Yeah, so this weeks episode literally got snowed out... thrice.
So while we dig ourselves out and figure that out, here's a wee talk about what Ainsley and Andrew find troublesome about the 'Verse in Firefly (even though one of them still totally loves it.)
Enjoy!
Anthony finally gets his wish and gets to do the movie he's been waiting for since before episode one: Scott Pilgrim vs the World!
Is it possible to make a comic, (or a work in any soundless medium) about music? On the other hand, can you adapt comics as a medium to a movie if the original was adapting video games as a medium to comics? What is the best hipster movie of all time? Does is make more sense for Scott to end up with Knives?
Is this a superhero movie? Our listeners say yes. Andrew says no! Plus: just wait till we talk about the book without the game in the movie of the book. You're going to really regret asking us to talk about this.
It's been a rough 2016, so we're treating ourselves to a month of Christmas wishes, starting with Andrew's wish: one of his childhood VHS rentals all the way from Wales, Superted!
Will we discover the secret of Superted's secret word? How many Doctor Who mainstays can we fit into this cast? How big of a rascal is former Secretary General of Egyptian Antiquities Zahi Hawass? And what the heck is up with hibernation? That's a bear's REAL superpower.
Come visit Planet Spot: "It's sort of a Smurf thing!" Then come back for Anthony's Christmas wish next week, revealed at the end of this episode!
NOVENGERS concludes with our reevaluation of the much maligned sequel to Marvel's The Avengers, the substantially more sensibly titled Avengers: Age of Ultron (Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire).
Is Age of Ultron an underrated, better put together movie than the better received first installment in this series? Has Stan Lee reached Stanception here by taking credit for Jack Kirby's war record as well as his comics? How often can you point out that the heroes are irresponsible city-destroying living disasters before we stop rooting for them? Does a SHIELD spy contract come with a starter family and farmhouse all inclusive?
PLUS! We rewrite half the movie to give it a facelift. Also, some weird sound stuff happens for a bit in the middle of this one, but not for long! Not even for as long as Quicksilver lasted in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Thanks Joss!
This is it! One of the biggest, most ambitious superhero movies ever made, it changed the business and made "shared universe" the watchwords for green-eyed Hollywood producers for years to come. The epic finale of Novengers begins with The Avengers 2012!
Are the Chitauri the perennial alien-ex-machina of the Marvel universe? Which media mogul just called up a tv station he owned to order them to play nothing but 60s Spider-man all day? Who is the Wonder Woman of the Avengers? And exactly how much of this plot just had no reason for being other than looking cool or building to a good line? Not that we're complaining... okay, well, not that people who aren't named Anthony are complaining.
This movie might cut a little close to home, with a boorish, self-centered billionaire saving us all and beat the most heroic among us to the punch. Oops! All this and a special dispatch from our girl in the field, Jill Butler! Also Loki. Rawr.
Welp, two of our number are laid up with the flu, and also just got a very pokey puppy who it turns out is more of a DC girl (see below).
So instead of a new show, we're taking the Avengers (and our show) back where it began with episode seven: 2008's Iron Man!
Be sure to stay tuned for next week and part one of our epic NOVENGERS finale as we take on Avengers 2012!
Get ready for a huge steaming pile of Cap!
For part two of NOVENGERS, the crew takes on their most requested movie and checks out the infamous 1990 feature Captain America.
Is Cap a bad enough dude to rescue the President? Is Italian Red Skull spending his spare time tickling the ivories of a nuclear piano? And are we finally seeing a Marvel Comics/ Condorman crossover!?
Happy election day America! Let's hope you make the right decision at the polls and vote where it really counts: for No Time for Heroics on iTunes!
It's the first episode of NOVENGERS as all this month the crew checks out Avengersish movies leading up to our two-part Avengers/Avengers 2 spectacular! First up, this ain't not your daddy's Nick Fury with David Hasselhoff slipping into the eyepatch to give 'er a whirl for the 1998 tv movie Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD
Is there ever any reason to built a cryo-prison? How bad does Hasselhoff need to pee? Why do Ainsley and Anthony know so much about tree frogs?
Find out in part one of NOVENGERS!
It's Halloween! And around these parts, we like to spook it spook it.
So this episode the crew steps a little outside their genre and matches wits with the bastard son of horror and superheroics: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors!
Is this whole series a metaphor for an older generation attempting to impose rules and ideals on the younger? Does the NT4H crew have the dream powers it'll take to take down Freddy Krueger?
Plus! Could Wolverine take Freddy? Could Jason take Michael Meyers? Not in a Manhattan way, like pugilistically speaking.
For our official Creepy Clown Watch 2016 episode, we welcome back Ainsley Hawthorn and invite her to become the Hermione of our podcast team (and argue over who's Ron enough to take the heat) just in time to throw her in at the deep end with a good old-fashioned Halloween hazing, forcing her to watch 1997's Spawn.
