Scifi Collectibles, Science Fiction Discounts

Reviews

Looks to be the Swedish glam rocker's first release.It's decent.Better cuts included "Twenty Four Seven",their Dead Or Alive cover "You Spin Me Around-Like A Record"(anyone else remember those guys?),"Myself Esteem",the ass-kicking "Poison Envy","Hitchin' A Ride" and "Neon Kicks"(nice rippin' guitar solo).The disc's power ballad "Hardcore" isn't half-bad either.Line-up:Tin Star-guitar&lead vocals,Snoopy-lead guitar&vocals,Rod Teilmann-bass&vocals and Slim Pete-drums.Comes with a twelve page color booklet with song lyrics.Might appeal to some fans of Faster Pussycat,Hanoi Rocks,Jetboy and Motley Crue.

The Good "Babylon Rockets" gets its energy from blazing licks and furious chugga-chugga riffing. Vocalist Tin Star is the quintessential glam frontman with his playful and cocksure vocal delivery. "TwentyFourSeven" has a catchy melodic chorus and addictive hooks that tell the story of rockstar lifestyle. Gemini Five included a glamed-up cover version of Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me (Like a Record)" on their latest release. It's stacked with fuzzy guitar tones and strong keyboard pulsations. "Get It Off" will draw you in with its up tempo riffs, power chord bridge, and high-pitched vocals. "Hardcore" starts off with subtle single note picking and soft vocals that give way to mild distortion. A driving riff dominates "Automaticool", an ode to the rock legends that inspired Gemini Five to play rock and roll. "Chemicals Between Us" is a dark acoustic ballad that explores how drugs can destroy people and their relationships. The Bad European audiences and American audiences differ greatly on the acceptance of this style of music. Sadly, its time has past in the states. The Verdict Even though Babylon Rockets is chock-full of high-energy riffs, catchy and fun song hooks, and lots of great guitar riffing, Gemini Five aren't exactly offing anything new in the way of their genre. You've heard it all before.

I can't express you my satisfaction in listening a fresh sound of what I grew up listening too in the 80's!! This album shows that rock n' roll, the real one, will never die, no matter what decade or millenium we are! Motley Crüe, Rage Against The Machine, Whitesnake, are just some of the influences of these fantastic guys!! OK, the visual is worst than Motley Crüe and Poison together, but forget about labels and visuals and go straight to what matters most!! ROCK N' ROLL!! Well written heavy songs and excellent ballads will makes you wish for more!! If you're a die hard 80's hard rock fan like me, buy it, you won't regret!!Oh, really nice Anime cover!

Reviews

First: should you happen to be missing the beginning of the season, go get it - while enjoyable on it's own, this set (and everything that follows) is SO much better when you can see the whole big story unfold in front of you with all the little pieces you pick up in season 1 fitting into the story. If you've seen the series, but have holes in your first season, BUY THEM. You will be *amazed* at the number of little hints that show the upcoming story in the follow seasons! DVD is to be released this summer, so you might want to wait if you'd prefer the disks. Another reason to have these: there are many little background hints that you'll want to rewind and catch. Overall, this is the best series of it's time and while the Trek(s) occationally match it, they fall down in having way too many stinkers thrown in. I can count TWO stinkers in *five* seasons of Babylon 5, it's THAT good.

We have just opened and viewed the videos of Babylon 5 - Epsilon Chronicles and are greatly disappointed in the quality of the tapes. Having subscribed earlier to the Columbia House versions of Babylon 5, the quality of these videos leaves a lot to be desired. They appear to have been dubbed on a less that optimum vcr. The subject matter is tremendous and the ability to select which sets to purchase is five star, however, I wish they had been first run quality. I will continue to view them for I am a five-star Babylon 5 fan. Be prepared to be disappointed.

