AFOS converts to stereo this Saturday, December 1--if there are no technical difficulties

After 10 years of AFOS being in mono (22050 Hz, 32 kbps, "Good audio quality for talk radio. Not great for music," according to Live365, which powers AFOS), I'm upgrading AFOS to stereo (22050 Hz, 56 kbps, "Audio quality is the illest," according to me). Since October 1, I've been going through the AFOS music library and re-converting five or 10 "AFOS Prime" playlist tracks per day, this time into stereo mp3s instead of saving them down as mono mp3s like I used to do for 10 straight years.

The conversion to stereo was originally going to take place on January 1, but because I now have enough mp3s that won't result in too much repetition, I'm moving the upgrade up to Saturday. That means I have to temporarily shut down the station tomorrow to upload all those redone files to the station locker. Hopefully, there won't be any technical snafus in the next two days because I don't have the patience for that shit right now.

The slightly bigger file sizes will result in less music in the locker, but far superior sound quality. In other words, AFOS won't sound like an AM station anymore. I streamed content in mono only because mono file sizes are smaller, and that allowed me to stream a lot more music (according to Live365, four times more music than I'll be capable of streaming in stereo, to be exact).

I was playing back the new stereo mp3 I just made out of "Malcolm and Martin" from the Do the Right Thing score album, and the difference is huge. I like being able to hear Terence Blanchard's trumpet during "Malcolm and Martin" with the same clarity and resonance it has on the album.

The downsized amount of music in the locker also means huge schedule changes. The "AFOS Prime" block will remain on the schedule, but the other blocks--"Beat Box," "Rock Box," "Rome, Italian Style," "Chai Noon," "New Cue Revue" and "Soda and Pie"--will not be back. However, some tracks from the "Chai Noon" playlist will be transferred to "AFOS Prime," and I might bring back "Beat Box" and "Rock Box" to the schedule at some point next year as I gradually rebuild those two playlists. I took another look at the revamped "AFOS Prime" playlist, and it turns out I do have enough not-so-John-Williams-y tracks to rebuild "Beat Box," so "Beat Box" is back on the schedule with a new time slot: Mondays through Fridays at 7-9am.

Frankly, I always hated mono, from the way it makes music sound so tinny to its very name. Audio formats shouldn't have the same exact names as diseases you get from kissing.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (11/28/2012): Dragons: Riders of Berk, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Dan Vs., Adventure Time and Regular Show

Marc Maron chewed on orange-flavored Nicorette acorns for a few weeks in preparation for his role as a squirrel. (Photo source: Adventure Time Wiki)

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

In the solid conclusion of Dragons: Riders of Berk's espionage-filled "Heather Report" two-parter, Outcast spy Heather's motive for working for the evil Vikings turns out not to be because she's evil too, but because the Outcasts have held her parents prisoner and forced her to do their bidding in order to free them. Like Hiccup, Outcasts leader Alvin believes the dragon way is the way of the future, but he wants to use the dragons for selfish, WMD-minded purposes, which is much different from Hiccup's view of cooperating with the dragons to help improve Viking society and make Viking life easier. Alvin failed to capture Hiccup in "Alvin and the Outcasts," so he's moved on to trying to steal Hiccup's Book of Dragons to figure out how to control the dragons he's held captive on Outcast Island, and he sent Heather to Berk to snatch the book for him.

Heather admits to Astrid, who was jealous of the attention Heather received from Hiccup and the others before they found out she's been spying on them for the Outcasts, that she lied about being attacked by pirates in order to save her parents. To retrieve the book, Astrid volunteers to go off on her own to Outcast Island--disguised in dyed-black hair as Heather--and is surprised to find out over there that Heather isn't lying about Alvin holding her parents prisoner.

(Photo source: Berk's Grapevine)

"Heather Report, Part II" features some great intentionally-bad voice acting by America Ferrera when Astrid first fools the Outcasts into thinking she's Heather, despite having a completely different eye color and sounding nothing like her. When she's posing as Heather, Astrid sounds more like the mocking and inaccurate imitation of Heather as a high-pitched and vapid seductress that she did in front of her dragon Stormfly in part 1. Astrid is a great warrior but a crappy impressionist.

