Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworldnovels have a terrific hook: all of the humans who have ever been born or ever died wake up together one day on a lush, Eden-like world, and they're all young and healthy and they have no clue how they got there. Just a few years ago the SCI FI Channel made a kind of cruddy miniseries based on the books, and now that they've re-branded as SyFy, they've already decided to give a Riverworld miniseries another go. A new trailer follows.
I already knew that Tahmoh Penikett (Battlestar Galactica, Dollhouse) was the star of the miniseries, but I didn't know that his Galactica co-star Alessandro Juliani was also in the mix. As much as I liked Galactica, I'm kind of getting burned out on seeing various actors from that show clumped together in other projects. Joss Whedon seems to be on a mission to cast every single Galactica actor he can get on Dollhouse, so you have weird scenes like that thing last week where Helo and Apollo were beating each other up (except they weren't Helo and Apollo), and now you've got Helo and Gaeta splashing around together on Riverworld (only they're not Helo and Gaeta). When most shows end, they just end and the actors never see each other again. But these semi-constant Galactica reunions are just getting weird.
Chickenpants, apparently, are plush chicken toys that Claire Chambers makes by hand and then sells on her Absolutely Small store at Etsy.com. They are chickens. They wear pants. Simple as that!
Now, I know what you're wondering. Does Claire make Star Wars Chickenpants? Well, yes! She does!
But don't you Trekkies feel left out, now. Claire's there for you, too. But her Star Wars and Star Trek Chickenpantses (Chickenpanti?) are going fast, so if for some reason you want a Luke Skywalkerpants or a James T. Chickenpants to call your own, you better get over to the Absolutely Small store at warp speed.
(Please, don't click on the Urban Dictionary defintion of chicken pants. It's not safe for work and it's not funny and it's just gross and awful and reading it has kind of ruined my day. Don't make the same mistake!)
A new trailer is online for Wes Anderson's upcoming stop-motion picture based on the Roald Dahl book... And just writing that sentence makes me feel like I've slipped into one of those Philip K. Dick bizarro universes where it's 1989 and Marilyn Monroe is alive and she's starring in a pornographic sitcom or something.
Jaime J. Weinman, over on the Something Old, Something New blog, has posted a cogent analysis of this bizarre and rather amazingly offensive Busby Berkely number from the 1933 musical comedy Roman Scandals. Not only does it feature Eddie Cantor in blackface, but he's singing to a group of women about how they better "keep young and beautiful" if they want to be loved. If Cantor started clubbing baby seals in the middle of this thing, it could hardly be any less p.c.
If you stick around, Cantor does experience a comeuppance of sorts. I really can't improve on Weinman's commentary:
The strange thing about the number is that as it progresses and gets more and more surreal and bizarre -- the usual pattern of a Berkeley number -- it almost seems to be rebelling against itself. First it betrays one of the rules of a blackface number by having the dancers actually notice that Cantor is a white guy in blackface, and get quite angry at him for it. Then the two groups of dancers, black and white, who were originally separated from each other, join together and team up against their common enemy: Cantor, the white guy pretending to be black, the man telling them all how they should look. They use one of the beauty treatments they had to go through to "keep young and beautiful" as an instrument of torture against Cantor, pumping their fists in revolutionary style
I doubt Berkeley actually intended this to be some kind of act of revolution against the traditional blackface number or girlie number. But he would follow his crazy ideas wherever they took him, and that's where this particular idea seems to take him: the chorus girls take over the number, stage a coup, and kill the star.
Two things to watch for:
1. Apparently one of the chorus girls is a young Lucille Ball, although I didn't spot her. 2. Around the 3:25 mark we come a lot closer to "side boob" than you'd expect to see in 1933.
In a surprising development, the Coen brothers tell MTV News that they're planning a sequel to Barton Fink, their odd, 1991 box office bomb. The film starred John Turturro as an affected, 1940s East coast playwright who comes to Hollywood to try and write for the movies, only to find himself staying in an immense and eerie hotel with a friendly psycho (John Goodman) in the room next door.
"It would be called 'Old Fink,'" Joel said.
"We did talk to [John] Turturro about doing 'Old Fink,'" Ethan added. "We want John to be old enough to do it."
The brothers even have (at least) a baseline idea of how they would from the story. "That's another 1967 movie," Joel said in reference to "A Serious Man," which is also set during that turbulent period. "It's the summer of love and [Fink is] teaching at Berkeley. He ratted on a lot of his friends to the House Un-American Activities committee."
"He's got the George Kaufman hair but he's going gray," Ethan said. "He wears a medallion." As if that explains everything. And it kinda does.
