New DVD Day!

Ah, Tuesday. The day which new DVDs come out on our shelves. I do so love Tuesday. If I lived in a major metropolitan area, I would probably blow half my paycheque every Tuesday at the DVD emporium.

Here's a couple of nerd-tacular releases coming out this day.

First up, one I've been blogging about for a while. That's the straight-to-DVD animated film Superman: Doomsday. See, with straight-to-DVD films exploding like the spread of DVD, everyone's getting in on it now. And, about a year ago, DC Comics and Warner Brothers said that they'd start pumping out a series of straight-to-DVD animated films, based on some of the bigger storylines and graphic novels in the DC library. Each one would be shooting for a very adult PG-13 rating, and they were to be supervised by Bruce Timm, the man who started the whole DC animation renassance when he gave us Batman: The Animated Series all those years ago. And, of course, the last time Bruce Timm was allowed to make PG-13, straight-to-DVD animated films, we got the classics Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker.

Anyway, the first one comes out today...Superman: Doomsday, which is based on the now-legendary Death of Superman storyline from the comic books. Superman fights Doomsday, Superman dies, and then an evil Superman shows up claiming to be the real one, and all hell breaks loose. Sadly, the reviews haven't been very good...apparently it had to be changed a whole heck of a lot to fit it into a 90-minute animated film.

For bonus materials, you get a featurette on the Death of Superman comics and its effects on pop culture, a featurette about the making of the film, and a trailer for the second film, Justice League: The New Frontier due out in the spring.

The second nerd-tacular DVD coming out today is Quentin Tarintino's Death Proof: Uncut and Unrated, which you may remember as Tarintino's contribution to the Grindhouse double-feature. And you read that right: uncut and unrated. All those scenes that they cut out, so they could put in the "scene missing" signs to fully recreate the grindhouse experience, are back in the film!

It's a 2-disc special edition, and you get a whole buttload of featurettes covering the various aspects of the making of the film.

For those curious, the second film from the Grindhouse double feature, Robert Rodreguiz's Planet Terror, is due out in a month. Everyone I read online is going, "I'm not going to buy Death Proof, because you just know that a super-mega-special edition of the actual Grindhouse double feature is coming soon!" But you know what? There are currently no plans in place to do that.

And I kind of hope that they never release Grindhouse all on one DVD, just as it was in the theatre...in this day and age, where home theatres are becoming the norm, it'd be cool if some experiences were left for the movie theatre. Grindhouse can be one of them.