SFX Spurious Awards

Porcine Prime Ministers, Primeval ’s dodgy calendar, Nintend-bingo and loads more…

RANT OF THE WEEK
In case you hadn’t heard, DC has done something big. Very big. Fan-baitingly, marketing-trumpetingly, retweet-mongously big. They’ve rebooted everything. Yep. Everything. All their titles will restart again from issue one, and all the characters will be getting gritty, contemporary makeovers and new costumes. It all ties in with the fact that they will begin publishing digital versions of their comics on the same date the paper versions are published. Radical. However, not everyone is happy with the new move…

TIMEY-WHIMEY STUFF OF THE WEEK
Oddly, this doesn’t go to Doctor Who , but Primeval , which suddenly seems to have noticed that it’s a show about time travel as well as dinosaurs. Lester spent much of this week’s episode panicking about what would happen to the timeline if Admiral Bloodlust sent a nuclear torpedo through an undersea anomaly. Surprisingly, although our heroes escaped the blast, there was a question about whether the torpedo had been disarmed in time or whether it had passed through the anomaly. Presumably the first, since the time line didn’t seem to be altered*. Or was it? Because a little while later Abby hands Matt a press clipping from a Victorian newspaper dated Sunday 22 January 1868. Which is all well and good, except that 22 January 1868 was a Wednesday… (*Lester’s quip about how we know why the dinosaurs died out wasn’t to be taken seriously, surely? One missile? Sent back to completely the wrong period in prehistory?)

CURE FOR THE COMMON COLD OF THE WEEK
Just wait a week, apparently. The Spurious Awarding panel will admit that it was worried after the previous week’s episode of Doctor Who , “The Rebel Flesh”. Why? Because of that grunt, Dicken, who kept sneezing. For no apparent reason. Y’see, characters in dramas, unlike in real life, are rarely ill for no good reason. It just doesn’t happen. Just like nobody picks their nose, watches soap operas or pushes traffic light buttons even they don’t need to cross the road just because it gives you sense of power over drivers (oh… er, just us then…). If you’re ill on TV, then there must be a plot reason for it. So there was Dicken, randomly sneezing his way through “The Rebel Flesh” and the alarm bells went off. “Uh oh – please don’t let the resolution in part two involve the ’Gangers falling victim to a common virus. That’s all so 19th century!” We needn’t have worried. A week later in “The Almost People” all signs of sniffling had been eradicated, whether by Sonic Night Nurse, or by ruthless editing we’ll never know. Just count us relieved that everything didn't end up all War Of The Worlds .

GAME OF THE WEEK
Our friends over at NGamer have been prepping for the unveiling of Nintendo’s new console (code name: Project Cafe) at E3 in an unusual manner. They created Nintend-bingo. Or something. “We're confident that our predictions for Nintendo's hour-long presentation are totally accurate,” they boast. “In fact, we have such confidence in our soothsaying that we've committed our conjecture to paper with our exclusive E3 bingo card – and you can play along with us at home, ticking things off as they happen.” So, just print out the image below, and make sure you follow all the announcements as they happen on Tuesday over on the NGamer site.

REVENGE OF THE WEEK
Somehow, it all makes a crazy kind of logic…

CROSSOVER OF THE WEEK
Who remembers the days when a Star Wars Muppet meant Yoda? Sadly, it seems that these will only be on sale at Disney resorts later this year, but we reckon there’ll be an illicit market in them on the internet, they’re so cool.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“If it wasn’t for a pig, we’d probably all be speaking German.” And it came from someone totally unexpected making a totally unexpected appearance. Yep, comics god Alan turned up on Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, and didn’t mention comics once. Instead he was introduced as “a writer, magician and expert on what his critics call, ‘Justly forgotten knowledge’ who in his youth made a startling discovery: the Churchill pig bunker. What he learned in this quietly buried piece of shameful British history was that Churchill was in fact a pig in a hat, a cigar marketing conceit that went too far and got elected Prime Minister. The cigar in question? Hamlet of course. “It was a pun,” Moore informs us sagely. “It worked on one level.” We reckon he’s telling porkies.