"We told Turturro this is one sequel we'd actually like to make but not until he was actually old enough to play the part," Joel explained. How old is old enough, you may ask? "He's getting there," Ethan said.
I was really disappointed with Barton Fink, I found it really tedious and self-indulgent. But it's one of those movies that sticks with you, as the months and years go by, you realize that there was a lot to like about it. I can't call myself a fan exactly, but there's definitely something special there.
A sequel all these years later sounds like a rather defiantly un-commercial idea. No matter how little they spend on it, it'll probably take them ten years or more to earn it back. It also sounds like it could be great... Or at least flawed in that interesting Coen brothers way.
The new TV ad for Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are adaptation introduces us to a few of the Wild Things by name. I still don't know what to make of this movie. The visuals look impressive and it looks like it will probably be interesting in its own right. But it also looks like a real departure from the Wild Things many of us grew up with. I've seen ads that made this look like an indie picture and other ads that made it look more like a kid picture, but so far I'm really not getting that Maurice Sendak feeling at all.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on the WB in 1997. That doesn't sound like that long ago, but a lot has changed since then. After seven successful seasons, Buffy went off the air in 2003. The WB went under, merging with UPN to form the CW network. Sarah Michelle Gellar went from "hot, young, notoriously difficult talent" to "aging, underemployed actress who would probably be pretty thrilled to star in a Buffy movie at this point". And the Internet took over the planet.
In an interesting article from last year, Martin Belam looks at the Internet as it was depicted in the 1st-season Buffy episode I Robot, You Jane. The plot concerns a demon that lives inside the internet, and Belam uses the episode as a kind of time capsule to explore the tech and technophobia of the Clinton era. (As Belam points out, that's actually the most interesting aspect of the episode. I, Robot is pretty rough going, even for Buffy's first season.)
As played out as Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise had become, I don't think many horror fans were thrilled at the prospect of a reboot that replaced Robert Englund with a new actor as Freddy. The whole idea just seems kind of wrong, frankly. I mean, Englund has been playing Freddy since the Reagan era! He's earned that role. And it's not like he's aged out of it or something, he can still give good Fred. (That's one of the perks of playing a character that requires elaborate special effects makeup; you could be 26 or 66 under all that rubber, and nobody would know the difference.)
But this new reboot trailer is genuinely creepy, and there's no denying that Jackie Earl Haley is an inspired choice for Freddy. (Although he kind of seems to be getting typecast playing child molesters, and that's something he really might want to discuss with his agent.)
The little glimpse we get of the new Freddy makeup makes me curious to see more, at the same time that I really don't want to see more.
Doctor Who has been on the air since 1963, and over the years the show's opening credits have changed quite a bit. This video features the opening titles for all ten incarnations of the Doctor. There are times when it gets so pixelated that it's kind of hard to make out, but it gives you a pretty good idea of what the titles were like and this is the clearest version I could find on Youtube.
The credits from the '60s and '70s actually hold up pretty well. That music must have been freaky as heck in 1963, and the graphics were simple but effectively creepy. Then things start to go totally berserk towards the end of the Tom Baker era, culminating in the sparkly Commodore 64 acid trip that was the Colin Baker-era titles. The titles were at their most strenuously "modern" in the '80s, and as a result they have dated pretty badly.
I wonder how the show's current titles will look to audiences four decades from now? (And will Doctor Who still be in production in some form, even then? It seems a bit unlikely... But then again, this is a guy who has been saving the universe since before the Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show.)
Over on the Conscious Object blog (very not safe for work), the blogger known as K-8 has written a post noting the extreme similarities between the sexy, partially-assembled robot girls in the print ads for the new sci-fi thriller Surrogates and the sexy, partially-assembled robot Summer Glau in the print ads for the recently-canceled Fox TV series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. K-8 has also noted that the Terminator ads were themselves clearly spun from the work of an unidentified mecha-erotica artist who has posted a series of Photoshop images online. In fact, the similarities are so blatant that a few commentors on the blog conjecture that this has to all be the work of the same artist.
That's as much as I know about all this. If anybody out there knows more about the origin of these ads and/or the identity of the original Photoshop artist, please say so.
We've already discussed Human Centipede, the upcoming horror movie in which Dieter Laser (Lexx's Matrid!) plays a mad (very mad) scientist who creates a human centipede by subjecting some unfortunate (very unfortunate) folks to a grotesque process in which he grafts them together, face-to-butt.
It's an utterly appalling idea for a movie... But you can't resist being curious about how it plays out, can you? Well, the first clip is now online, and it's embedded below.
I don't recommend clicking on it. Seriously, think twice. You know you'll regret it.
Isabella Rossellini has had a long and distinguished career as an actress and model, with unforgettable roles in such films as Blue Velvet and Death Becomes Her. But lately she's been winning over a whole new following with Green Porno, her own series of squirmingly peculiar short films for the Sundance Channel.