Is it me or does Heather appear to be lesbian? I doubt Dragons: Riders of Berk will go there like Ugly Betty, Ferrera's LGBT-friendly old show, used to do, but I got an inkling that Heather plays for the other team--and I don't mean the Outcasts--after Astrid rescues her parents and recovers the book. When Heather says goodbye to the gang, she hugs Astrid but doesn't hug Hiccup, and when a still-smitten Snotlout whispers "Write me" to Heather as she sails off, she amusingly shuts Snotlout down with a Pussy Galore-style "I'm immune to your charms, James" headshake.

Snotlout's longing look at Heather at the end isn't the only longing glance during this episode at a female character while she sails away. In a nicely directed moment early on in "Heather Report, Part II," Hiccup stops himself from saying "I love you" to Astrid on Berk's beach when she heads off on her dangerous mission. It's the first time we've seen Hiccup view Astrid as more than a friend since his vision of her walking seductively in slo-mo with an explosion behind her at the start of How to Train Your Dragon. I've said before that both that movie and Dragons are about the challenges of limited communication, whether it's between humans and non-verbal dragons or teens and their inflexible parents. Now we can add to those challenges Hiccup's shyness about expressing his feelings for the girl he loves.

***

I was pleased with "A Necessary Bond," the conclusion of Star Wars: The Clone Wars' four-part Jedi younglings arc with special guest star David Tennant as a lightsaber-building droid named Huyang--up until when the Battle Droids showed up and started speaking in those grating Eddie Deezen-ish voices of theirs. Then I remembered why I was underwhelmed by the overtly kid-friendly Phantom Menace and why I've stayed away from The Clone Wars, which, like Genndy Tartakovsky's surprisingly good earlier spinoff of the same name, takes place between the events of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. The Battle Droids and their "Roger, roger" catchphrase rank right below Jar Jar, the Asian-accented villains and child actor Jake Lloyd's inability to act as lowlights of The Phantom Menace. Those Deezen-ish droids are emblematic of how flat and not-so-menacing all the villains in The Phantom Menace were.

Fortunately, General Grievous (Matthew Wood, who also voices all the Battle Droids) is the main baddie in the younglings arc instead of the Battle Droids. His conquest of duplicitous intergalactic pirate Hondo Ohnaka (Jim Cummings) and his crew forces Hondo to team up with Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein) and her younger charges, whose lightsaber crystals Hondo's crew attempted to steal in "A Test of Strength." During "A Necessary Bond," the spider-like armor design of this asthmatic proto-Darth Vader (who made his first appearance in the franchise during Tartakovsky's Clone Wars), the Jedi knights' difficulties with stopping him and his Predator-like trait of collecting the knights' lightsabers as trophies are all reminders of how much of an improvement Grievous was over the Battle Droids as a prequel adversary. When Grievous wiped the floor with all those Jedi during his genuinely riveting introduction in Tartakovsky's Clone Wars, you got the sense that George Lucas realized how insipid the Battle Droids were and how boring Darth Maul was, so he came up with a threat who was more intimidating than either of them.

(Photo source: Toonzone)

Yet Grievous doesn't hold a candle to Vader in the first two Star Wars films or Star Trek's Khan Noonien Singh, whose voice and charismatic personality Cummings channels in his portrayal of Hondo. Though I enjoyed a few elements of this "Young Jedi" arc (Wookiee youngling Gungi, whose growls are amusingly left unsubtitled like Chewbacca's, is an especially intriguing addition to the cast, and the Tenth Doctor does a nice job subbing for Anthony Daniels' C3P0 as a foil to R2D2), I'm still not ready to make The Clone Wars a regular viewing thing. The lack of personality in Grievous and the other prequel characters--except for Huyang, Gungi, Hondo and Ahsoka, who were all created for this show and are as close as the prequel projects have gotten to coming up with new characters on a par with the way more entertaining likes of Han, Leia, Chewie, Lando and yes, even whiny Luke--continues to draw me away.

