MUSIC FROM SPACE: Siouxsie & The Banshees - HALLOWEEN

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Whether you're planning to transform into a man-eating lycanthrope or a bloodthirty vampire tonight, here's Siouxsie Sioux and the boys, live in Germany in 1981, to get you in an appropriately sinister mood.




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BLAIR WITCH duo planning a sequel

Given the blockbuster success of shaky-cam, faux-documentary scarefests like Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity that are very clearly influenced by 1999's The Blair Witch Project, it's hardly surprising that Blair Witch creators Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick are thinking about making a sequel to the movie that started it all.

They passed on Blair Witch 2 and quickly ended up in the "Where Are They Now?" file, but Sanchez tells TheStar.com that might just "milk" the genre one more time.

They're now at the point where they're ready to do a Blair Witch 3, once again sharing writing and directing. They'd pick up from where the original left off, pretending Blair Witch 2 never happened. The duo recently went on a drive through their original Blair Witch haunts, about a half hour from Sánchez's Maryland home, looking for inspiration.

They've worked up a treatment for a new story, which would involve original cast members Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams, albeit in smaller roles.

"We're at the step where we're about to pitch to Lionsgate, which owns the movie rights now. It's pretty much up to them. They can completely squash it or greenlight it."


The news that Donahue, Leonard and Williams could be involved has me curious. Would this be "lost" footage from the original trip in the woods? (If so, good luck making the actors look a decade younger.) Otherwise, it seems like they'd have to give some sort of closure to the original film's enigmatic ending. Either the three would be alive, or they'd be dead and appear as ghosts or something.

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ROGER RABBIT writers working on sequel, Zemeckis says

In the clip below, Robert Zemeckis tells MTV news that Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman, the screenwriters of the original Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, are now at work on a sequel.

Sigh. If Zemeckis had announced he was working on a sequel to Roger Rabbit in 1990, 1995, heck even in 2003, the news would've been thrilling. But this is the Robert Zemeckis of The Polar Express, Beowulf and that truly dreadful-looking upcoming version of A Christmas Carol, the guy who is at work on some ghastly motion-capture remake of Yellow Submarine.

These days Zemeckis seems to be deep in the throes of George Lucas Disease, a cruel ailment that turns gifted filmmakers into guys who make loud, frenetic yet boring movies that look way too much like cutscenes from PS3 games. The prospect of him mounting a Roger Rabbit sequel at this point is grim. Almost Phantom Menace grim.

The original film was all about the contrast between the grit of the film noir "real" world and the goofy comedy of the cartoon characters. But you just know the whole sequel will be done in motion capture (once Zemeckis tried mo-cap, he never went back), so the "real" people will just be one kind of dead-eyed cartoon and the "toon" cartoons will be another kind of dead-eyed cartoon.

I'd like to take some hope in the fact that the original film's writers are working on the sequel, but a look at their work since then is not encouraging. If these guys could foist that Grinch remake on the world a few years ago, I don't put anything past them.




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RINGWALD & MOLLY IN: HALLOWEENIES!

Rob Schrab's classic work of "drawless animation", offering the timeless message: "Halloween kicks Christmas' ass!"

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Centaur skeleton

Friday, October 30, 2009

On the one hand, this centaur skeleton, created by the folks at Skulls Unlimited using the real bones of a person and a horse, is undeniably impressive.

On the other hand, the remnants of a dead human and a dead animal were fused to make this thing. Doesn't that seem... Well, disrespectful at best? Did the person give permission for this before they died, or was this just some random person who got cancer, and they died without knowing that one day their skeleton would be used in a little art project and put on display?




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GINGER SNAPS: A bittersweet Halloween treat

For the next two or three years at least, everything you read about the 2000 werewolf film Ginger Snaps is going to include some variation of the phrase "this is the movie that Jennifer's Body desperately wanted to be". The two films do indeed have a lot in common. Like Jennifer's Body, Ginger Snaps has an unmistakably feminist sensibility, featuring two very close, snarky, endlessly quip-y suburban teen girls who are beginning to grow apart, and the loss of their childhood bond (and many of the other horrors common to adolescence) is expressed as a bloody, supernatural horrorshow.

