Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel and Mark Lee, with special guest podcaster Lindsay Eanet. Topics include Comic-Con, fandom, vampires, and dudes who date fictional characters.

To join the debate on real vs. pretend people, first visit the New York Times article “Love in 2D.”

Tell us what you think! Email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401. And… spread the overthinking by forwarding this episode to a friend!

Download Episode 56 (MP3)

[This continues our coverage of New York Comic-Con 2009]

While Miley Cyrus’ Asian Eyes were spreading controversy throughout the interwebs, a group of Asian-American comic book authors and illustrators were at New York Comic-Con promoting their upcoming anthology of Asian American superhero stories, Secret Identies. OTI’s writer of the Asian persuasion was there, of course. Not surprisingly, the portrayal of Asian-Americans in pop culture is an issue near and dear to my heart, so I was intrigued to see how their work deals with the oh-so-sensitive subject of race and ethnicity.

[This continues our coverage of New York Comic-Con 2009]

No introductory text can do justice to the elaborate costumes of Comic-Con convention goers, so I’ll just let the pictures do the talking.

If there’s no caption, it means I couldn’t identify the character. Apparently, I’m only a level 4 geek, so help me out in the comments.

Did I mention that the scale of Comic-Con absolutely boggles the mind? It boggles the mind. The main convention space is gargantuan. The theater where the screenings are held is enormous. Beyond that, there are rows and rows of conference rooms for panels and other events. There is visual stimulus everywhere.

I hope these pictures convey some sense of what it was like to drink from this fire hose of popular culture.

And that’s even without the costumes. I’m saving that for the next photo gallery.

[Warning: Spoilers for the fourth Futurama movie.]

I was lucky enough to join Mr. Wrather at the sneak preview screening of Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder at this year’s NYC Comiccon.  I found the plot somewhat hard to follow (although, possibly, that was part of the point), and the first third, which involves Bender dating the Robot Mafia Don’s girl, was completely irrelevant to the rest of the film.  Each individual bit, however, was pretty funny–much funnier than the first two Futurama movies, in my opinion.  Overall, though, I still found it inferior to any old Futurama episode running on Comedy Central.

But OTI isn’t a reviewing site; it’s an Overthinking site.  And Overthink I shall.  But I’ll do it below the fold so you can avoid tainting your brain with the spoilers I must reveal.  If you’ve seen the movie or don’t mind being spoiled, read on, Macduff.

Matthew Wrather hosts a panel including Mark Lee, Peter Fenzel, and Ryan Sheely (with special guest John Levin) to overthink the moderate suck-fest that is the Grammys and our recent visit to New York Comic-Con.

Comments? Rants? Raves? Email podcast at overthinkingit dot com or call 20-EAT-LOG-01 (that’s (203) 285-6401).

Download Episode 32 (MP3)

A few housekeeping announcements for this balmy (at least in the Northeast) February day.

• Our coverage of New York Comic-Con 2009 continues. Don’t miss any of the (mostly spoiler-free) news and info.
• We’re adding polls to the Think Tank feature—read our writers’ takes on the week’s subject, and vote for your favorite. (The winner earns a long stand on the keg of glory and bragging rights as your favorite overthinker for a week.) This week: The Best Board Game Ever. Read Part 1 and Part 2, then vote!
• We’ll be watching and live-twittering the Grammy awards tonight. Follow our twitter feed for obsessively detailed updates every few seconds.
• <pimp class=”shameless”>Dying to translate your ephemeral and transcendent love of Overthinking It into a gift of cold, hard cash? We’re very grateful, as our server costs recently increased by a factor of 10. There are a couple ways. You could throw us a couple bucks via PayPal, or use this link to Amazon.com (drag it to your address bar for easy, repeated access!) when you shop there and a percentage of your purchase will automatically go to support the site (though you get the same low price you would anyway).</pimp>

[This continues our coverage of NY Comic-Con 2009]

The middle child of Warner Brothers’ Comic-Con screening family was some footage for the upcoming remake of Friday the 13th. Honestly, I haven’t even seen the original, and I had next to zero interest in this film. After watching the preview footage, if it were possible to have a negative amount of interest in it, I certainly do. Wrather and I were subject to about 6 minutes of incredibly graphic violence, including a bear trap around the leg (with a lot of raw flesh), a woman burning inside a sleeping bag, machetes through the leg, machetes through the head, and other things that I missed because I literally couldn’t watch.

Now, just to be clear, I do watch horror movies every once in a while, but usually the campy variety (Shaun of the Dead, Army of Darkness, etc.) I have not seen any of the Saw movies, and I have absolutely no intention to. Call me squeamish, but this level of violence and gore has no appeal to me, and I struggle to see how it appeals to others. To Each His/Her Own, I guess, but this stuff was just brutal by any definition of the word.

There was one notable moment in the Q&A: someone basically asked why we need yet another movie where Jason kills a bunch of teenagers in the woods. In other words, he thought this was a stupid remake that no one needed. The filmmakers’ response was essentially: no one is saying we “need” this; we’re doing it because we want to. Some portion of the audience loudly cheered this response, but I have the feeling that the majority of the audience was of the former opinion.

Other writers/readers: are you excited about this, or other ultra-violent horror movies coming up? I won’t judge you. I just won’t go with you to see it.

[This continues our coverage of NY Comic-Con 2009]

I have to admit: the thing I was most looking forward to at Comic-Con was Warner Brothers’ Terminator Salvation sneak-peak screening. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re pretty big Terminator fans here at Overthinking It, and I for one have been cautiously optimistic about this film’s chances of restoring the Terminator franchise to some semblance of dignity after the disappointing Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. (The recent TV series has accomplished some of that already, but that progress would be quickly erased by a stinker feature film.)

(Mostly) spoiler-free first impressions after the jump.

[This continues our coverage of NY Comic-Con 2009]

This was arguably the main event of this year’s Comic-Con: Warner Brother was trotting out previews for three of its upcoming films: Watchmen (opens March 6), Friday the 13th (opens Feb 13), and Terminator: Salvation (opens May 22). Each preview was also accompanied by a Q&A session with select movie makers.

First up was the oh-so-highly-anticipated Watchmen.

Spoiler-free first impressions of Watchmen, after the jump.