How many sheiks does a party need for it to tip over into being an evil party? How tall is Martin Sheen? And why the heck isn't Michael Jai White starring in all the movies?
Come back to the hey-day of Wizard Magazine, variant covers, and a plucky little upstart comic company that stood up for the noble idea that an artist could own and profit from their work, took that momentum and made Spawn with it.
All the world is waiting for her! And we're going to have to keep waiting, because this 2011 Wonder Woman staring Adrianne Palicki is never, ever being released. Jesse Codner's back from our Green Lantern episode to talk about another pilot that crashed and burned.
What exactly is Wonder Woman's corporation in the business of, other than scholarships, baseless accusations, and sex dolls? Is this Wonder Woman more of a Trump or a Bush in regards to unilateral flouting of the law? Will we ever have a conversation about what Wonder Woman's all about that goes beyond whether or not she wears pants?
Finally, we get to listen to what what three men have to say about about the pros and cons of the greatest female superhero of all. Ugh. Sorry. Spoilers: Adrianne Palicki was a great Wonder Woman. Spoilers? The script. That's what spoiled it.
The transformation of the superhero into James Bond that was started in Condorman (yay) comes to fruition with 2005's Batman Begins.
How is this movie just a long-form adaptation of a ethical thought experiment called the Trolley Problem? Why on Earth is Ken Watanabe such a poor judge of friends? How badly does Bruce Wayne fail at sticking to his own morals? And welcome back to the show Liam Neeson as fearsome Irish ninja Ra's O'Ghul.
Andrew and Anthony are more than men now, they are a symbol. An idea. How did they power this transition? With FEAR. Because all creatures fear, and the idea of fearful symbols that men fear just frigging cannot be killed. Therefore, we are using our newfound unkillability to just pig out on wings all day and not even care.
After a year of offstage shout-outs, citations and cameos, Ainsley Hawthorn comes on the show to complete the Hawthorn collectors set, and also to talk about the 1985 animated spectacular Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer!
Does Rainbow Brite fit the definition of superhero? How is this movie a functional rebuke of Orwellian dystopia? Why can't anyone in Star Trek: The Next Generation figure out how to use a bed? And how many Akira tattoos does Anthony have secreted around his person?
PLUS! We rate history's greatest horses in our new, short lived, quickly off the rails segment "Horses More Magnificent Than the Most Magnificent Horse in the Universe"! We're still workshopping the title.
Get ready for a deluge of obscure references being described with even more obscure references as the team loses all touch with modern reality and dives into the pot-o-gold at the end of the Rainbow. YAY RAINBOW!!!
Look folks, your hosts are old, okay? They're from the twentieth century. They remember video tapes and also when it was a hip idea that Tony Stark was dating Shannon Elizabeth. But they're not as old as Norse mythology, so they're going to stand next to Thor: The Dark World in public just to seem young and with-it by comparison and see how that goes.
What's the scale of technological development on a world that has laser guns but still uses swords and ox-drawn carts? Why is Natalie Portman's character, a doctor of physics with three degrees, written to speak like a tweenish babywoman? And if you are investing a few billion dollars into twenty movies and five or six television series to build up to an epic story about the Infinity Stones, why the hell can't you get even the colour of the stones right!?
Anyway, enjoy this second foray into Thor, hey? Or else Andrew and Anthony have to commit Norse Seppuku.
PS: The amazing Ring Cycle comic we are talking about which we did not have at hand and subsequently forgot all the details of is The Ring of Nibelung by P. Craig Russell (and not Charles Vess. Sorry. But you should go check it out.
Andrew and Anthony turn the superhero genre upside down and see what happens when instead of action and adventure you dial up the horror and existential dread with the superpowered sci-fi series Stranger Things!
What makes this story of a kid given strange powers by lab experiments and running away to have adventures different from 99% of Marvel comics? How is our reaction to Eleven formed by gendered archetypes we've been beating at since The Odyssey? And why the heck does everyone like Barb? She's pulling a reverse Friday the 13th! But hey, maybe there's a little Barb in all of us.
Welcome to the Kid Danger genre! Plus, the guys wax poetic about Stephen King's It, catch a powerful case of Anthony's Disease wishing the CG Demogorgon was a rubbery '80s abomination instead, and lose their sanity gazing into the impossible unknown of Katsuhiro Otomo's linework in Akira.
This week we take to the skis! Sorry, skies. And blast off with the cult 1991 Disney adventure movie The Rocketeer!
How is it that a movie this in love with flying never got off the ground? Did Dave Stevens somehow grow Billy Campbell in a lab to look exactly like his drawings? Is Cliff Secord the living embodiment of male entitlement? And where does Andrew get off hosting a movie podcast when he has apparently seen next to no movies?
