Emerald City Video

ECV Spinner Rack #1: DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 4 Premiere

Hello, and welcome to the Emerald City Video podcast. I’m your host, Russ Burlingame, and if you listen to the show at all, you know me.

If you don’t listen to the show — and it just so happens that the episode where I give an explainer is your first episode to the show — then I’ll break it down for you.

Emerald City Video was, until April of 2009, a video rental store in Syracuse, New York. I used to manage the store for a while, and since this show started, nearly every voice you have heard on this show is someone who used to work at Emerald City at one time or another, as well.

This episode, I am introducing the ECV Spinner Rack, named for the spinning magazine racks that people used to be able to get comic books off of back when comics were sold anywhere other than comic book specialty stores. And, as you might guess, this segment, or this type of episode, will be dedicated to looking at comics and comic book adaptations on TV.

I am leaving the movies alone, since they are huge blockbusters and almost always get covered on the New Release Wall anyway.

When I am not podcasting about movies with people who used to work at a video store, my real, paying job is writing about comics and related media for ComicBook.com. Up to now I have kept a wall up between the two gigs, but as we near our hundredth episode, I am looking to roll out some new features and some new ideas for ECV.

More on that in the weeks and months to come.

For a long while, I had a podcast called Panel Discussions, in which I talked about comics and related media with people who, believe it or not, NEVER EVEN WORKED AT A VIDEO STORE. Crazy, I know.

I recently shuttered that podcast; it was just another thing costing me $15 a month to host, and I did not have the time to consistently update it. But since I still like talking about that stuff, and sometimes I like to talk about It in ways that are not conducive to how we write stories or what I am assigned to cover at work.

So here I am. And in keeping with things like the New Release Wall and Five for Five, I wanted to give this a veneer or the video store, creating a title for the feature that would resemble something you might actually find in a video store. So — The ECV Spinner Rack.

In the near future, one of the big changes we are going to be rolling out is that we are going to have other co-hosts who haven’t all worked for ECV in the past. When I do so, I will introduce them by asking them where their home video store was, when the last time was they were in a video store, and what their favorite video store memory is. That will give us all a point of commonality and community, even when they aren’t people who worked or rented at ECV.

Today’s guest is Michele Curran, the co-host of the Krypton Podcast and the Hashtag TV Geek Podcast. I met Michele through another show I host, Archie Digest: A Riverdale Podcast, and we have become friends in the couple of years that show has been running. She has appeared on Panel Discussions in the past, discussing last year’s “Crisis on Earth-X” crossover event with me.

Tonight will be another chance for Michele and I to talk about The CW’s shared DC Comics universe of shows, as we will be looking at DC’S LEGENDS OF TOMORROW. Legends, which debuted its fourth season tonight, centers on a ragtag team of misfits and C-list superheroes who travel through time fixing things, breaking them again, and then fixing their own mistakes. After an underwhelming first season — which I actually didn’t mind, and so you can see quotes from my review of the pilot used as examples on the show’s Wikipedia page — the show found its groove by embracing the weird, fun energy that the characters and its cast brought to the table naturally. 

Each season of Legends has been something of a soft reboot, and this year things are getting a bit…magical. At the end of season three, the Legends defeated Mallus, a demon who had been trapped in a time prison. In order to have their final showdown with the demon, they needed to release him from his prison, but doing so opened the door for other beings and creatures who now have to be rounded up and sent back to where they came from.

The team will be joined in the quest by John Constantine, played by Matt Ryan. Constantine is a demonologist and master of the mystic arts — or a petty dabbler, if you want to be really specific about it. Ryan’s version first appeared on a self-titled NBC series that ran for a single season before moving to The CW, where he has made occasional appearances on Arrow and Legends, as well as headlining an animated movie that was serialized and shown as short episodes on the web-based CW Seed network. The movie, along with about a half an hour of previously-unseen footage, is available now on Blu-ray and DVD.

As I have always endeavored to do with Archie Digest, this segment is intended to be released immediately after Legends airs its premiere on the East Coast. So — spoilers ahead, and don’t listen to us talk about the show until you have had a chance to see the episode. If you missed it, press pause now and wait until tomorrow, when you can either buy it on your Video On Demand service of choice or stream it on The CW’s website.