***

"I remember pitching the cartoon version to [writing partner] Dan [Mandel], saying something like 'If it's a cartoon, we can do 'Dan vs. the Mailman' one week, and 'Dan vs. the Lost City of Atlantis' the next,'" said Dan Vs. co-creator Chris Pearson in a Toonzone Q&A. Mandel and Pearson's Hub cartoon (which was originally conceived by Mandel as a live-action sitcom where the ability to create worlds like Atlantis would have been held back by budget restrictions and the limits of live-action) has gone on to do exactly that at the start of its third and current season. The show pitted the titular misanthrope against something very relatable last week (anger management classes) and then pitted him against something much more fantastical and I Dream of Jeannie-ish this week (an undead, 4,000-year-old Egyptian king who wanders off from a local museum exhibit).

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (11/21/2012): Dragons: Riders of Berk, Kaijudo, Dan Vs., Adventure Time and Regular Show

The theme of this episode is "five things I wouldn't expect to see under someone's skirt."

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

On Dragons: Riders of Berk, Snotlout (Zach Pearlman), the overly confident alpha male of the group, and his dragon Hookfang stumble upon a pretty girl (Mae Whitman) who's lying in a shipwreck on Berk's beach and looks like Meg from Disney's Hercules. The girl, who's named Heather, claims to have been attacked by pirates who killed her parents and laid siege to her island.

All the guys, including Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), are immediately smitten with Heather, and they each try to impress her, in ways that range from Hiccup's bashful approach of "You can stay at me and my dad the chief's house!" to straight-up spitting game. In the funniest moment in "Heather Report, Part 1," Snotlout tries to show off Hookfang to Heather and orders Hookfang to "get your butt over here!," but the dragon flies away, which proves that either Snotlout is a terrible dragon trainer or Hookfang simply doesn't like Snotlout. Animals that don't listen to trainers always makes for great comedy--or captivating YouTube videos.

Astrid (America Ferrera) is the only teen who isn't drinking the Heather Kool-Aid because she sees Heather sneaking around near her house at night and catches her leafing through the Book of Dragons, plus the girl is suspiciously always asking everyone in the group about their dragon training techniques. Her suspicions about Heather are confirmed when she sees her conferring at night with the Outcasts, the enemies of the island who had previously attempted to invade it in "Alvin and the Outcasts." The gang realizes Astrid has been right about Heather when this girl who's been spying on them for the Outcasts steals both Astrid's dragon Stormfly and the Book of Dragons.

After failing to capture Hiccup so that he could gain control of the gang's dragons, Outcasts leader Alvin (Mark Hamill) wants to capture the next best thing: the book. Alvin, a character who wasn't in How to Train Your Dragon, is always a welcome presence on Dragons: Riders of Berk because his presence means both impressively staged and animated Outcasts-vs.-dragons battles and Hamill doing what he does best: absolute villainy.

***

(Photo source: Kaijudo Wiki)

Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters takes on cyber-bullying--an especially timely issue after all the details of Paula Broadwell's threatening e-mails to Jill Kelley--when the Light Civilization sends Princess Sasha (Kari Wahlgren) to study human behavior, and she experiences the worst of it while disguised as a human girl at the middle school attended by her new human friends Ray, Allie and the smitten-with-Sasha Gabe. A simple misunderstanding about the human invention of toilets, which is reminiscent of what Chiana went through when she first discovered a toilet while on Earth on Farscape, gets caught on several students' camera phones and immediately goes viral.

In a shout-out to a movie none of Kaijudo's kid viewers are likely to have ever seen, the original Carrie, Sasha finally loses her patience with humanity at a school dance when the viral video of her mistaking a "throne" for an actual throne is shown in the auditorium as a prank, and she attacks the attendees, but it's a TV-Y7-rated rampage on the decorations in the auditorium. No one gets hurt, of course, because you can't electrocute and incinerate a crowd full of people on a TV-Y7-rated cartoon like you could in Carrie.

