Talking to reporters this morning, Oka and Panettiere talked about the upcoming fourth season of the show. Oka said that the cast and crew of the show are aware of critical reactions to the show's second and third seasons, but that that's made the show better for its return:

It's hard not to ride the highs and the lows of the show. Without a doubt, season one was definitely lightning in a bottle where we had something special. Season two and season three, it was hard to meet the expectations, but season four, there is some sense that our backs may be a little bit against the wall, but because of that, we're creatively swinging for the fences. There're so many bold choices and risks being made, there's a lot of creative freedom in some sense because of that. I'm really really excited about this season. I would probably say that this is as favorite a season... as season one.

Part of the reason for that, Oka went on to explain, is the shorter length of season four:

[A shorter season is] actually fantastic... I think 25 episodes stretches out a storyline that should've been compressed... That means you dilute it, you dilute the storyline and make it filler, and that last episode isn't going to be as strong as it should be. Having 19 just allows you to be creatively tight, make every episode so packed with story, character development, action, all that, and ultimately it makes a better show.

Both Panettiere and Oka's characters will be dealing with more down-to-earth problems this year than previous end of the world scenarios; Claire, Panettiere explained, will be dealing with the whole new world that is college:

[My character is] in college and dealing with a new best friend and roommate. We have a very interesting relationship together, but she's really the first person that she's been able to let in on her secret and someone who's really a confidente, but that's a very delicate balance that can easily fall apart. One little misstep and her dad will bring Rene the Haitian in to wipe their memories and then that'll be that, and she's happy that she's semi-caught up to that normal life she's been chasing. Where exactly are we going to go? I think there's going to be some manipulation and some really fun stuff.

Hiro, however, has less fun stuff ahead, considering that whole "terminal illness" thing he's going through - which, Oka revealed, is the result of freezing time while keeping more than just himself able to move about, an explanation that was cut from the end of the third season - but, as Panettiere herself asked, can anyone really imagine a Heroes without Hiro? Turns out, Oka can:

I think it would be a very bold move. I don't think anything's been set in stone yet [about whether or not Hiro will actually die]. We really don't know which direction they're going to take it... Whatever gets decided, I want to make sure that it's something that won't betray the audience. In that we're asking them to take this really emotional and sweet ride with Hiro, so we don't just want to pull the rug and say, oop! [The illness] is not there! Whatever outcome we come up with, we think it should offer some poetic justice to the storyline... I want to make sure we don't cheat death, like we have in the past and not give it the weight that is meant to be.

It's an emotional and sweet ride that Hiro will be undertaking without such close contact with sidekick Ando, however; Oka said that the bromance between the two will be affected by Ando marrying Hiro's sister in the first episode of the new season, something that came as a surprise to Panettiere, who then promised that she really did read the scripts she was given. Of course, maybe she was just waiting to watch the episodes herself:

Because I was working so much last season, I Tivoed all the episodes so I could watch them back to back to back, and I could not put my remote down. "Just one more episode! Please!" And this is a show that I'm on, and I don't generally like to watch myself. But it's exciting, and it's smart, and I don't think it belittles the audience, and I think it's just one of those rad shows.

She then checked herself, and asked, "Did I really just say that? Did I really just say 'rad show'?"

Heroes, NBC's most rad show, returns September 21st.

[via The Hollywood Reporter]

Oka tells The Hollywood Reporter that his hours spent playing MMORPGs gave him the idea for his new movie, The Defenders, about a group of teen players who must emerge from behind their avatars to join forces against a real-world menace.

"You can be whoever you want to be," Oka says of gamers. "The question came to me: What if you had to live up to the person you created in the virtual world?" He pitched the idea to genre giants Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (currently riding high with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Star Trek), who had been looking for Spielberg-type teen group adventure movies (à la The Goonies) to produce. Writing the screenplay for The Defenders will be Oka's World of Warcraft pal Gary Whitta (screenwriter of The Book of Eli, next year's postapocalyptic thriller from the Hughes brothers, starring Denzel Washington). DJ Caruso (Eagle Eye) is signed up to direct.

Naturally, there'll be a videogame tie-in.

We hope Oka's gaming buddy writes him a big part in the movie, though its teen focus makes that sound unlikely. And we hope the film turns out to be more than just an excuse to concoct a cool new game. Still, we're all for a modern-day Goonies-type tale. Sloth lives!

Experienced in this whole press junket thing, Nate explained the idea behind the straight-to-DVD spin-off:

We were so amazing [in Get Smart] that they were like "Stop the presses! What are we doing? We need more of those two guys!" Not really. We knew from the beginning, the whole audition process, we knew that there were going to be two movies. [Bruce and Lloyd is] written by the same writers as the first movie because it's on the same timeline. Our DVD shows what we're doing back in the lab when Agent 99 and Max go off and do their mission. We end up having to go on a mission of our own. One of our inventions gets stolen, it's an optical camouflage technology is what it's called, OCT. And it's like an invisible blanket. And Max and Agent 99 need it in Russia, so we're trying to get it back for them. There you go.

For those of you with a more theatrical bent, Masi translated:

So Get Smart is Hamlet but we get to do Rosencrantz and Gilderstern Are Dead. We didn't get to play the questions game, which is the sad part, though.

Despite Get Smart's TV history, the duo weren't that familiar with the concept before signing up for the movie, as Nate explained:

I loved it, I loved it... I was just too young. I remember teething and watching it and thinking "I wanna be on that..." No, It was, what, the sixties? So it was a good twenty years out, or fifteen years out, before I saw it. I saw it in reruns and didn't actually know too much about it.