Without further ado, the first episode of ECV’s Spinner Rack.

You can find us (and a number of other awesome podcasts) on the ACPN family of shows.

If you like what we're doing here, you can become a patron of the Emerald City Video Podcast, which comes with fun perks. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also have Instagram and Vero accounts where we share images, photos, memes, and nonsense.

Be back for more by noon on the fifth day, and please -- always remember to rewind your videocassettes.

Episode #22: Jack Ryan and the Hunt for Red October

This week’s episode is the first recorded on new hardware, the first recorded while part of the ACPN group (as opposed to recording an episode and then being invited while in production), and the first in a while to have the “classic” format of an old release and a new release.

For anybody who might be new to Emerald City Video and is currently reading these notes (likely at ACPN), here’s what our deal is:

Russ Burlingame (that’s me!) is a senior writer for ComicBook.com, but in another life, I managed Emerald City Video, a family-owned video store in Syracuse, NY. During that time, I worked with Visu.News's Zach Roberts briefly as well as a number of other people who have been featured on this show less regularly, including Logan Bretschneider, Dan Fecteau, Erica Ladd, Eva Furmanska, and Dave Nielsen.

The idea of this show is to have the kind of conversations people used to have at the video store: a little more casual, a little more in-depth, and a lot more organic than you get from the crappy algorithms of Netflix, Amazon, and the like.

For example: today, YouTube Movies suggested six movies I should buy, and — as acknowledged under each one with the caption “you purchased this,” each of their purchase suggestions was a movie I already owned. Additionally, they were all six Marvel movies. That seems like a huge missed opportunity to pitch me on…I don’t know, literally any other big blockbuster?

At any rate, Emerald City Video.

In the beginning, over two years ago, our format was that we would talk about one new or new-to-video movie that everyone was buzzing about, and another, older movie that was somehow thematically linked.

For instance, our first-ever episode was Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the underrated girl-power masterpiece Josie and the Pussycats.

Yes, masterpiece. Fight me.

The reason we chose this format goes back to our video store: at ECV, when it was in business, you could rent any movie at full-price and get an older/catalog movie for free. The most frequent combination, of course, was that somebody would get one of the hot new releases, come to the counter, and be reminded “you can grab an older movie for free if you want.” This was one of the most frequent ways that conversations would start, with the cutstomer saying “well, what might go with the thing I have in my hands?”

In today’s case, Zach and Russ are talking about Jack Ryan, the new Amazon series, and the very first live-action Jack Ryan adaptation from 1990, The Hunt for Red October, directed by Die Hard and Predator filmmaker John McTiernan.

There are four more Jack Ryan movies, and we will get to those (and a little more talk about the rest of Jack Ryan season one) over the next few episodes.

You can find us on Facebook at facebook.com/emeraldcityvideo or Twitter at twitter.com/ecv_podcast. If you want to support our show, we have ways you can do that, either at PayPal.me/emeraldcityvideo or at https://patron.podbean.com/emeraldcityvideo.

And for more from Russ, Zach, and the rest of the ECV crew, make sure to be back here by noon on the fifth day, and always remember to rewind your cassettes.

World of Old Krypton: House of Zod & Action Comics #1000

Russ is on site in Toronto visiting the set of Shazam!, and has a number of other reporters on to bask in the glory of "House of Zod" with him. Krypton is great, guys.

You can find us (and a number of other awesome podcasts) on the ACPN family of shows.

If you like what we're doing here, you can become a patron of the Emerald City Video Podcast, which comes with fun perks. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also have Instagram and Vero accounts where we share images, photos, memes, and nonsense.

Be back for more by noon on the fifth day, and please -- always remember to rewind your videocassettes.

World of Old Krypton: The Word of Rao

Russ is joined by Jon Wilson and Jeffrey Taylor to talk about the fourth episode of Krypton, "The Word of Rao."

You can find us (and a number of other awesome podcasts) on the ACPN family of shows.

If you like what we're doing here, you can become a patron of the Emerald City Video Podcast, which comes with fun perks. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also have Instagram and Vero accounts where we share images, photos, memes, and nonsense.

Be back for more by noon on the fifth day, and please -- always remember to rewind your videocassettes.