But Ginger Snaps is a true cult classic (while Jennifer's Body is already fading from the memory of the few who saw it) because Ginger Snaps' screenwriter Karen Walton never lets her characters toss out cute lines at the expense of credibility. Walton's kids feel very real, and that makes the film's horror much more horrifying.

Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Bridgette (Emily Perkins) are a pair of slouchy goth sisters who are outcasts at their high school. They love to talk about suicide and murdering their bitchy classmates, as kids will. But then Ginger is attacked by a creature, a huge and hairy beast that's not a bear or a stray dog. She recovers from the attack all too quickly, and then poor Bridgette is forced to watch her sister transform into somebody (or something) unrecognizable.

Ginger Snaps is terrifying, hilarious and heartbreaking, all at once. It's not absolutely perfect (some of that 2000-era soundtrack, for instance, sounds a little too much like music from some syndicated TV drama circa 1993) but it's damn good. But if you really love the film, do yourself a favor and skip the sequel (Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed) and prequel (Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning). The sequel is a peculiar mess that will just make you depressed and angry, and the prequel is some straight-to-DVD oddity where Isabelle and Perkins put on corsets and pretend to be Ginger and Bridgette's 19th century ancestors - who are also named Ginger and Bridgette. (It is worth noting that Walton was not involved with either the prequel or sequel.)

The original Ginger Snaps is something really special, a weird horror-comedy-tragedy that tries a lot of things and actually succeeds at most of them. But Ginger Snaps is the sort of movie that absolutely does not cry out for a follow-up, and somehow it launched an unlikely franchise that's still not completely dead. There are even occasional rumors of a TV series, as hard as that is to imagine. There are fans out there who really don't want to let these characters go, they want more Bridgette and Ginger stories in any form, and I can sort of sympthize with that impulse. But these girls have suffered enough. It's time to put a silver bullet in their franchise before they're reduced to Ginger Snaps Goes Hawaiian or Ginger Snaps in Outer Space.




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The making of MAD MONSTER PARTY

The 1966 Rankin and Bass' stop-motion classic Mad Monster Party is one of my favorite animated films. It's not as widely known as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and some of their other holiday TV specials - probably because, at feature length, it doesn't get shown on TV that often. But it's an amazing little picture, featuring a punchy script partially credited to Mad Magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman and absolutely charming character designs by longtime Mad artist Jack Davis.

Ever since I was a kid I've been seeking out whatever material I could find about the making of the film. I'm pleased to report that just a few days ago this short documentary about the creation of Mad Monster Party was posted online. It's interesting stuff, featuring a lot of things I'd never known. I never would've guessed that one guy supplied the voices of almost every male character in the cast!

The first part is below, and the second part will be one of the clickable options that pops up at the end.




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MUSIC FROM SPACE: Tim Curry - ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN ON HALLOWEEN

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Tempted though I was to link to a Rocky Horror clip in honor of Halloween, those songs are sort of all over the place this time of year. So instead I'll treat you to Anything Can Happen on Halloween, a Tim Curry number from the 1986 TV movie The Worst Witch.

It's a silly kid's movie and by all rights this should just be a silly kid's song, but Curry invests it with that special Dr. Frank N. Furter sass, snarling and swooning around in a crazy glitter cape and turning the sequence into something too weird to forget.




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The Skeksis Chamberlain trick or treats in Vancouver, 1999

On Halloween, 1999, the people of Vancouver were paid an unexpected visit by the Skeksis Chamberlain from the classic Jim Henson movie The Dark Crystal. The Chamberlain wandered through the crowded streets, beseeching passerby to pleeeassse give him some candy. But, just like in the movie, the poor ol' lizard-bird-monster couldn't get no love. Women and children would flee at the sight of him, while grown men would stand well back, eying him warily. So, finally he retreated to spend a lonesome evening browsing the racks at some chain record store.



