"SyFy" sounds exactly like "Sci Fi" when you say it, but, as Richard noted in the Trade Roundup, NBC Universal will own it now. For years, NBC executives had longed to trademark the channel's own name, but legal kept telling them you can't trademark a genre of entertainment for lonely obsessives. So they spent years, and paid a branding company gobs of money, to come up with SyFy.

The fact that a Floridian named Michael Hinman discovered that you can creatively misspell Sci Fi more than 10 years ago, when he founded a web site that eventually became the SyFy Portal, which covered many of the Sci Fi Channel's shows, seems not to have bothered NBC Universal. A couple months ago, SyFy Portal abruptly changed its name to Airlock Alpha, which the site's founder says was done "indirectly because of" the Sci-Fi Channel's decision to steal and/or buy the name.

Accompanying the name will be the channel's new slogan, "Imagine Greater," which means nothing and is grammatically incoherent.

Nikki Finke says it's all Jeff Zucker's fault.

Schroder said the project is his fifth with the Halmis, following January's Journey to the Center of the Earth, which aired on Ion Television.

"Twenty years ago, the Halmis and I collaborated on Lonesome Dove, and I am honored that our relationship has developed to the point where they trust me to direct Hellhounds, " Schroder said.

The project, which The Hollywood Reporter notes is "full of CGI and special effects," is actually Schroder's sophomore directing effort, coming four years after his indie debut Black Cloud and overlapping preproduction on a short for the suspense anthology Locker 13. Best of luck to Ricky in Eastern Europe; if anyone can keep the lauded Romanian New Wave alive in these desperate, trying times, it's probably him.

• Ricky Schroder releases the 'Hellhounds' [THR]