World of Old Krypton: The Rankless Initiative

Russ is joined by Jon Wilson and Jeffrey Taylor to talk about Krypton's third episode, "The Rankless Initiative"

You can find us (and a number of other awesome podcasts) on the ACPN family of shows.

If you like what we're doing here, you can become a patron of the Emerald City Video Podcast, which comes with fun perks. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also have Instagram and Vero accounts where we share images, photos, memes, and nonsense.

Be back for more by noon on the fifth day, and please -- always remember to rewind your videocassettes.

World of Old Krypton: Pilot

Russ is joined by John Wilson, Michael Bailey, and Jeffrey Taylor to talk about the pilot of SYFY's new series Krypton.

You can find us (and a number of other awesome podcasts) on the ACPN family of shows.

If you like what we're doing here, you can become a patron of the Emerald City Video Podcast, which comes with fun perks. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also have Instagram and Vero accounts where we share images, photos, memes, and nonsense.

Be back for more by noon on the fifth day, and please -- always remember to rewind your videocassettes.

New Release Wall #15: Black Lightning [Pilot]

Russ and Zach have thoughts on the first episode of The CW's new series Black Lightning.

You can read Russ's full review here: http://comicbook.com/dc/2018/01/08/black-lightning-game-changer-review/

You can read Zach's thoughts here: https://visu.news/2018/01/16/podcast-blacklightning-is-the-tv-show-we-need-right-now/

 

New Release Wall: Crisis on Earth-X Day One

The CW's superhero shows come together for another big-ass crossover -- and this one feels bigger and more epic than Justice League, so Russ had to comment a bit.

Joining him is Michele Curran from #TVGeek Podcast, and the two tackle the first night of the crossover event in as much non-spoiler glory as they can.

If you want to hear more like this, check out our Patreon -- you can find it here, and among other things backers can get a quarterly, exclusive video podcast DELIVERED ON VHS.

To Riverdale and Back Again

There's no new episode of Riverdale this week, so Russ, Craig, and Chris decided to check out Archie: To Riverdale and Back Again, a 1990 TV movie in which Archie Andrews is -- unsurprisingly -- the worst.

 

This time, though, so is the movie, and holy cow, we had some fun skewering it, all while trying to have a semi-serious discussion about what Riverdale does better, what it might learn from this movie, and more. We hope you enjoy it almost as much as we didn't enjoy watching this turkey for you.

 

Since Russ is footing the bill for hosting and had to buy some new editing software recently so that he can make all this magic happen quickly and quietly, we’ll probably put together some kind of Patreon so that you can sponsor the show in exchange for swag soon enough. For now, though, if you want to contribute anything and everything, you can do so at Paypal.me/emeraldcityvideo. Anyone who contributes $10 and up will get an 8”x10”, framed original photo of Pop’s Chock’Lit Shoppe, taken by Russ Burlingame during one of our visits to the set of Riverdale.

 

We've also put together a RedBubble Store at https://www.redbubble.com/people/archiedigest/ where you will be able to get t-shirts, stickers, cell phone cases, and other goods inspired by Riverdale and our show. Currently there's just one design -- #SheriffKiller -- but there's more to come in the next few days.

 

Lastly, you can check out a new tie-in comic Russ wrote for The Belko Experiment -- in theaters today -- at http://tinyurl.com/belkocomic. The story is set within the narrative of the film, which comes from director Greg McLean and writer James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy, Slither).

Archie Digest: A Riverdale Podcast - Faster, Pussycats! Kill! Kill!

This week on Archie Digest: A Riverdale Podcast, we respond to possibly the biggest, craziest episode of the series yet — and that is saying something.

 

We also welcome on board Brittany Rivera, best known as a Screen Rant contributing writer but her dulcet tones can also be heard on The Flash Podcast and The Marvel Report.

 

Since Russ is footing the bill for hosting and had to buy some new editing software recently so that he can make all this magic happen quickly and quietly, we’ll probably put together some kind of Patreon so that you can sponsor the show in exchange for swag soon enough. For now, though, if you want to contribute anything and everything, you can do so at Paypal.me/emeraldcityvideo. Anyone who contributes $10 and up will get an 8”x10”, framed original photo of Pop’s Chock’Lit Shoppe, taken by Russ Burlingame during one of our visits to the set of Riverdale.