Sigh. Actually, that doesn't sound that different from my last Halloween.

(Scuzzbopper, the Youtube user who posted the clip, has posted many other delightful videos, including a few Creature Comforts-esque clay animation experiments.)

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The making of THE HAUNTED MANSION, hosted by young Kurt Russell!

A disturbingly young (and incredibly smarmy) Kurt Russell is your host for this fascinating look at the creation of the original Haunted Mansion attraction at Disneyland. The ride is even more impressive when you see how all of that spooky splendor was basically achieved with mirrors, clockwork gears, turntables, rubber bands and other old junk you'd expect to find in your grandpa's garage.

I would so some terrible things to own some of those little model sets or props. Terrible, awful things. Don't even ask.



If you've never been to the Haunted Mansion (you poor, deprived creature), perhaps this video will give you some idea of what it's like. It takes you from the winding line outside (complete with somebody's uncle making corny jokes to pass the time) all the way through the ride, complete with a ride breakdown when one of the naughty spooks traps you in your "doom buggy".

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FRIDAY THE 13TH's Jason Voorhees... Unmasked!

So, what does Jason Vorhees from the Friday the 13th movies look like without his famous hockey mask? Well, it all depends on which of his many, many movies you're talking about.

I've never been a big fan of the Friday the 13th pictures (or slasher movies in general, really), but this MovieFanFare article about Jason's unmasked appearance in the series is pretty funny and interesting stuff. It's weird how Jason started as a deformed kid with one droopy Quasimodo eye, and as he became more charred and zombie-ish in the later movies his droopy eye somehow straightened itself... Only to then go all crooked-y again in later movies, sometimes. (Fair warning that the site will take you to a page with some pretty cheesy monster makeup... Although really, if you're traumatized by that stuff, I don't know how you've lasted this long online.)

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: The Broken Hearts - BLACK CAT

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

(Yes, this is a re-post, from May. But nobody was reading the site back then. Besides, it's Halloween, and this is just about the most Halloweeny song around.)

The Broken Hearts are Nisha Thirkell and Amber Jane Butchart, two rather improbably glamorous young ladies. They work in a trendy London vintage clothing store, design their own clothes and jewelery, and have become UK fashion gurus in their own right. They are performance artists and club DJs. Oh, and they just happen to front a little band that's earning rave reviews, with London's Guardian declaring that they are the prime movers - and only members, so far - in a scene the paper dubbed "nu burlesque." (Seriously, there's no way two people could cram that much coolness into every day. Do Thirkell and Butchart actually exist, or is their band bio just copy off the back of the box of one of those Bratz London Punk dolls?)

Their 2007 single Black Cat is both bouncy and slinky, which is really pretty tricky to pull off. The video is reminiscent of one of those trippy old Fleisher Bros. cartoons, with Thirkell and Butchart as two live-action, pin-up doll magicians vying for the attention of a cartoon cat with strange powers. Black cat is coming!




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Ohio's Berea High is schooling tomorrow's Frankensteins

For far too many of us, high school was a purgatory of constant dodgeball games that left us with deep scars both metal and physical, and math classes that felt like they would never, ever end. (Mr. Carter, you told us that when we grew up, we would be glad we took algebra and we would use it all the time... But you lied! Why did you lie to us?! Why?!)

So I'm sure I'm not the only one who seethes with envy when they read about the Visual Effects and Design class that Jim Bycznski teaches at Berea High School in Ohio. (The class' official website, bhsfx.com, seems to have been hijacked by a Japanese site at present.) For several hours each day, the kids collaborate on various sculptures, props, masks, and goodness knows what else. And their work has real world applications, being put to use by indie filmmakers, local businesses, trade shows and more.

Let that sink in. These kids go to school every day, and make monsters. Vampires! Zombies! Other wonderfully gross and horrible things! And all the while, Bycznski is teaching them the kind of team-building skills and creative problem solving that they really will use all their lives. I wasted my youth trying to understand what the heck an integer was, while these little creeps get to make grotesque rubber boogiemen like Mr. Horribulus de Fangface over there!

