| 18/12/2009 In exactly 1 week it's Christmas Day. AAAAAAH! Tomorrow I leave for home and when looking back on my semester here the thing that keeps popping into my head is the bills. TV Licence and phone/internet bill aside (not everyone's paid me back yet) after I complained about the state of our electricity and gas usage/charges, Nathan and Dad sent me emails talking about how things are. Mum and Dad pay a monumental amount for heating and electricity (don't you two want to look at how to reduce that?) and Nathan has used calculated figures to convince me that heating in any form is expensive. And as it has turned out since that entry, gas heating is actually plenty cheaper than electric. While we had kafuffles at the start, we've since then been able to programme the boiler to switch the heating on and off automatically at set times. I basically set it to 3 times a day, 8 hours apart. So since then the house has been warm enough to not warrant someone switching it on manually and then forgetting to switch the bloody thing off 4-8 hours later! (It happened) So yeah, over the course of the semester the outgoings for gas have gone right down and only a couple of pounds are used a day. Except last Sunday when 5 extra pounds managed to vanish from the meter, but I reckon that's to do with the vast amounts of hot water needed to do the washing up in the aftermath of the Christmas dinner. I just wish it was the same for electricity: £5 barely lasts a day. Switching topics: I got such a shock when I found out a movie based off 'Max Steel' is in development, to the point that the actor for Jacob in 'New Moon' was named as the actor to play the titular character(s?) of Max Steel/Josh McGrath. Now I have no issues with the choice of actor, I'm just wondering why this old example of kids' entertainment is being used. For those who don't know 'Max Steel' was a CG animated show for kids that appeared in the late 90s (1998) and petered out in the early 00s (I last watched an episode in 2001). The basic premise is that Josh McGrath is a teenage boy about to go to college with no idea his Dad works as head of a special agency called N-Tek. The public raison d'etre of N-Tek is as a commercial seller of sports gear, in actual fact it's your bog-standard employer of secret agents and the like. So in a freak accident Josh, unconscious, absorbs a large amount of experimental nanomachines, which fuse with his blood cells, so from then on he has to absorb transphasic energy just to survive. One side effect of this is amazing abilities, like changing what he looks like. So as an agent, the blonde-haired brown-eyed Josh goes in the guise of brunette blue-eyed Max. So yeah, ripe material for a movie franchise (because any movie about superheroes just can't be stand-alone these days). I still don't get why this though. It was definitely successful, having had 3 seasons made and sold a number of toys. I suppose one reason it was unique was that it was one of the few CG shows that saw success (also the only successful CG show not done by Mainframe Ent.) and would also stand out as the only western superhero movie not based on a comic. There's also the idea of getting one's powers from nanomachines, that's rarely explored and his powers are cool (superspeed, superstrength, invisibility). In all honesty there was truly little about this show that was unique and the franchise isn't exactly one that survived the times. I mean, I've found few traces of any great fanbase for this thing. The original TV show was mainly successful because it happened to fill a void: there were few superhero cartoons and few CG shows, there were also few shows with action in it (on terrestrial TV anyway). So I'm not greatly encouraged by the fact that Hollywood has turned to this dead franchise for more ideas and to-once again-fill a void. It can be a successful movie though. All this movie needs to do, is to have great and epic action, while still being fun and mostly light-hearted and providing us with likeable, believable characters. I do believe that one of the strengths of the TV show was that I liked the characters and their development was believable. It was also entertaining to see how Josh dealt with his multiple priorities (and the problem of him admitting to Laura he had kissed Rachel-that was actually heart-breaking). |