The Last Unicorn is something of a lost classic. I saw it on its original release in 1982, and it had a huge effect on me as a child. It led to a years-long love of fantasy novels, particularly Tolkein and Terry Brooks.

Several years ago, a friend brought it up in conversation, and we decided to try and find it on video. It turned out it had been out of print for quite some time. It's since been re-released, and it's seen several versions on DVD, none of which you should consider buying.

…and so it winds to a close. Though this series has ended up in a completely different place from where it began, the ending is quite satisfying. Looking back over it, this was far more ambitious than the initial episodes seemed to suggest.

Massive spoilers to follow.

My local high-school football team is called the Wolverines. The high-school football team and guerilla patriot squad from Red Dawn is also called the Wolverines. Yet, whenever I see someone in a letter jacket and scream, "Wolverines!" with a rifle in my hand, people just don't seem to get it.

Why? Because one of the great classics of Reagan-era American cinema languishes in near-obscurity. This is truly unfortunate, especially since we just haven't had enough flag-waving jingoistic fervor in this country lately. Every red-blooded American should go out and watch this movie immediately.

If you don't, then the terrorists have already won.

If you're following the American release schedule, this contains major spoilers.

Lots of bandwidth-sucking images ahead. Consider yourself warned.

One of the nice things about Bittorrent and the DVD format in general is that obscure television series and movies are available all over the world, as opposed to just the countries in which they were broadcast.

I finally finished the Melancholy of Suzumiyu Haruhi, and what a ride it was. It still remains to be seen if this show will ever see a stateside release, but judging from reactions and sales in Japan, it would seem very likely.

Here's hoping Manga doesn't screw up the localization.

The scene pictured above is a dream sequence, which, depending on who you ask, either saved the world or completely re-wrote it into one strongly resembling the one preceeding. Besides, it's more of a red-herring, since the whole show was aired in an arbitrary order, and this is …

Somebody tell me what's going on. Please?

I usually hate this sort of series, but two minutes into the first episode, my jaw was hanging open in awe. It's not every day someone throws such a disparate hodgepodge of ideas together and has it actually work. What's more, it's incredibly dense and entertaining, with a wonderful sense of humor.

Think Monty Python doing classic space opera, with musings on quantum physics, artificial intelligence, time travel and the nature of God. Set it …

Season 8 of the Simpsons is out on DVD. This was really the liminal season; the cracks had begun to show as far back as Season 4, and after this, the show took a real downturn, from which it hasn't recovered.

The series started out as a great family drama/sitcom, and its strength was in the interplay between the characters. After a few years, it started dredging its comedy from abstract situations and gimmicks, and the characters became cardboard cutouts going through the motions over and over again.

One of the most annoying devices was the use of …

I love Warren Ellis. If he was a beautiful woman, or if I were gay, I'd kiss him. Even though he's English.

Of course, given that neither of the above conditions apply, we'll just have to say, "it's the thought that counts."

Ellis has brought some real merit to the world of comics. Transmetropolitan more than lives up to all the hype you've heard. This is the guy who turned Image's dreadful superhero comic Stormwatch into the loud, obnoxious, borderline-fascist and utterly exhilirating Authority that we all came to know and love. He's also responsible for …

I grew up on Chris Claremont's X-Men. The book struck a chord with me, and soap-opery as it was, it was much better than the silly fare most companies were churning out. Claremont took some of the strangest people imaginable, breathed life into them, and made the reader care.

Somehow that all lost focus in the late 80s when Jim Lee hijacked the book. Throughout the 90s, it was a total mess, with a revolving door of mediocre writers and artists who really had no feel for the characters. Every now and then, I'd pick up a copy …

Ah, it's been awhile. If you don't know who this happy little gent is, well…you've never seen Manos: the Hands of Fate. When I was in college, a friend brought a copy of this movie over one Friday night for us to watch. It had been given to him by his film professor as "a catalog of heinous mistakes." We tried to sit through it. We really did.

In the years since, I'd largely buried the resulting psychological trauma under a thin veneer of denial and forgetfulness. Although I'd …