he motto of Mighty Big TV is "Television Without Pity" and it's a credo that the folks behind this terrific page take very seriously indeed. Offering an index on what's up on the tube—not to mention lots of forums where fans discuss their favorite shows—this site is the best place to go to catch up on missed episodes, and to catch a giggle in the process.
The molten core of MBTV is its episode recaps, detailed summaries of recent airings of current programs. On the SF front, this site covers everything from Buffy and Smallville to The X-Files. The catch? These aren't straight recountings of the action; rather, they are gonzo summaries, full of critical opinions and humorous observations. They can be unforgiving—a recent Angel recap of the episode "Dad," for example, is titled "Baby, baby, where did our plot go?" Recaps are kept rigorously up to date, with short summaries appearing right after episodes are aired, and longer ones following soon. Dedicated fans can arrange to receive an e-mail when a full recap has been posted to the page.
MBTV is far from the easiest site to navigate, and at the moment is prone to glitches which return visitors to its main page instead of forwarding them onward to desired content. Nevertheless, the summaries and discussion forums are worth this bit of hassle. Show forums are divided into categories—Smallville already has four topics, including a villains forum and one on the greater Superman mythos. They are active and well moderated, great places to find fellow fans. The site also offers freebies like wallpaper and screensavers, and has a sassy FAQ. As every show covered gets its own MBTV logo, visitors can also buy T-shirts and other merchandise with a stylized image representing their favorite program.
For fans looking to fill in the gaps on a show's big storyline or just connect with other devotees of a favorite program, Mighty Big TV offers critical information, community and laughter. With a healthy dose of sarcasm in every episode recap, it also provides a hearty reminder to everyone that no TV show, no matter how awesome, should ever be taken too seriously.
— A.M. Dellamonica
Site of the Week—December 17, 2001
phemera is the classy word collectors use to refer to non-book, non-magazine printed material, and I've always loved collecting such items. Advertisements, posters, matchbooks—these simple items, once deemed utterly disposable, can nostalgically evoke entire eras in ways that even more complex artifacts cannot.
Surely one of the most wonderful classes of ephemera is trading cards, the non-sports variety. Most SF fans know of such famous sets as the Mars Attacks! one, with "shocking" illustrations that caused much controversy. But what other sets from the heyday of such cards—a decade roughly bounded by the years 1959 and 1969—can you summon up? If your failing memory needs jogging, visit Monster Cards of the 1950s and 1960s.
Here you'll find concise data on such well-distributed sets as "You'll Die Laughing," with its Jack Davis drawings, to such rarities as the science-fictional "Adventures of Captain Chapel," which only saw release through Mister Softee locations. Each set is represented by a few thumbnails of sample cards, fronts and backs and sometimes even the wrappers, but unfortunately the thumbnails are not enlargeable, and not every card is depicted. Still, the resolution is good enough to inspire much marveling. And you can even perform scientific studies, by, say, comparing the makeup jobs of the original Planet of the Apes actors—as featured on their card set—to that of the recent retread. Finally, a link to Good Stuff Cards sets you up to buy new sets and reproductions of some of the oldies you've been admiring.
All that's missing from this site is the gum!
— Paul Di Filippo
Site of the Week—December 10, 2001
cience fiction as a genre is an American invention. The legendary editor Hugo Gernback pulled together elements that already existed in such writers as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and from them distilled a new form of literature. Since the founding of Amazing magazine in 1928, many other countries have added their voices to the genre chorus, and what at one time belonged to but one country long ago become an international phenomenon. Many countries have reinterpreted science fiction for themselves, in turn energizing it for the rest of us.
Of all these varied nations, the one that has evolved to publish the largest-circulation SF magazine in the world is the People's Republic of China. The print version of its monthly fiction magazine Science Fiction World—published since 1979 in Chengdu, the capital city of the country's Sichuan Province—boasts a circulation of over 370,000 copies per issue, a figure which beats the readership of any other SF magazine many times over. In addition, the company also publishes two other periodicals—a media magazine titled Amazing Files and an SF magazine for children, Flying.
As one would expect of such a vast SF empire, the Web site that supports it is also vast. Science Fiction World contains not only a great deal of fiction, but also news, movie reviews, book reviews, games reviews, a bulletin board and more. As I reviewed the site in Chengdu with Web master Lu Wei and the rest of the staff, I realized that in the comprehensive range of content it offers readers, Science Fiction World could almost be considered a Chinese-language Science Fiction Weekly. For those who can read Chinese, the site is a window on another culture's take on SF. And even for those who can't decipher the details, the site is still fun to explore, its depth standing as further proof that SF belongs to the entire world.
— Scott Edelman
Back to the top.
