Disney buys Marvel

In the unlikely event that you haven't already heard the news (and heard it about 600 times today), Disney has purchased Marvel Comics.

Gilliam's IMAGINARIUM will be released in the US

Coming Soon is reporting that Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus has finally secured distribution in the US and will open this Christmas.

I'm excited... But the more I hear about the movie, the more I get Baron Munchausen flashbacks. Really, a movie featuring the final performance of Heath Ledger, along with Jude Law, Colin Farrell and Johnny Depp, should not have had this much trouble finding a distributor!

Maybe it's just too good for the suits, like Brazil was. Or maybe it's a big, confusing, boring mess, like Munchausen. Well, at least now we'll finally get a chance to decide for ourselves.

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SUPERNATURAL's not ending next season after all, or maybe it is

Supernatural creator Erik Kripke is apparently trying to drive fans nuts. Not long ago he was adamant that the upcoming fifth season would be the show's last. Now he's telling Entertainment Weekly that the series could quite possibly continue beyond the fifth season... While still leaving open the possibility that it could all be ending next May!

“I did set out [to] tell a five-season storyline,” the exec maintains. “Quite frankly, I never expected [the show] to make it to five years. But now that we’re in our fifth year, I have every intention of ending the story with a bang and not drawing it out or watering it down.”

Relax, Supe Nazis. Here’s that catch I promised you…“That having been said,” Kripke continues, “I’m looking at this season as the last chapter in this particular story. That doesn’t mean there can’t be a new story. Buffy did it. The X-Files did it. You close a chapter on a big mythology storyline and then you begin a new one.

My guess? The show will continue, because it's a critical darling and the closest thing the CW has to a hit. Kripke himself will probably continue with the series, but he'll hand a lot of the control over to somebody else. Sera Gamble, perhaps.

At the very least, here's hoping we get a Ghostfacers spinoff.

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Ghetto Man roasts the SuperFriends

Back in the '70s, NBC tried to launch a live-action comedy series based on DC comics' most famous superhero characters. (Well, most of DC's most famous characters; Superman was busy being in movies and Wonder Woman was occupied with her own hit TV show.) Legends of the Superheroes was a debacle, but it's since acquired a pretty devoted cult following. The second episode followed a "celebrity roast" format - hosted by Ed McMahon! - and featured the following sequence in which Brad Sanders (as "Ghetto Man") does a stand-up routine that maybe slightly less embarrassing than his part as Batty Boy in Hollywood Shuffle.

The Kipper Kids on MONDO BEYONDO

Back in 1982, Bett Midler starred in Mondo Beyondo, a funny but absolutely bizarre cable TV special. She played Mondo, an Italian bombshell who introduced various up and coming, artsy performers of the day - including, in this sequence, the rather nightmarish performance art duo known as the Kipper Kids. Perhaps best known today for their appearance in the cult classic movie The Forbidden Zone, the Kipper Kids were sort of like characters from an old Popeye cartoon, and sort of like escaped mental patients. This clip is basically Bett Midler being menaced in a men's room by two insane cockney man-children making farting noises with their mouths. Enjoy!



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Kids in the Hall have a Facebook page

This is sort of neat. The Kids in the Hall now have their own Facebook page, and they're posting regular updates from the set of their upcoming comic murder mystery series, Death Comes to Town.



I have been off camera for three days watching Kevin, Bruce and Scott dig in. Bruce's prosecuting attorney is v funny. A psychotically comic creation with beaver teeth. After lunch the mayor of North Bay drops by. FYI Bruce was quoted somewhere ...as having said the reason we picked North Bay to shoot in was because the "the mayor's wife sleeps with everyone'. Yes, he has brought his wife. She is cool about it.



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Bugs Bunny in Ed Wood's GLEN OR GLENDA

Bugs Bunny.

Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda.

Together at last.





(Via Reverend Dan.)

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Strange people torturing poodles with "creative grooming"

The wretched and unhappy creature you see to the right is not a mutant panda. It is a poodle... A poodle that somebody has trimmed and dyed to look like a panda. If you find this disturbing (and you do, if you have a human heart,) you definitely don't want to click on this link to learn more about the unspeakable practice known as "creative grooming".

I'm honestly not sure I want to live in a world where things like this happen.

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HEATHERS coming to Fox as an awful, awful TV show

Yep. They're doing it. A Heathers TV show. On Fox.

Deep down, even the people making the show know this is an awful idea. They're all running around with big fake smiles on their faces, telling each other how awesome the show will be, and then they go home for the day to their houses high in the Hollywood hills, and float around in their backyard swimming pools wondering if they're the only ones who secretly think this show is an utterly horrible idea. Everybody else at the studio seems to like the idea so much. It can't really be as stupid and crappy as it seems. Can it?

In the unlikely event that any of the people working on the Heathers series read this, I say unto you now: don't just stand by and let this show happen. Get angry, get loud, go pound on some office doors and make a stink. Be the one who stood up for TV that doesn't suck turds, and everybody will respect the hell out of you while they watch you clean out your desk and get escorted off the lot by studio security. You'll end up working in your uncle's shoe store, but you'll be able to hold your head up high as you help fat ladies try to fit their size eights into size sixes.


