Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Amazing Screw On Head


Mike Mignola will probably go down in history as the man who created Hellboy and rightly so. It's a beautiful, creepy, funny, intense book that's just as original today as when it was created in 1994.

But Mignola has done other things. He's drawn Batman and Superman and the X-Men and Spider-Man and done great work with all of them. He also created another book; The Amazing Screw-On Head. And Sci-Fi made a pilot of it.

Here's where it gets interesting. I could tell you it's a great show because it has all the atmosphere of Hellboy with dialogue that sounds like The Tick. I could tell you that it captures the look of Mignola's art when even the team creating the Hellboy animated movie said it couldn't be done. I could tell you that it stars Paul Giamatti, David Hyde Pierce and Molly Shannon. And all of this would be true.

But what makes this show notable is the way Sci Fi is marketing it. They commissioned the pilot, they bought it and they're going to air it next week. But they're still waiting to see if it will become a series. This is where you come in. You can see the entire pilot (yes, the entire pilot) now on Sci Fi.com. Then you can fill out a survey to help decide whether it will get a full order of episodes. This is all before the pilot even airs.

Sci Fi is at a critical point in its development. After years of airing straight to video movies that couldn't make it to video, they finally have a critical and commercial success with the new Battlestar Galactica. And they want to keep going in that direction, with smarter, sharper, more interesting properties. Is Amazing Screw On Head a part of that direction? Go and tell them yourself.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Watched the piece on SciFi yesterday. Fucking cool as hell.