Sad news indeed as it seems Spartacus: Blood and Sand star Andy Whitfield won’t be able to return to the show for its second season due to health complications. According to Starz, the network which produces the show, the actor’s doctors have advised him to stop training for season two of the series and seek immediate, aggressive treatment for his illness.

The actor was first diagnosed with treatable Stage 1 non-Hodgkin Lymphoma in early March but had been in remission. He was even at Comic-Con in San Diego where we spoke to him and he seemed perfectly healthy and in good spirits, ready to begin season 2 of the series.

Starz is currently in production on a prequel series called Spartacus: Gods of the Arena which it plans to air in January and then was to begin production on season 2 of the main series following that for a planned return in mid 2011. Obviously, with this news on Whitfield’s condition, things have changed.

As fans of Whitfield and the show we are saddened to hear of his condition, We wish him all the best for a full and speedy recovery.

Click through to read the full press release from Starz.

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Welcome to this week’s On the Radar where we delve into all corners of the entertainment, tech and geek Internets for news, views and whatnot that may have escaped our regular coverage this week. Let is know if we missed something interesting. Otherwise, on to the links!

• Zombies meet Trekkies in this awesome new trailer for Night of the Living Trekkies.

• Some guy proposed to his girlfriend via a custom Super Mario Bros. World. Good thing he locked that down now…

• We may enjoy Glee, but here are 5 examples of how those musical teens have ruined urban music for the rest of us.

• Anyone who’s been to a comic book convention knows that there’s nothing worse than a fat Spider-Man…except for 30 fat Spider-Men.

• Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails is giving you a taste of 5 tracks from his potentially bad ass score for the upcoming biopic The Social Network.

• This leaked footage of a live action Pokemon film raises two questions: Is it fake? and Is this movie 10 years late?

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If you’ve been coming to The Flickcast for pretty much any time at all you undoubtedly know we love good TV shows. That’s why we’re excited for the return of two of our favorites next week: Chuck and Community.

Both of these shows represent what’s best about TV and excel in their given genre. From action to humor to drama to romance both of these shows deliver. So, to commemorate them returning to the air next week, we’ve got previews from both shows to share with you today.

First up is Chuck and in this video you get some details about the fourth season of the show from series stars Zachary Levi and Yvonne Strahovski. But wait, you also get a surprise appearance by Dolph Lundgren as well so what could be better than that? Finally, Casey gets a real nemesis. Or does he?

Next up is Community which, if you’re not aware, is one of the funniest shows on TV. Go watch the episode entitled “Modern Warfare” if you don’t believe me. In the videos today we’ve got all sorts of great stuff including a Season 1 remix clip and cast outtakes. Great stuff indeed and more than enough to get you ready for next week’s premiere.

Check out all the videos after, as always, the jump. Chuck returns next Monday at 8/7C and Community on Thursday at 8/7C only on NBC.

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How long will it be before we stop using the word laptop? And really, who wants a Netbook? Well, if these recent comments by Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn are taken into consideration, we might have to get used to the word, and to using, an iPad instead.

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dunn remarked that the iPad “had cannibalized sales from laptop PCs by as much as 50%.” That’s a pretty impressive number when you consider that Best Buy doesn’t even sell iPads in every one of its stores.

If you think about it it sorta makes sense though. For myself and many of my colleges, a laptop is a second computer that they use on the road. Or, they have a laptop for the kitchen or the living room for the kids and still rely on a desktop computer, or in my case an iMac, to get the real work done.

The iPad is the perfect casual computer that can fulfill most of the roles of the traditional laptop. You can browse the internet, check your email, watch movies and TV shows, read books, play games and much more all while using a cool and innovative device. Couple that with the ridiculously long battery life of the iPad when compared to most laptops and I think you’ll start to see why this is happening.

The iPad can almost completely replace the laptop for most people. And once Best Buy is featuring the device in all of its 1093 stores, which it’s expected to do by September 26th, you can bet we’ll see that number rise even higher.