While I rate B5 as 5-star Sci-Fi series (leaving every incarnation of Star Trek in the dust) I only give this pack 4-stars and the beginning of season 1 gets only 3. Season one seemed to thrash about looking for a purpose before the story arc really took form and charicture. Chrysalis is a must own as it fails to pull a single punch, leaving you breathless at the end. Quality of Mercy is a little "Treky" in it's presentation. Babylon Squared is neat in that it sets the foundation for things to come. Voice in the Wilderness is a standout in season 1 for its good writing, but again some of the concepts seem a little "Treky"

There isn't a bad video in this set. Ok, so if I wanted to get picky I might rate them as between 4.5 (Quality of Mercy); 4.7 (Babylon Squared); and 4.9 (Voice in the Wilderness I & II)The other episodes all fit in there somewhere.I wouldn't rate any of these at four stars or below.If you are a true fan of B5 and JMS, then you'll want all videos in the series. Even if you don't want them all these are a must have.

This pack features the final episodes of Season One, where the series begins to deepen and darken. Shades of meaning, emphasis on surprising past plot elements...all of a sudden, B5 gets really good! These eps only have this power because of the foundation laid by the earlier eps, so you've got to watch them, just so you get to "A Voice In The Wilderness" and "Babylon Squared", the real meat of the first year. "Chrysalis" sets some of the stage for season two, but who knew then Sinclair would be gone...for a time.

Reviews

What can one say for a Hugo winner episode? Apart for the great directing, acting and special effects, the "Coming of the Shadows" triggers the series of events that will lead the heroes to the Shadow War. Bringing in mind an Ancient Greek Tragedy, where the characters are driven by powers beyond their will, this episode evolves around Centauri Emperor Tourchan. A really tragic figure, he comes to B5 to ask forgiveness for old sins. But those sins drug him down and he dies before he has the chance to save his people's future. Mollari, a puppet of his Dark allies, makes sure of that. Meanwhile, G'car tries to act honourably, whatever that may cost. And in the heart of the events the Vorlon ambassador foretells the End: "In fire." After the first superb episode, it's hard to evaluate on "Gropos". This episode is not bad, however, compared to the previous one may seem boring. This is hardly the case. It is a decent story of good men and women who went to their deaths in a faraway planet, for reasons they may never know. In the meantime, the station has the chance to get armed for the war at hand and Dr. Franklin confronts his father. The highlight of the series. Don't miss it.

In "Quality of Mercy" Dr. Franklin (Stephen Biggs) stumbles upon Dr. Rosen (June Lockhart) using an alien device for healing in Downbelow's Brown Sector; a device used as a means of capital punishment for condemned prisoners. Meanwhile Security Chief Garibaldi (Jerry Doyle) asks resident telepath Talia Winters (Andrea Thompson) to probe the mind of a condemned prisoner. And Ambassador Mollari (Peter Jurasik) takes Lennier (Bill Mumy) under his wing, showing him some of Babylon 5's rough edges. In "Chrysalis" Garibaldi uncovers a dark Earth Alliance conspiracy which will have important implications for what follows in subsequent seasons of Babylon 5. Ambassador Delenn (Mira Furlan) begins a startling transformation. Ambassador Mollari starts his descent into hell as he makes a deal with Mr. Morden (Eric Wasser) which will have dire consequences for himself, the Centauri Republic and the Narns. Without a doubt, in this final episode of Season 1 are ample signs and portents of what will follow shortly in the Babylon 5 saga.

The first episode on this tape is an average enjoyable slice of B5. It has good acting and some fine lines, little stands out from it though, but there is an air of menace that Star Trek never has, especially when Garibaldi, second lead, relishes throwing the switch on the serial killer.The second episode is Sci-Fi at it's finest. It has more epic events than you could shake a Heinlein at. This episode is bursting to the seams with action and tension. Don't miss it!

Reviews

This series is quite simply pure class. Centered around the advertising & macho corporate world of New York in 1960, from the costume design all the way through to the story this is a must for people who enjoy adult drama. The pace is fairly slow to begin with but sets the scene perfectly as the season draws to its climax. The main character is extremely complex, interesting and never fails to leave you astounded. No surprise he has won multiple awards for his performances (notably Golden Globes). The way women are portrayed is extremely unsettling for people born after this generation but I'm sure hits the mark. Wouldn't be great if we could still sip whiskey at work while updating our Outlook accounts! Fantastic series & looking forward to Season 2 & 3. At the discounted price this is a MUST!