And just to pour sulphuric acid in the wound, a lot of their work looks really good, too. Just look at this short film where a teenage mad scientist goes nuts in his laboratory. Those effects are lot better than anything you'll see in a SyFy original movie.





Fortunately, this is apparently the only such class in the nation. Let's just hope it stays that way. Your teen years are when you're supposed to be ditching class, smoking clove cigarettes out behind the dumpster and forging the bitter regrets that will follow you to your grave. Teenagers should not be having this much fun. We were taught that our monsters needed to be turned inward, so they could gnaw away at our very souls. If today's youth were to have a creative outlet for their angst and aggression, they might just grow up to be happy and well-adjusted adults!

Now, there's a prospect to really chill the blood.

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Creepy rubber vampire mouth in a can

Aw, jeez, I'm not even sure how to describe this product without getting banned by Google Adsense for life.

Okay, kids... Let's say that your daddy goes away on a lot of business trips, trips that keep him away from home for days and days. On those long nights while he's all alone in his cheap, poorly-lit hotel room, he misses your mommy terribly. He misses her in that special way that, um, daddies miss mommies.

Now, naturally he doesn't want to cheat on your mommy. And besides, he's fearful of the strange diseases he might catch from the painted ladies who work down by the docks. So, in his suitcase, he carries a little... object. A... horrible little rubber thing. With a mouth.

Now, let's also say that your daddy is a big vampire fan. Like, he's into vampires way too much. The lady vamps on True Blood get him all swoony. Or maybe he's a big Twilight fan; your daddy could be gay, I'm not judging. Well, now there's a product on the market that will make your vampire-loving daddy very happy. It's called the Succu Dry, and it has a little rubber vampire mouth. With pink teeth. Now, when your daddy is having his late night hotel room lonesome times, he can use the Succu Dry to stimulate his, er, imagination.



Dear lord. By trying to make this thing sound not dirty, I've just written a blog entry that makes me want to go take a 3-hour shower and scrub off a few layers of skin.


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3D STAR WARS sequel rumors are stupid! Stupid and ignorant!

I called it. (Well, so did pretty much everybody else, really.) There's no truth to the rumors that George Lucas is working on a trio of new 3D Star Wars sequels. Lucasfilm's Head of Fan Relations Steve Sansweet was asked about the rumors by Movie Geek Feed, and his response was downright snippy.

"It wasn't a news item," Sansweet said. "It was something that somebody made up. It's totally, totally ignorant and stupid, and even the people who picked it up and spread it along, said there's no way this can be true. And of course there's no way it can be true. You shouldn't believe what you read on the internet. Take everything with a big grain of salt."

Jeez. Why do I get the feeling that if one more person asks Sansweet about this stuff, he's gonna after them with a plastic lightsaber?


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MUSIC FROM SPACE: Iron Maiden - THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

I was a heavy metal dork for about two solid years in my teens, and during that time I lived and breathed for Iron Maiden. Naturally I'm deeply ashamed, and I apologize to anybody who had the misfortune to encounter me during this period. Every day I give thanks that I discovered the Sex Pistols not long before my 17th birthday, and pulled out of my heavy metal tailspin before it was too late.

Seriously, most heavy metal is embarrassingly juvenile, campy crap, and Iron Maiden is certainly no exception. Watching this clip for Maiden's 1982 satanic opus The Number of the Beast, it plays exactly like an outtake from This is Spinal Tap, released the same year. (It hardly helps matters that lead singer Bruce "Air Raid Siren" Dickinson was such a dead ringer for Nigel Tufnel in those days.)

But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that this stuff still gets me on some level. I'm laughing at it, but it's still great fun and it's catchy as heck. And dear lord, that video! Featuring a parade of clips from movie monsters who were seemingly chosen specifically for their ridiculousness (Michael Landon from I Was a Teenage Werewolf? Really?) and culminating with the knock-out triple punch of the crazy ballroom dancers, some skinny guy in red PJ's and a dime store devil mask, and a shambling appearance from a giant puppet version of the band's zombie mascot Eddie, this thing is that close to being a performance clip from a Halloween episode of The Muppet Show.

