MOSTLYFILM: #NotAllBatmen

True story. About twenty-odd years ago, my young nephew had three favourite action figures. The first was Batman: with his lumpy grey suit and navy blue cowl, he was obviously based on the 1966 TV version, and presumably some sort of family heirloom. The second was Batman: all in black, a sculpted torso replacing the middle-aged spread, looking more like Michael Keaton did in the 1989 film. The third was, well, Batman: the square jaw and cartoonish features marked him out as being the one from The Animated Series, the version my nephew was most familiar with at the time. And I'd watch in fascination as he'd wrangle all three of them into play scenarios that would frequently end with them having a big fight.

In a way, that's kind of what we're doing on MostlyFilm today, as we continue the site's farewell run of posts. #NotAllBatmen features five of us each picking one depiction of the Caped Crusader - the three discussed above in action figure form, plus the one currently on telly in Gotham, and me looking at one of his DTV animated incarnations - and comparing them against each other. No big fight at the end of this one, unfortunately: the best I can do in this Red Button Bonus Content page is show you a bunch of trailers featuring each of our Batmen.

MOSTLYFILM: The Good Place/Harry Dean Stanton

It's been a busy old week on MostlyFilm. You may have noticed that the site's not updated as frequently as it used to be, but we're still putting out hot content whenever circumstances demand it: and this particular week, circumstances have demanded it twice. I'm involved in both of the posts that resulted, which is why I'm telling you about them here.

Firstly, there's the TV show The Good Place, for which I've written a preview. I actually watched most of the first season earlier this year, on a Cathay Pacific flight during our holiday in Hong Kong and Japan, and yes I will get around to writing about that soon I promise. Anyway, it's a similar story to the time last year when I discovered Crazy Ex-Girlfriend on a plane: like that show, The Good Place has now been picked up by Netflix in the UK, allowing you to catch up on old episodes as well as watch new ones the day after their transmission in the US. I think you should do just that, and the article explains why.

Secondly, there's the small matter of Harry Dean Stanton, who died last weekend at the perfectly respectable age of 91. It was felt that MostlyFilm should mark his passing in some way or other, so three of us - CaulorLime, theTramp, and yours truly - have each picked one of Harry Dean's performances and written a bit about why they were so good.

It would be monstrously glib to try and link these two pieces by expressing the hope that Harry Dean Stanton is now himself in The Good Place. So I won't. Instead, I'll give you a few bits of video as your Red Button Bonus Content.

MOSTLYFILM: Once In Every Generation

I won't say too much about this one, because it's a group affair. In case you weren't aware, the first ever episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer was broadcast twenty years ago last month, on March 10th 1997. You may remember that I marked the show's ten year anniversary with a review of the first season. Ten years after that, I've got involved in something bigger.

Over on MostlyFilm, a bunch of us - CaulorLime, TheTramp, Jim Eaton-Terry, MrMoth, me, Sarah Slade and The Belated Birthday Girl - have grabbed one season apiece (apart from Jim who's grabbed two because he's greedy, and The BBG who... well, you'll see) and reviewed the hell out of it. MrMoth has glued it all together seamlessly into a gigantic celebration of all things Buffy that we're calling Once In Every Generation. It'll take you ages to read, and it damn near broke some of the people involved in its creation. But it's definitely worth putting some time aside for it.

You theoretically shouldn't really need Red Button Bonus Content, given all the Actual Content on offer here. But I've quickly hurled a video playlist together with the unwitting assistance of YouTube user BuffyverseTrailers, who's created a fake cinema-style trailer for each of the seven seasons of the show, allowing you to get a flavour of the whole run in about 20 minutes. And the playlist is topped off with an official trailer for the Buffy Season Eight motion comic, which ties in with the subject of The BBG's segment.

MOSTLYFILM: Bipolar

If things go according to plan - bearing in mind, of course, that we currently live on a planet where the concept of 'things going according to plan' appears to have been completely abandoned - then during February, you should see three new posts on here covering the cities we visited on our Christmas holiday: Berlin, Warsaw and Krakow. Lots of sights were seen and lots of beer was drunk, so there'll be plenty to talk about there.

