SciFi4Me For You

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Tonight, a special New Year's edition with a little news and a special interview on this edition of Multiverse Tonight. There are many universe out there. Welcome to the one with news about all the others. This is Multiverse Tonight. Now, here's your host, Thomas Townley. Hello everyone! Happy New Year and welcome to episode 16 of Multiverse Tonight. I'm your host, Thomas Townley. Now, this is a very special episode. Unlike our uh usual episodes, we're going to have uh a very an easy time of it on this one. Just a few news items and an interview with a friend of mine from sci-fi for me, Jason Hunt. Now, I'd really like to say thank you to my uh coffee backer and and if you would like to help support me in this new year, you can tip me via KoFit Coffee, that's K-O-F-I, Patreon, and now directly from the Radio Public app and the Buzz Buzzprout Player. We also have some merchandise for sale on our Tee Public store at uh and that link will be in our show notes and on our website. So uh check out multiverse tonight.com to see those show notes, affiliate links, and the occasional original column, and much, much more. Now let's get on with the show. The second annual Los Angeles Online Film Critics Society Award ceremony will take place on Wednesday, January 9th, 2019, at the Taglean Complex in Los Angeles. And honored this year will be Captain Marvel star Bree Larson, who will be given the second annual Trailblazer Award, and Star Trek actor John Cho, who will be the first recipient of the new LA FOCS Acting Achievement Award. Since beginning his career in 1987 1997, John has been in over a hundred different films and TV shows. Congrats to both. Well-deserved awards. Now, Aquaman is proving to be a good catch for Warner Brothers. The movie is headed towards $400 million at the box office. Most of that being from the Chinese box office. It has already proven that Disney is a little all wet, beating out Murray has it to beat out Murray Poppins, which came in second to the King of the Seas. Yeah, like the uh C Puns there. Ava DeVernay might be teasing us with who the focus of her new gods movie will be. On Twitter, she posts an image that features High Father, Orion, Light Ray, and Mr. Miracle, Scott Free, and Scott's wife, Big Barta. Also pictured is the Metreon. It'll be interesting to see where they go with these characters. Personally, I'm hoping that Scot Free will be the main focus. I love me some Mr. Miracle. Now, uh we know that the timel we now know the timeline for Star Wars episode 9. Empire Magazine reports that the movie will start a year after the events of The Last Jedi. Maybe it takes a year for Luke to reconstitute himself. And congratulations to George Lucas for coming in first on the 2018 Forbes list of America's wealthiest celebrities. According to Forbes, the Star Wars creator has a net worth of five point four billion. Most of that coming from the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney, which gave him four which gave him 4.1 billion on top of the uh money he already had. Now George beat out his friend and fellow uh creator, Steven Spielberg, who came in second with 3.7 billion. Perhaps they should just spread some of that wealth around. Spielberg could offer refunds to those who saw the last Indian Jones movie, and George could offer restitution for the Star Wars holiday special. Now, let's have a quick word about Radio Public. I'd like to thank you for listening to this edition of Multiverse Tonight. You know, one way to support the show is to listen with Radio Public. Every episode of Multiverse Tonight, as heard through the Radio Public app for iPhone and Android, means that we make money so this show can grow. There's a link to our show in the episode notes. Give it a try today. Welcome back. My guest today is Mr. Jason Hunt, the man who is more or less responsible for me speaking to you through this mic today. I don't know that I'd want to that you want to claim that. He is the founder, publisher, and editor of sci-fiforme.com. Uh sci-fi for me is an all-in-one site for all things sci-fi with news feeds, reviews, interviews, and podcasts dedicated to the science fiction and celebrates 10 years in 2019. Jason Hunt, welcome to Multiverse Tonight. Thank you for having me. It's good to be here. And congratulations on the show. This I I hear this is doing uh pretty well. Yep, pretty well, pretty well. You know, we're six months along, so you know. And uh I've just signed for my for my uh first ever table at uh at uh the uh Smallville Comic-Con. Well, that'll that'll be fun. We're hoping to get down there too, so we'll see you down there. Oh great. Hey, maybe we can share the table. I'll be willing to do that. Uh starting off here, uh Jason, go ahead and take us back to the beginning. How did Sci-Fi for me come about?