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THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG - animating Dr. Facilier

Yet another clip stolen from the folks at Cartoon Brew, this time featuring a look at the animation process for Dr. Facilier, the magician villain in Disney's upcoming return to hand-drawn cartoons, The Princess and the Frog. Too soon to say if the film itself will be any good, but this is a bad guy with style.

MUSIC FROM SPACE: The Groovie Goolies: 123

Your ears do not deceive you! We're actually featuring two Music From Space posts in a single day. I'm not proud of myself for it, but I just can't resist passing along this old Groovie Goolies video I found when I was working on the Gothic Archies thing. The damn song just won't get out of my head, and by the time the animation has cycled for the third or fourth go, it stops seeming cheap-ass and takes on a strangely hypnotic quality. Here comes the dancing chandelier spider monster again... And is it the little monsters under the stairs next? Ah, yes. Yes it is.




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Rob Zombie's remake of THE BLOB will not be blobby

Rob Zombie, whose Halloween II crashes into theaters today, tells Variety that for his next film he plans to stray outside of horror and remake a campy sci-fi classic of sorts: The Blob. Only his Blob will be somehow less... blobby.

“My intention is not to have a big red blobby thing — that’s the first thing I want to change,” Zombie said. “That gigantic Jello-looking thing might have been scary to audiences in the 1950s, but people would laugh now.”

True enough. But Rob... It's the Blob. A blob is, by definition, blobby, blob-esque, blobular. The Blob just is a gigantic Jello-looking thing, and to make it anything else is folly. Saying you intend to have a Blob who is not a "big red blobby thing" is like saying you're making a werewolf movie where the werewolf isn't all werewolf-y.


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MUSIC FROM SPACE: The Gothic Archies

The Gothic Archies are a self-described "goth-bubblegum band" mostly consisting of Stephin Merritt, frontman for The Magnetic Fields. Their songs are blackly funny and often catchy as all hell, perfect music for friendless 15-year-olds on a Friday night.

Check out this brilliant little fan-made music video for Freakshow. It's like one of those old musical sequences from The Groovie Goolies, as directed by Gahan Wilson.



Then there's Smile! No One Cares How You Feel, a lovely song dripping with genuine menace and despair. It's a perfect slice of '80s-style mope rock, from back when goths didn't even have a collective name yet and they were just the weird, pale kids at the back of the class.


If you're wondering why that clip was illustrated by a bunch of covers from Lemony Snicket books, it's because the Gothic Archies are actually best known for providing the music for Snicket's audio books. (Snicket, AKA Daniel Handler, has also been an occasional member of the band, playing the accordion.) I barely made it through A Bad Beginning and then I gave up on the Baudelaire family for good, but I'd be tempted to buy the audio books just to hear the music of the Gothic Archies. Fortunately I don't have to, since they've released the CD The Tragic Treasury: Songs from A Series of Unfortunate Events, featuring all of their music from the books. (You can buy it by clicking the Amazon link above, hint-hint.)

For extra fun, here's Merritt performing Smile! on a live morning news show, preceded by one of the most uncomfortable live interviews I think I've ever seen. (I almost felt sorry for the interviewer. The guy is busting his ass trying to keep a jolly, inconsequential little morning news conversation going, and Merritt is just not having it.)




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Is CLOVERFIELD on his way to stomp the 3rd Street Promenade?

This appears to be a viral video for Cloverfield 2, featuring the monster paying a visit to the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. (Even if you don't know the Promenade by name, you've seen it a thousand times on TV. Jay Leno does a lot of tiresome "man on the street" stuff there, for instance, and Buffy and Dawn used to shop there.) We get just a glimpse of a monster invading the Promenade, then the clip ends with a shaky view of the sign for Cloverfield Blvd.

People are arguing about whether the clip is legit. If it's not real, it's a pretty good fake. The switch to LA would seem to be pretty natural for a franchise about a monster that destroys major American cities, and setting the monster attack in the daytime would help set it apart from the first film's night time chaos. But I can see drawbacks to a daytime LA setting. Special effects almost always look worse (and less scary) in the sunshine, when you can't hide anything in the shadows. And LA really isn't an ideal town for giant monster movies; the skyline is just too flat. Seriously, Cloverfield could take out the downtown skyscrapers in about six minutes. Then where does he go?




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THE HAUNTED WORLD OF EL SUPERBEASTO red band trailer!

Stand back! It's the red band (that means R-rated) trailer for Rob Zombie's upcoming cartoon super-grossout jigglefest monsterfun horrorsex explosion, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto!



(Also ganked from Cartoon Brew.)