The episode's other shout-out to a movie that kid viewers have no knowledge of and are most likely not allowed by their parents to watch is the title itself: "The Unbareable Being of Lightness," a play on The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I'm looking forward to seeing My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic become the next Hasbro Studios cartoon to reference steamy and hot-as-hell Lena Olin movies (maybe Romeo Is Bleeding?).

"The Unbareable Being" script's attempt to tackle cyber-bullying can be clunky at times--is it really necessary for Gabe to explain cyber-bullying to the tech-savvy audience?--but luckily, the episode doesn't try to find solutions to this problem through lame speechifying. All that Kaijudo can do is throw up its hands in befuddlement and say cyber-bullying is here, it sucks and there's nothing we can do about it, which is the same reaction most of us adults have to this bizarre form of bullying that's permeated everything from the Star Wars Kid phenomenon to the Asian-bashing UCLA skank's video and now Petraeusgate.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (11/14/2012): Star Wars: The Clone Wars, The Avengers, Kung Fu Panda, Adventure Time and Regular Show

With that hairdo, Falcon looks like he's about to sing backup on "If I Ever Fall in Love" with Shai. (Photo source: Marvel Animation Age)

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

These days, I'm more of a Doctor Who fan than a Star Wars fan. That's mainly because unlike Star Wars, Doctor Who took a huge leap in quality--ever since Queer as Folk creator Russell T. Davies revived the long-absent show in 2005. Instead of mistakenly thinking that visual effects and spectacle are the only elements that deserved an upgrade, Davies and his fellow writers, including his eventual replacement Steven Moffat, also worked on upgrading the writing and acting on Doctor Who. They added a new layer to The Doctor's character (in the form of the PTSD and survivor's guilt that Christopher Eccleston's Doctor suffered from due to the off-screen "Time War"), they frequently delved into why The Doctor is the way that he is and they made The Doctor's new companions fully realized characters instead of one-dimensional sounding boards for him like in most of the show's pre-Ace years (some hardcore fans might disagree and have dismissed most of the new female companions as lazily written Mary Sues, especially Billie Piper's Rose Tyler, who was in love with The Doctor and was clearly a stand-in for the openly gay Davies, even more so than omnisexual Captain Jack).

I've avoided watching Cartoon Network's CG-animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars because it focuses on the characters from the dreadful prequel trilogy--those three movies are among the greatest examples of when a style-over-substance approach goes wrong--and it's not supervised by animator Genndy Tartakovsky, whose cel-animated, nearly dialogue-less 2003 Clone Wars prequel to Revenge of the Sith was more satisfying than any of the three live-action prequels (why Lucasfilm didn't ask Tartakovsky back for another round of Clone Wars continues to boggle the mind). But when Peter Mayhew reprised his role as Chewbacca in the 2011 episode "Wookiee Hunt," I finally tuned in, out of love for the first two Star Wars flicks.

I ended up enjoying "Wookiee Hunt," not just because of Chewie's presence, which briefly helped turn The Clone Wars into the Star Wars I grew up with and remember fondly, but because the Clone Wars character Chewie interacted with, plucky Jedi trainee Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein), had a spark to her that was missing from the boring characters in the live-action prequels. Still, "Wookiee Hunt" wasn't enough to make me a regular viewer of The Clone Wars, which is spearheaded by supervising director Dave Filoni instead of Tartakovsky. I continued to be uninterested in the show until Lucasfilm announced that former Doctor Who star David Tennant was the guest star in this week's "Test of Strength" episode, which pits Ahsoka and a pack of Jedi younglings (the most badass of the youngling group?: the Wookiee kid) against Hondo Ohnaka (a Ricardo Montalban-inspired Jim Cummings), a space pirate who attempts to steal the younglings' lightsaber crystals.