This week at the Tokyo Game Show, Capcom revealed two new characters as well as a new trailer for Marvel vs. Capcom 3: The Fate of Two Worlds. One of the characters was not a huge surprise after her unofficial announcement in Monday’s Episode 2 Trailer. The second on the other hand is somewhat of a shocker.

Announced for Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is Wolverine’s younger, less hairy and much prettier female clone, X-23. Currently in her own series after sever minis, a stint in New X-Men and most recently X-Force, Laura is no less vicious than Logan and in some cases her lack of emotion even scares Wolverine as he has seen what it had done to his own life.

In the video below, take a peek at X-23 in action as she shows herself off as a faster and more agile version of Wolverine. Though the strength might not be there, it looks like X-23 can hold her own in a fight.

Also officially revealed is Tron Bonne from the Mega Man series. Tron appeared in the previous Marvel vs. Capcom 2 where her infamous specials included the control of waves of rampaging Servbots. Take a peek at her trailer below to see the little guys in action again.

Finally, take a peek at the last trailer for a full view of all the game’s combatants in campy Capcom-y goodness including a brief clip of everyone’s favorite select screen music “Take You For A Ride”.

Stick with us for all things Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and check out all three trailers after the jump.

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Welcome back, Sunny! Good to see your smiling faces once more, and it looks like you managed to handle the interim pretty well. No new scars, shaved beards, dyed hair (or, in the case of Charlie Day and Danny DeVito, neatly combed follicles). The only difference is Kaitlin Olson’s pregnancy (which I understand will become the basis for a future episode…but I’m getting ahead of myself).

Season…umm…we’re up to six already? Wow. Season six opens with “Mac Fights Gay Marriage” (for those of you too lazy to read the title of this article) wherein wannabe bodybuilder Mac, trying to pass himself off as Dennis to get free gym access, discovers that his former “lover” The Tranny has finally gotten her sex-change operation. Excited at the prospect of consummating their “relationship,” Mac’s libido-broken to also discover that s/he’s likewise gotten married.

Back at the bar, Mac relates his disgust at the union to the rest of the nonplussed gang and proclaims that it’s unnatural and wrong, seeing as how The Tranny used to be a man, and in some logically twisted sense, that goes against God (this sort of grey area would make for neat subplot in a Curb Your Enthusiasm). The gang usefully points out the irony in Mac’s disgust since he was dating The Tranny back when s/he was a man, but the observation goes over his head, and he launches a half-assed all-out campaign against gay marriage.

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Easy A is a modern twist  on the classic novel The Scarlet Letter, and it’s a nice throwback to all the 80′s teen comedies like Can’t Buy Me Love and The Breakfast Club. A standout performance by up and coming actress Emma Stone elevates this comedy above most in the genre.

Olive is a beautiful, smart and self-assured high school student who suffers the same fate of all gorgeous ladies in romantic comedies-she can’t get a date.  Yeah, right.  Olive spends her Saturday nights at home singing to her dog. Rather than fess up to that fact, she tells her best friend that she was out with a college boy, and implies that she lost her virginity.

Word of the (pretend) coupling travels quickly via texting and such, and Olive is soon rebuked by the females at the school for being  the school slut.  At the same time, she has a new found popularity with the men, who believe they might have a shot at her.

When her best male friend (who is gay) waffles on whether to come out of the closet or not, she urges him to wait until after high school. They concoct a plan to silence his tormentors; she’ll pretend to sleep with him and everyone will think he is straight.

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Every once in a while, a piece of casting news comes out of left field and seems like the best possible choice for a film. That is 100% the case in this piece of news, as Borat’s Sacha Baron Cohen has signed to play Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in an upcoming untitled biopic about the band.

The script comes from writer Peter Morgan, who also brought historical dramas like Frost/Nixon and The Queen to the silver screen. Morgan is currently finishing another draft of the script, which means we will most likely see production for the film begin be the beginning of next year.