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The YELLOW SUBMARINE ride

I ain't felt right ever since I heard that truly nauseating news the other day about Robert Zemeckis' plans for a horrible, motion-capture remake of one of my favorite movies, the psychedelic cartoon classic The Yellow Submarine. The world felt gray and dreary, like I was one of those hopeless newspaper people in the original film's achingly and incongruously sad Eleanor Rigby sequence. Friends, the Internet can be a lonely place on a Saturday night. (And this is only Thursday morning.)

But today I discovered something that put the spin back in my propeller. It seems that back in 2000, there was an actual Yellow Submarine theme park ride in Germany and Japan. Guests boarded the Yellow Submarine, where Old Fred took them on a journey to Pepperland, stopping off along the way for a visit to the Sea of Monsters, the Sea of Science or the Sea of Time. (Apparently it was totally random which sea you'd visit, but the Sea of Monsters was definitely the E-ticket acid trip of the bunch.)

The kind folks at Fab4Art have posted all of the ride's filmed material on YouTube. You won't get the full, immersive experience of the actual ride, but this footage is still a real treat. First, Jeremy the Nowhere Man and Old Fred prepare to bring us aboard, before those damn Blue Meanies arrive and totally screw everything up. (Ain't that just like them?)



As you can see, the ride's creators did a really good job of capturing the film's freewheeling spirit, and the CGI animation is rather startlingly effective, bringing the film's very stylized, 2D characters into the third dimension. But you ain't seen nothing yet, kids...



The Sea of Monsters! Complete with Kinky Boot Beasts! And the Vacuum Monster! And then off to Pepperland, where we defeat the Blue Meanies with music. Now I can die a happy geek. (If the Hey, Bulldog song doesn't sound familiar, that's because it was cut from the original film and wasn't re-inserted until the 1999 re-release.)

But we must sail on, we have other seas to see. Let's go for a dive in the Sea of Science. You can skip ahead to the 1:20 mark to avoid seeing the whole intro sequence again.



Impressive as it is, this is arguably the weakest of the three seas. It seems the least connected to the film itself, with various images and scenes just sort of floating around in a psychedelic void before we get involved in some strange business with a shrink ray.

Now, off to the Sea of Time! Again, fast forwarding to 1:20 will get you past the intro.



This sequence also feels like it could have benefited from sticking a little closer to the film, but it's impressive in its own right and must have been stunning as a ride. (Imagine zooming through those giant, churning clock parts!)

In this article one of the ride's creators talks about all the hard work that went into making the ride, and you can really see it. This thing is clearly the work of people who really understood the original film's weird appeal, and who piled on enough crazy details and inside jokes to keep fans coming back for years.

But sadly, the ride wasn't around for long. It's all gone now, leaving only these Youtube clips behind. But hey, at least we can re-watch them without having to stand in a long line, crossing our fingers in hopes that this will be the time we finally get to see the Sea of Monsters.

(Via Cartoon Brew.)

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New ZOMBIELAND trailer

Zombieland looks like some really fun horror-comedy trash, with Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson as two of the last men on Earth after an outbreak of zombieism. Listen in as Eisenberg walks us through a few of the 47 rules of survival in a world overrun with the undead. You might wanna take notes, this is info that could come in very handy if the dead ever do start crawling from their graves in search of tasty human brains.

See old school DOCTOR WHO, for free

Doctor Who began its amazing run in 1963, and has been popular around the world ever since. But the show's been around for so long that there are now generations of fans who've never seen the original Doctor, William Hartnell. The BBC sells individual Doctor Who stories on DVD, but this is a show that was meant to be seen as a serial, one story bleeding into the next, and trying to do it the BBC's way could send you to the poorhouse.

So let's give thanks to Combom, a blogger who has posted all of the original Doctor's adventures online so you can view them for free, in all their imaginative, cheaply produced, black and white glory. I'm at a loss to explain why the BBC hasn't shut it down already - they really love to stomp on this sort of thing. So, enjoy this while it lasts.


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That's My Face

Send That's My Face two photos of a single human head - one shot from the front, one from the side - and they will make an astonishingly cool yet also slightly horrifying 3D, full-color replica of it. It could be your own head. It could be a celebrity's head. It could be the head of Loretta, the girl who swore she would love you forever, but then broke your heart on that terrible night in November of 2003. You still see her face, every time you close your eyes. You reach out in the darkness to feel the warmth and softness of her skin, but all your fingertips find is shadows and sorrow. Now she can be yours again, in colored resin form.



That's My Face has plenty of clever suggestions for things you can do with your second head. You can hang it on the wall! You can make a mask of your own face! You can scale it down and make an action figure with your own head! You can get one with a hollow top and use it for a pencil mug that will make your grandma weep and cross herself like an old gypsy lady in a wolfman movie!



And of course, you can attach your Loretta face to a lifelike mannequin you buy off of Ebay. Then you can dress up your new Loretta in modest but flattering outfits and spend long evenings telling her all of your hopes and dreams.

This Loretta will never criticize you, or laugh at you, or leave you. This Loretta is yours to keep. And if you love her long enough, if you believe hard enough, perhaps one day she will actually speak to you. You will hear Loretta's voice, telling you she loves you. And then, everything will at last be right again.