It was the first time ever in Poland for both The Belated Birthday Girl and myself, so that was a whole new set of experiences to process in itself: and, inevitably, one of those new experiences was seeing Polish movies without subtitles at the cinema. It didn't work out quite as successfully as I'd hoped, but the results are now documented in the traditional way, in an article on MostlyFilm entitled Monoglot Movie Club: Bipolar.

To spoil the article a little for those of you who haven't read it yet, we (eventually) watched the latest two episodes in a crime drama franchise called Pitbull. It's a series that's had a long and complex history, as I explain in the review: and you can experience that history right here, right now in this Bonus Content for the review, as I present a series of videos showing how Pitbull has evolved over the last twelve years. Caution: scenes of violence, sex and mucky Polish language will follow.

MOSTLYFILM: Netflix and Chill

Christmas isn't too far away now, and you may even already be making plans for what sort of stuff you'll be putting on the TV for vegging-out purposes. Well, the fine people at MostlyFilm are way ahead of you. A couple of days ago, we published an article entitled Netflix and Chill, reviewing the collection of Slow TV programmes from Norway that have recently turned up on Netflix. They're huge, slow-moving things that require very little intellectual effort on the part of the viewer: real-time depictions of train journeys, boat cruises, burning log fires, that sort of thing. (There's also a knitting marathon, but we didn't have time to review that.)

MostlyFilm's crack review team covered four of the programmes in the piece. There's Ricky Young, watching eight hours of train travel through a Night Nurse-induced haze: there's me, trying to focus on an eleven-and-a-half hour canal journey while trying to shred some old bank statements: there's Mr Moth, spending twelve hours failing to warm to a night of wood-chopping and log-burning: and there's Jake, gearing himself up for a 134-hour Hurtigruten cruise only to discover that the Netflix version has been cropped to just one hour of highlights.

All of these were broadcast on the Norwegian NRK channel, to surprisingly high audiences. And because NRK is a national broadcaster with a public service remit, all four of the shows we reviewed have archive pages on the channel's website, full of surprisingly large video clips and background text, perfect for linking to in this Red Button Bonus Content piece. Okay, so the text is all in Norwegian, but we have Google Translate on our side, so I can't see how that can go wrong.

MOSTLY FILM: Friends, Romans, Juno's Countrymen

Somewhere in my house, there's a copy of the programme for the 1991-ish West End production of An Evening With Gary Lineker, a play by Arthur Smith and Chris England. If I could be bothered trying to track it down from inside a collection of cardboard boxes, I could quote you the exact text from the biography of cast member Nick Hancock. Instead, I'll have to do it approximately from memory: "his television appearances include the roles of Cockney In Dressing Gown in The Bill and Cockney On Fire in London's Burning." It's a line that's stuck with me for over two decades now, because it has a degree of wry truth to it: these are exactly the sort of TV parts that actors have to take while they're waiting for something brilliant to come along.

In my latest article for Mostly Film - a review of the final season of Spartacus, entitled Friends, Romans, Juno's Countrymen - I mention another English actor, Simon Merrells. His CV was largely made up of appearances in soaps and the like, until this year he took on the role of lead baddie in Spartacus: War Of The Damned and tore the living arse out of it. His 'something brilliant' came along, and he grabbed the opportunity when he saw it. Good for him.

Most of the acting talent pool on Spartacus comes from Australia. So if English actors have to mark time in The Bill while waiting for their big break, what are the equivalent shows for an Aussie actor? Find out in this Red Button Feature, and specifically in the YouTube playlist below.

MOSTLY FILM: Beyond Moviedrome

If you assemble a bunch of British film buffs of a certain age in one place and wait for a while, eventually they'll start talking about Moviedrome. Between 1988 and 2000, it was BBC 2's Sunday night slot for the presentation of cult movies, complete with a handy to-camera introduction to put them into context. Between 1994 and 2000, those introductions were presented in the uncertainly-pitched voice of Mark Cousins (though these days, technology has provided a solution to that). But for the first six years of Moviedrome's life, it was Alex Cox's baby, and he's the host that people remember most fondly.

