Around the Internets: 03/20/08

- A prequel to the original Trainspotting novel is in the works, while the long-planned prequel to Battlestar Galactica has finally been greenlit. Haven't Irvine Welsh and Ronald D. Moore heard Patton Oswalt's brilliant bit in which the comedian/script doctor breaks down what's wrong with prequels like the last three Star Wars movies and imagines an encounter with George Lucas during the time he wrote them ("Well hey, you say you're a Star Wars fan. Do you like Darth Vader? In the first movie, you get to see him as a little kid... and then he gets taken away from his mom and he's very sad...")?

- Composers like Hans Zimmer, Anne Dudley and La Vie en Rose's Christopher Gunning complain that present-day film scores are too bland-sounding in an article for London's The Times. Zimmer asks, "Where is the next Jerry Goldsmith?" Uh, Hans, his name is Michael Giacchino. Zimmer adds, "So many scores sound like nobody really thought about them." Yeah, the likes of Jon Brion, Howard Shore, Alexandre Desplat and Terence Blanchard put very little thought into what they write.

- Awesome! Someone's finally posted "The Huey Freeman Hunger Strike," one of two recently banned episodes of The Boondocks. "Hunger Strike" resurrects one of the old strip's most memorable threads, Huey's gripes with BET's offensive programming.

Word on the street is BET threatened legal action against The Boondocks' distributor, Sony Pictures Television, and Adult Swim if the latter aired the two BET-bashing eps. I guess BET's henchmen didn't act fast enough to stop Canada's Teletoon channel and its Adult Swim-like Detour block from premiering "Hunger Strike" last Sunday (the other BET-bashing ep, "The Ruckus Reality Show," is set to air on Detour this Sunday).

"Hunger Strike" is one of the funniest eps of The Boondocks' second season, despite the series' continuing uncertainty over how to make Huey as dynamic a character as he was in the strip (Huey's intellectual nature played better in the strip than on the animated series, whereas the not-as-cerebral Riley thrives in the animated format--his eps are more fun to watch than the Huey-centric ones).

Huey's stand against BET is overshadowed by the hijinks of Rev. Rollo Goodlove. Cee-Lo does his second Boondocks guest shot as the self-serving Goodlove, and he gets to sing "Go-Go Gadget Gospel" from his first Gnarls Barkley album, during a musical sequence that goes on a bit longer than it should. Scrubs' Donald Faison, who voiced another character in an earlier Boondocks ep, provides the sped-up voice of "Weggie Rudlin," who proposes a BET "ho-ward show" to honor the best video hos. Weggie is the series' jab at its former executive producer, current BET president Reginald Hudlin, whose name still shows up in the Boondocks credits due to contractual obligations. The Boondocks writers also throw in some amusing in-jokes about past BET personalities like Sherry Carter and Tavis Smiley (who voices himself) that will probably sail over white viewers' heads.

The ep's best lines come from the Dr. Evil-like CEO of BET ("You've fired everyone that could read? I love it!") and Uncle Ruckus ("BET forever!! BET boombaya!!") I love how Star Wars fan Aaron McGruder asked 9th Wonder, the series composer, to model Ruckus' theme music after John Williams' tuba theme for Jabba the Hutt from Return of the Jedi.

- I would cringe while listening to many of the train wreck questions fanboys and fangirls would toss at the celebrity speakers during panel discussions at the 2007 WonderCon and the '07 San Diego Comic-Con, so I love this Mark Evanier complaint about the attention whores who abuse the open mic at panels:

One time, I was interviewing Ray Bradbury. The first guy at the mike — who'd been poised there since before Ray and I arrived on stage — just wanted to say how much Ray's work had inspired his own, beginning efforts and he wanted to read aloud a passage from one of those stories to demonstrate this. If I hadn't stopped him, he'd have turned the rest of the hour into a books-on-tape recital.

- Poplicks.com says Obama's stunning speech about race was effective, but they wish he could have done more with it.

- Comics 101 remembers Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens, who passed away March 10. The secret of how the Rocketeer managed to fly around without burning his ass off dies with Stevens.