i had gotten season 2 from 101 cbs.fm and i watched it i sort of figured out how they got their in season 2 so i wanted top see if i was right or not i order a lot of stuff from amazon . com all the time i also like if you dont have it in stock yet because it has not come out or been released yet you can pre-order it and when it is released you send it lets see best buy do thatso i got season 1 from you guys and i have season 3 on pre-order thank you JEFF SCHNEPF

You'll Love the Way It Makes You Feel Mark Greif Mad Men: Season One Lionsgate Home Entertainment, £29.99, October 2008 Last month, the television show Mad Men won the Emmy Award in the United States for best drama series, putting it in the company of The Sopranos, Lost and 24. Like those other programmes, Mad Men has a long, unfolding storyline, costs millions of dollars per episode to make, and seems largely intended for home-recording or DVD viewers, who will trouble to watch it in sequence. It is on billboards and the sides of buses everywhere and the puff interviews are inescapable (its network, AMC, has never had a hit show to publicise before). The first series ran on BBC4 in March; the second series will be broadcast next year. Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better. We watch and know better about male chauvinism, homophobia, anti-semitism, workplace harassment, housewives' depression, nutrition and smoking. We wait for the show's advertising men or their secretaries and wives to make another gaffe for us to snigger over. `Have we ever hired any Jews?' - `Not on my watch.' `Try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology; it looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use.' It's only a short further wait until a pregnant mother inhales a tumbler of whisky and lights up a Chesterfield; or a heart attack victim complains that he can't understand what happened: `All these years I thought it would be the ulcer. Did everything they told me. Drank the cream, ate the butter. And I get hit by a coronary.' We're meant to save a little snort, too, for the ad agency's closeted gay art director as he dismisses psychological research: `We're supposed to believe that people are living one way, and secretly thinking the exact opposite? . . . Ridiculous!' - a line delivered with a limp-wristed wave. Mad Men is currently said to be the best and `smartest' show on American TV. We're doomed. Beneath the Now We Know Better is a whiff of Doesn't That Look Good. The drinking, the cigarettes, the opportunity to slap your children! The actresses are beautiful, the Brilliantine in the men's hair catches the light, and everyone and everything is photographed as if in stills for a fashion spread. The show's `1950s' is a strange period that seems to stretch from the end of World War Two to 1960, the year the action begins. The less you think about the plot the more you are free to luxuriate in the low sofas and Eames chairs, the gunmetal desks and geometric ceiling tiles and shiny IBM typewriters. Not to mention the lush costuming: party dresses, skinny brown ties, angora cardigans, vivid blue suits and ruffled peignoirs, captured in the pure dark hues and wide lighting ranges that Technicolor never committed to film. Sooner or later, though, unless you watch the whole series with the sound off, you will have to face up to the story. At its centre is Don Draper, a ladykiller and champion ad man. (The name seems to recall Dick Diver, Tender Is the Night's fallen hero.) His careless arm, draped over the back of a leather couch, seen from behind, forms Mad Men's logo. Either he is surveying the immense territory over which he is lord and master, or he is pondering some facet of his existential dread. Don is supposed to be the profound one. Around him is ranged a toybox of tin stereotypes. The format of the show is to suspend a backstory and subplot from each diminutive stereotype, episode by episode, and sketch some quick pathos around the character to see if it can humanise him or her. There is the Older Mentor, a partner in the firm who, by his clothes, seems to represent the Roaring Twenties - evidently that was the last generation before the 1950s, in television's way of remembering history. He looks like Faulkner and drinks just as heavily, regretting his lost youth. Don Draper also has a Stifled Wife, Betty, who is styled like Grace Kelly, and exhibits the twitchy anxiety of suburban housewives as described by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique before their liberation came via feminism; she is a child, and her mother has just died, leaving her at sea in a world of uncaring men. There are Assertive Women, too, who find Don Draper adulterously irresistible. The Bohemian Artist welcomes Don at any hour into her carefully dishevelled Village studio apartment. The Wealthy Jewess lures him back to her father's department store to seduce him, against her solid judgment and her faith. A perverse aspect of the obsessive period detail of Mad Men emerges in these old-timey stereotypes which we have jettisoned, but the 1950s still possessed. My favourite is the Emasculating Lady Psychologist - a cross between Hannah Arendt and the Wicked Witch of the West - who heads the firm's research department, appears in the first episode and then, alas, isn't invited back to exhibit her horribly fake German accent until Episode 6. (`Freud, you say,' mocks Don Draper. `What agency is he with?' - as he dumps her report in the trash.) Great moments in the history of advertising are simply acted out, rather in the way Kraft Television Theater in its day might have dramatised scenes from the life of George Washington. All through the first episode, Draper, as creative director, is