introduced in season 3.
Check out the new teaser for Stranger Things, season 4, below. And the bad news: it’s not arriving until sometime in 2022.
The most exciting movie of the year now has tie-in toys, and an early look at the toys appears to telegraph the return of three original Ghostbusters donning their garb again. That’s Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, and Ernie Hudson, clearly featured as part of several toys coming from Hasbro and other brands for Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
Hasbro is offering a line of line up higher end figures, the Plasma Series (available here for pre-order now) featuring characters from the 2021 film, including Trevor, Lucky, Podcast, Peter, Winston, and Ray.
Check out more new Ghostbusters: Afterlife toys, including a new Cluebelow…
The kids aren’t all right because they released something vile from this old well…
The most exciting trailer this year comes from a film Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray have been interviewed about since Ghostbusters II. Taking a cue from Halloween, Predator, and Terminator, the franchise did some skipping of reboots and made Ghostbusters: Afterlife a direct sequel to Ghostbusters II. The lead role is for Mckenna Grace, who has appeared in lots of genre films and shows (Ready Player One, Independence Day: Resurgence, Captain Marvel, and horror franchises: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Annabelle, Amityville, and Hill House). In a nice nod to the late, great comedy writer and Ghostbusters co-star and writer Harold Ramis, Grace and Stranger Things co-star Finn Wolfhard (who wore his own Ghostbusters suit in his series) will play the grandkids of Ramis’s Dr. Egon Spengler. Shifting to a prairie setting from the city, the tone feels more like the creepy and cool Stranger Things. Annie Potts’s return is refreshing in this trailer, along with (at least) the voice of Dan Aykroyd.
Paul Rudd(Ant-Man) plays the grade school teacher, and the kids’ mom is played by Carrie Coon, who played the creepy antagonist in the second season of Sinner as well as in Thanos’ army in Avengers: Infinity War. Plus Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver, Ernie Hudson, Gozer-everyone but Rick Moranis–have been confirmed for at least a cameo. And there’s an El Camino and the return of the Ecto-1 with some extra features, and no doubt some animated series tie-ins and Easter eggs. What more could you want?
Check out the new trailer for Ghostbusters: Afterlife:
Ten years! That’s ten years reviewing TV series in the decade that streaming services began to dominate TV viewing– and binge-watching was born as Netflix began releasing entire seasons at once in 2013. How do you pick the best series? As with yesterday’s list of movie recommendations, our theory from the very first day of publishing borg has been reviewing only those things we like, things we think are fun, imaginative, or just plain cool—because if we think they’re cool, maybe you will, too. What makes a great TV series? Great writing—great storytelling. Also we looked to difficulty level and technology innovation—TV productions tend to get a fraction of the budget of big-screen features, so what they do with their time and money is critical, and some television series in the past decade were all-out feats. The third factor we looked to is re-watchability—we’ll be watching the best series for years to come. The big difference between ranking movies and TV is the change between seasons, that force that inevitably causes most shows to decline with each season. So consistency is a factor. Finally, as with movies the most important factor is the fun—why would you devote so many hours of your valuable time if you’re not going to have a great time?
One more thing: Ten years is a long time so we narrowed the series we’re including to those recommendations that fall primarily within the ten-year window. We covered several fantastic, re-watchable series that cemented their status in reruns or syndication, many beginning before borg began publishing and finishing in the years after, including Burn Notice, White Collar, Warehouse 13, Leverage, House, MD, In Plain Sight, and three landmarks among the best pop culture-packed series of all time, Chuck, Psych, and Community. We were disappointed that some of the best series were canceled and left to only a single season, otherwise they may have gone on to fare better against our top recommendations, shows like Jason Isaacs’ psychological police procedural Awake, Sarah Shahi’s all-for-fun Fairly Legal, Lauren Cohan’s action/spy series Whiskey Cavalier, the Doctor Who spin-off Class, the adaptation of Max Allan Collins’ popular noir novel series Quarry, the slick animated series Tron: Uprising, and the cyborg future-world Almost Human starring Karl Urban, to name a few.
So here are the Top 40 series we recommend, spanning 2011 to 2021. These are our favorites. How should you use lists like this? If you like what we talk about at borg, you’re probably going to like these shows. If you’ve missed any, odds are you have some new series to take a look at. Let’s start at #40 and move our way to #1. As with everything borg, we’re stressing genre series. Title links are to one of our previous borg reviews.
