You know the drill! It’s the State of the Wall post, showing everything coming up as well as news about a platform change and other need-to-know information about things currently happening here!

Schedule of Upcoming Episodes
12/4 – Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Dark Holiday Special
12/11 – Sensation Comics #14: The Story of Fir Balsam
12/18 – Steam Wars Christmas Special
12/25 – Christmas with the Superheroes #2
1/1 – My Top 15 Favorite Episodes of AT4W
1/8 – PATREON: Legion of Superheroes: The Great Darkness Saga
1/15 – Patreon Viewers’ Choice (NFL SuperPro #2, Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos #3, or James Bond, Jr. #1)
1/22 – PATREON: JLA/Avengers
1/29 – PATREON: Homestuck, Act 2

As always, the schedule is subject to change for any number of reasons, I’m pretty locked down with these choices… aside from MAYBE my Top 15 Favorite Episodes. I keep waffling on it, but for now it’s what we’re going with.

The Road to 500… and the 10th Anniversary
2018 will mark the 10th Anniversary of Atop the Fourth Wall! Needless to say, it’s going to be a big year for the show. If everything goes according to plan, there will be two storylines within it – the Contest of Champions arc that began in October as well as a shorter 10th Anniversary storyline whose name I shall reveal once we get to it, likely ending October 29th (if not the 22nd to coincide with the 10th Anniversary episode).

To celebrate this momentous time, every review that is not a Patreon-sponsored episode will be a follow-up to something from the past ten years! This would include sequel episodes to previous material, like another issue of something covered previously, a thematic follow-up like, say, from the same creators as a popular episode or could be thought of as following the same ideas as that episode. However, thankfully some of the Patreon-sponsored episodes themselves will be follow-ups, as indicated by the January 29th episode being the second act of Homestuck (which should hopefully make the many Homestuck fans asking for me to cover the next act happy).

Along those same lines, we’ll be doing the second Patreon Viewers’ Choice episode! The official announcement for the poll on that one will likely come at the end of the Top 15 Favorite Episodes of AT4W, but I’m letting you see the choices now to start thinking about it. The choice will be between three goofy tie-in comics I’ve covered previously – another issue of NFL SuperPro, another issue of Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos, or going all the way back to James Bond, Jr.’s first issue. I did return to James Bond, Jr. for a live show that hasn’t been put up yet, but we haven’t seen it on the show proper since the end of 2009. A comment on that issue is the source of the infamous “You’ll never be as popular as the BeeGees!” comment that is now immortalized on the back of the second DVD.

But of course there’s even another big even happening in 2018 as part of the 10th Anniversary – we’re going to hit the 500th episode! I definitely want to do some special stuff this year for the 500th, most especially being another livestream like we had for the 300th. It’ll take some time to plan, but here’s a list of ideas I have currently for it:
-More testimonials, trivia, and anecdotes like in the 300th
-Showing some otherwise-DVD exclusive content from all my DVDs, including the Movie
-Showing the previous “100th episodes” – Sonic Live #1, Spider-Man: One More day, Holy Terror, and Marvel Super Special #7: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
-A live showing of the conclusion to Pokémon Omicron, where we’ll take on the Elite 4
-Various Longbox of the Damned episodes
-Special guests
-Live-riffing some shorts

These are all just ideas for the time being, so if you have any of your own, feel free to let me know! We’ve got 5-6 months until the 500th and I’d love to know what people think!

Platform Change 4: The Revengeance of the Whils
VidMe has announced that they are shutting down their services as of December 15th. As such, there are going to be some changes in how things are handled around here. This is the FOURTH time that a platform has failed and I have had enough. We hadn’t even really finished replacing the vidme embeds on the LAST embed player change, so screw it: we’re going all in on youtube. There might be an option for Vimeo down the road, but for now, here’s in the broad sense what’s going to happen:
-All Atop the Fourth Wall videos, from here on, will be thumbnail images of the title card that you click through to go straight to youtube.
-All Longbox of the Damned embeds will be made into youtube embeds. Next year’s Longbox videos are currently up in the air, but hey – we’ve got ten months to figure that out and maybe have a tried and tested system in place. For now, it makes more sense to make them youtube embeds because of people’s nature in marathon-viewing videos and Longbox videos are short enough as-is.
-New videos like vlogs, side content, and Let’s Plays will follow the title card thumbnail process being used for Atop the Fourth Wall. Old videos are up in the air, but they will likely be embedded videos just to make life easier on us as we once again replace everything.
-History of Power Rangers… well, that’s a bit of a beast all on its own. Refer to the History of Power Rangers section below for more details.

As always, I ask for patience during yet another period of transition. Plenty of videos will be unavailable during this time (including crossovers in particular), but we’ll try our damndest to get things back to working order as soon as possible.