I have to believe that the Iron Maiden boys were laughing their butts off when they made this thing. And if they weren't? Well, that just makes them even more adorable, doesn't it?

Fair warning that this is a song about midnight satanic rites, culminating in the line, "666, the one for you and me!" So if you're the sort of person who is going to see this ridiculous thing and then flip out bigtime and send me emails about how I'm going to hell, do us both a favor and just don't click on this clip in the first place. OK?




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DOCTOR WHO: THE ANIME

Paul "Otaking" Johnson is a talented English cartoonist who is working on what looks to be a truly epic Doctor Who fan film, made in the style of 1980s anime. It's quite professional looking; if you didn't know better, you'd swear that this was a real show from '87 or so.



If this version of the Doctor seems unusually violent compared to, say, David Tennant, that's actually (somewhat) in keeping with this incarnation of the Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee. Pertwee's Doctor was a man of action, often quick to settle things with a bit of "Venusian Aikido". I'm not sure why Pertwee, of all the Doctor's various incarnations, is the one represented here. Johnson's deviantArt page says he's 31, so he's a bit young to have grown up watching Pertwee in the early '70s. But Johnson certainly does a good job of turning Pertwee into a willowy anime hero, something I previously would've doubted was possible.


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I LOVE SARAH JANE: Sort of like GUMMO, with zombies

Zombies have been done to death (see what I did, there?), but Spencer Susser's short film I Love Sarah Jane is less about zombies and more about their terrible aftermath. Set in an Australian suburb sometime after a zombie outbreak has swept through the streets, the film follows a group of kids in a world without grown-ups. Jimbo is a little boy who rides his bike through streets full of smashed and broken things, spending his days hanging around with other boys whose unchecked youthful aggression is quickly giving way to cruel barbarism. Sarah Jane is the local girl he pines for, but even though he could literally be almost the last boy alive, she barely knows he exists.

This is a sharp and uncompromising horror short, hideously bloody one moment and heartbreaking the next. The violence is particularly unsettling because it seems so much like plausible kid behavior, but the little moments of human connection are effective because they feel so real, too. There's also lots and lots of swearing... Do I even need to tell you this is probably not safe for work? Susser's now at work on his feature debut Hesher, and Mia Wasikowska, the film's titular Sarah Jane, will soon have another title role as Alice in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.

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William Shatner keeps it gay

Monday, October 26, 2009

In the 1970s, after the original Star Trek and before the Trek movies, William Shatner just seemed to kind of go nuts for a while. In this clip from The Mike Douglas Show, Shatner launches into an inexplicable production number about "keeping it gay" as the studio audience visibly squirms. The really weird thing? Shatner's singing isn't bad!

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Bow down before your Klingon overlords

This is an odd one. There is now a cartoony but very slick Klingon propaganda website online, and so far nobody is really sure what it's all about. Is this a fan thing? Some sort of viral deal to promote an upcoming Star Trek project?

The site features a very Commie-style Klingon propaganda film - seen below - that sort of fits with the very Commie-style Klingons of the original Trek series. (It doesn't really fit the Klingons we came to know during the Next Generation-Deep Space Nine era... But these days it seems like we're all just sort of supposed to pretend that the last 20 or so years of Trek never happened. Not that I'm at all bitter about that or anything.)




(Via SCI FI Wire.)


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Dead Tauntaun wedding cake

Chris Trevas' wanted a special wedding cake, so the good folks at Cake Nouveau made a distressingly realistic cake version of "Dead Tauntaun with Luke Skywalker", from The Empire Strikes Back. More photos here.

(The likenesses really are excellent... But why does the poor tauntaun have to look so darn sad?)






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Humpty Dumpty by Edgar Allan Poe

Here's another little delight from Dylan Curry, in which Baltimore's favorite (prodigal?) son Edgar Allan Poe offers up his interpretation of the famous nursery rhyme.