racking his brains for the right pitch to sell Lucky Strike cigarettes. Unable to bring even a single good idea into the meeting with his client, Draper asks the company president, who's come all the way from Winston-Salem, to describe how tobacco is made. `We plant it in the South Carolina sunshine,' the old man drawls, `cut it, cure it, toast it - ' `There you go!' Draper says, and writes: LUCKY STRIKE: IT'S TOASTED. All cigarette tobacco is toasted - but no rival has yet claimed it. Hence, advertising genius. In fact Draper's slogan was first used by Lucky Strike not in 1960 but in 1917. Claude Hopkins based a famous set of ads for Schlitz beer on a visit to the brewery, where he discovered that they washed and sanitised their bottles with steam. `His hosts assured him that every brewery did the same,' as Martin Mayer recounts it in Madison Avenue, USA, an indispensable book written in 1958, but that didn't stop Hopkins from running with his new slogan, SCHLITZ: WASHED WITH LIVE STEAM. When Don Draper pulls the stunt, you don't know whether you're supposed to be impressed or to feel that the whole advertising industry is unconscionable and stupid. What's certain is that the dramatic process leading up to these bolts of insight - Draper writing on pads, Draper staring into space, Draper sending his secretary-cum-copywriter Peggy home with an electric weight-loss belt to see what it does (predictably, it's a vibrator; the proposed slogan is `You'll Love the Way It Makes You Feel') - is desultory, and distracts only a little from the soap opera antics of bed-hopping and keeping secrets. It was Eisenhower who in 1952 became the first American presidential candidate to use a television commercial. `To think that an old soldier should come to this!' the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe moaned at the filming. By 1960, two long Eisenhower terms later, television and advertising had become essential to the modern electoral campaign. Everyone remembers the young and handsome John F. Kennedy's triumph in televised debates with his rival Richard Nixon. According to legend, Nixon lost the 1960 election by his refusal to put on makeup before the broadcast. One of the more subtly interesting moments in Mad Men occurs when we see an actual Kennedy TV spot, pulled from the archives, screened in the boardroom of the show's fictional Madison Avenue firm. (The firm, Sterling Cooper, is working for Nixon, just as they work on cigarette campaigns and everything else we know to be bad for you.) The Kennedy commercial gives one of the few genuine shocks of the series. `Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy!' chirrups the jingle, set to a big band tune. Cartoon hands hold up `Kennedy' signs in an arty collage that places the candidate's chiselled face among celebrities, names of US states, doodles, and lines of eager voters. This real commercial was pure `brand' manipulation. It had nothing to say about policies or issues, or even about Kennedy's personality, biography and character. We just don't see political ads like this anymore. The shock, of course, is that advertising has become somewhat more modest across the span of fifty years. We no longer invest so much in mere association - it has at least been put in its place. John McCain may be launching ugly spots with increasingly crude and mendacious claims about his opponent; Barack Obama's media teams will certainly spotlight their man's high cheekbones and trim good looks, even when he's talking up his tax plans. But cheerful decoration alone isn't thought to sway the electorate as it did in 1960, and coded messages can't make an end-run around the conscious mind to elicit audiences' submerged opinions. Advertisers in the 1950s and 1960s were for many reasons more eager to believe in a Svengali model of mass persuasion. The black-magic prestige of professional psychology was at its height. The field had been enhanced by the adoption of `applied psychology' for wartime propaganda and intelligence operations, an expertise that was retrofitted, like so many disciplines after World War Two, for the new explosion of industrial productivity. Something had to be done, competitively, to try to sort the flood of identical products: Tide, Cheer, Duz, Dash, Cascade, Comet, Zest (all household soaps and cleansers). No one was more credulous than the ad impresarios themselves, with the exception of their angry detractors, who left us such cautionary documents as The Hidden Persuaders and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (whose eponymous antihero worked in PR). Emerging stars like David Ogilvy and Norman B. Norman publicised the ad man's mystique of deep creative force, genius and restraint, as an up-to-date alternative to the old market barker's persistence. Industry opened its purses to pay for strange approaches (Louis Cheskin's Color Research Institute) and memorable accidental art (like that leisured, mustachioed man with an eyepatch, `the man in the Hathaway shirt'). Up swelled one of those colossal bubbles of pompous self-regard, enclosing account execs and art directors and copywriters, that leave their sticky residue on history. It's a commonplace that portrayal of the past can be used to criticise the present. What of those cases in which criticism of the past is used to congratulate the present? I suppose it does at least expose what's most pompous and self-regarding in our own time: namely, an unearned pride in our supposed superiority when it comes to health and restraint, the condition of women, and the toleration of (some) difference in ethnicity and sexuality. Mad Men flatters us where we deserve to be scourged. As I see it, the whole spectacle has the bad faith of, say, an 