You Have Been Loved – George Michael 🎵

Song of the Day – Last Christmas (Pudding Mix) by Wham! 🎵

The original Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas special is just such a delight to revisit. 🐿❤️🐿💙🐿💚 🎵

I am absolutely heartbroken at the news that we have lost Anne Rice. Her work has been a fixture in my life for more than thirty years, and she is one of my most important influences. I can’t believe it. The world will not be the same. 💔📚

We discussed our complicated feelings about Masters of the Universe: Revelation in the most recent episode of Masters Cast. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. ⚔️

I would have ranked these in a different order and there are some surprising omissions, but this is a solid list. 🎵 George Michael’s 30 greatest songs – ranked! | The Guardian

Smart TVs are great in some ways, but I think they all should have a “dumb mode”.

My musical awakening came a little earlier than it does for most people, whose taste in tunes tend to settle in during their teen years. For a long while, I have been wanting to make a purely nostalgic playlist. I wanted it to take me back to the days of my youth, when turning on the radio in the mid 1980s meant that I knew (and generally loved) most of the music on the airwaves. It was a time when “pop” was less of a genre and more about whatever happened to be popular at the moment. It was a time when WHAM !, Bon Jovi, Sting, and Guns and Roses were all battling it out at the top of the charts. It was a glorious time, full of variety and talented artists.

Those of a certain age or musical persuasion will understand. Music, inherently, is incredibly subjective. I’m not here to judge anyone else’s taste, only to celebrate mine. If you have a similar love for the decade that shaped me, you might enjoy my 80s Radio FM playlist on AppleMusic. It’s intended to be listened to on shuffle. With over 21 hours of music and nearly 300 songs, I wanted to recreate flipping on the radio in the 1980s—you never know what you’re going to get, but it’s all going to be something good.

Depending on your own taste, you may find some glaring omissions in this list. I deliberately left off some songs that I really didn’t care for, and also included some that are here more for the nostalgia than the artistic merit. AppleMusic makes it easy to use a playlist like mine as a basis for your own custom version, so feel free to do that if you find it lacking in some area you would prefer.

I hope you enjoy, and happy listening!

It is too early in the season for it to be 27°f while I have my morning coffee. 🥶☕️

Carving jack-o'-lanterns is one of my favorite Halloween traditions. 🎃 Next up? It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and Garfield’s Halloween Adventure 👻🧡🖤🧡👻

Nothing says autumn like sitting on the screened-in porch on a crisp rainy morning and roasting fresh coffee beans. ☕️🍂

🔖 42 years later, how ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ has endured : NPR

Heaven Help Me by Deon Estus 🎵

What a loss. He was such an incredible musician. 💔 Wham! and George Michael bassist Deon Estus has died aged 65 🎵

I now have a profile on BingeBooks.com, and you can follow me there. I really like BingeBooks, both as an author and a reader. Other similar sites have always felt like work to me. BingeBooks is fun! 📚

I can’t be the only person who is considering, if the new iPhone is indeed called iPhone 13, renaming my device “Mockingbird Lane”. 🧟‍♂️ 🧛‍♀️ 🦇

Listening to this newly remastered and expanded soundtrack to STAR TREK II – THE WRATH OF KHAN, I am once again reminded why this is my favorite movie score of all time. 🎵 🖖🏽

Jon Kallis and I recorded this special episode of MastersCast, where we discuss (and sometimes debate) the history and importance of the Masters of the Universe character, Teela. – Ultimate Battleground 1: Teela | Masters Cast ⚔️

🔖 This is a promotional video for a print reading device for the blind in the 1970s. 😱 It would have been like learning to understand R2D2. 🤖 Crazy!

Imagine if everyone online expended half as much energy toward celebrating the things they love or making the world a better place as they currently do spreading hate. What a world we could have.

On episode 74 of MasstersCast, we discuss Masters of the Universe: Revelation in depth. Join us as we celebrate the power’s return!