Maybe it was the chance to act out his apparently-real-life inventor fantasies that lured him in:

The gadgets in the movie were pretty cool. We have exploding dental floss, which is pretty amazing, a Geiger counter watch, knockout spray that comes out of a cellphone... that's a good one. I like that one. If I were a mad scientist, I'd do knock-out and then I'd have something that could change it, and then it could just be perfume or, like, mouthwash. You know, like a breath spray. I just like that it's already up there [by your mouth], it just sprays in the mouth. "Oh, I actually physically have to talk to someone now." Look at that! Banaca! Someone write that down. It could go far.

Of course, now that the movie's "a summer smash," inventing is but a distant, non-lucrative second place to acting. Does the success of the movie mean that we should expect to see more of CONTROL? Masi spilled the beans:

I know the writers are actually already beginning to write it. The box office just kind of determined how big our sets are going to be, whether it's going to be a very small telephone booth or a very big telephone booth.

However, he's much less forthcoming about the next season of NBC's Heroes, sarcastically saying "everyone dies in the first episode" when asked what's coming up this September. That said, he did tell us just how evil Hiro will be next year. Kind of:

Masi: On a scale of 1 to 10, I would say about... I don't know, that's an interesting question. Probably about 8.
Nate: That's pretty evil.
Masi: But is 1 evil, or is 10 evil? That's the question.
Nate: Okay, he kills a baby.
Masi: Don't tell!
Nate: But then he brings it back to life. It's a great episode, I've seen it.

And on his cameo in Pixar's Wall-E [His portrait is shown in a scene where we see a wall of portraits of the former captains of the BnL cruise ship that's been in space for 700 years]?

Masi: I'm in Wall-E? I had no idea. I gotta check this out. I had no idea!
Nate: That's awesome.
Masi: Well, I know a lot of the Pixar guys, I used to work at Industrial Light and Magic, so maybe some of those guys put me in there...
Nate: I smell residuals!

In closing, the two actors had a very special personal message to all io9 readers out there:

Masi: I want everyone to buy tickets to Get Smart and then sneak in and see Wall-E. That's what we should do!
Nate: Just keep buying Get Smart tickets. Every movie you see, just buy a ticket for Get Smart and sneak next door. That ten dollars is gonna move the world. That's all it takes.

Get Smart's Bruce and Lloyd Out Of Control

We have all sorts of ideas we are exploring. And there's plenty of joking around about what Heroes should NOT become. Our head of digital entertainment teases Tim Kring about "Heroes on Ice" (with all due respect to figure skaters).

With the show off air for the foreseeable future, Heroes: Evolutions offers the only chance for fans to interact with their favorite characters... and for those characters to interact back. Says Tolerico:

Masi Oka writes and creates all of the Hiro blog entries himself. I put together the Drucker postcard code and our lead designer (Markus Hagen) created the artwork and flash file. The games and riddles for Heroes Evolutions are developed by our in-house team and the Heroes Transmedia team working together with the show writers to help guide us and keep us within the show's mythology... We miss our show writers and hope the strike is settled soon. We are working to develop pieces that are interesting to the fans, but with no new episodes these are different stories. Fortunately the tapestry of Heroes provides us with many different places to "play."

Joe Tolerico [Heroes Wiki.com]

So with the strike dragging on and...

Jeph: Strike? What strike? You mean, it might last longer? What?

Well, since you've completed a whole volume before the strike, will NBC be putting that out on DVD a bit sooner to give fans something in the interim?

Tim: Well, there are really no plans for that, and we're not talking to NBC right now. But, it seems like a very logical thing to do since we have a whole volume with a completed story.

Jeph: Great, I can see the headlines tomorrow. "NBC Releasing Heroes DVD Early!"

There's been a great effort in the show to tie powers to genetics, but at some point will you look to other methods for people getting their powers?

Tim: I shied away from that idea initially, but I also said I reserve the right to have it morph and change into other theories. There have been other theories posited, like that maybe someone made them and that this was all experimental. Since we know the company is a big nefarious operation, you could definitely come to that conclusion.

Jeph: I think it's God. I've always thought it was God!

Tim: And there has been some talk about the possibility of the spiritual aspect of the powers.

Suresh has been the human voice of the series and been used as a framing device. Will that continue when the series comes back?

Tim: Yeah, we didn't lean on it as heavily in Volume Two as we did in Volume One. There is an omniscience to that voice, as if he's talking from some distant knowing place in the future, and that idea is still good for us.

The Heroes graphic novel has been the first foray at taking the show into the comic book realm. Jeph, are you still writing comics?

Well, we didn't really do a graphic novel. Every week we put out a comic book online, so it's a webcomic. This was just a collected volumes of those issues, but it was all recolored by artists, and it looks a lot different on paper.

And, I'm proud to say that I have the number one comic book in the world right now, the new Ultimates that has just been relaunched, and next month I'm relaunching The Hulk.

Well, thank you both, we love the show.

Tim: Thank you very much!

Jeph: Yes, thanks a lot, and good luck with io9!

The result? A scene that is both cool and slightly maniacal, with Hiro shutting time on and off and worrying about paradoxes before kissing his lover. Of course the samurai sees their cheatin' ways, and all kinds of time-mangling events are about to be unleashed. Meanwhile, in other subplots, unbreakable cheerleader Claire found herself trapped in a plot from the movie Heathers and mega-mutant Peter is trying to find poutine in Montreal. So let's focus on the kissing for now. The kiss that fractured time.