History of Power Rangers
I’m happy to report that FINALLY, all of History of Power Rangers is back up after so many months of being down due to ContentID striking many of them from VidMe. Minor edits have been made due to the lengths of certain clips used…

…And you can only enjoy them for another 13 days because VidMe is shutting down. Or rather you can DOWNLOAD them for another 13 days using a third-party downloader.

Simply put: I’ve had it. These videos were made for a different time, when Blip was the main video host and longer usage of video clips wasn’t an issue. The platforms have dwindled and it’s down to youtube and I’ve already tried to upload these videos to youtube once before and it didn’t end well. The audio quality of these videos isn’t that great compared to my current standards and many of them utilized low-quality pirated versions of episodes recorded off of TV. I own all of Power Rangers on DVD now and new Power Rangers content that I put out has to come from legitimate sources like DVDs anyway. I simply cannot make these older versions work anymore. Don’t bother trying to suggest another video host like Vimeo or DailyMotion. Aside from both having their own ContentID systems, I am tired of trying to accommodate an inferior product.

Work will begin anew on the revised History of Power Rangers videos. While I had wanted to work on them in order, it took forever just to get the SLIGHTLY-edited versions back on VidMe due to my busy schedule. As such, I’m going to release them on youtube out of order, starting with Overdrive through RPM (Samurai, Megaforce, and Dino Charge already exist on youtube) because of their already-decent audio quality. If you want the old versions (and sadly that will now include the SLIGHTLY-edited versions that I have put up more recently), feel free to download them however way you can, because I am no longer going to try to support it. Let it not be said that I didn’t TRY to keep them up after so many years of fighting with various platforms over them.

I had planned to announce that it was likely the In Space History of Power Rangers would be delayed as it is simply due to the busy schedules of others needed to work on the “Under Pressure” section, but, well, here we are. Hopefully we can see HOPR restored to something better than it was once the dust completely settles.

Let’s Play Pokémon Omicron
As stated in the last State of the Wall, the Pokémon Omicron streams are on hiatus due to finally reaching the Elite 4. Due to the various things I’ve had do to these last few months (not the least of which being concluding a storyline, Longbox, AND getting married) I’ve had little to no time to work on Omicron videos. As I’ve said before, I’d like to do a major stream for the Elite 4. If you look above, I’ve suggested fighting the Elite 4 as part of the 500th AT4W Episode Celebration Live Show and would like to hear some feedback on that.

Storyline Compilations
In case you haven’t been following the youtube channel (which you probably should be at this point given what’s going on with VidMe – link HERE), the Game Show Reviewer (who does a lot of the special effects for the show) has put together compilation videos of the AT4W storyline! They feature JUST the storyline segments and occasionally a clip or two from a review for context (or because he felt a joke was funny enough to include). At this time, everything through the “His Blue Soul” arc has been released. The other compilation videos are done and uploaded, but I’m currently waiting for some ContentID claims on the Royalty-Free music to pass before I release the rest. Otherwise, you can enjoy the compilations currently available thanks to this hand-dandy playlist.

DVDs and T-Shirts Sale
In honor of the holiday season, IT’S SALE TIME! All INDIVIDUAL volumes of Atop the Fourth Wall DVDs have been reduced to ten dollars (until December 26th), including the most recent – Volume 3: Character Reboot. In addition, Shark Robot is still running their Black Friday sale through December 6th – just use the promo code “BLACKFRIDAY17” on the two Atop the Fourth Wall t-shirts – “I am a Man” and “Because Poor Literacy is KEWL!” You can find those shirts HERE!

After the Black Friday sale is done with, you can order the t-shirts with 15% off the price with the promo code AT4WXMAS! That sale will run through December 26th, as well!

I’m working on getting some other sales ready for both the Screenwave store and the T-shirts, so feel free to keep checking back here for any updates on additional sales!

Event Comics Month II
The first Event Comics Month was such a big success we’re doing it again next year! As before, it’s a vote by patrons at any level picking two DC and two Marvel event comics! You can check it out HERE, become a Patron, and make your vote known about what you’d like to see reviewed next year!

Patreon
As a reminder, the Patreon-sponsored review tier for Patreon is still closed for the moment, with details you can read HERE. While I still don’t have a date yet as to when I plan to reopen them, I’ve been taking your feedback about it into consideration. A common train of thought is that any non-comic review should at least be in some way linked to comics, be it about superheroes or, at the very least, linked to something I actually regularly do/am in some way interested in (for instance, the occasional sentai reviews are fine given History of Power Rangers, or video games could be Star Trek or Pokémon or the like). I don’t think that’s too unfair a compromise given what people are thinking, but I wouldn’t mind getting more feedback about it during this time, so feel free to make your feelings about it known if you haven’t already!

That’s all I’ve got for now! Feel free to let me know your thoughts/concerns/questions for everything going on!

Back Issues!