The films feature Rossellini explaining the sex lives of various animals. But Rossellini doesn't just explain - she becomes the animals, dressing up in crude costumes and acting out some of nature's most appalling sexual practices with a naughty grin on her face. (That she usually takes on the male role in these scenes just ups the weirdness even more.) The series manages to be educational, cute, disgusting and hilarious all at once.
The new season focuses on undersea creatures, and makes some pretty major changes to the format. There is less of the squirmy sex puppet stuff, and an increased focus on conservation, with each clip ending with a little seaside lecture from biologist Dr. Claudio Campagna. You can watch the episodes on the Sundance Channel website (do I even need to tell you these clips are probably not safe for work?). Rossellini also has a Green Porno book and DVD set out now, availble at Amazon by clicking the link to the left, over there.
There's a series of fascinating videos online, in which the camera zooms in for closer and closer views of everyday things - clay pots, human teeth, bugs, etc. I've embedded a clip below where we zoom in for an extremely close look at a butterfly's wing. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find out where these clips originally came from. The narrator's voice is extremely familiar, it's driving me nuts. (He sort of sounds like Mohinder Suresh, doesn't he?)
I don't suggest watching the clips where they zoom into human body parts unless you have a really strong stomach. The one where they zoom into human skin made me want to take a bath in a big tub of bleach.
Apparently it's 1980s Flashback Sunday here at Monsters and Rockets. I hadn't intended to post another music clip so soon, but this sucker is too weird to not share. It's Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas way back in 1985 (pre-"lady lumps"), performing a horrifyingly peppy cover of the Pretenders' Middle of the Road on an old kids show called Kids Incorporated.
One of the weirdest things about the clip is how they left most of the lyrics the same. "When you own a big chunk of the bloody third world, the babies just come with the scenery" becomes "when you own a big chunk of the whole darn world", but she still sings the parts about being 33 with a kid, having some little jerk on her back and bombs being dropped on her street. Only instead of Chrissie Hyde's weary snarl, Fergie does it all with a Mouseketeer grin.
Chris Ware is one of the most fascinating cartoonists working today, and his gorgeously designed, emotionally devastating books have won nearly universal praise. But back in the late '80s, when he was in his teens, he published a comic that was very different from the work that would make him famous.
Floyd Farland: Citizen of the Future was a sci-fi satire set in a totalitarian future. Ware despises the book today, so much so that there are rumors he's actually been buying the remaining copies from collectors just so he can destroy them.
I've been curious about Floyd Farland for years, and now a few pages have at last been posted on the Again With the Comics blog. Ware is by all accounts a moody and depressive sort, and I've no doubt that he's developing a bleeding ulcer at the thought that people are actually seeing this work. Judging by this small sample the book looks rather trite and very much of its time, but it had an interesting style and was certainly nothing to be embarrassed about.
Journey with us now, all the way back to 1984, forSensoria, a mind-warping music video from the pioneering industrial music group Cabaret Voltaire.
Sure, there's no denying that aspects of this video have become rather painfully/hysterically dated over the last 25 years(!), with the stop-motion robot dancing and all that. But from that stunning opening camera move (how the hell did they do that?), to the crazy preacher man leading that creepy little girl around, to the group of ladies doing what looks like some sort of worship dance in the long shadow of the nuclear power plant, somehow all of the cheap symbolism and gimmicks in Sensoria end up being a lot more powerful than they should be. There was a real crackle of apocalypse in the air back in 1984, like the whole damn works could just fall apart on us any day. You can hear that crackle in this video, it's not drowned out by all the retro camp.
I grew up on the TV edit of this thing, which was probably about 4 minutes shorter and somehow managed to get the point across without quite so many shots of the lead singer's jacket. It's right on the border between art and an old Mike Meyers Sprockets bit, but it could just be that this dark, exquisitely pretentious old curio is exactly what you need on a Sunday morning.
From the fifth season of Bewitched, a commercial for Kodak cameras that apparently ran before the end credits.
Watching this show now, I think most of us tend to side with Endora regarding Samantha's weird fixation on not using magic, and always doing things the mortal way. Samantha literally had the powers of a god, and she chose to spend her life living in the suburbs, scrubbing pots and pans by hand. Madness!
Student animator Giles Timms has made a really lovely and remarkable video for Dead All Along, a jangling, resonant and bittersweet song by musician Ceri Frost. The video is an Edward Gorey homage that manages to be wrenchingly effective in its own right, telling the story of a little boy named Yorick who goes for an outing with his parents and is led astray by some pixie-folk. Alas, poor Yorick!