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Well, it was February of 2009 when uh the sci-fi channel announced that they were changing their brand. This was when they first announced the the switch over to sci-fi with the new spelling. And ostensibly, what they had uh shared as their reasoning for the change was that they could control the trademark a little bit better, they could expand uh some of the different programs that they were able to do. And it was met with a great deal of uh negative blowback from the fans who felt that you know, 17 years we've given the sci-fi channel its success, and now you're abandoning us trying to be another USA network. And a lot of the discussion on uh the online bulletin boards and discussion threads were basically fans saying we just want someplace where we can get science fiction and none of those reality shows and the supernatural and the ghost hunters and the hauntings and the whatever. And my initial thought was well, why does it have to be a cable network? What if it was something online? And this is back before the the digital channels that we've got now, before Netflix, before Disney Plus, before Hulu and all of those others. We had the idea that eventually what I could do is set up a site that could be uh kind of an all-in-one where you could watch video, you could read any kind of news articles, and basic basically be the movie theater, the newspaper, the TV station, the radio station, and the and the community center all in one website. It didn't quite work out like that, but uh we launched in March of 2009, right after that. And so you know, thinking eventually we would be an online TV network, very similar to the way SciFi Channel started when it was just a little channel in Florida. And the response was not great. Uh, you know, it was limited resources being what they were, started off as a blog in a basement, just like everything else. Uh, but we went about a uh a week after we launched the site and managed to get into our first Planet Comic-Con uh with cameras and microphones, and we were able to interview uh several of the guests there, including Aaron Gray. And uh we talked to uh Kerry Callen and uh Kevin Mellon and Dennis Hopeless. This is back before Kevin was a storyboard artist on Archer before Dennis Hopeless was working with Marvel. Uh we've talked to uh oh, he's married to he's married to Kelly Sue, I believe now. What's his name? He was uh um uh I can't remember his name now. He did Iron Man. He went he went he went to do Iron Man right after what right after we had uh right after we had interviewed him. So we we we had a good start. Uh but it was you know it was small. Um was not uh as as successful as I had originally anticipated, but you know, my eyes were bigger than my my internet at that point.

SPEAKER_00 9:29

Well, you know, what you know what is you know, you know, it's a build it's a building thing. Um what have been some of the the highlights for sci-fi for me? Oh, um there have been a lot of them.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

One of the things that uh the having the site has afforded us is the ability to uh meet with and visit with a number of celebrities. I mean, that's that's the usual perk uh that you get to talk to all of these people that you see on TV. And you very quickly realize that they're just they're just people like anybody else. And uh, you know, they have they have needs and they have desires and they get tired and and they have things that they don't want to talk about, and they have things that they really want to talk about, they're just like anybody else. And the you know, being able to uh get a little bit of an inside perspective on you know the production of television shows and movies and the process of creating books and comic books and and that sort of thing, that's been a highlight. But also being able to just talk with people, just meet with people out at the events. And you know, we've been able to do things that no other website has ever done before or since. We did uh uh all five days at WorldCon 74 live from the floor of the event. We got 53 interviews in five days. We talked to just about everybody. Once they figured out what we were doing there, because it was uh it was it was something new, it was something that people had to wrap their head around. That we were actually live streaming WorldCon very similar to what you would see with a broadcast network doing a sports event or a political convention where you had anchors down on the floor, you had reporters out in the out on the field, and we were talking about this event pretty much through the entire uh five days that was here in Kansas City. And then we also did it for Planet Comic-Con in 2017. And our hope is to do more of that in 2019 from a number of other events.

SPEAKER_00 11:42

Okay. And uh so you know you you've done all you did all these things about the beginning of 2018, you started winding down. Take me back there, and what made you decide to come back?

SPEAKER_01 11:56

Well, um we run our site now with a WordPress template. And I'm constantly looking for plugins that would help us, you know, make that design better and give us more features and more functions. And one of the challenges has always been getting good statistics, getting good uh data on our audience and our traffic and what kind of things people are looking at. And I finally found a plugin that could give us a distinction between traffic that is generated by bots, you know, search engines and malware and you know, information data mining and that sort of thing, and traffic coming from an actual real people IP address. And uh back in September, October last year, we determined that about 95% of our traffic was generated by bots. So we decided to take a break, reevaluate a little bit, and kind of wind down. And we did uh we did a few video productions up through uh the beginning of 2018, but then we pretty much went dark. Uh and and my original thought at that point was that we were done. And um, you know, I mulled about it for a little bit and and really didn't have any plan to come back until Planet Comic-Con announced their dates and announced that it was their 20th anniversary that was coming up here in March of 2019. And that got me thinking, well, March of 2019 is going to be our 10th anniversary. And if we go back to Planet Comic-Con, that would be our 10th time at Planet Comic-Con. So things started, you know, just kind of circling around in my head that you know, these are things that I started thinking about okay, well, if we came back, what would it look like? What kind of things would we need to do? Knowing that our audience is you know not really there. We'd basically be starting from scratch, which is which is the approach that we've taken. So I've done a lot of research, we did a lot of market surveys, trying to determine what would be the best approach. And I I I think we're we're about 80% there.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

Perfect. And so now that you're bringing it back, tell tell us more about uh what you plan on doing in this coming year.

