• Ah, the canceled TV series that leaves the whole show on a cliffhanger! A pretty decent list. Some of these — like Odyssey 5 — still kinda haunt me.

• NBC’s highly-hyped The Event disappointed in the ratings.

• Oh, my Lord, they’re talking about a third movie in the Bill & Ted (Excellent Adventure) series. As anti-sequel as I am, I actually think it could be kinda meta after all these years (not to mention after Reeves starring in The Matrix).

• The unstoppable folks over at Save Our Seeker are working on a campaign to get the People’s Choice Award to include a new fantasy-related category (which, of course, they hope Legend of the Seeker would win). Go, SOS!

• Please, God, not another Godzilla reboot. But apparently he’s fighting other monsters. They don’t say who, but Mothra seems like a given, right?

• Firefly re-imagined as a musical, below. The browncoats will truly never die, will they?

• Orson Scott Card is an unmitigated bigot, but Ender’s Game is still a great book — and it looks like the movie version might finally happen.

• The most (only?) interesting thing about the Hulk movie franchise is, and always has been, the behind-the-scenes drama. Edward Norton is the latest to speak out, about not being cast in the upcoming The Avengers. It was all about greed, he says.

• Twenty “epic” failures in TV sci-fi/fantasy.  Damn, there’s been a lot of crappy sci-fi/fantasy! But it still seems weird to have a list that includes both Firefly and the horrible Bionic Woman reboot.

• After being knighted last year, Terry Pratchett made his own sword. Out of meteorites. Which is just so beyond cool:
  

  

Four and a half Torches (Out of Five)

There are fandoms, and then there is the Firefly fandom, which unlike any other.

Joss Whedon’s “space Western” aired for a mere eleven episodes in 2002 — 14 were produced in all. But an outpouring of enthusiasm from fans has kept the show alive since then (and led to a 2005 movie, Serenity, that was even better than the series).

Not surprisingly, in addition to the movie, much media have been created to satisfy fans of Firefly, the latest project of which is Firefly: Still Flying, a sort of scrapbook-like “celebration” of the series.

This book is not a definitive “guide” to the series — not surprisingly, that’s been done before (and plenty is also available online). This project probably isn’t for the casual fan.

But if you’re a devoted “Browncoat,” or truly devoted fan of the series, you’ll absolutely love geeking out on this book, which takes sort of a “little bit of everything” approach to its subject.

How did the scripts get outlined and written? Jane Espenson tells you. How were stunts done on the show? They interview Nick Brandon, the show’s stunt coordinator.

There are also storyboards and costuming sketches and behind-the-scenes photos and weaponry and even a look at the kitchen utensils on board the Serenity.

No, seriously. Like I said, this is for serious geeks of the series.

Most interesting of all, the book includes new fiction about the characters written by writers of the original series.

If anything is disappointing about the book, it’s that most of the interviews with the actual cast members are snippets from old, previously published articles.

Still, this is all very well-done and highly recommended for, well, you know who you are.

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• Iron Man 2 dominated the weekend box office to the tune of $133.6 million. Of that, $6.50 was mine for a matinee Friday, which I enjoyed immensely. Meanwhile, Nightmare on Elm Street suffered an ear-popping 72% decline to place a distance second at $9.1 million. Seven weeks into its run, How To Train Your Dragon was still 3^rd with $6.7 million.

• I continue to giggle inappropriately at the YouTube spoof Outcasts of Hogwarts. Who knew that inserting yourselves into a fantasy franchise along with extreme editing could yield a comedy goldmine. This episode has the boys forming a band with Harry.

• Americans will get their shot at Russell Tovey and the bunch when the second series of Being Human hits BBC America in July. The ghost, vampire, and werewolf (who live together on the show) don’t spend much time living in domesticated bliss after ridding their town of aggressive vampires in season one. They may have drawn too much attention to themselves.

• I enjoyed Alice In Wonderland. It wasn’t the greatest film I’ve seen lately, though, so it bothers me that it has knocked The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers out of the all-time top ten box office films, with a $928.9 million gross.

• Let’s face it: if you could use The Force, would you run around the universe getting involved in a complicated galactic war, or would you terrorize the town and make inappropriate gestures with your light sabers? I thought so. Jedi A-holes is the short for you.

• Kevin Durand is lining up new roles now that his stint as the baddie on Lost is wrapping up. He’s in negotiations to play the head of the aliens who are hunting for survivors in I Am Number Four, starring Alex Pettyfer, then he hopes to step into a Don King role in the Hugh Jackman robot boxing movie Real Steel.

• The novel Paul Is Undead, which imagines the Beatles as zombies, has been optioned for film. In the book, the Fab Undead are pursued around the world by the world’s greatest zombie hunter, Mick Jagger. The Beatles as zombies, I can buy — but isn’t the real-life Mick already a member of the undead?

• Tron: Legacy has released a huge amount of concept art you’re supposed to hunt down across the web. Thankfully the folks at io9.com have corralled a lot of it in one place, because who has that kind of time? On the front page, I used a render of the Light Car show from above that gives the impression it’s not so much a car as an ATV, despite how it look in this poster:

• I don’t have a lot of background on Captain America’s origin story – Cap was always too goodie-goodie for my tastes – but reports are that Hugo Weaving being confirmed as Red Skull is just the beginning. British actor Toby Jones is in discussions to play evil scientist Arnim Zola, who will actually create Hugo’s Red Skull.

• Televisionwithoutpity.com has managed to get their hands of the book Firefly: Still Flying (due May 25^th) and have come up with a list of 10 Things We Didn’t Know about the Sci-Fi Classic, from the upcoming fan movie to the death of Jayne.

