Sunday, January 17, 2016

DVD Update: Wizards & Warriors

Wizards & Warriors (1983)

WARNING: This is an ANCIENT Post! Only slightly updated.

This post has been sitting around for a few many many months almost years since the September 2014 release. I just was never motivated to continue with it, plus once again scanning photos or surfing the web for an appropriate image caused me to dilly dally and procrastinate. While trying to clear out my dusty drafts folder I decided it would be better to go ahead and post an out of date old post, and add some images, rather than delete it wasting any effort I put into it.


The long awaited television series Wizards and Warriors (1983) has finally come to DVD 30 years after it originally aired sort of. Unfortunately the series was very short lived having only 8 episodes total. I'm not even sure if all of them were aired. Again an unfortunate event is it is only available as an "On Demand" Title. Meaning it is made to order ONLY when ordered online and burned onto a DVD-R not a regular mass printing.

Marco (Walter Olkewicz) and Prince Erik Greystone (Jeff Conaway)

The series was a sword and sorcery fantasy series that starred Jeff Conaway, Clive Revill, Duncan Regehr, Ian Wolfe, Walter Olkewicz, Julia Duffy and Randi Brooks with an appearance (well two) by Christine De Lisle. It was very tongue planted securely in cheek slapstick campy humor. Sort of a Dungeons and Dragons version of the 1970s When Things Were Rotten. Which was a short lived Robin Hood series produced by Mel Brooks.

When I first heard this was coming to DVD I was super excited since I loved the show and hadn't seen it since the original airings. Sure some people have been selling pirated copies on all formats (even some VHS copies) on Ebay for years. However, they were typical pirate low-quality copies not even worth watching. Most copied from an ancient VHS copy.

The Wizard Vector (Clive Revill) and The Witch Bethal (Randi Brooks)

I'm not sure if I am going to take the plunge on this one. I'm not too thrilled about the ON Demand concept. There are some other titles of shows/movies that are in this same ON DEMAND DVD-R boat. I can't think of those titles at this moment and I don't want to do any more research for this ancient post. I would love to get this, but I'm just not sure.

The best photos of the show seem to be at a fan website called wizardsandwarriors.org of course. It is an old site and probably hasn't been updated. That is the site I got the screen shots from. It seems to be the only site people have gotten stuff from, they have the most variety of images, i.e. more than just what a quick Google image search gives you. The DVD cover shot is at several sites, most of them I think are from people who got the DVD and reviewed it on some online forum.

Show links on imdb.com
Wizards and Warriors (1983)
When Things Were Rotten (1975)

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

An Update of Sorts

A Book Update and Maybe More
(or Less)

I have been doing a little house cleaning here on this blog by updating somethings that were severely outdated. One of those was my reading list static page. I only had a link to my Goodreads booklist. I have beefed it up some with recent reads from the last few years. I still have more to go and since my online list says I have 472 books read and I know there are more books I have read that I haven't even logged in on the list. Many of those I have to make sure the correct edition is logged in. If I keep up with it eventually due to character limitations for pages (something like 1MB of data) whenever I reach that limit I will have to break the page up some. I know one thing would be to break off the Series that I have listed onto a series page, or if the series is big enough break off it's own page. Sort of what I have done with Charmed already but for now I have decided to keep the Charmed books on the overall list as well. For some I might just have an ongoing post rather than a static page devoted.

If I have reviewed a book I have linked to my review as posted on this blog, or wherever else whenever. For now I have the list alphabetical by author's last name (but shown first name first). After I have added to my satisfaction, or patience I might tweak the page to make things easier to read, like switching to showing last name first. Maybe I should do that anyway. Hmm.

It has also been a while (try years not just months) since I've posted a review, let alone actually written one. I've been planning on correcting that. 

Friday, January 01, 2016

State Of The Blog: 2015 Recap

State of The Blog
2015 Edition

As I sort of detected and suspected about halfway through the year this past year 2015 I DID NOT meet my minimum posting quota for blogging. Lets see how I did anyway:

January: 1
February: 1
March: 5
April: 1
May: 3
June: 5
July: 3
August: 1
September: 1
October: 1
November: 1
December: 1

TOTAL: 24
Monthly Average: 2

This year I FAILED the yearly goal of 32 posts per year. That is the 3rd time in 10 years, but it had been 4 years since the last time, and this failure was the "best" of the "worst". There were several factors this year, the regular procrastinating. Not concentrating on What to blog about. Plus early on I was concentrating on trying to meet my book reading goal of a minimum of 20 books for the year. I beat that one by one book and am currently about 20% through what would have been book #22 but will officially be counted as book one for 2016 since that was the year I Finished it not started it.

Now lets look at how the 2015 blogging matches up with past years:

2006 - 32
2007 - 43
2008 - 36
2009 - 34
2010 - 18
2011 - 20
2012 - 38
2013 - 93
2014 - 57
2015 - 24

Yearly Average: 39.50

2015 brings the yearly average from 41.22 down to 39.50 an almost 2 post drop per year. The monthly average in 2015 was only 2 instead of the 2.6? to meet the yearly goal. So all in all it wasn't THAT bad, but it still hurts. I is like an NFL team going 6-10 instead of breaking even at 8-8. Not terrible but still a losing season.

I hope to improve on my blogging this year in 2016.