Thomas J. Norton

We first met the Minions in the Despicable Me films. They were the henchmen of Gru, desperate to be seen as The Greatest Villain of All Time. But the Minions movie begins at the dawn of time when these funny, goggle-wearing creatures, babbling in their unique humina-humina-humina language, emerge from the primordial sea. They’re immediately driven to seek out the greatest villain they can find. But no sooner do they find one than they bumble into eliminating him.

PRICE $6,000

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Blacks are truly black
Fine detail
Near-perfect off-axis viewing
Minus
Pricey
Annoying calibration menus

THE VERDICT
LG’s recent price adjustments have made the company’s OLED sets more approachable, though hardly cheap in the biggest-screen Ultra HD models. But in today’s market, you’re unlikely to find a UHDTV that offers better performance than this one.

While OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology offers most of the benefits of the now sadly departed plasma sets (and in some ways, more benefits), it’s been difficult to manufacture at commercially viable prices. So far, only LG is actively marketing OLED in the U.S. (though we hope others will follow). A recent drop in LG’s prices for OLED sets has rendered them more affordable, though still far from generating “Attention, Shoppers” announcements at K-Mart.

Egyptian history is astonishingly long by modern standards. The pharaoh Tutankhamun lived roughly 13 centuries after the pyramids were built, and another 13 centuries would pass before Cleopatra friended an asp.

The plot of this two-disc, 4.5-hour miniseries is centered on the limited facts we know about Tut. He was the son of Akhenaten, whose worship of the sun god Aton and rejection of Egypt’s traditional deities nearly tore the country apart. Tut became pharaoh around age nine and eventually restored the old gods and stabilized the kingdom. But by the time of his death at a young 19, he had failed to produce an heir by his wife and half-sister Ankhesenamun.

We’re only a couple of months away from the scheduled introduction of Ultra HD Blu-ray players and the UHD discs to play on them. At CES both Samsung and Philips announced players due in March, and 17 titles are currently listed on Amazon for release March 1.