18th-century American slaveholding society happily ridiculing a 17th-century Puritan society - `Look, they used to burn their witches!' - while secretly envying the ease of a time when you could still tie uppity women to the stake. If we've managed to become less credulous about advertising, to make it more normal and the bearer of more reasonable expectations, perhaps in 50 years' time viewers will look back on the silly self-congratulatory subtexts of Mad Men, shake their heads, and be grateful that gender and sexual tolerance have likewise been normalised. Advertising circa 1960 is genuinely interesting. Would that Mad Men had been genuinely interested in it. It is a tribute to the show's acting that despite the odds stacked against them, some of the characters do gain dimension. The Jewish love interest, played by the stage actress Maggie Siff, is mesmerising, self-possessed and unfazed by the strictures of `playing history' even as she stays unusually true to the period. The apple-cheeked and boyishly malevolent Vincent Kartheiser, as Pete Campbell, Draper's Younger Rival in the firm, manages to steal every scene he enters. They are, paradoxically, the two actors who would seem most at home in a real 1960s Hollywood movie, yet play their roles with the kind of commitment that lifts them out of time, escaping pastiche. The pretty Bohemian Artist, I'm sorry to say, holds her last marijuana party in Episode 8, though not before taking Don to a pre-Bob Dylan-era poetry club, where he has an inane debate with a Beatnik. Whether one finds all of this claustrophobic and ludicrous or tightly wound and compelling depends very heavily on one's opinion of Don Draper. Draper, as written, is a kind of social savant. He knows how to act in every emergency. He deploys strategic fits of temper to attain his ends. He's catnip to women. As played by Jon Hamm, though, his manner hardly matches his activities. Hamm looks perpetually wimpy and underslept. His face is powdered and doughy. He lacks command. He is witless. The pose that he's best at, interestingly, is leaning back in his chair; it ought to be from superiority, but it looks as though he is trying to dodge a blow. Draper is supposed to have a deep secret, but it would make sense only if that secret were his weakness - fearfulness or femininity - instead of the show's anticlimactic revelation that his mother was a whore and he picked up another man's identity on the battlefield in Korea: bizarre Gothicisms that belong to some other series. One never sees hunger or anger in Hamm's eyes, only the misery of the hunted fox. Either he is playing the hero as a schlub in deference to a 21st-century idea of masculinity as fundamentally hollow and sham, or he's completely underequipped to convey male menace. The most necessary thing that he can't do is to justify viscerally why strong women keep falling for him, or why the competitive males in his office accept him as an Alpha. In the classic Hollywood cinema, there was a name for the role Hamm should be playing: the Mug, who seems OK at first but in the end has to give up the girl to Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy. The Sopranos, the programme for which Mad Men's creator Matthew Weiner worked as a writer before getting his own series, is often invoked by journalists as a godparent to the newer show. The two share a focus on the world of men, a primary relationship between an older, world-weary boss and a sneaky young turk, even a psychiatrist figure who pops up to allow a character to express what can't be said at home. Unfortunately for Mad Men, the example of The Sopranos shows up all the possibilities of the medium that aren't exploited in Weiner's show. And unfortunately for Jon Hamm, James Gandolfini's depiction of Tony Soprano shows the kind of man Don Draper might have been: someone in whom strength and weakness, allure and cruel cunning, were held in balance, through an alternation of authority, neediness and physical violence. The only really moving parts of Mad Men, curiously, have to do with the further reaches of its most annoying feature: its knowingness about how everything right today was wrong back then, which could be expected to become most sanctimonious when it addresses sexual orientation. (The show barely considers race, perhaps because one can hardly say that there everything has turned out `all right' in America over fifty years.) Every so often we get to see a gay or lesbian character begin to act on impulse, rather than suffering in silence or mouldering in confusion. The art director, Salvatore, meets a male client from out of town who takes him to drinks, then dinner, then offers to show him the darkened view of Central Park from his hotel room. The office sexpot, Joan Holloway, hears her old roommate confess a deep, non-Platonic love as they stand before a mirror in Joan's bedroom: `Think of me as a boy,' the woman begs. The roommate is rebuffed. The art director, too, goes away, but not before cueing us in to the fact that, though closeted, he is not utterly unaware: `I have thought about it. I know what I want. I know what I want to do - and that is nothing.' `What are you afraid of?' his suitor asks. Salvatore: `Are you joking?' What had been condescending becomes, momentarily, tragic. Then another precisely dated song is played, and the credits roll, and we are back by the next episode to the historical-dramatic irony which is the most the show can treat us to and, finally, not enough. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Vol. 30 No. 20 · 23 October 2008 » Mark Greif » You'll Love the Way It Makes You Feel (print version) ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright © LRB Ltd., 1997-2010

