ECV Spinner Rack #1: DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 4 Premiere
Hello, and welcome to the Emerald City Video podcast. I’m your host, Russ Burlingame, and if you listen to the show at all, you know me.
If you don’t listen to the show — and it just so happens that the episode where I give an explainer is your first episode to the show — then I’ll break it down for you.
Emerald City Video was, until April of 2009, a video rental store in Syracuse, New York. I used to manage the store for a while, and since this show started, nearly every voice you have heard on this show is someone who used to work at Emerald City at one time or another, as well.
This episode, I am introducing the ECV Spinner Rack, named for the spinning magazine racks that people used to be able to get comic books off of back when comics were sold anywhere other than comic book specialty stores. And, as you might guess, this segment, or this type of episode, will be dedicated to looking at comics and comic book adaptations on TV.
I am leaving the movies alone, since they are huge blockbusters and almost always get covered on the New Release Wall anyway.
When I am not podcasting about movies with people who used to work at a video store, my real, paying job is writing about comics and related media for ComicBook.com. Up to now I have kept a wall up between the two gigs, but as we near our hundredth episode, I am looking to roll out some new features and some new ideas for ECV.
More on that in the weeks and months to come.
For a long while, I had a podcast called Panel Discussions, in which I talked about comics and related media with people who, believe it or not, NEVER EVEN WORKED AT A VIDEO STORE. Crazy, I know.
I recently shuttered that podcast; it was just another thing costing me $15 a month to host, and I did not have the time to consistently update it. But since I still like talking about that stuff, and sometimes I like to talk about It in ways that are not conducive to how we write stories or what I am assigned to cover at work.
So here I am. And in keeping with things like the New Release Wall and Five for Five, I wanted to give this a veneer or the video store, creating a title for the feature that would resemble something you might actually find in a video store. So — The ECV Spinner Rack.
In the near future, one of the big changes we are going to be rolling out is that we are going to have other co-hosts who haven’t all worked for ECV in the past. When I do so, I will introduce them by asking them where their home video store was, when the last time was they were in a video store, and what their favorite video store memory is. That will give us all a point of commonality and community, even when they aren’t people who worked or rented at ECV.
Today’s guest is Michele Curran, the co-host of the Krypton Podcast and the Hashtag TV Geek Podcast. I met Michele through another show I host, Archie Digest: A Riverdale Podcast, and we have become friends in the couple of years that show has been running. She has appeared on Panel Discussions in the past, discussing last year’s “Crisis on Earth-X” crossover event with me.
Tonight will be another chance for Michele and I to talk about The CW’s shared DC Comics universe of shows, as we will be looking at DC’S LEGENDS OF TOMORROW. Legends, which debuted its fourth season tonight, centers on a ragtag team of misfits and C-list superheroes who travel through time fixing things, breaking them again, and then fixing their own mistakes. After an underwhelming first season — which I actually didn’t mind, and so you can see quotes from my review of the pilot used as examples on the show’s Wikipedia page — the show found its groove by embracing the weird, fun energy that the characters and its cast brought to the table naturally.
Each season of Legends has been something of a soft reboot, and this year things are getting a bit…magical. At the end of season three, the Legends defeated Mallus, a demon who had been trapped in a time prison. In order to have their final showdown with the demon, they needed to release him from his prison, but doing so opened the door for other beings and creatures who now have to be rounded up and sent back to where they came from.
The team will be joined in the quest by John Constantine, played by Matt Ryan. Constantine is a demonologist and master of the mystic arts — or a petty dabbler, if you want to be really specific about it. Ryan’s version first appeared on a self-titled NBC series that ran for a single season before moving to The CW, where he has made occasional appearances on Arrow and Legends, as well as headlining an animated movie that was serialized and shown as short episodes on the web-based CW Seed network. The movie, along with about a half an hour of previously-unseen footage, is available now on Blu-ray and DVD.
As I have always endeavored to do with Archie Digest, this segment is intended to be released immediately after Legends airs its premiere on the East Coast. So — spoilers ahead, and don’t listen to us talk about the show until you have had a chance to see the episode. If you missed it, press pause now and wait until tomorrow, when you can either buy it on your Video On Demand service of choice or stream it on The CW’s website.
Without further ado, the first episode of ECV’s Spinner Rack.
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