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I'd feel like a lazy-ass if I didn't contribute anything to this party, so here's a Rod Serling blooper clip. It's really weird to see. I always kind of imagine him waking up in the morning wearing that suit, and sitting down at the breakfast table with a cigarette as he makes clipped but incisive commentary about the dark nature of man.
Thanks to Hot Toys' innovative new PERS (Parallel Eyeball-Rolling System), action figures can now roll their eyes. They demonstrate in the clip below, by having the head of Heath Ledger's Joker look at you with sneering contempt.
It's not much, but here's a clip of Darren Garrett discussing one of the characters he designed for Dreamland, the upcoming animated Doctor Who story featuring one of the last outings of David Tennant's incarnation of the Doctor. The show is reportedly set to air in the UK in October, although there's been no word of exactly when.
The Times Square Two were an eccentric musical comedy duo who were apparently fairly popular in the '60s, appearing on most of the big variety and talk shows of the era - Merv Griffin, Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Dean Martin, et al. They affected the personas of a pair of creepy yet endearing nitwits from the bygone days of early vaudeville, with "Mycroft Partner" as a pompous English dandy and "Andrew I" as a storky nerd with Coke bottle glasses, greased and center-parted hair and a squawking, Jerry Lewis voice. (They often introduced themselves as "My Partner and I.")
In reality, "Partner" was Peter Elbling, AKA Harold Oblong, an English writer and character actor who became uniquitous in the '70s and '80s, turning up everywhere from The Phantom of the Paradise to WKRP and Taxi. The "I" in this team was Michel Choquette, a French-Canadian who went on to be one of the early writers for The National Lampoon, among other accomplishments.
At the height of their popularity, The Times Square Two stayed in character even when offstage, claiming to know little about the pop culture of the day and being driven around by a chauffer in a vintage motorcar. They took the act about as far as it could go, finally splitting up in 1970.
The Times Square Two have become rather obscure in the decades since, and footage of their old performances is rare. This clip, from the old Smothers Brothers' show, captures the pair in performance. By being such an odd throwback, their act became sort of timeless. If these two were just starting out now, they would probably baffle and amuse audiences just as much as they did in 1964.
"It very cleverly uses H.P. Lovecraft in a fictional way, but there's some loose biographical elements. But it certainly has the flavor and the tone of Lovecraft," Howard told me during an interview for an upcoming story on a different topic. "The character is a very young Lovecraft."
The once and future Opie is actually a slightly more versatile director than people give him credit for. He can make a charming light comedy like Splash, for example, and he can make a reasonably gripping historical fiction like Apollo 13. Hand the guy a decent, middlebrow script and he can make a decent, middlebrow film. But when he tries to stretch, you can get howlers like How the Grinch Stole Christmas. A horror movie/fictionalized H.P. Lovecraft biography is several miles outside of Howard's comfort zone, and it's hard to imagine this thing working. Still, a spooky story with Lovecraft himself as the protaganist is a pretty irresistable idea...
(That Amazon link is the Call of Cthulhu featurette from a couple of years back, far and away the most faithful - and awesome - Lovecraft picture ever.)
Takena Nagao is a student animator who makes stop-motion movies where truly horrific things happen to cute, clay characters. I've never been a fan of that contrived, juvenile "Sick and Twisted" animated stuff (the Happy Tree Friends et al), but Takena's work - as disgusting as it is - deserves to be seen. It's well-designed and cleverly animated, with stories that are actually involving. Takena has a genuine flair for gore.
Here's Takena's clay zombie epic, Chainsaw Maid. There's no nudity or swearing, but the zombie violence makes it very not safe for work indeed.
I guess the big problem I have with a lot of the Sick and Twisted dorks is that they inflect horrific punishments on characters who have done nothing to deserve it, they take creepy, sadistic glee in watching their characters suffer. The Happy Tree Friends are just doing cute cartoon animal things, and then one of them falls into a wood chipper or something for no reason, and blood spurts out all over the place. Where's the fun in that? But in what I've seen of Takena's work, the violence is arguably just as excessive and gross, but it mostly happens to the bad guys, who are evil and frightening creatures who deserve whatever they get.
I have no interest in seeing a little girl chainsawed into bloody chunks... But I have no problem seeing a maid protecting that little girl from zombies, by chainsawing said zombies into bloody chunks. It's a dodgy distinction to make, but I'm sticking to it. (Unfortunately I think Chainsaw Maid's bloody work is far from over. Despite what seems like a happy ending, the little girl's father has been bitten by a zombie, and we all know what that means.)
Pussycat gets into even more iffy territory, telling a positively Tarantino-esque tale of cat girl who goes on a date with a pig who has serious issues, while a hungry wolf in a sharp suit skulks around outside. This one is incredibly twisted, and hard to defend. It's also pretty hard to stop watching, once you've started.