It’s been several hours since I finished watching part 1 of the new animated series Masters of the Universe: Revelation on Netflix, and I wanted to share a few thoughts. This review will be as spoiler free as possible, but if you want to stay totally in the dark, come back after you’ve seen it. I’ll still be here.

I’ve been a life-long fan of Masters of the Universe and its various incarnations and reboots. I am one of the co-hosts of Masters Cast, the first He-Man and She-Ra podcast, and was lucky enough to be a contributor to the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Character Guide and World Compendium. For more on some of my history with the franchise, click here.

Without question, the Filmation He-Man and the Masters of the Universe animated series from 1983–1985 was the most successful incarnation of Masters of the Universe to date. So successful, in fact, that two series have been developed as direct sequels to it, not counting She-Ra: Princess of Power which was both a sequel and spinoff. The first was 1990’s The New Adventures of He-Man. The second is Netflix’s Masters of the Universe: Revelation.

Making a series like Revelation has got to be one of the most difficult and thankless jobs in television. You have to honor what came before, update the look and sound of a forty-year-old cartoon, and write a story with characters that were designed for children that pleases middle-aged adults to felt so much of a connection with them in their youth that they still want more after all these years. To put it simply, you will never please them all.

Masters of the Universe: Revelation clearly was created by a cast and crew who both know and love the source material. Is it perfect? Not to me. Is it pretty great? You’re damn right it is. While I would have made some different choices as a storyteller, what has been done manages to blend elements from some of the very best episodes of the original Filmation series. Remember when Orko saved the day? Remember when Teela found out the truth about her destiny, only to have that knowledge snatched away again? Remember when our heroes and villains had to work together against a common threat? Some of these plot points happened more than once in different ways through the original series' 130 episode run. Some of them (and others) are revisited in Revelation in new and more sophisticated ways.

The voice talent is truly superb. Nearly every character is voiced to perfection, with Skeletor and Orko being the standouts for me. Orko, in particular, hasn’t had a portrayal on screen since the Filmation series (when he was voiced by Lou Scheimer) that I found to be very good, and I loved the 2002 reboot series. Here, though, his voice is just right, much like the original series but without the unnatural pitch-change used with 1980s tech. And what can you say about Mark Hamill? The man’s deservedly a legend, every bit up to the challenge of the legendary Lord of Destruction.

If Revelation has a weakness, it is likely to be in the decision to split the series into two parts on Netflix. Much of what long-time fans want to see is likely not going to happen until the final act, and the show breaks the mold of the past formula of Masters of the Universe series in ways that a certain segment of the fandom will not be able to come to terms with. This is part of what MotU has always been though. The jungle tribesman He-Man of the mini-comics packaged with the earliest toys was nothing like the one we saw in the 1983 DC Comics limited run series; the DC He-Man, in turn, was nothing like the one in Filmation, who was nothing like the New Adventures version…and so on forever. The characters and mythos continue to grow and spawn different stories throughout the multiverse. In no way can Revelation and New Adventures coexist in the same MotU universe, so, like the Star Trek Kelvin films, we can place them where we like in our own head canons. Some will choose to ignore it, like I do for New Adventures, and that’s fine. But Revelation is deserving of a chance to shine.

I think fans who go into Revelation with an open mind will enjoy what the show has to offer. I enjoyed it more than I expected, and my expectations were fairly high. Whether my opinion remains that high will hinge largely on part two, but given the quality of the storytelling in part one, I suspect there is little to worry about.

The power has returned; let’s enjoy it while it’s here.

I really enjoyed Masters of the Universe: Revelation. I am not sure I’m happy with how it ended, but the rest was so good that I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for part 2. ⚔️

Hamill is such a class act. – Enjoy this snippet of Mark Hamill’s Skeletor in Masters of the Universe: Revelation ⚔️

Song of the Day – Someone Special by Richard Marx 🎵