(Photo source: Wookieepedia)

What a casting coup, right? Some Doctor Who fans feel that Tennant is wasted in his role as Professor Huyang, a wise old droid who designs lightsabers for the Jedi (Tennant signed up for a three-episode arc, by the way, so yay, more Tennant), because the synth effects the show uses to transform Tennant into a droid obscure Tennant's voice too much. But I've had no problem recognizing Tennant's voice. I even had flashbacks to his days as The Doctor when Huyang instructed the younglings with "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow"-esque technobabble like "You have inverted the emitter matrix, which will cause the power grid to backfire."

I'm still not sure yet if "A Test of Strength" and the two episodes that are left in this four-episode youngling arc will totally convert me to Filoni's Clone Wars (which is now in its fifth season and like M*A*S*H, it will end up lasting way longer than the three-year war it's been depicting, if recent speculation that the Disney/Lucasfilm deal will call for Lucasfilm to produce future Clone Wars episodes for Disney XD ends up becoming true). But because charismatic Ahsoka is the focus of this arc instead of stuffy young Obi-Wan Kenobi or Ahsoka's not-yet-corrupt master Blandakin Skywalker, I'm interested in how Ahsoka will pull herself out of her current predicament, in which she's captured by Hondo, whose plans for Ahsoka and her body are perhaps not-so-TV-PG-friendly. And if the action sequences continue to be as nifty and engaging as the engine momentum trick Ahsoka comes up with in "A Test of Strength" to eject the pirates from her ship Ellen Ripley style, perhaps the reports from lapsed Star Wars fans that the franchise has been dead since Tartakovsky's Clone Wars have been greatly exaggerated.

***

After 52 episodes, the cartoon that began when "there came a day unlike any other" calls it a day. In "Avengers Assemble!" (also the title of Marvel Animation's next show featuring the Avengers team), The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes ends its two-season run by pitting the team--as well as the rest of the New York superhero community--against one of Marvel's most giant-sized adversaries, the planet-eating alien god Galactus, a threat Captain America was first warned about earlier this season in "Prisoner of War," an episode that was a series highlight. "Prisoner of War" was also a better-executed summation of the series' mission statement (disparate personalities who should have no business being in the same room together are forced to unite against threats bigger than themselves) than "Avengers Assemble!"

However, I like what "Avengers Assemble!" writer and series story editor Christopher Yost does here with Iron Man at the start of "Avengers Assemble!," and it's remarkable that Yost is able to insert a moment or two of character depth with Tony, considering how little time Yost has in this action-packed series finale. The Avengers leader has been feeling worn-out from the onslaught of recent villains and has lately been worried about how history will remember him and the rest of the team after they're gone (when one of those recent foes is a master of mind control who turned you into a fascist who used your inventions against the world, of course you'd start to undergo an existential crisis). Then Tony gets an answer to his question of "How will we be remembered?" in the form of heralds who represent a mute alien stranger named Galactus. They arrive to stir up lots of calamitous shit on Earth so that their ginormous master will be able to devour our planet like a barbecued rib.

(Photo source: Marvel Animation Age)

While "Avengers Assemble!" plays to the series' two biggest strengths (efficient storytelling, which Yost often excels at, and action sequences that are even more epic than the ones in Joss Whedon's live-action version) and treats us to several strikingly animated mini-battles between smaller three-person teams of heroes and Galactus' heralds, I'm not so enamored with the way the episode rushes through the Galactus crisis. "Avengers Assemble!" is a victim of Marvel Animation's mistake of tinkering with Earth's Mightiest Heroes' preference for longer storylines and forcing the show to do more standalone episodes.

The choice of Galactus as the adversary is a great one for the series finale, but one can't help feeling throughout "Avengers Assemble!" that more could have been done with Galactus. "This isn't some supervillain or would-be conqueror. This is different. This is a force of nature," observes Mr. Fantastic (Dee Bradley Baker), and Galactus' calamitous assault on Earth would have been better suited for a two-or-three-part story instead of a standalone. The sense of danger is diminished when you try to cram the war against Galactus into a 22-minute finale. Justice League Unlimited, DC Animation's Earth's Mightiest Heroes counterpart, had a more satisfying series finale, simply because storylines like its series-ending Darkseid arc were allowed to take their time and breathe on that show (also, JLU's characters were a lot wittier, which is surprising because Marvel is often better at witticisms than DC).