First there was the original flawed yetfascinating 1958 shocker, The Fly. That spawned a pair of unlikely sequels. Then there was David Cronenberg's 1986 remake, for my money one of the most disturbing films ever made. That also spawned a (now justly obscure) sequel. Then Cronenberg adapted the story for the 2008 stage opera, perhaps the most unlikely version of the story so far. Or at least it was, until word came down that Cronenberg is now in talks to remake his own film.
I really can't imagine how this could be a good idea. You're not going to improve on Jeff Goldblum's performance, and the makeup effects still look better (and more disgusting) than anything you could do with CGI today. Cronenberg was previously rather sniffy about the prospect of a Fly remake. What changed his mind?
In a long and funny but also surprisingly revealing interview with the Onion AV Club, The Mighty Boosh stars Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt actually put their comic personas aside for a while and talk about their creative process in detail. I've been a Boosh fan for a few years, but I've never read an interview with them that was quite like this one. At one point, you can see a riff they're doing about a bunch of weird recipes starting to turn into an actual comedy bit that Barratt wants to continue working on, later. It's fascinating to watch their peculiar creative process at work.
But during the interview they also drop the dispiriting news that they're undecided about making a movie based on the series, and they also have doubts about making a fourth season of the show.
NF: Often, we realize we’ve changed our minds just to do something else. Just to push ourselves to do something different. And it’ll be because we’re sick of it. We do think it might be a bit much if we do another six adventures. How many monsters can we make the musical style of?
JB: The basic thing is, with our characters, they’re always the same. The relationship between the two characters is a similar kind of dynamic all the time. There are some key jokes for us. The joke of our characters.
NF: We realize people are way behind us as well. They’re enjoying that aspect. (Barratt and Fielding have been doing these characters) for 10 years.
JB: We’re really bored of it.
As grim as that excerpt sounds, Barratt and Fielding are generally quite positive about The Mighty Boosh in the interview, talking at length about how the show allows them to really use their skills for music and visual art in a way that few other projects could. These two have a rare partnership, and they're obviously not taking it for granted.
A new trailer is online for that X-Files porno parody The Sex Files, and like that Star Trek porno parody from a while back, I'm both impressed by how hard the filmmakers are trying to capture the spirit of the original property, and totally icked-out at the prospect of seeing that property pornified. I mean, they even have a Skinner, for Pete's sake! (The clip's safe for work, although there is a blurry glimpse of butt.)
At least the idea of watching Scully and Mulder have sex isn't nearly as creepy as the idea of watching Spock and Uhura have sex. I've been following the Star Trek characters since I was a kid, they're like family at this point and the idea of seeing them naked is just a big, shrieking no. Scully and Mulder don't have that kind of a history for me, and that last movie showed them getting pretty intimate and it was fine, it was sweet and not nasty. But that sure as heck doesn't mean I want to watch them get busy on Scully's autopsy table. (And you know they will, at some point in this porno version.)
But seriously, if we see Skinner get naked at any point in this thing, I plan to puke until I die. Some people were not meant to be naked, ever.
At a charity screening of Dr. Horrible the other night in New York, two of my favorite dudes, Joss Whedon and This American Life host Ira Glass, sat down for a lengthy chat about Whedon's career. The Buffyfest blog has a fairly detailed recap, including a few Youtube clips where you can almost make out what they're saying over the laughter, shouts and muffled coughing of the audience. This is probably the clearest clip of the bunch.
At one point during the chat Whedon was surprisingly frank about some of the problems with Fox during the first season of Dollhouse.
[Dollhouse] became just a scoach too whore-y. Never had a better meeting, everything was great, then they [FOX] said "so they're kinda like prostitutes and that's not ok" Word came down that it wasn't ok. I wanted to make a show thats about feeling bad about feeling good or good about feeling bad. Fantasy is just that, fantasy. FOX wanted to back away from these implications. Every episode is ridiculously hard because the central core has been ripped out just enough, that we're constantly dancing around our own premise.
I'm amazed to say that I kind of side with Fox against Joss on this one. The more "whore-y" aspects of the show often felt just plain sleazy - and not fun-sleazy, either. Sleazy-sleazy, like we were expected to get off on the idea of Eliza Dushku as somebody's literally mindless, progammable love slave. Whedon's shows have been just acclaimed for their feminism, but Dollhouse's Echo was an airhead whose only function in life was to gratify the kinks of her clients, after which she was shut up in a box until next time. You don't have to be Gloria Steinem to be skeeved out by a premise like that, and the episodes where Echo was a jewel thief or something else a little less sexbot-ish were kind of a relief.