Mostly Film, by its very nature, is a bunch of British film buffs of a certain age assembled in one place. We started talking about Moviedrome on our first day: the comments section of my opening review of Alex Cox's Repo diptych quickly turned into an affectionate discussion of how the show introduced us to films we may not have seen otherwise. Nearly two years later, we've made that discussion an article in its own right. Mad Cox: Beyond Moviedrome features six of the Mostly Film regulars - including me - talking about the impact that a particular Moviedrome presentation had on our cinematic taste.

My contribution to the piece is fairly small, so let's keep this backup material nice and simple: trailers for the six films discussed.

MOSTLY FILM: Blood From An Angry Sky

How many American TV producers have I bemused online over the years? As of this morning, that number has doubled.

The first one was back in 2000, when I wrote an article in praise of the Sammo Hung cop show Martial Law. At the end of the piece I posted a collection of links, including one to the site of the show's executive producer Lee Goldberg. I described the site as follows: "Lots of pictures and useful info, but be warned he's assuming that you've already seen season 2 and casually gives away its ending, the bastard." Useful tip: if you're going to call someone a bastard online, don't do it next to a link to their homepage. The email he sent me in response on August 1st 2000 thankfully took the comment in the right spirit ("I laughed my ass off"), and he even had a copy of the article reproduced on his site for a few years.

And now I can add Steven S. DeKnight to the section of my address book headed Hollywood Power List. DeKnight is the creator of the TV show Spartacus, which is the subject of an article I wrote for Mostly Film this week. At the time of writing, it's been up for a day, and seems to have attracted some online interest - but the most delightful discovery is that it's been retweeted by DeKnight himself. (Although I'm sure the use of the phrase 'knockers and killing' by Mostly Film's Social Networking Team must have been part of what appealed to him.)

Spartacus: Blood From An Angry Sky is a retrospective piece timed to coincide with the October 1st release of the latest season on home video. For once, I haven't crammed the article with YouTube links, although there are lots of clips out there, as the framegrab above proves. Still, that leaves plenty more material for this Bonus Content section: starting with the musical number that gives the piece its title, plus an additional verse, and an amateur rendition.

MOSTLY FILM: The Great And Powerful Oz

Happy birthday, Oz! The first ever episode of HBO's sweary, violent, big-dicked prison drama was broadcast 15 years ago today. How do I know this? Because 15 years ago next Thursday (July 19th), I travelled to the USA for the very first time. My first night on American soil was spent in a tatty hotel that wasn't quite as close to New Orleans as the name Days Inn New Orleans would suggest. My stay was made slightly more more comfortable by the discovery that on my TV that night, I could watch the second ever episode of Oz, a new show from the makers of one of my favourites at the time, Homicide: Life On The Street.

Oz eventually made its way onto Channel 4 in the UK, so I was able to catch up with the first episode, and watch all the ones that followed. I became a fan, and even wrote about it here in 2002 (when Channel 4 were four seasons into what would eventually become a six season run). Ten years later, I thought it was worth revisiting the show for the good people at Europe's Best Website. The Editor-In-Chief was initially sceptical - "the 15th anniversary, eh?" were his exact words - but I went ahead and did it anyway.

So yesterday on Mostly Film, I came as close as I could - given our current three-days-a-week schedule - to marking that 15th anniversary with a piece entitled The Great And Powerful Oz. And today on this site, we mark the actual anniversary with the usual bonus content.

Deadliest Warrior

They used to say that Charlie Brooker Is Right About Everything. That may have been the case once, but in recent years he’s dropped the ball embarrassingly quite a few times. And one of the biggest errors he’s made has been over the TV show Deadliest Warrior, whose third season has just kicked off Stateside. On two of Brooker’s own programmes, he’s railed against it as being a symbol of all that’s wrong with television today.

In one sense, he may be right. But in another sense, he’s completely ignoring that it’s a brilliantly – almost cynically - constructed bit of edutainment, with something for every viewer. Assuming you can actually see the bugger, which for British viewers is a separate problem altogether.