7 Days 'Til 007: "Skyfall"

Each weekday since November 1, I've posted a few grafs about an exemplary vocal theme or instrumental piece from the official 007 movies to count down to today's release of Skyfall in America. The series of posts concludes today with the newest 007 opening title theme, Adele's "Skyfall."

Alright, so it's not the greatest Bond theme, but it's the latest. It's also a solid addition to the Bond music catalog and a good Adele song outside the context of Bond ("Skyfall" has already been covered on YouTube by singers like Willow Smith, who doesn't whip her hair back and forth in her version, but she does a decent job covering it).

Sure, as Julian Sancton wrote in a fascinating Movieline piece where he dissected the Adele theme musicologically and pointed out how it upholds John Barry's classic sound, "Skyfall" isn't as hummable as "Rolling in the Deep." But it's classic Bond music, from the first Barry-style horn blast to Adele's last phrasing of the song title, which echoes what Tina Turner did at the conclusion of "GoldenEye" and what Tom Jones did at the conclusion of "Thunderball." Except Adele didn't pass out like Jones did in the recording booth after hitting a final note that's Tom Jones-ese for "Hand over the panties, honey, because no other bloke can hit a note as high as this."

Sancton's analysis of "Skyfall" is so good I want to plagiarize it. This post should just be nothing but excerpts from his essay. The best part is his swipe at Sheena Easton and Bill Conti's "For Your Eyes Only," a tune I don't hate (who can resist a hot Scottish chick singing a Bond song and singing it well?), although it lacks the swagger of "Diamonds Are Forever" and "A View to a Kill" and the brash lyrics that make The Spy Who Loved Me's "Nobody Does It Better" an enjoyable ballad. Sancton compares the Easton ballad to an '80s sitcom theme song, which is funny because its lyrics were written by Michael Leeson, the co-creator of The Cosby Show, I Married Dora and The Bill Engvall Show.

"Imagine it playing over Three's Company-style opening credits, with scenes of Bond walking into MI6's office and throwing his hat onto the coat rack while Ms. Moneypenny rolls her eyes and smiles," wrote Sancton.

But in "Skyfall," which Adele wrote with her regular producer Paul Epworth after they got to read the film's script, we're far from the world of Jack, Chrissy and Mr. Furley. The lyrics are apocalyptic ("Let the sky fall/When it crumbles") and the tone is suitably moody (but not slash-your-wrists moody) because the song accompanies a grim opening where, according to an early TotalFilm review, "James is shot... plunging from the roof of a moving train into Daniel Kleinman-designed titles filled with skulls, tombstones and other totems of death."

I haven't seen Skyfall yet, but I'm dying to, and that's partly because of the Adele song, which the singer recorded with a 77-piece orchestra at London's Abbey Road Studios ("When we recorded the strings, it was one of the proudest moments of my life," said Adele in a press release). We know a new Bond song is good when it whets our appetite for the new Bond film like "Skyfall" did. One of the ways that Epworth whetted our appetite was when he dove into Bond's musical arsenal and pulled out a crucial element that Madonna's much-maligned "Die Another Day" completely ignored.

"Peppered throughout the song are echoes of the original instrumental theme John Barry wrote for Dr. No, including the unmistakable four-note riff here played by the electric guitar 1 minute 50 seconds in," wrote Sancton.

Yep, Bond is back.

Previously:
002. "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" by John Barry (1969)
003. "A View to a Kill" by Duran Duran (1985)
004. "Diamonds Are Forever" by Shirley Bassey (1971)
005. "Surrender" from Tomorrow Never Dies by k.d. lang (1997)
006. "Capsule in Space" from You Only Live Twice by John Barry (1967)
007. "007" from From Russia with Love by John Barry (1963)

(Photo source: Wikipedia)