Baron Cohen, who’s most known for his Kaufman-esque stunts as Borat and Brüno, may be stepping out of his outlandish comedic role to play more of an outlandish musical character. Though the flamboyance of Mercury could be seen as a parallel to some of Cohen’s other roles, we can’t imagine this film being done in the same vain as Da Ali G Show.

Rights have been purchased for such Queen classics as Bohemian Rhapsody, We Will Rock You, We Are the Champions, Another One Bites The Dust and You’re My Best Friend. No word on whether or not Cohen will actually step in to rerecord the vocals, but knowing his method-style of acting, we can imagine he might.

The film is currently under the banner of GK Films, who will produce alongside De Niro and Jane Rosenthal’s Tribeca Productions. More news will likely break in the coming months as to the casting and plot outline for the rest of the film.

It’s hard to talk about video games and not mention the Halo franchise. Constantly breaking records and taking names, Halo is a system selling behemoth of a property for the XBox 360. It was one of the games so popular, that it would go on to spawn multiple Machinima series, animated shorts created using assets from the respective games. These included everything from Phil to Arby ‘n’ The Chief to what may be the most famous Machinima ever, Red vs. Blue.

Smartly coinciding the release of the 8th season of Red vs. Blue entitled Revalation and the Recollection three disc set with the release of Halo: Reach, Rooster Teeth helps provide Halo fanboys with more Halo than they can handle in the biggest week of their gaming year.

The Recollection contains the second full story arc of the Red vs. Blue universe. Not a part of any official Halo canon, Red vs. Blue takes aspects of the game world never explained like the constant fighting in multiplayer of the different Spartans and tries to explain it. Taken with a grain of salt, the story even gets a little meta and makes a viewer step back and wonder how much applies to them. But for the most part, there is just lots of great comedic moments and swearing over a finely animated and even dramatic story.

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Moby Dick is probably the pinnacle of 1950s Huston. Moving from his ‘40s adaptations of contemporary American pulp (The Maltese Falcon) and popular works (In This Our Life) to more ambitious projects (The African Queen, The Red Badge of Courage, Moby Dick, and, eventually even The Bible), the decade marks a grandiose turn in Huston. It’s a bittersweet transformation. On the one hand, these works have a high spirit of adventure to them that still holds up and stay true to the original material. On the other, they lack the deeper, personal, more profound humanity of his earlier films.

Moby Dick is grounded firmly in the former, and, watching it now in 2010, nearly 55 years after it was made, it’s still a fun watch. Moby Dick is among the finest novels this country has ever produced and has held a special place in this English majors’ heart since college, when I took an hour-a-week class on it taught by my grizzled advisor “Uncle” Vic, a mid-fortiesh Virginian with a dusty leather jacket, beady horse eyes, and a half-kempt beard.

The class was only an hour long and held once a week, but in it, we exhausted nearly every theme, brought in a biology professor whose specialty was cetology, and garnered an appreciation for Melville’s epic prose.

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One of the nice things about running your own website is that you can highlight movies, comics, games, TV shows or other entertainments that otherwise might not get a lot of attention or even, in some cases, slip under the radar completely. One such show is Fox’s Human Target which, in spite of its great cast led by Mark Valley and featuring Jackie Earle Haley, has not exactly been a ratings winner for the network.

Fortunately, the show has been given a second season and hopefully it will find new fans and become a big hit. It’s a great show with a good mix of action, drama and humor and an engaging cast which makes for an entertaining hour of TV each week. To help get potential fans excited for the new season and for established fans who want to relive their favorite moments, the show is coming to Blu-ray and DVD.

To help kick things off right we’ve got a scene from the show to share with you which helps illustrate the action, characters and humor I referenced earlier. This scene, part of the special features on the Blu-ray and DVD release, gives you a great idea of what the show is about.

Other highlights of the release include all twelve episodes, featurettes, commentary with cast and producers as well as a gag reel. So, with tall that in mind, check out the promo for the release after the jump.

Human Target The Complete First hits store shelves on September 21.

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