One of the many San Diego Comic-Con annoucements this past weekend including the all new Chuck community hub, Chuck Me Out! (incase you missed Comic-Con, you can watch the Chuck panel here)  Chuck Me Out! is a new site from NBC and the creators of Chuck that features all new videos, news, photos, and posters about the series along with message boards, videos, and exclusives for fans.

Included in the mix is a thermometer that is tracking views of Chuck episodes on NBC.com with a goal of 1 million streams.  Check out the link above and catch up on episodes of Chuck and lets help reach that goal in a record time!  I’m not sure why this isn’t up with the Hulu video of the Chuck Comic-Con panel, but Jeffster opened the panel! Click here to rock along with them!

The 2009 San Diego Comic-Con is going to have a lot of panels, showcases, signings and events, but I wanted to take a moment to look at what is ahead at the con for one of My Hollywood Dream’s favorite shows, Chuck!

On Friday, July 24th, Zachary Levi will be apart of the TV Guide Sci-Fi Hot List and will be part of a Q&A with Johnny Galecki and Jim Parsons of The Big Bang Theory, Scott Peters and Scott Wolf from the new reboot of V, Rebecca Romijn of fall’s Eastwick, and Kevin Williamson the writer of Scream who is behind the new vampire series based on the book series with the same name, The Vampire Diaries.  This panel begins at 6:15pm in Ballroom 20.

Saturday the real fun begins! At 10am in Ballroom 20 (why so early?) is the Chuck panel.  It will begin with a five-minute retrospective highlight reel, then moderator Alan Sepinwall will present Josh Schwartz, Chris Fedak, Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski, Joshua Gomez, Ryan McPartlin, Mark Christopher Lawrence,Vik Sahay, Scott Krinsky, Sarah Lancaster and Adam Baldwin. They’ll hold a Q&A and preview the new season.  While they will not have footage to show from the new season, they will definitly be giving away some much desired info on the direction of the new season (Super-Chuck?) and you never know when they might give away prizes like t-shirts or DVDs.

Following the panel, all of the cast members from the panel will be heading to the WB booth to sign autographs and chat with fans.  Don’t forget your camera, because this is your chance to snap a pic with your favorite cast member.

Also, keep an eve on the WB’s booth over the course of the whole convention, because you never known when they might be giving away Chuck related goodies. In the past I’ve taken home free Chuck comics and a really cool bag. If you are heading to San Diego, have fun at the con!

Wow, this weekend went by fast! Lots of news to enjoy with your morning coffee.

• Natasha Henstridge will voice the villainous Charity Vile in Stan Lee’s new animated webseries Time Jumper. The comic book styled thriller follows a college student who finds his late father’s time-travel device and is recruited by a secret crime fighting unit to help take down a criminal cartel led by Vile. The series will have ten episodes ranging in length from five to eight minutes.

• Warner Brothers and Leonardo DiCaprio have hired Rand Ravich to write a new Twilight Zone flick.  The film will be based on classic episodes of the series but is rumored to be one story and not presented in anthology format like Twilight Zone: The Movie.  I never watched Ravich’s NBC series Life, nor his film The Astronaut’s Wife, so I just sorta shrug at his name. Although I’m glad to see a new Twilight Zone film moving forward. I wonder which stories they might adapt for this.

• There aren’t nearly enough movies about woman’s roller derby (or roller derby in general). Check out this trailer for Whip It, starring Ellen Page, Kristen Wiig, and Drew Barrymore (who also directed the movie).

• Dark Horse comics has a free eComic version of H.G.Wells’ War of the Worlds. The comic is a straight adaptation of the classic novel.  64 pages for free? How can you say no?  Click here to give it a read.

• Jorja Fox (sans William Petersen) will make a multiple episode return to CSI‘s next season. What brings her character back to Las Vegas? Where is Grissom? According to Entertainment Weekly, we’ll find out on September 24th.

• While on the subject of EW, they put together a pretty cool gallery of preview images for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con.  Sadly, this will be the first one I will not be able to attend in the past 4 years. Preview night is Wednesday, and panels are Thursday through Sunday. Expect a ton of movie and TV news this week!

It is that time again, sit back, relax and enjoy your weekly Pit!

• The 2009 San Diego Comic-Con’s Wednesday Preview night will include sneak peek screenings of the pilots for Human Target, V, and The Vampire Diaries. While The Vampire Diaries looks like it is taking all of the horrible things about Twilight and making it into a TV series, the comic adaptation Human Target and the remake of the alien invasion V actually look really interesting.

