SFX Spurious Awards

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UNCONVINCING GEEKY CONVERSATION OF THE WEEK

Doesn’t it make you cringe when actors who clearly wouldn’t be seen dead in a comics shop are called on to suddenly become geek experts, and it’s painfully obvious they haven’t got a clue what the scriptwriter’s given them? Great example in EastEnders last Friday (spotted by sci-fi-lycra_angel on the SFX forum) when Lauren has to explain the great “DC versus Marvel” debate. She manages to say Green Lantern and Nightwing like she’s learnt the words phonetically, then makes matter worse with “It’s either one or the other. And I’ll always stay true to Bruce, Diane and Clark.” Diane? Diane? After much debate on the forum, we assume she must mean Wonder Woman (who is, of course, Diana Prince) and just didn’t read her script properly.

SIGNATURE OF THE WEEK

It’s got to take some guts to legally change your name to Captain Awesome. You’re just inviting criticism from laydeez who find you anything less than awesome. And to be fair, you’ve got to assume that anyone who wants to call themselves Captain Awesome is probably covering for something. But that’s exactly what unemployed Oregonian cabinet installer Douglas Allen Smith Jr, has done, naming himself after the legendary character in Chuck (who is awesome), according to a report in the Washington Post. And he’s gone further still in his newfound awesomeness. He’s also legally altered his signature. After determining the name change wasn’t for fraudulent reasons, a judge granted Smith permission to use a picture instead: right pointing arrow, smiley face, left pointing arrow (pictured above). So, any single woman out there fancy being Mrs Awesome?

ANTHROPOMORPHISM OF THE WEEK

College Humour, a site that offers us so much Spurious potential, this week posted a series of five book covers, showing what fave SF franchises would look like as children’s literature. To be honest, most of them are a bit naff, but we have to admit the likeness on this Adama Bear is downright uncanny.

CRITIC OF THE WEEK
Wired had the inspired idea of getting internet sensation Tron Guy to review the new Tron: Legacy. And what did he think? Well, we don’t think he was being entirely objective: “I’ve been waiting 28 years to see if the other shoe would ever drop on the Tron universe. It has, and the result is visually stunning, intellectually engaging and emotionally exhausting.

“It’s a logical continuation of the original, although you need not have seen Tron to understand what’s happening now. Strong performances by Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde and Michael Sheen should prevent the kind of complaints about wooden acting that surrounded the original movie. The result delivers an unexpected emotional impact, especially at the ending.

“Perhaps the emotional ending influenced my final reaction. As the credits rolled, I had to fight off tears… I walked out of the theatre to my cold truck, determined to not let my feelings show. Nobody there would have understood.” Actually, we think they would.

PR NIGHTMARE OF THE WEEK
The Green Hornet director Michel Gondry stirred up a right hornet’s nest this week with an interview in The Guardian that won’t be winning him any new friends amongst comic fandom: “I usually identify with the nerds, but these ones just reinforce the social rules. Their values are fascistic. All those people marching around in capes and masks and boots. The superhero imagery is totally fascist! When you step into this genre, they feel it belongs to them. They want you to conform, or they won’t like you. They want the conventional. But it’s fine. The movie’s been doing very well, I think, whenever we’ve screened it to normal people.” So Gondry thinks comics fans are abnormal fascists. No wonder he looked so miserable during his panel at Comic-Con this year. And he might want to avoid the place next year. Abnormal fascists can be quite dangerous when riled.

VIDEO OF THE WEEK
This is just genius. There’s not much more to be said…

AGONY COLUMN OF THE WEEK
Comics Alliance’s Chris Sims has clearly had a fascinating time in recent weeks, trawling through 30 year’s worth of the now-defunct “Sage Advice” columns from Dragon magazine. This was an help service for players of Dungeons & Dragons, primarily concerned with sorting out issues over the finer points of gaming. But, it seems, occasionally it felt more like an Agony Aunt column. Sims had listed 11 of the silliest questions ever submitted to the column, and while some are just plain dumb (“How much damage do bows do?” Answer: “None. Bows do not do damage, arrows do”), a surprising number are concerned with characters getting pregnant and/or married. Sims reckons that, “Writing into a magazine about D&D to ask how you should handle an unplanned pregnancy is basically the greatest thing anyone has ever done with their life.”