Network Television was Better Off with Better Off Ted

I have to give Netflix credit: Because of its wide selection of television titles, it’s a great resource for me to find high-quality but short-lived series that somehow escaped my attention when they were originally aired. (This is a welcome change from most television syndication arrangements, where only popular shows are aired repeatedly on channels other than the one that originally aired them.) In fact, it was thanks to Netflix that I found Better Off Ted, a wickedly intelligent satire of corporate culture that aired for two 13 episode seasons on ABC from 2009 to 2010.

Better Off Ted is a half-hour sitcom that takes place in the offices of Veridian Dynamics, a monolithic mega-corporation that engages in all sorts of odd and amoral activities to increase worker productivity and maximize profits, often at the expense of everyone and everything else. The characters consist of the titular Ted Crisp (Jay Harrington), a single father who heads Veridian’s research and development department; Ted’s intimidating, hyper-competitive boss Veronica Palmer (Portia de Rossi); and Ted’s underlings, product tester Linda Zwordling (Andrea Anders) and product development scientists Phil Myman (Jonathan Slavin) and Lem Hewitt (Malcolm Barrett).

While the interplay among the characters provide the plots for the episodes, most of the jokes in Better Off Ted are targeted directly at the behavior of modern-day corporations and their approach to people and science--or, as Lem puts it in one episode, “the place science goes to bend over and grab its ankles”. Throughout the series, various Veridian products become the subject of absurd and dark humor, such as its revolutionary cure for baldness (that is also a parasite) and a sound device that can deliver messages straight into a person’s brain (and can also cause uncontrollable, explosive vomiting when set at high frequencies). In a way, Veridian is less openly violent but just as misanthropic as Omni Consumer Products, the devious military-industrial conglomerate in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. Indeed, notorious mad scientists such as Frankenstein, Jekyll and Moreau would feel right at home in the laboratories of Veridian Dynamics.

I love Better Off Ted and if you love comedy that is smart, sinister and strange, then you should check it out too.

A Self-Made Superhero Gets an Upgrade in Iron Man 3

Due to financial problems beyond my control last summer, I have begun to catch up on all the box office fun I missed just a few months ago. First up: Iron Man 3, the concluding chapter in the trilogy about Marvel's resident techno-genius Tony Stark and his super-powered alter ego.

Iron Man 3 opens with Stark (played by Robert Downey Jr.) still reeling from the events in The Avengers movie. Overwhelmed by the many possible threats that could doom humanity, he has become obsessed with upgrading Iron Man--and himself--to counter any and all future menaces. Further complicating the picture are the appearances of the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), a terrorist mastermind who has been orchestrating a series of surprise attacks around the world, and Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), a corporate rival who threatens to topple Stark Industries through his own "think tank" called Advanced Idea Mechanics (AIM). When a surprise attack by the Mandarin forces him away from home and friends, Stark has to rely on his intelligence and resourcefulness to stop the Mandarin and uncover AIM's secret agenda.

Long story short, I loved Iron Man 3 and I regret not seeing it in 3D on the big screen. It's everything a high-octane superhero film should be: witty without being campy, compelling without being ponderous, and thrilling without being shallow. It succeeds as a sequel, building upon the events in The Avengers and the previous Iron Man movies to reflect how Stark and his two closest allies Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) have changed over the course of the stories. It also has a plot that makes ample usage of many characters and ideas from the Marvel universe (e.g., AIM, Extremis, the Mandarin, etc.). If Iron Man 3 is any indication of how Marvel plans to develop more movies based on its vast universe of characters and settings, then I think that superhero movie fans are in for many more blockbuster treats in the summers to come.

As I mentioned in my review of Iron Man 2, superhero stores are at their most compelling when they act as parables of power. As such, Iron Man 3 brings Stark's personal crisis about his responsibility towards others to a complete circle. In Iron Man, Stark bowed out of the international arms race because he felt that he could do more good as a superhero; in Iron Man 3, Stark has to come to grips that he never really left the arms race at all, that by becoming Iron Man he just exchanged his participation in one arms race for another. This is an intriguing dilemma for a superhero movie to portray, and Downey's performance as Stark is up to the challenge. (In light of the film's plot, I think that putting Stark on movie's poster as a falling Icarus was a nice touch.) The fact that the film is able to tell an entertaining story by largely keeping Stark outside of his Iron Man armor--working out his problems without routinely resorting to superheroics--speaks to how well made Iron Man 3 is. I also liked the film's jab at how the modern military-industrial complex needs to create villains for the sake of maintaining profit. In fact, given his role in RoboCop, I suspect that the inclusion of Miguel Ferrer in the cast of Iron Man 3 was a deliberate wink to Paul Verhoeven's dark satire of America's militarism.

I'm sure that Hollywood's current infatuation with superheroes will eventually reach a point of diminishing returns, but Iron Man 3 indicates to me that we are far from that right now. Until DC and its corporate masters at Time Warner come up with a better series of superhero movies, I'll be happy to make mine Marvel.

A Look at Kotobukiya's ED-209 and RoboCop MK-2 Figures

When it comes to figures and miniatures for the RoboCop franchise, plenty of figures, busts and model kits have been made of the titular RoboCop character. However, recreations of other robots from the franchise, such as the ED-209 and RoboCop MK-2 (a.k.a. RoboCain), have been much harder to come by and very expensive to purchase. Things are slowly turning around in terms of availability: NECA will be releasing an ED-209 replica this summer, while Hot Toys will be releasing an ED-209 replica in early 2014 to go with its new deluxe RoboCop figure. Yet with both versions of ED-209 costing a sizable chunk of cash--NECA is charging $50 and Hot Toys is charging $410--these new collectables may still be out of reach for many RoboCop fans.

Thankfully, I was able to add ED-209 and RoboCop MK-2 to my personal collection a few years ago for around $10 each, courtesy of the Japanese model and toy company Kotobukiya. Kotobukiya did a series of 3.5-inch figures based on robots from the original RoboCop trilogy. Each figure was pre-painted and only required minimal, snap-together assembly. Read on to learn more about these two fun and affordable RoboCop collectibles.

Looking back, discovering what Kotobukiya was releasing regarding RoboCop collectibles was dumb luck on my part, and I made it a point to take advantage of this cost-efficient opportunity as soon as I learned of it. I was not so fortunate when it came to Konami's figure series that was based on the Alien saga; by the time I discovered what Konami had done, several pieces from its Alien series had already become rare and expensive collector's items. (Between the work of Kotobukiya and Konami, I have to wonder: Why do the Japanese fans get such cool and affordable merchandise based on film franchises from America, while American fans of the same franchises don't get the same opportunities?)

Kotobukiya's ED-209 is remarkably detailed for such a small figure. It only has five swivel joints: two for the "hips", two for the guns, and one for the "waist". As such, it doesn't have the complete range of motion as the original ED-209 design. Yet because this figure is essentially a display piece--and an astonishing one at that--its lack of poseability doesn't matter.

In contrast to the ED-209 figure, Kotobukiya's RoboCop MK-2 only has two moving joints--one for each of the smaller arms, and that’s it. It comes with a small display stand that helps it stay upright and that's it. Nevertheless, this RoboCop MK-2 figure faithfully recreates many of the details of the original robot design.

These figures may still be available through some retailers on the Internet. If you happen to run across these figures--especially at their original prices--I highly recommend that you purchase them. It's rare when so much detail is put into a such small package and at such a low price, so don't pass up this opportunity if you can find it.