• Fox has hired Kyle Ward to pen a script for Hitman 2, a sequel to the studio’s abomination that they tried to pass off as an adaptation of the hit game. Variety describes the plot of the sequel as a time that “catches title character, Agent 47, at a low point.” Funny enough, the first Hitman movie was the title character’s low point!

• With the casting of Ryan Reynolds as Green Lantern, Warner Brothers and DC Comics better get their act together with their other superhero properties. The Marc Guggenheim penned GL script features a cameo by Clark Kent. Will the WB use this to tie together a movie DC Universe? Will they continue forward with Brandon Routh as Clark Kent? Tom Welling? Or start fresh again.  Would it be very jarring to cast a new Clark Kent who we don’t know before a new Superman film has even had any development? For once, I really wish the WB and DC could take a page from Marvel Studio’s book .
  

• While on the subject of Marvel, their comic side has posted a new free issue online, Captain America Reborn: Prelude. As the title says, it is a prelude to their currently running Captain America Reborn limited series which showcases the return of the classic Captian, Steve Rogers.  Check it out at Marvel’s website.

• I guess I’m going to keep this week’s Pit completely geektaskic. TheWB.com has posted all 13 episodes of the Blade TV spin-off. I missed it in its original run, so I’m excited to be able to watch it whenever I want online, for free. With all this recent talk about a possible Blade movie prequel and Ryan Reynolds getting another comic book role, I’ve been back in the mood for the vampire hunter.

• Previewing this week’s comic preview… BOOM! Studios is releasing the first issue of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a straight book to comic adaptation of the classic Philip K. Dick novel that inspired Blade Runner. The series will run for 24 issues.

I saw a panel and behind the scenes footage for the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline” at the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con and it blew me away. Henry Selick (who directed “The Nightmare Before Christmas”) is directing “Coraline” in all of its stop motion glory in 3D. The teaser trailer for the film has hit the web and you can view it after the jump…

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DC Comics and the makers of Mortal Kombat are teaming up for one of the strangest video game crossovers ever, pitting characters from both universes against each other in a fighting game. At the San Diego Comic-Con, the makers of the game brought some footage and described various features and characters within the game. Well, they have been kind enough to share that footage online…

I love Sin City and I love Frank Miller’s comics, but I’m still not sold on The Spirit. It really irritates me when people talk about “Frank Miller movies” and his “film style” when they fail to realize that he has no style yet. Sin City was only co-directed by Miller; the actual directing was done by Robert Rodriguez. He brought Miller on as a co-director in order to preserve the style of the comic books. Miller had previously never allowed his work to be filmed, but when Rodriguez offered him co-director credit and an opportunity to be on the set to be certain that Rodriguez wasn’t screwing up his work, he agreed to let him make Sin City. Miller had little to no part in the actual directing of the film and the style is literally his comic book brought to life.

The Spirit is Frank Miller’s actual first film, as he is directing someone else’s material in his first solo effort. So far, it all looks like a cheap Sin City to me, as though he hasn’t actually developed his own style and is simply aiming for the praise that Sin City earned. I’m nowhere near being sold on The Spirit yet, especially since there’s just no reason to give it that Sin City style. I will give Frank this though, this is the third Comic-Con I’ve seen him speak at and this was the most vocal I’ve ever seen him. He’s normally very quiet and introverted during panels with short answers, yet he seemed very enthused to show some Spirit footage for us. He brought out some of his cast: Gabriel Macht (The Spirit himself), Jamie King (Lorelei Rox), and Samuel L. Jackson (The Octopus) and showed us various clips from the film.

The first clip showed The Spirit with one of his many women, Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson) as they have an intimate conversation. The second clip was prefaced with a long explanation of this new technology that they used in order for the actors to look like they were underwater though they actually weren’t…however it didn’t look to me as though they were underwater at all. The clip showed Sand Saref (Eva Mendes) looking for something in a lake when The Octopus shows up. The final clip was a campy fight sequence between The Octopus and The Spirit, and the closest thing to the actual source material.

The problem with all these clips was that they all looked like they were from different films. The first conversation appeared out of a 50’s noir flick, the second underwater sequence out of a cheesy sci fi flick with bad effects, and the third appeared to be a campy super hero flick, which is what I think the rest of the film should look like. It all makes me just a little nervous that Miller’s trying to do too much in his first outing. If anything though, it certainly looks like he’s enjoying himself.