“Coming in 2013!” Many movies that are announced never come out. Two that were announced in 2013 as “coming soon” and then disappeared seem to be unfortunate M.I.A.s, from Flayrah’s point of view.

Oggy and the Cockroaches: The Movie. “Ever since the world was born, two forces have been locked in perpetual battle. Their struggle is so Manichean, so ferocious, so Herculean that it makes the clash between good and evil look like a game of checkers! This ancestral duel is so ancient and so merciless that it can only be...Oggy against the Cockroaches!” The trailer, featuring the eternal battle between cats and cockroaches “from the Stone Age to the Space Age”, shows an imaginative mixture of animation styles, with the Stone Age and Medieval age in traditional 2D cartoon animation, the present as a mixture of cartoon and computer graphic imagery, and the futuristic Space Age sequences in all CGI.

Did you ever hear of Oggy and the Cockroaches: The Movie? Did you ever hear of an Oggy and the Cockroaches regular animated TV series? Then you’re not French, Indian, or Vietnamese. Oggy et les Cafards, 7 minutes an episode, has been broadcast in France since 1998, and has sold to Indian and Vietnamese TV. The Indian broadcast appears on the Cartoon Network there, but in Hindi. The two-hour movie premiered in French theaters on August 7, 2013, and since a trailer in English exists, someone is apparently trying to get it distributed in America. Good luck.

We don’t look at a lot of board games around here (how anthropomorphic can you get with them, really?), but now and then something catches our interest.  One such thing is Sewer Pirats. It’s a new 4-player board game created by Andreas Pelikan, with artwork by Marina Fahrenbach, and published by Heidelberger Spieleverlag (whew!). Here’s how they describe it: “In Sewer Pirats, deep underground in a maze of domed caverns, narrow tunnels, and piped passages, a motley cast of rodents, insects, and other vermin sail the treacherous waters of human refuse aboard bizarre vessels in search of discarded booty. In order to claim the best haul from the abandoned flotsam, players must make careful use of the unique abilities of their crews’ rats, cockroaches, weasels, and other critters. Don’t settle for less than left-over fast food and dumped toys. Go for your goal to become a true legend among the sewer pirates.” Apparently out for a while now in Europe, the game has only recently become available in North America. Check it out at Board Game Geek.

image c. 2012 Heidelberger Spieleverlag