Pop Culture Safari!

Bat villains!

Stephen Fry to play Sherlock Holmes' smarter brother

The great British comic/actor will play Mycroft Holmes opposite Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock in a sequel to last year's Holmes movie.

Now streaming on Netflix: Isis and more!

I have fond memories and I'm not sure why of Isis and the Captain Marvel live-action series of the 1970s. Pure nostalgia, I suppose. Anyway, I may watch some of these episodes. Can somebody tell me why the Shazam series isn't available on video? Some rights thing I suppose, but why?

Anyway, here are some new offerings I found interesting, now available on your computer or Roku box:

Michael Palin travel specials.
A Bit of Fry and Laurie Season One.
Isis.
A whole ton of National Geographic specials.

Hear Neil Young's new guitar album

Also on NPR. This one's pretty interesting, both to listen to and the story behind it:

As producer Daniel Lanois puts it, there is no band, no overdubs, just "a man on a stool and me doing a nice job on the recording."

...To record the album, Lanois gave Young an electro/acoustic guitar; he'd spent years perfecting the instrument's electronics.

"I wanted to give him something he'd never heard before. He picked up that instrument, which had everything — an acoustic sound, electronica, bass sounds — and he knew when he played it that we had taken the acoustic guitar to a new level. It's hard to come up with a new sound at the back end of 50 years of rock 'n' roll, but I think we did it."

Hear Sean Lennon's new band

His new duo with girlfriend Charlotte Kemp Muhl has a bad name (Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger) but performs some good music. You can hear them in session on NPR here.