Attack of the Big Heads Floating in the Sky

One of my earliest memories involves standing on the sidewalk outside the Fox Theater in Long Beach and staring, slack-jawed, at the poster for the original Star Wars. Painted in a lushly pulpy, retro style, the poster featured the then-unfamiliar images of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, etc., all beneath a zippy, Flash Gordon-ish logo. But this poster, which was already enough to stop me in my tracks, had a strange, arty, postmodern touch that left me baffled: it was painted so that it resembled a faded, posted bill, with another bill beneath it featuring the movie’s credits and rips along the left-hand side showing a plywood construction site wall underneath. This was obviously a brand-new movie, with ray guns and robots and weird little hooded guys with glowing eyes, yet the poster looked like a tattered relic from a bygone era. It was, in retrospect, absolutely the perfect poster for a movie that took elements from a lot of other, older movies and scrambled them together to create something new. But all I knew at that tender age was that this was a movie I had to see.

Even today, after all these years and those sad, wretched prequels, that poster (co-painted by noted poster illustrators Drew Struzan and Charles White III) still has the power to remind you of what you loved about the original Star Wars trilogy. This was an unforgettable poster in a decade of unforgettable posters. It was impossible not to feel a shiver of real fear when you first saw the poster for Jaws, with that nightmare shark approaching the unsuspecting swimmer from below, his monstrous head the size of a semi-truck and his mouth overflowing with a million dagger-sharp teeth. And who could resist the goofy charm of the original Bad News Bears poster, with telling caricatures of Walter Matthau and the rest of the cast provided by the great Mad Magazine artist Jack Davis? When I grew older, I also learned to appreciate the movie posters of earlier decades: the snazzy deco of the silent era; the towering, stone logos of the ‘50s biblical epics; the fluorescent, psychedelic insanity of the ’60s.

But sometime in the late ’80s, movie posters all started to look alike. It was one poster after another featuring blandly flattering photos of the stars, almost invariably looking straight at you and surrounded above and below by type. This look was employed for comedies, dramas, indie pictures, historical epics, whatever, and movie marketing people had a name for it that really said it all: Big Heads Floating in the Sky. The Big Heads poster evolved because of something called equal likeness, a newly developed contractual feature specifying that if one star appeared on a poster, his co-star (or co-stars) were guaranteed to appear on the poster atexactly the same size. The poster for 1992’s A Few Good Men, for instance, features exactly half of Tom Cruise’s face on the left-hand side and exactly half of Jack Nicholson’s on the right, with the resulting design being as blandly symmetrical as a discount-brand package of frozen peas. The MPAA also began to wield increasing control over posters, arbitrarily vetoing anything they deemed objectionable. The original poster for Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, for instance, featured a spooky painting of the Headless Horseman carrying his own head; the MPAA rejected the image as “too graphic,” so it was replaced with a forgettable poster featuring the Big Heads of Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci.

There were a few potent deviations from the artless norm, such as the wonderfully unnerving Silence of the Lambs poster that featured a death’s head moth over Jodie Foster’s mouth—a moth that, when you looked really closely, actually featured an image of seven naked ladies from Salvador Dali’s painting Female Bodies as a Skull. But mostly it was all Big Heads, all the time. Pretty much the only thing you had to look forward to were the holidays, when those blandly flattering star photos suddenly sported ridiculous Santa hats for Christmas or party hats and noisemakers for New Year’s Eve.It’s tempting to declare that the movie poster is a dead art, but in recent months there have been some encouraging developments. The poster for the indie picture A Good Woman features the kind of art deco illustration rarely seen since the days of Fred and Ginger, while the poster for the Bad News Bears remake was a clumsy but obviously heartfelt shout out to the Jack Davis original. Revenge of the Sith may have disappointed on almost all counts, but at least its poster featured some strikingly old-fashioned design by none other than Drew Struzan.

It’s been a very long time since I stood outside a theater and stared, slack-jawed, at a movie poster. But if the movies have taught me anything, it’s that no matter how bleak things look, there’s always the chance for a happy ending.

(Originally printed in OC WEEKLY... And now that a few years have gone by, I suppose I can confess that I absolutely hated that last paragraph. It was really strained and precious, but I couldn't think of anything better. Mostly I'm just posting this old article now so I'll have an excuse to link to the video below.)

Movie Poster Floating Heads - watch more funny videos

Google Adsense is crazy and prudish

Today I was startled to see that Google Adsense was running charity ads on this blog again. Bloggers don't get paid anything when readers click on the charity ads, and Adsense only runs them if you've posted "objectionable" content. In the past they flagged me for the post about animated f*tish *rotica for the deaf, which I found rather extreme. But this time I couldn't think of what the heck Adsense had tagged as p*rn. I hadn't written anything even slightly naughty lately!