Tell him No Time for Heroics is back from vacation with new episodes. Tell him Howard Hughes said so.
PS; This one's in memory of Jon "Ten bucks a shot" Polito, who passed away just two days after we recorded this podcast praising his work. He joins a cast of top notch character actors. Enjoy!
PPS: Here's the books Anthony recommended at the end of the episode!
Five Came Back
Last week of back issues, and we're going out with one of the most popular graphic novels turned middlingly popular movie of all time, V for Vendetta!
Back to your regularly scheduled complaining next week!
Sticking in 1996, this back issue fetures Fox's tv movie/aborted pilot Generation X!
Your heroes are enmeshed in a diabolical web of criminally labour-intensive intrigue and moving house, so on this sunny Summer day, and to celebrate our one year anniversary, let's all enjoy a look back at some of our favorites, starting with the purplest hero of them wall!
I mean all. Ugh, all this spackling...
Possibly a first in the history of podcasting, Andrew and Anthony get to take revenge on a fan for requesting a horrible movie this one time by forcing them to come on the show and watch that movie's sequel. Listener Meghan Murphy joins us to take on 2011's Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance!
Would this movie have been better if the kid had been named Seamus O'Bullfighter? Is the moment when Ghost Rider turns a titanic industrial digger into a hell-machine the greatest moment in the history of cinema? And welcome to the show cave-dwelling, tattooed Christopher Lambert!
PS: Don't look up that "first in the history of podcasting" thing from before, it's undoubtedly not true.
PPS: The audio gets really screwed up for reasons unknown half way though. We're still trying to figure that one out. Though really we may have unintentionally replicated the experience of watching a Neveldine/Taylor movie, which is that it's really loud and kinda hard to follow, but if you do it's a pretty great time.
Well, Suicide Squad is coming out... but it's expensive to go to the movies and also we don't wanna. So instead we sent a confused and put-upon mother to our local Blockbuster that no longer exists and had her rent the Suicide Squad ripping-off mockbuster Sinister Squad!
Isn't it redundant to have a personified Death that is trying to kill people? Why is the Pied Piper, the only character in this movie with mind control in his original fairy tale, the only one here without mind control powers? But the hundred-million dollar question: will this rip-off prove to be a better movie than Suicide Squad?
Help us carry on the grand tradition of mythpunk stories not really translating to the screen, and at the same time reset our ratings scale for movies that are really and truly poor with 2016's Sinister Squad!
It's our 50th episode! And we're spoiling ourselves by watching one of the greatest entries in the superhero movie genre and immediately questioning its place on top... Superman: The Movie!
Is this movie the best Superman comic that we've yet made? Why does Jor El care about inspiring an alien race when his whole planet is dying? If you were trying to blend in at a '70s newsroom, why play a bumbling, attention-grabbing anachronism? And the fact that Otis sounds like the Jawas aside, how perfect is John Williams' score in this?
So join us, you diseased maniacs, as we celebrate our fiftieth show!
We talk a lot about comics becoming movies on the podcast. Here's a movie that became a comic, but in the process evolved into something truly ambitious and bizarre. This episode we read Jack Kirby's 2001 comics adaptation.
2001: A Space Odyssey, a product of two geniuses in two different media, Stanley Kubrick in film and Arthur C. Clarke in print, filtered and translated through a third.
We're breaking format to take the ultimate trip and check out what happens when you take an already great work of art and hook it up to Kirby's dream machine.
In short, the new seed is the spirit of our own self belief. Think about it.
Pictured here: omgwtf
We've got a special request to talk about X-Men Oranges Wolverine! So I guess that's what we're doing now.
Could we please have a movie where an actress of Lynn Collins caliber plays something more than a love interest who dies to motivate a dude? And oh man, Wolverine? Northwest Territories? Daniel Negreanu? Get ready for the most Canadian movie since Men with Brooms. Also get ready for more fakey French Canadian accents cause Gambit returns!
Spoilers? This movie has next to nothing to do with wolverines, which is disappointing as they're like totally badass out there in the woods. Oh well!
PS: It's our last full episode before our big 50th and also before we take a brief Summer vacation. Stay Tuned!
Superman and Wonder Woman had a daughter. And all she wants is to get to school on time once in a while.. But all these bullies, martial artists, killer robots, and alien invasions keep getting her stuck in detention. No Time for Heroics tackles its first anime movie and gets tackled back by Project A-Ko!
Is this just a long-form Warner Brothers cartoon dressed in fighting robot clothes? Whose project is this anyway? And why, why all the cartoon boobs? Even some of the guys have cartoon boobs. Japan. Why.
There's a dearth of female superheroes in North America, so we're heading across the pond. Okay, maybe a couple ponds. It's the 30th anniversary of Project A-Ko, and we're starting the party by remembering that Project A-Ko exists!