• This French trailer for Avatar: The Last Airbender has more new footage than any of the American trailers have introduced, and includes a really cool introduction of the Four Elements. Thankfully, the trailer itself is in English, with French subtitles. As a side note, I finally saw the trailer with the flying Appa over the weekend on the big screen, and he looks awesome!

• Splice’s Vincenzo Natali is stepping in to direct William Gibson’s classic Neuromancer, which may or may not still be starring Hayden Christensen. I have serious misgivings about the adaptation of one of my favorite books after what Keanu Reeves was allowed to do to Johnny Mnemonic fifteen years ago. Hayden is pretty, but he’s the same kind of blank, emotionless actor.

• What can you learn from friendly ghosts haunting a house in San Francisco — former humans who died in the AIDS epidemic? That’s the question Ben Francisco seems to be asking in San Francisco Ghost Hunt. This is a quasi-sequel to his story Tio Gilberto and His Twenty-Seven Ghosts, and is part of an entire sub-genre of activist ghost stories I was entirely unaware of, but the author makes a decent case for the story in this above interview.

• And because I just saw this for the first time, and was stunned to silence, here’s a two-year old video of Spider-Man dancing West Coast Wing to Michael Bublé’s version of the Spider-Man theme song. That girl does NOT look like Mary Jane.

• It’s been a good week for Browncoats (or Firefly fans). Castle is on a role, so is Chuck. Alan Tudyk was just cast in the reboot of The Rockford Files, and now comes news that Sean Maher and Jewel Staite have an upcoming storyline on the mystical SyFy Warehouse 13 season coming up.

• MTV says that actor/comedian Patton Oswalt is prepping a one-shot comic with a new chapter to the Firefly story called Serenity: Float Out. It will center around a group of Wash’s friends getting together to christen a new ship.

• I suppose I can’t avoid it any longer – the trailer for Twilight: Eclipse has hit the interwebs, and other than a few more long, angsty pans, the only major additions I see are Dakota Fanning and her backup singers (whoops – that’s The Runaways). You can watch, or just catch the boss’ review of the teaser.

• Need to clear the taste of that from your mouth? How about 9 Lame Vampires Still Cooler Than the Vampires in Twilight? Personally, 3-year-old me found Count von Count terrifying.

• Casting is underway for Men In Black 3. This is totally unnecessary. Current names tossed into the hat are Josh Brolin and Sacha Baron Cohen, plus Flight of the Conchords‘ Jermaine Clement. Why can’t a tentacled green alien come up from the subway and eat me instead?

• I’d talk about casting for Captain America, but every time I pause writing to check my browser, there’s another name in the mix. With all these guys they’ve considered, they could have cast all of The Avengers and Ultimate Avengers as well.

• Charles Stross wrote a delightfully quirky pair of books that take place in The Laundry, which is kind of like the British Secret Service for dealing with the occult. Now it’s being turned into a roleplaying video game called, naturally, The Laundry.

• The creators behind the very odd and original Being Human have turned their attention to a new show for BBC One based around superheroes. Not a lot is known at this point, but it does sound like it takes place on a world similar to Earth, but not quite. The “not quite” part won’t be obvious in the beginning — which, let’s face it, is intriguing.

• Speaking of British things, there’s a new trailer for Robin Hood out, and it looks possibly worse than Twilight: Eclipse (see, I have a running theme). I don’t remember any epic battles of thousands of knights battling for the king’s throne in the versions I’ve read (OK, watched the Disney cartoon). It’s included here for you to mock, plus it has knights and castles and battles on horseback, so it almost fits.

• Oscar and Golden Globe nominee Eric Roberts has agreed to star in Roger Corman’s Sharktopus for Syfy. I hope he plays the sane guy that saves the day, because he doesn’t look crazy enough to invent a sharktopus.

• Speaking of Sharktopus, if you recall a few columns back I said I wanted SyFy to make Pirahneagle because it was the most terrifying thing I could imagine. A bunch of you jumped in with other great suggestions. We’ve all been one upped, because someone else came up with a list that while lamer than ours, had Photoshop applied to create the beasts. But seriously – Wolfoenix looks like a gay pride mascot.

• Most people have a reaction to the name J. Michael Straczynski. He created Babylon 5, which people either think is better than Star Wars, or dumber than Twilight. I don’t know how to react to the news he’s taking over both Superman and Wonder Woman comics.

• I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe Box of Shadows. It’s about a 15^th century steampunk coffin that lets live people play ghost. But like any good Final Destination rip-off, death isn’t amused they just want to play dead and wants them to stay dead. Still, the box is kind of neat.

• Night of the Living Trekkies is headed your way from the publisher of Pride, Prejudice and Zombies. It’s been described as “Galaxy Quest meets Dawn of the Dead” which is either the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard, or the most brilliant. Head over to the link to see Zombie Spock.

• Christopher Nolan did a long interview with the Los Angeles Times that they pitched as being about Inception’s dream thieves, Dark Knight, and Superman. As far as I can tell, all they said is the equivalent of “we know what we’re doing.” No details of any of it emerged other than Superman is a reboot, and Dark Knight 3 is an epilogue. If anybody else finds more content than that, put it in the comments.

• The latest analysis over at the always cynical TVbytheNumbers.com has the ratings for Legend of the Seeker up slightly, but not a ton. Needless to say, they have the show on deathwatch.

• Robert Englund has the most ridiculous looking horror/comedy micro-budget film in the works called The Moleman of Belmont Avenue. This has camp classic, Troma-should’ve-done-it written all over it, and I can’t think of a better way to start the weekend.