Finally I figured it out. I removed the words cr*ss-dr*ssing and *ss from that last Kids in the Hall story, and that did the trick, the charity ads were quickly replaced with ads for commercial products. How pathetic is that? The cr*ss-dr*ssing reference was a direct quote from an article in Toronto's Globe and Mail (not exactly Penthouse or anything) and *ss was used in the context of "this will get your *ss fired." There was absolutely nothing *bscene in that story!

I find censoring *ss to be really silly, but I tend to doubt that was really the offending word. I suspect Google Adsense flags the phrase cr*ss-dr*ssing as p*rn, which is actually kind of creepy. Why is all cr*ss-dr*ssing automatically flagged as p*rn by Google Adsense? Was Some Like It Hot a p*rn movie? I'm sure there are many cr*ss-dr*ssers out there who would object to their harmless little hobby being added to George Carlin's list of the seven words you can't say on television.

Anyway, now we've got our real ads back, and you can resume clicking on them and making me a few nickles per day. G*d d*mn, I gotta find something better than Adsense. Between the censorship and the paltry revenue, Adsense kinda s*cks *ss.

Esref Armagan: the artist with no eyes

Esref Armagan is a Turkish artist who was born without eyes. As a blind artist, you would expect him to sculpt in clay or to carve wood, to do something very tactile that doesn't require eyes.

But Armagan is a walking X-File, and he does something that shouldn't be possible. He paints. Representational paintings. Using color. And perspective. His buildings look like buildings, his trees have green leaves and his skies are blue. Against all odds, his Bill Clinton somehow looks like Bill Clinton.

It seems like this has to be a hoax. But the man either has eyes or he doesn't, there's no faking that. He has been put to the test many times, and apparently the impossible is true: he has no eyes, and yet he paints. In the video below we watch him at work, carefully finger-painting as the cameras roll. Later he is led to the Baptistry of Florence, Italy, where he feels the building's corners and is then able to sketch out a crude representation, using correct perspective, as a crowd watches.


So, he can feel a building's shape, and draw it. That makes some sort of sense. But how does Armagan paint imaginary monsters, or fish playing the violin? How does he know to make reflections in water?

I gather that his artistic process involves a lot of memorization. From talking to people, he learned that the sky was blue. Then he figured out that his blue paint had a certain smell. So, when he paints skies now, he knows which tube of paint to grab. He was told that bananas are yellow and watermelon is red, and he combined that knowledge with his own perception of how bananas and watermelons are shaped to paint a plate of fruit. Every time he touches paint to canvas, his mind is remembering a million little things and putting them together in extraordinary ways. From the words he's heard, the colors he's smelled and the objects he's touched, he is able to form a vision he can share with the world.


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More info on the Kids in the Hall's DEATH COMES TO TOWN

More info is coming out about Death Comes to Town, the upcoming murder mystery miniseries from the beloved Canadian comedy troupe, the Kids in the Hall. I hadn't realized that the production is as far along as it is; apparently they're currently shooting, and the 8-part series is scheduled to air in Canada in January and will probably air in the US not long after.

In an interview with Canada's Globe and Mail, Bruce McCulloch (the show's executive producer, and the tiniest Kid of them all) revealed that the project began as his idea but it's evolved quite a bit since the other Kids got involved.

It marks the first time the Kids have reunited for television, and it will be their first narrative outing since the 1996 movie Brain Candy, directed by Kelly Makin, who will also helm the new program. As in their sketch comedy, the Kids will play multiple roles - including a pizza delivery woman with Alzheimer's (McDonald), a 600-pound ex-hockey player who won't leave his house (McCulloch), and a child named Rampop (still to be cast) who sees all people as butterflies.

"We're still working out what Mark is going to look like as Death. We want him to be haunting and hilarious," says McCulloch, who adds that the drifter holes up in a sleazy motel and has a weakness for redheads.

I love everything about those two paragraphs, with the exception of the worrying news that Makin is the director. I haven't seen Brain Candy since it was in theaters, but I remember being deeply and bitterly disappointed, feeling like it didn't come close to capturing the Kids at their best. But Makin did direct a big pile of classic Kids in the Hall segments, including Sausages, a positively brilliant piece of work that was like a lost scene from Brazil or something. If you've never seen it, here's your chance. It's not really funny, but then it's not supposed to be. I can guarantee you'll never forget it.

Just in case you're worried that the Kids have lost their comic edge now that they're middle-aged and pudgy, check out this short film they made last year. It's as sick and funny as anything they ever did, and it's super mega not safe for work, times three. Seriously, this thing will get you fired.

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8-BIT TRIP

I don't have a lot of nostalgia for old video games. (I tend to think of them as "that crud we had to play while we waited for game graphics to improve.) But that being said, even I cannot deny the avalanche of awesome that is 8-Bit Trip. It's even worth sitting through the yucky Eurodisco for.

WAR OF THE WORLDS: GOLIATH

War of the Worlds: Goliath is an upcoming, straight to DVD animated feature that serves as a sequel to H.G. Wells' original story. The film is the directorial debut of Joe Pearson, and while the character designs have that anime/Batman: The Animated Series look that's starting to feel pretty tired, there is a lot of truly gorgeous steampunk tech on display and the movie looks like it could be great fun. Here's the official synopsis, followed by a trailer so fresh it's still steaming.