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Don't forget the Geocities... This was supposed to be the new world

Sunday, October 25, 2009

An era ends on October 26th, 2009 (that would presumably be tonight at midnight) when Geocities officially shuts down for good.

Back in the late 90s and the early whatever-we're-calling-this-decade*, Geocities was the place where a lot of us first got to know the internet. Ranting manifestos, pages listing every item in some shut-in's collection of He-Man action figures, obsessive fan sites dedicated to some band that broke up in 1980 without ever getting within shouting distance of the top 40, galleries of furry giantess jpegs... Geocities offered all of that, and oh, so much more. All of a sudden, being a misfit became a lot less lonely. No matter what wacky crap you were into, all you had to do was click around on Geocities for a while, and eventually you would find people who shared your obsessions.

If you're enough of a geek to be reading this and you're over the age of 25 or so, I'm willing to bet that Geocities has touched your life. Before Geocities, America's misfits had pen pals and they published 'zines (and raged against machines), and that was all very well... But it just wasn't enough. The internet changed everything, in ways tiny and beyond measuring, for good and ill. And for a lot of us, the internet began with a visit to those dorky little virtual "neighborhoods": Area51, TimeSquare, SiliconValley, SoHo...

You might think it's silly to get nostalgic about virtual places you haven't visited since 2001 or so. Or you might feel like they're bulldozing the streets where you grew up.


*Isn't it ridiculous that we still haven't figured out what to call the years 2000-2009, even now that they're almost over?

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STRANGE TOONS: SHAFT OF LIGHT

Bill Tomlinson's Shaft of Light is a peculiar little 1996 stop-motion film that once seen in never forgotten. Set in a bleak, steampunk-ish, underground realm, the film introduces us to the Carriers, dull-witted, hunched-over robots who spend their lives hauling stuff around for the benefit of an unspecified "them". But then one day, the Carriers discover that the way is blocked. What is blocking the way? They do not know. They shall be late. It is bad to be late.



Shaft of Light
did pretty well for a modern short film, screening at Sundance and other festivals and airing everywhere from Bravo to IFC to the Sci-Fi Channel. Around the same time, Tomlinson directed a feature called Artemis that I can't seem to find out much about. But that seems to be as far as he went in the movies, I get the impression that he gave up his film career a while ago. He is a restless talent, and over the years he's worked for Mattel, been a professor at UC Irvine, studied bugs, acted in Mamet plays and served as the creative consultant for something called the "Robotic Life Group" at MIT. (And what have you been doing with your life since 1996?)

Tomlinson's also done a series of art installations, including Boxed In, the large sculpture he and his sister Lynn Tomlinson created for the city of Philadelphia in 1996. If you couldn't make it out, the big fellow is holding a video monitor in one hand, and a video camera in the other. If he looks familiar, he should. He's a Carrier, encased in a too-small display window and no doubt muttering to himself about how the way is blocked.


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The MAD MAGAZINE TV special

Saturday, October 24, 2009

I'm surprised to say that until just now I'd never even heard of this 1974 animated Mad Magazine TV special. I was born too late to have seen this when it was new, but I was a big Mad geek growing up and I'm not sure how I got this far without ever hearing anybody mention the thing. (It's on Youtube in three parts. The first part is below.)

The commenters over at Cartoon Brew criticize the special for not capturing the flavor of the old Mad, but I think the show was actually amazingly faithful to its source material, compared to cartoon specials of the era that adapted other properties. Most '70s TV specials are pitched directly at kids and feature rather low-budget animation and a lot of sappy songs. (I have a certain nostalgic fondness for the Rankin & Bass version of The Hobbit, for instance, but Tolkien probably would've had a stroke if he'd seen that thing.)

The producers of the Mad special adapt a lot of Mad features pretty directly, almost to a fault. It's funny how the relatively mild humor of Mad seems fairly edgy in this context. Remember, this was decades before stuff like The Simpsons and Adult Swim, when angry satire was the last things anybody expected in TV animation. The opening bit about auto manufacturers is a pretty relentless attack. It almost plays like something out of early Saturday Night Live!