I'd assumed that the network had been pushing Whedon to tart Eliza Dushku up more, not the other way around. Ms. Dushku is a damn fine-looking woman, don't get me wrong... But it seemed like we spent about six minutes watching her dance in a minidress in the pilot, and by minute three I was starting to wonder if that's how we were going to spend the whole series. As the first season progressed, the show dealt more with the dark side of Echo's situation and became more interesting. Hopefully we'll see more of that when season two starts on Friday.
500 Pound Planet was a confusing, rough, very strange but fascinating stop-motion film made some years back by Jesse Brown and Josh Doglin, two pals who were then not long out of college. They'd intended it to be an 8-minute short that would hopefully get them work as animators, but instead it turned into a 45-minute epic that took years to shoot and ultimately turned the friends against each other. It also didn't do anything for their animation careers at all, being too weird for TV and too long to play in festivals. Jesse went on to be a public radio host and Josh became the "hiphop klezmer" performer, Socalled.
Brown has now posted the film online, and it seems inevitable that this thing is going to acquire a large cult following in a hurry. Brown describes it as a "weirdo sci-fi hiphop buddy film", which is accurate but doesn't quite capture the full strangeness of it.
The film is set in an alternate, urban reality where clay monster people worry about drug deals and going bald, where the grills in grimy diners are powered by the pulped remains of sad little tribbles and getting caught by the cops can lead to a fate more horrible than prison. At times it almost has the rhythms of an early Scorsese picture, as we follow these two hopeless, bickering mooks around while they try to figure out how to get by in the big, bad city - but then things will take a sharp left turn into nightmarish weirdness, and we realize we are not in Brooklyn anymore.
It's sort of like the dark, urban fantasy Ralph Bakshi was always trying to do, only it actually works.
There is also a prelude, which doesn't exactly explain things but at least gives you another few pieces of the puzzle.
It appears that neither Brown or Doglin has been active in animation for a while, which is a real shame. These guys were really doing something special, and whatever their talents in public radio or klezmer/hiphop, it seems like they missed their calling. Brown is a featured blogger at Boing Boing right now and he's using the opportunity to show 500 Pound Planet to a new audience. Here's hoping somebody in that audience works for Adult Swim.
The Ross Sisters were three pretty young gals who entertained audiences of the '40s with an act consisting of peppy, Andrews Sisters-ish harmonies, spectacular arobatics and freakshow contortionism. This number, from the 1944 movie musical Broadway Rhythm, features the girls performing the annoyingly catchy tune Solid Potato Salad for a minute or so and then suddenly revealing themselves to be crazy ninja android babes who can plop their chins down on the ground, hoist their butts over their heads and then dance around their own skulls.
In the middle ages, these three would've been burned as witches.
One more weird footnote to what will already be the weirdest clip you've seen in about five years: according to their Wikipedia page (which also features the lyrics to Solid Potato Salad), the Ross Sisters were really named Vicki, Dixie and Betsy Ross, but for some reason they went by the names Aggie, Maggie and Elmira for their act.
Sylvester Stallone. "Jesse's ... exploring the mansion. [Stallone] comes in, he's a zombie, ... Jesse charges him, and then it's basically all the jokes were tied to movies: They're sparring like Rocky, and there were some Rambo references. ... We kind of structured it that Woody's character was a huge fan of whatever celebrity's house they went to. ... That was the source of ... the comedy, when Woody would have to fight his idol."
Mark Hamill. In one version of the script, the former Star Wars actor was discovered in his Beverly Hills house, undead and ready to fight. The script included a version of a human-on-zombie lightsaber fight. "There's not as wide of a variety of Mark Hamill references to draw from," Fleischer adds. "I think that's why maybe perhaps he wasn't interested because, I guess, ... [he] doesn't want to be associated with that or I don't know."
Steven Seagal. The has-been '80s martial-arts action star would have, natch, fought with martial-arts moves. "They're all based on the same idea," Fleischer says.
I can understand the actors turning it down, really. Think about it: if you were a faded celebrity, would you want to play a dead version of yourself, rotting and gross and performing a zombie parody of that one role you played decades ago that got you totally typecast forever? Jeez, even Adam West probably wouldn't be down for that crap.
Here's one for my fellow aging Gen-X’ers. Remember The Great Space Coaster? You know, that crazy-ass kiddie show that was on every morning before you went to school, the show that nobody but you seems to remember? The one with the teenagers on the asteroid and the weird-looking puppets and the cartoons and stuff? It was like the Muppets on mushrooms.