In 1900, the Earth was attacked by ruthless invaders from the planet Mars. The Martian’s 80 ft tall, heat-ray spewing, Tripod battle machines laid waste to the planet, but the invaders ultimately fell prey to Earth’s tiny bacteria.

Fourteen years later, Man has rebuilt his shattered world, in large part by utilizing captured Martian technology. Equipped with giant, steam-powered Tripod battle machines, the international rapid reaction force, A.R.E.S., is Mankind’s first line of defense against the return of the rapacious Martian invaders. Based in a massive fortress complex at the south end of Manhattan Island, the young warriors of A.R.E.S. train under the leadership of Secretary of War, Theodore Roosevelt, and the grim General Kushnirov.

And return the Martians do. The rematch finds the multinational squad of the A.R.E.S. battle Tripod’s Goliath’s on the front-lines of a vicious interplanetary offensive when the Martian invaders launch their second invasion using even more advanced alien technology. In the crucible of combat, this young team helming the mighty Goliath will be tested to the limits of their endurance and courage as they fight for Mankind’s very survival under the onslaught of an implacable enemy.



(Via your pals at Sci Fi Scoop.)

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SUPERNATURAL season 5 promo

The new promo is online for the upcoming fifth and perhaps final season of Supernatural, AKA the show that single-handedly justifies the CW's entire existence. The promo isn't too spoiler-heavy (actually, they pad it out with a whole lot of footage from season 4,) but it does give us a few glimpses of sweet, sweet apocalypse.



I thought I'd made peace with the idea that Supernatural could be winding down, but... No. I was lying to myself. I want this show to run forever, until Sam and Dean are sneaking out of the nursing home to go kill demons. (Actually, that sounds kind of awesome, in a Bubba Ho-Tep way.)

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X-FILES sequel? Or reboot?

The X-Files News website is reporting that Gillian Anderson told a group of reporters at the Sarajevo Film Festival that another X-Files sequel could be in the works.

"They've talked about doing it in 2012," she apparently said. "I think there were some discussions about that."

The site went on to report that Chris Carter has already responded to Anderson's remark, saying, "I'm afraid I have no news to report - other than our continuing desire to make a third film if there's an audience for it."

Bloody Disgusting, meanwhile, reports that there is talk of a franchise reboot.

While Hollywood is in a reboot frenzy right now, I have my doubts that we'll see the X-Files rebooted, at least until after 2012. The TV series ended with a very deliberate cliffhanger about bad things happening in 2012, and it would seem to make more sense to do something with that (even if it was only a direct-to-DVD something) instead of starting over with a new storyline and/or new actors.

You could say the last few seasons of The X-Files were an attempt at a reboot, with Doggett and Reyes swapped in for Mulder and Scully. But audiences never warmed to it, because they still wanted to see Mulder and Scully.

The problem with I Want to Believe wasn't that Mulder and Scully had gotten older, or that Anderson and Duchovny had lost their chemistry. The actors did a good job, and the film itself wasn't awful. But it also wasn't anything that inspired people to go see it in theaters. If it had been some epic about an alien invasion, maybe people would have wanted to see that. If it had been Mulder and Scully on the trail of some truly terrifying monster, maybe people would've wanted to see that.

But Mulder and Scully working out their relationship problems, occasionally taking a break to follow up on some sad, transsexual Frankenstein monster who is just stretched out on a slab for the whole movie, looking comatose? That would've made for a weak episode of the TV series, and it was pretty hopeless as a film.

I don't doubt that there are discussions going on right now, including discussions of a possible reboot. Even if the last movie tanked, The X-Files made too much money for Fox for them to just let it all end with the whimper that was I Want to Believe.

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The hippie kids who REALLY blew up the Death Star

As a follow-up to our post the other day about the troubled production of the original Star Wars, Monsters and Rockets reader Charles Lapo has sent along a link to a really interesting (if a tad overlong and occasionally rather technical) article focusing on the creation of the film's special effects. I already knew that a lot of effects techniques were invented for the film, but this article paints a vivid picture of just how young and green the effects crew really was. 20th Century Fox basically handed over a few million to a group of post-collegiate hippie geeks, and prayed that these kids knew what the heck they were doing. (The image of these kids being chased around the effects stage by an out-of-control, rampaging motion control camera is pretty hilarious.)

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FRANK's Woodring on those Manhog music videos

Back in July, I wrote a post about two Jose Gonzalez music videos that ripped off the Manhog character from Jim Woodring's Frank comics. I also wrote a post about it on the Comics Journal message board, and now Woodring himself has posted a comment there explaining what really happened.

I found out about those music videos after they had been made and released. The performer was giving promotional interviews about them in which he described them as being based on my work, which I thought was a little... brazen. At any rate, everything was worked out more or less to my satisfaction.