The animation itself is not bad, either. It simplifies the Mad look a lot, but that sort of thing is inevitable in animation. But jeez, is that "smooth jazz" score ever obtrusive! What furshlugginer clod thought that was a good idea? Ecch!




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The Main Moon


When you are the Moon, you have your own website, so even in the daytime, people can look at your chalky white face.

Now you can look at the moon, on your laptop. 'Ey, the moon... on your lap!

(I realize we're in danger of too much Mighty Boosh coverage on this blog... But come on, how could I not link to the Moon's own website?)

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Rob Zombie's WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

Friday, October 23, 2009


The sketches on G4TV used to be a hell of a lot funnier before the network went all Maxim-y on us, but every now and then they still come up with a corker. Here's Attack of the Show's version of Where the Wild Things Are as re-imagined by shock rocker turned horror movie auteur Rob Zombie.

Warning: very nasty. But probably not as nasty as it would've been if Mr. Zombie made a real version of Wild Things.




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CREATION will be distributed in US after all


Toldja so. Creation, the Charles Darwin biopic that was supposedly "too controversial" to be released in the US, is going to be released here after all... By Newmarket Films, the same folks who brought us The Passion of the Christ.

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: Paperhand Lincoln - TOO LAZY TO BLEED

Dylan Curry is a very talented musician/artist/puppeteer who is nowhere near as famous as he oughtta be. He fronts the band Paperhand Lincoln, makes splendid music videos featuring weird little puppets of his own devising, and then posts them to Youtube where they get a few hundred hits if he's lucky.

This is an outrage! Seriously, check out his awesome video for Too Lazy to Bleed, and tell me why Eminem is a gazillionaire while this guy is probably working in a bank or some crap like that.



Get your butt over to his Youtube page, watch some videos, buy some stuff. If Curry gets discouraged and ends up putting his guitar and all of his puppets in a box in his attic, it will be your fault for not supporting a guy with this kind of potential when you had the chance. Do you really want to live with that kind of guilt? Do you?

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How accurate was Kubrick's 2001 about the future?


A very interesting post on Currybetdotnet, examining the various things that Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey got right and wrong about the future. (Er, or the past, for us. But it was the future, in 1968.)

I think the author doesn't give the film quite enough credit in some ways. For instance, 2001 was shot before we'd ever actually set foot on the moon, but the film's depiction of the lunar surface is spot-on. And even if the film fails to capture what the real year 2001 ended up being like, it presents an amazingly persuasive alternate history by taking the NASA tech of the space age and extrapolating where it would go in the coming decades. You watch that movie, and it's hard to believe those are wooden sets and plastic spaceship models. You really feel like you're seeing life in space.

Sigh. Kubrick's 2001 had routine flights to the moon, cryogenic sleep and superintelligent computers that are pretty awesome when they're not trying to toss you out of the airlock to die in space. Our 2001 had 9/11, George W. Bush and "Bennifer". I think we got the raw end of that deal.

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Eric Stoltz almost went BACK TO THE FUTURE in a time traveling fridge


The original Back to the Future was almost a very different movie. How different? Well, instead of Michael J. Fox driving the Delorean at 88 miles per hour to travel back to 1955, the film originally featured Eric Stoltz flying through time in a refrigerator powered by an exploding nuclear bomb.

Stoltz was hired as the film's leading man, and apparently the shoot was pretty far along before director Robert Zemeckis decided that Stoltz just wasn't working in the role. By various accounts Stoltz was "too serious" as Marty McFly, and wasn't clicking right with Christopher Lloyd. For reasons unknown, the footage of Stoltz as Marty is hard to find; it doesn't seem to be online at all, and I don't think it's been on any of the video or DVD releases. Even this short TV piece about Stoltz's firing from the film only uses still photos.



This is a total guess on my part, but maybe Stoltz was disgruntled about being dropped from the picture and didn't sign off on his footage being used. In any case, there's definitely something weird going on here. A lot of Back to the Future fans would like to see that footage, but it's been locked up in a vault somewhere for over a quarter of a century.