SPEAKER_01 14:13

We're gonna do a lot more collaborations for one. Um we're uh excited about some of the partnerships that we're putting together. Uh starting in January, we have five shows coming back. We have uh, well, uh two shows coming back and several new shows. We have uh the H2O podcast is coming back. Tim Harvey and I are gonna be doing our thing. And uh we have a new show called Good Morning Multiverse, which is gonna run on Saturday mornings, which is kind of, you know, as the name implies, it's very similar to Good Morning America. It's gonna be a mix of news and discussion and interviews and feature stories and whatnot. And then we have a new show called TARDIS Sauce, which is going to be our Doctor Who themed discussion program. We're partnering with the guys over on the Traveling the Vortex podcast out of Topeka. And uh Tim Harvey is going to be our participant, he's gonna do our side of it. And then Glenn, Sean, and Keith from Traveling the Vortex will be in on that as well. And it'll be a bi-weekly, every other week program, half-hour program, discussing pretty much everything having to do with Doctor Who, not just the current season, the current doctor, but also everything else, all the way back to the beginning. That includes, you know, classic who, it includes the books, it includes the comic books from Titan, it includes the Virgin books, it includes the wilderness years and the audio stuff, anything and everything having to do with Doctor Who, they'll they'll have that on the table. And then we have another program called Trailer Park, which is going to be uh a discussion, roundtable discussion among filmmakers, film critics, and industry professionals about the trailers that are coming out. So, whenever, let's say we just had a trailer for Avengers Endgame. That would be something where we'd we'd look at the trailer, analyze does it work, does it not work, does it give away too much? Does it make me want to see the movie? Is there stuff that's not in there that I want to see in there? And talk about the the process of actually making trailers and what goes into uh that step in the in the marketing of a film to generate the audience to get people in the seats. Uh and then we've got a couple of other things that are in development for February that I'm not quite ready to announce yet, but it's coming. We're very excited about everything that we're going to be able to do.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Great. And and so there is more, there is way more to come after this initial release. There is.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Uh, and and I think uh a couple of things are going to be very exciting for fans. Uh people who have been around for a while, especially you know, people my age uh who are going to really appreciate uh some of the news that we've got. Uh I'm I'm I'm not I'm not quite ready to say yet because I need to I need to make sure everybody's okay with us announcing it and making it public. But we're very excited about a couple of partnerships that we still have yet to make public.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

Cool. Now, has as far as uh genre projects this this uh coming year, 2019, uh like uh the new Avengers movie, things like that. Is there anything you're looking forward to?

SPEAKER_01 17:26

Um I would say uh I'm I'm curious about what Captain Marvel's going to do.

SPEAKER_00 17:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

Uh given that it is the beginning of the next. You know, it's it's not really the beginning of phase four, but it's coming in on that tail end of phase three, into phase four. And uh we're hearing not too much yet. Uh the reactions to the trailers have been mixed. Um, not too many people are thrilled uh with what they've seen out of Bree Larson so far, but uh it's it's still early in the campaign. Um so that's that's out there. You've got Avengers Endgame, of course, which is coming out, which I'm not as looking, I'm not looking forward to it as much because I know that there's going to be things happening after that because we already know that that uh there's a Spider-Man movie Far From Home that's coming out. So we know that Peter Parker uh is is going to come back, which kind of implies that everybody's going to come back. Not not everyone will make it back in, but we know that there's going to be some resolution to that. And it's kind of it kind of spoils it a little bit. Uh and then, of course, you got Star Wars episode nine coming out at the end of the year. And I think despite my disappointment with The Last Jedi, I'm I'm I'm about 60% looking forward to episode nine. I'm curious what J.J. Abrams is going to do to fix things given what we're hearing now coming out of Disney and Lucasfilm as far as the reset, uh, so-called quote unquote, uh, in addition to what they're doing with TV, with Mandalorian, and uh the other the other projects they've got in development.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

Well, great. All right. Uh that's well, I'd say that's all the questions I have today. Uh Jason Hunt is the editor and publisher of sci-fiforme.com. That's sci-fi for me. And as he said, the return of H2O comes out on January 5th. You can find it wherever podcasts are found. And we'll have a link to Sci-Fi for me in the show notes. Jason Hunt, thank you for being here. Thanks, Thomas. Looking forward to talking to you again. Of course. I got right, I got right for you again.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

That's right. Well, yeah, we didn't even talk about that. The return of the lungbox hunter.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

I'm looking forward to it. Yep. Gotta get to nail my butt to this chair so I can write. That's right. You're on the deadline now, sir. All right. Good to see you. All right, you too. Bye. All right. That was a great interview that that uh I had with him, you know, and I look forward to working with Jason again in the future. Well, that brings us to the end of this edition. I'll be back in two weeks with a regular compliment of news. In fact, uh it'll probably be, you know, piled to the ceiling, so you know, get s get set down for probably an extra long episode. And uh be sure to check our social media. We're of course on Twitter at multiverse tom and also on Facebook and Instagram as well. And uh if you're interested in contributing some money again, please do so at uh coffee. That's K O dash F I dot com slash multiverse or on Patreon as well. And be sure to visit multiverse tonight.com and check our affiliate marketplace links and the link to our Tea Public store show notes and so much more. And uh if you're a subscriber, be sure to share us with your friends, and if you're brand new to the show, please uh be sure to subscribe and leave us some feedback and let us know how we're doing. Special thanks to Lobo Loco for theme music and another big thank you to Jason Hunt for the interview. Be sure to check out sci-fiforme.com. That's sci-fi the letter4me.com. Thanks for watching Multiverse Tonight. We'll be back in two weeks. Now please exit the universe in an orderly fashion. Good night. Multiverse tonight is a production of half a big genre production. Copyright 2019, all right, reserve.