Woodring also politely refutes one message board poster's rather silly assertion that Manhog himself is a rip-off of Gilbert Shelton's Wonder Wart-hog, while noting that a human-pig hybrid in the 1973 Lindsay Anderson film O Lucky Man! "has haunted me ever since and undoubtedly contributed something to the wellspring of nastiness that emerged as Manhog."

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Who shall you call, good sir? Why, none but the League of S.T.E.A.M., but of course!

A couple of months ago, Monsters and Rockets featured a sprawling post about all of the exotic folks to be seen at the yearly Labyrinth of Jareth masquerade ball in Los Angeles. We noted a group of steampunks wearing some sort of crazy clockwork backbacks, but there was so much to see there that we never paused to consider what these guys were supposed to be.


Well, it seems they were actually the League of S.T.E.A.M. (Supernatural and Troublesome Ectoplasmic Apparition Management), unofficially known as the Steampunk Ghostbusters. Look, they have their own website, and a few ghost girls who follow them around. I'm pretty sure we saw a couple of them, too.

Steampunk Ghostbusters. Sweet lord. I'm not sure if these guys are taking their fandom to some horrifying new extreme, if they've broken through to previously uncharted realms of nerd cool... Or both.

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KIDS IN THE HALL return for DEATH COMES TO TOWN

In a surprising development, the often-feuding Canadian sketch comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall are planning to reunite for a new TV series called Death Comes to Town.

The series will reportedly be eight episodes long and will be a "murder mystery" that Dave Foley has compared to The League of Gentlemen. (And if you've ever been lucky enough to see that brilliant, macabre BBC series, the idea of the Kids exploring similar territory probably has you very excited indeed.)

More on this one as it develops, but in the meantime let's enjoy the Kids' epic battle between the Head Crusher and the Face Pincher.




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Tennat to voice the Doctor for another cartoon adventure

While David Tennant's era as Doctor Who's titular time traveler is winding down, he sure doesn't seem to be in any hurry to put the role behind him. In addition to the upcoming specials and his appearance as the Doctor in an upcoming Sarah Jane Adventures story, he'll also lend his voice to Dreamland, an animated episode that will appear later this year via the UK's "red button" video service and will later screen on BBC2.

Tennant previously voiced the Doctor for The Infinite Quest, a fun and fantastically designed animated serial that aired a few years ago. Below is an image of how Tennant will appear in Dreamland, and the design looks much more stiff and businesslike.



Yikes! Paint him blue, and he could almost pass for one of the aliens in that Avatar trailer. But the story sounds like it could be interesting, as we follow the Doctor back to the Roswell, New Mexico of 1958.

During a visit to a local diner he stumbles upon a mysterious alien artefact that leads him on a mission to rescue Rivesh Mantilax from the threat of the Viperox and the clutches of the American military.

Joining David Tennant will be Georgia Moffett (Doctor Who, Spooks) in the role of Cassie Rice – the Doctor's new animated companion.

David Warner (Wallander, Hogfather) also stars as the leader of the ruthless Viperox.

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WINKERS!!!

Ladies, have you ever wanted to transform your butt into a horrifying cat-monster that constantly winks at passerby? How about adorning your ass with two duck heads that constantly snap their beaks? Or maybe you longed to slap a big, crazy owl head across your posterior? Well, thanks to Winkers, your dreams have come true!



Via Metafilter, where this link has apparently been posted a number of times, only to then be deleted because the mods think people are posting this to laugh at heavyset ladies. I think that's totally missing the point. Seeing this clip, I sure ain't laughing at what the Black Eyed Peas would refer to as "all that ass inside them jeans." But I am in hysterics about the jeans themselves, because they are quite possibly the most wonderfully stupid thing there ever was.

Bryan Singer is remaking everything ever

So... many... remakes.

Just a few days ago it was announced that X-Men director Bryan Singer is at work on a thoroughly unnecessary upcoming Battlestar Galactica reboot. Now word comes that he is also planning not just an Excalibur remake, but a new take on Jack the Giant Killer as well. Jeez, some days it seems like every single movie released in 2010 is going to be a remake of something from my childhood.

Well, who knows, maybe Singer will make something worthwhile out of Excalibur. But when it comes to Jack the Giant Killer, he'll have a devil of a time trying to improve on cinematic greatness like this two-headed giant vs. sea monster vs. dog vs. chimp fight. (God, this movie is a ridiculous gem.)




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Trailers for WOLFMAN and that AVATAR thing

First, there's the Avatar trailer. I think I am officially getting old. The entire Internet is in a swoon over how awesome this thing is, and to me it just looks like yet another noisy sci-fi action movie with fakey CGI. You kids go have your fun.




And then we got the Wolfman trailer. I'm not sure if it looks fun in its own right, or if it just looks fun compared to that Avatar business.

George Lucas' STAR WARS nightmares

I was a tremendous Star Wars geek for years and years, back before George Lucas beat most of the fandom out of me with Jar-Jar, Hayden's speech about how Natalie Portman is nothing like sand, and all of the other unspeakably lame Star Wars prequel crap of the last decade. (Just think; 2009 marks 10 full years of Star Wars stinking like Bantha "poodoo." Congrats, George!)

