Battle! Destruction! Blades and arrows and death and mind control!
Kay: Deadliest Warrior: “Apache vs. Gladiator” – Katherine saw an episode of this somewhere, and wanted to watch one. And … well, actually, hey, it’s kind of fun in a “D&D Porn” kind of way. Meaning they take two opposing individuals / armies / archetypes and try to figure out who would win, with lots of shallow research into weapons, lots of demos on human body simulators, and some magical computer program that evaluates the bouts.
In this case it was Apaches (guerilla stealth fighters, using bows, tomahawks, war clubs, knives) vs. Roman Gladiators (using the cestus, the trident and net, the sling, and the sica). Which is a bizarro match because, once all the analysis is done, it’s completely dependent on the situation (put both in a gladiatorial ring, the Gladiator wins; put both in the countryside, the Apache wins).
Ultimately the Apache won, but the hour-long episode took us at least 50% longer because Kay and I would pause it and argue about the points being presented. Which means it was rollicking good fun for both of us.
And, I informed her, she was hoist on her own petard, because that was the perfect segue into …
Dave: The Hunger Games – I watched this on the flight home from India. Kay’s been reluctant to join up with 95% of her age cohort in reading this (almost directly resisting the impulse to go along, which I salute), but I thought she would actually enjoy the movie, which has most of the action from the book but about 1/3 of the Emo Drama Llama stuff.
And, in fact, she reacted as expected — enjoying the world-building of the first half more than the gladiatorial combat of the second half, but calling out vocally all the obvious dramatic plot twists and manipulations.
It’s actually a fun movie to watch with someone else, to be honest.
I have no idea if she’ll read the book (the first is the best), but she wanted something to cleanse the palate after that, so we watched …
Dave (kinda): Avengers – Earth’s Mightiest Heroes: “Emperor Stark” – We really have loved this series, pulling together a loving melange of Avengers history over the decades into a modern cartoon. This one was non-canon, but featured the Purple Man, everyone’s favorite most-loathesome villain (voiced perfectly by Brent Spiner, to tie it into last night’s TNG episode).
As good as Spiner was as Zebediah Kilgrave (best. villain. name. ever.), Brian Bloom as an awful, over-the-top Captain America.
Good episode, in a great cartoon.