August 30th, 2007Heroes on Ice
Masi Oka can. The NBC hit’s happiest hero promised it to reporters on a recent conference call promoting the series’ first-season DVD (released today), second-season TV premiere (Sept. 24 on NBC) and current Heroes World Tour, a global promotional jaunt by three different clusters of the show’s actors and producers.
(The World Tour hits New York Tuesday for a 9 a.m. “Heroes” DVD signing at The NBC Experience store in Rockefeller Center. Expected are cast members Noah Gray-Cabey, James Kyson Lee, Zachary Quinto and new arrival Dania Ramirez, plus artist Tim Sale and co-executive producer Jeph Loeb.)
Oka told reporters he and “Heroes” creator Tim Kring will be on the Asia trip, hitting Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore. (The third group goes to Europe.) “And when we come to your city,” Oka enthused, in his real-life American accent, “we put on a full show. We’re going to be a musical on ice skates. The ‘Heroes’ Ice Capades is what’s going to happen.”
Nothing is impossible
Before you scoff - and yes, Oka, was kidding - remember that anything can happen when it comes to “Heroes.” Nobody expected that much from this fanciful drama when it premiered last fall to middling reviews. (Full disclosure: I wrote a rave.) But “Heroes” just kept exploding. The ratings grew through the winter. NBC’s Web site went nuts, as fans flocked to an online graphic novel, insider blogs, busy message boards and eventually full-episode streams where diehards could dissect each week’s minutiae and hear cast/crew commentary. NBC is selling more than 30 “Heroes” merchandise items, from T-shirts and caps, to art pins and Oka-faced Hiro watches. (They’re “by Sylar,” the power-leech villain who, you may recall, was a watchmaker.) “Heroes”-mania now reaches so far and wide that “on ice” isn’t out of the question.
But the focus is currently on Universal’s seven-disc DVD set (list price $60), a black series-logo package that folds out to reveal colorful comic illustrations of the everyday characters unwittingly turned superpowered heroes. Creator Kring said in the conference call with Oka he hopes the DVD will attract new fans who weren’t on board from the beginning and “felt that they couldn’t jump on to the show midseason, because they felt that they would have missed too much. Or people that just wait now for the DVD to come out in order to catch up with what’s on television.”
The “Heroes” set makes that easy with bonus features that illuminate the show’s evolution. While newcomers should probably start with the hour series pilot as it aired on NBC, fans who’ve already been there can jump to the first disc’s bonus original pilot: an extended 74-minute cut previously shown only at last year’s Comic-Con. Its cutting-room-floor scenes introduce Greg Grunberg’s mind-reading cop character right away (he didn’t arrive on-air till the second episode), in conjunction with a never-aired thread about a reluctant Muslim extremist (Omid Abtahi) who has radioactive hands - a power that instead manifested in the character of Sprague.
Too real world
It’s easy to see why this intriguing thread was jettisoned - it introduces far too sensitive a slice of real-world jeopardy to the otherwise escapist proceedings. You can hear all about it in Kring’s full-length commentary, where he explains the dropping of this “dark, kind of terrorist story.”
More insight arrives in some very nice, concise featurettes - a general making-of with Kring and the cast (10 minutes); a look at stunt work (10 minutes); a just-detailed-enough illustration of how visual effects create locations and freeze time (9 minutes); a glimpse of Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman scoring the music (9 minutes), and some time with the artist who creates painter Isaac’s portentous art, Tim Sale (11 minutes).
It’s clear that “we started our planning of the DVD pretty much right at the very beginning,” Kring said, “in terms of a lot of the behind-the-scenes footage that we shot, the commentaries. The core audience of a show like ‘Heroes’ is very savvy about these kinds of things, and wants a DVD that reflects the nature of the show, which is always surprising and always state of the art. So we’re aiming very high with this.”
They’ve also produced an HD-DVD set (list price $100) that Sale says “has tremendous interactive capabilities. It allows you to navigate onto the Web and collect various materials, and to participate in various games and tests. It allows viewers, through a feature called U-Control, to follow various threads in the show. There’s even an extension that allows you to look closer at all of the artwork that Tim Sale did for our show. So there’s just a tremendous amount of extra stuff for the fans to watch.”
Did I mention the regular DVD set’s 50 deleted scenes? Or the 12 other episode commentaries? (Fans may have heard these online.) And Kring promises, “we’re approaching Season 2 with many of the same ideas as season 1, of just creating as much extra material for the audience to see.”
Oka’s reaction? “I’m still waiting for ‘Heroes’ on Ice.”