Growing up, I poured over every Star Wars making-of book and video I could find. But while I've probably spent a solid month of my life watching stuff about the making of Star Wars, but somehow this article was full of things that were new to me. I knew Lucas had taken a huge risk by making the first film, but I'd never known just how troubled the production was, with a shoot that began with the first Tunisian rainstorm in 50 years and ended with the leading man being disfigured in a car crash.

(Via Io9.)


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HALLOWEEN 2 ad campaign wins, yet fails

THE WIN: The ad monkeys who whipped up the Internet campaign for Rob Zombie's upcoming Halloween II (not to be confused with, you know, Halloween II) have come up with a genuinely brilliant idea. They have a bunch of flash ads that look just like those ubiquitous, cheesy, animated ads for auto insurance, online dating, etc. You see the usual video of the hot girl gabbing on the phone or the dancing couple... And then all of a sudden the series' villain Michael Myers lurches into the scene, and drags them away. Simply awesome. Those ad monkeys earned their bananas on this one!

THE FAIL: The ads don't seem to be embeddable, which is just ridiculous marketing fail. So, I'll have to send you to their website to see the darn things.

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Lucy McRae: long live the new flesh

Lucy McRae is an artist who does fantastic, horrible things with the human body. With her camera, a handful of supplies you could find at the local Rite-Aid (paper, balloons, a box of Q-Tips) and a naked person or two, she can create a small army of beautiful monsters. With almost every one of her pieces, you have the same three-stage reaction, occurring in a fraction of an instant:

1. Oh! How amazing!

2. Oh! Now I see how she did it. It's really just a bunch of thumbtacks/toothpicks/whatever.

3. Oh! How amazing!









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Robert Zemeckis' YELLOW SUBMARINE remake must be stopped, by any means neccessary

I just... I can't even speak. I'm too upset.

Here's The Hollywood Reporter with the news that made me want to throw all of my Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? DVDs in a pile and set them on fire.

Robert Zemeckis is negotiations to direct a remake of "Yellow Submarine" for Disney.

"Submarine" was a 1968 animated feature based on music by the Beatles. It was produced by United Artists and King Features Syndicate.

Disney had no comment on the dealmaking, which is in the thick of trying to acquire the rights to the music to the film, which included the title track as well as classics such as "Eleanor Rigby," "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," "When I'm Sixty-Four" and "With a Little Help From My Friends."

Like all Zemeckis productions, "Submarine" would be done in performance capture and would also be a digital 3D endeavor.

Not just a remake. A mugger-hugging mo-cap remake. So we'll get to see John Lennon as one of those horrible Polar Express digi-zombies, stiffly shambling around with glassy eyes, like a monster brought to life through some sort of ghastly, occult ritual.

This must not happen. It must not happen.


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Chess boxing

When French cartoonist Enki Bilal created chess-boxing for his 1992 graphic novel Froid Équateur, he surely never imagined that one day it would become an actual sport. But it has, and it's a surprisingly popular one.

The rules of chess-boxing almost read like surrealist poetry. Here's Wikipedia's summary:

A match between two opponents consists of up to eleven alternating rounds of boxing and chess sessions, starting with a four-minute chess round followed by three minutes of boxing and so on. Between rounds there is a one minute pause, during which competitors change their gear.

"If you don't know anything about chess-boxing it might seem a strange combination", chess-boxing trainer Andreas Dilschneider told Time Magazine, "but if you think about it, in both sports there are many parallels." Just as you can be knocked out in boxing, "you can be in front in chess for 10 or 20 moves. You can build up a very strong position. You can be a very good player. But if for one moment you are not aware, and you make one bad move, the whole game is over."


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VENTURE BROTHERS season four teaser

A few weeks back a teaser for season four of The Venture Brothers screened at the Comic-Con in San Diego. Now, at long last, that teaser is online. I know the formatting of this post is just crazy, but I've futzed with it all I'm gonna and we're just going to have to learn to live with it now.

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Pub Orangina Animaux

And speaking of furry folk... I now present to you a French Orangina soda ad that will quite probably be the most disturbing thing you have ever seen. An argument could be made that footage of war atrocities or open-heart surgeries would be more disturbing than this footage. But it's not an argument I'd be willing to make. When I die and go to hell, they'll escort me into a little room and show me an endless loop of the part with the octopus lady.

(While it's not actually explicit, this is still something you maybe don't wanna watch at the office... Or anywhere else, for that matter.)

MUSIC FROM SPACE: The Beatles: ROCKY RACCOON

A few years ago, Youtube user Korybing made this really charming cartoon music video for the Beatles' Rocky Raccoon as an assignment for an animation class. It's very mpressive, professional-looking work... Although I must admit that after years of running into "furry" stuff online, I can't see Disney-esque cartoon animal-people like this anymore without worrying that at any moment they're going to take off their cartoon animal-people pants and do things I'd really prefer not to see.





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