There's surprisingly little about the show online. If you want to have your childhood illusions shattered into tiny bits, one of the puppeteers has a page up with a lot of behind-the-scenes photos, showing M.T. Promises with his head off, and more. The Just My Show podcast features a fun and sometimes surprisingly frank interview with the surviving cast members, who dish all sorts of dirt on our old puppet pals. Weird factoid: Kevin Clash, the guy who did the voice of Goriddle, went on to do the voice of that Elmo creature on Sesame Street. While playing Elmo would easily be enough to earn somebody a piece of prime real estate by the Lake of Fire in Hell, it’s possible that Clash has earned a free pass through the pearly gates thanks to his years as Goriddle. I suppose we’ll just have to wait until the Day of Judgment to know for sure.
The clip below features 10 minutes of The Great Space Coaster, and if you aren't already familiar with the characters and the various running jokes, it probably makes for pretty strange viewing. Oh, who am I kidding? This is pretty strange viewing under any circumstances. (The show remains sadly unavailable on DVD and there aren't a lot clips online, so enjoy these 10 minutes while you got 'em.)
Some things from your childhood really don't hold up when you see them again as an adult. But seeing these clips now makes me feel seven years old and stoned, at the same time. I feel like a stoned seven-year-old, and I like it.
Time works differently for children. They have such long, busy days. Each day at school is an eternity of tedious lessons and tasteless fishsticks. And then, when they're at last released from captivity - still in mid-afternoon - there's time yet for naps, time for cartoons, time to mount an expedition into the wilds of the backyard, to dig deep grooves in the soil, to fill the grooves with piles of crunchy leaves, to run the garden hose for hours and see what happens. In a child's day, there is time enough to build your own little world out of the puddles and rocks and twigs that most adults step over, barely noticing, as they rush through days that can seem like they're over before they've begun.
Artist Andy Goldsworthy looks at puddles and rocks and twigs with a child's imagination and sense of possibilities, but he brings to his work a patience and precision that is profoundly adult. Goldsworthy lavishes hours on his creations, briefly bending nature to his will as he connects icicles into an intricate, abstract sculpture, twists twigs into a mesmerizing web, or otherwise commits what hippie bumper stickers would describe as senseless acts of beauty. Sometimes nature cooperates, allowing Goldsworthy time to work his magic. Other times nature harshly reasserts herself before the artist is through, and his hard work is swept away by the merciless tide, blown to bits by the unthinking winds, or it just plain flops over and melts. If Goldsworthy is lucky, he's managed to take some beautiful photographs before his creation descends back into the muck from which it came. Otherwise, he just starts all over again, piling stone upon stone, twig upon twig.
The clip below, from the fascinating documentary Rivers and Tides, features Goldsworthy at work, trying to coax a clump of twigs into a spiderweb-like design.
Even those who dismiss all abstract art with a sneer of "my kid could draw that" usually can't help being fascinated by Goldsworthy's rock piles or icicle works. His ideas speak to the yearning primitive within us all, to that first ape who impressed his handprint into the wet earth outside his cave one prehistoric morning and then stood back to wonder at what he'd done.
If you've never seen Goldsworthy's work, it's hard to do it justice with words—he sounds like some hippie weirdo who makes piles of stones on the beach. And, let's be honest, that's kind of what he is. But he is also a truly brilliant artist. And a kid with time on his hands.
(This post originally appeared, in an altered form, as an article for OC WEEKLY.)
There's an interesting article on SCI FI Wire today about Tim Burton's upcoming stop-motion feature remake of his old short film Frankenweenie. Among other things, we learn that Burton is personally designing the film, taking on a more direct role than he did in previous animated features like The Corpse Bride. Also, it seems that directing the original Frankenweenie is what got Burton fired from Disney back in the '80s, something I don't think I'd heard before. Coming back all these years later to direct a Frankenweenie feature film on Disney's dime has gotta be pretty freakin' sweet.
I wasn't that thrilled with the original, live action Frankenweenie, but I'm curious to see what Burton does with in animation. The story of a boy who brings his dead dog back to life via mad science certainly sounds like something Burton could have fun with.
When you play one of the Silent Hill games, you expect fog-shrouded streets, disturbingly Freudian monsters, a lot of talk about an ancient religion that never really seems to make sense... But you sure don't expect to hear a song like You're Not Here.
It happens like this. You leave Silent Hill 3 on the start-up screen while you go and let that cat out or whatever, and then suddenly you get a jolt as you hear this loud, hard-rocking yet melancholy song that sounds like the Pretenders in their prime. Composer Akira Yamaoka has always taken pains with the music of the Silent Hill games, but while it works very well in the games it's usually not something that stands on its own. You're Not Here does.
Here's the original clip that runs when you leave the game idling on the start-up screen. Those graphics actually hold up pretty well for a game that dates from the distant era when Bush was declaring "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.