Has the scourge of mindless fame whores on reality tv driven audiences to such desperation that they will now accept ANYTHING that is scripted? And be convinced it is good? Mad Men is miserable "entertainment" choc-o-bloc with wooden one dimensional characters hobbled by delusions, dalliances and the worst possible writing on a modern day television program. Egotism, sexism, racism, alcoholism, elitism. A crass cavalcade of cliches, you get it all in a filthy little package with Mad Men. It is the largest collection of feckless troglodytes and obsequious toadies I have ever experienced. In fact, the characters are so poorly written and developed that you never get a chance to connect with or feel any empathy or compassion for a single one. WHERE is the humanity? WHERE is the color? There was surely more to the 60's black experience than tending elevators or serving sandwiches to the man. How brazenly backward for the writers and producers of Mad Men to blatantly ignore this pivotal point of cultural history. It makes me gag. Speaking of which, I felt like I got contact emphysema watching this show. The ubiquitous cancer sticks are more of a crutch than a secondary prop to set the scene. Cigarettes are SO overused that they become a distraction and a lame joke by the middle of the 1st season. The pervasive poisonous atmosphere ends up being a evanescent yet tangible parallel for the dysfunctional professional and personal relationships that seem to inexplicably implode on every episode. It is a sordid and nihilistic display. There is some redemption for Mad Men. The clothing, hair and makeup are a magnificent visual feast. Genuinely gorgeous. All of the creative artists and professionals working behind the scenes at Mad Men are a wondrous testament to the magic that happens when you have the right people working together toward a beautiful goal. That said I will add that the profound depth of this visual perfection is Hollywoods dastardly deception. Because it is precisely these aesthetcs that end up being a grotesque metaphor for the sickening superficial nature of Mad Men. All style, ZERO SUBSTANCE. Performance wise the sole saving grace of Mad Men is actress Christina Hendricks. She is DIVOON. Her electrifying presence and magnetic radiance illuminate the screen and help raise her primal essence above the utterly pedestrian scripts. Her dazzling talent (as previously seen on ER) is woefully squandered in the flatulent falderol of Mad Men. I hope Hollywoods good old boy network can get their act together to give Miss Hendricks her due. She is in fact LONG past due. The big screen is waiting for her incomparable brand of star shine.

I LOVE this show!! Great writing, great cast and having grown up in this era, it is very realistic, but also very entertaining. Can't wait to see Season Two.