I'm not quite sure how it happened, if it was made by the game's producers or if this is some fan deal, but there is also a music video online where the game's teenage emo heroine, Heather, actually sings the song while fighting monsters and walking through hospitals made of meat. It doesn't quite work, partly because it seems weird for Heather to be singing in the middle of all that, and partly because that's an awfully big, grown-up song to be coming out of a girl who looks like she's ditching her driver's ed class. (That's actually Mary Elizabeth McGlynn on vocals, a talented voice actress who has played characters in just about every video game ever made, except for the Silent Hill series.)
Tom Baker, arguably the best (and certainly the most peculiar) actor to have starred in Doctor Who, has now launched his official website. Baker, much like his incarnation of the Doctor, is wonderfully eccentric and witty, and while his site doesn't offer too much content yet he's already posted a "newsletter" that makes for an entertaining read. (But what happened to Edith and Hello, Tom? Don't leave us hanging like that!)
It's not unlikely that CBS will yank this clip off of Youtube soon, so let's enjoy it while it lasts: Dr. Horrible hijacks the Emmy broadcast to deliver a speech decrying network TV, only to be surprised by the arrival of a few familiar faces.
"That was many years ago, before he got sick," writer Rhett Reese told ShockTillYouDrop.com. "It was (going to be) a Patrick Swayze zombie. They got attacked by him zombified and we had these wonderful moments where they found a potter's wheel and there's Columbus on the wheel and these other hands come up behind him and it's Patrick Swayze the zombie. Ultimately, they fight and Patrick bull rushes Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) who grabs him and lifts him into the air, a la Jennifer Grey, and smashes him into a pillar."
I'll bet they're glad the scene didn't work out, because jeez would a scene like that seem creepy and wrong, now.
An absurdist, one-act play in which longtime PBS host Charlie Rose interviews longtime PBS host Charlie Rose about technology. Things do not go well. Steve is not happy. Google...
Greg Johnson's song I Got Opinions doesn't do much for me, but the video is a must-see, a creepy/cute little epic following a little bear/dog/bunny thing as he embarks on a psychedelic odyssey, rocketing through a variety of strange locales and differing illustration styles.
This cartoon web series by Youtube user Whatchalookinatman is a real oddity, totally incoherent and off-putting in a way that's strangely compelling. It plays like a South Park episode that Matt Parker and Trey Stone wrote when they were really, really baked.
Gilligan's Fantasy Island of the Apes is a cartoon that raises many questions. Why is the Professor a gay black guy who talks like Scatman Crothers? Are the apes ever actually going to show up? Why can't I stop watching this crazy thing?
Youtube user SecretCavern is my new favorite person ever, for posting a mess of video versions of those old book-and-record sets from Power Records. If you're too young to have owned them (or your parents just didn't love you enough to buy them for you), Power Records used to sell these awesome packages featuring a comic book and a 45 record with an audio drama adaptation of the comic. The stories featured various popular franchises of the time - everything from the original Star Trek to Planet of the Apes to superheroes from Marvel and DC - and reading the comic at the same time you listened to the audio version brought the story alive in a way that wasn't like anything else. It was a weird hybrid of cartoons and old time radio that shouldn't have worked, but did.
I had a few of these sets growing up, and my favorite featured Spiderman going up against Draco the Dragonman, a reptilian supervillian with a most colorful origin story. I haven't read/heard the story for many a year, and it's a real trip to discover it lurking on Youtube in 2009. Seeing this on Youtube probably won't give you the full experience of flipping those pages one by one, but this is still a fun story and it will be a total kick in the head for anybody else who grew up with these things.
I'm a Wallace and Gromit geek, but somehow I missed hearing about Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death, a new half-hour featurette that's due to arrive on DVD in mere days! This clip, courtesy of Coming Soon, suggests that our boys are at last finding love with a portly dame and her shy pet poodle.
Now, this is neat: a website that features lots and lots of old robots from around the world. Toy robots, robots used for manufacturing, robots from the movies... Every kind of robot you can imagine is lovingly represented here.
(It's actually rather startling how many of them are knock offs of VINCENT from The Black Hole. Doesn't "George" here look familiar?)
"Science fiction plucks from within us our deepest fears and hopes, then shows them to us in rough disguise: the monster and the rocket." - W.H. Auden
Who is he, this one who is called "Greg Stacy"?
Greg Stacy began the MONSTERS AND ROCKETS blog in April of 2009. Prior to that, he was editor of the popular sci-fi/horror news website DARKWOLDS.COM. He has also written for LA WEEKLY, OC WEEKLY, UTNE READER and LOS ANGELES CITYBEAT. He always feels weird writing about himself in the third person.