There's one more odd little detail about Stoltz's involvement with Back to the Future, and it's something I've never heard anybody else mention.

Just recently I finally caught up with the pilot episode of Caprica on DVD (say what you wanna say about how Ron Moore ends a series, but the guy sure knows how to start them) and I noticed for the first time how much Stoltz looks like Michael J. Fox. It's kind of uncanny once you see it, Stoltz could be Fox's taller, redheaded brother. I'm assuming that when the producers of Back to the Future fired Stoltz, they didn't deliberately set out to find a replacement who looked just like a shorter, darker haired version of him. Although apparently the resemblance did come in handy; I've heard that a few of Stoltz's long shots actually made into the finished film. The resemblance is strong enough that from 15 or 20 feet back, they could pass off Stoltz as Fox.

Doc Brown's Delorean was originally supposed to be a fridge, and the closing sequence - which got as far as being storyboarded - involved Marty harnessing the energy of an A-bomb test to blast himself back to the future. But executive producer Steven Spielberg was worried about kids imitating Marty and locking themselves in fridges, so it was changed to the souped-up Delorean. (Note that that /Film link features an embedded video of concept artist Andrew Probert doing a storyboard walkthrough of the film's original ending. But don't get your hopes up; the footage is no longer available.)

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McKean in talks for CAGES film

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Dave McKean, perhaps best known as the innovative illustrator for various Neil Gaiman comics and novels (Sandman, Coraline, etc.) is apparently in preliminary talks to make a film version of his own, early 1990s graphic novel, Cages.

"Great first meeting about Cages film," McKean wrote on his Twitter page. "A long term possibility, but good to know all interested parties are on the same page."

In a later tweet, he responded to a reader's question with, "I would be adapting + directing. I did Cages 20 yrs ago, think it could grow into unusual animated film."

Cages would be a real challenge to adapt to film. An ambitious and boldly experimental work, told with shifting visual styles and surreal plotting, the book followed the tangled lives of the various residents of a single building in England. It's apparently no longer in print, but can be found online without much trouble.

This wouldn't be McKean's first feature; he previously helmed the interesting misfire Mirrormask, which Gaiman wrote.

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More STAR WARS movies?

By the time you read this rumor it will probably already be debunked, but SCI FI Wire is reporting that George Lucas is allegedly working on three new 3D Star Wars pictures.

Here's hoping it is just a rumor. At this point the prospect of Lucas further tainting his legacy is just depressing. I recently came to the grim realization that the Star Wars franchise is now at least half crap, and it's probably more like 2/3rds. Even if we agree that the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are great and we grade Return of the Jedi generously, then you've got those wretched prequels, a pair of pretty rank Ewok TV movies, the Star Wars Holiday Special, the Droids cartoon from the '80s, that Clone Wars TV series and the upcoming live action TV series that you just know will suck Bantha poodoo... That's three (well, be fair, two and a half) classic movies, in a franchise that has otherwise pretty much been three long decades of constant disappointment.

I'm sorry, but it must be said. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

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"Manualist" plays SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW with hand-farts

You know that thing your weird cousin used to do when you were kids, where he could squeeze his hands together and make them fart out Mary Had a Little Lamb or Happy Birthday to You? Gerry Phillips has been making his hands fart out songs for decades, and today he is arguably the world's greatest hand-farter. (He prefers the term "manualist", but to me that sounds like somebody who writes instructional manuals or something. You're a hand-farter, Gerry! Be proud to be a hand-farter!)

In this clip, Phillips pinches out the Wizard of Oz classic, Somewhere Over the Rainbow. He really nails those high notes, doesn't he? Aye, 'tis a thing of beauty t'would bring a tear to Judy Garland's eye.



If this clip leaves you aching for more of Gerry's manualizing, he has posted lots of other songs on his Youtube page. Lots and lots, in just about every genre imaginable. You want Herbie Hancock's Rockit? He's got it. Under the Bridge? Poker Face? Don't Stop Believing? You name it, and this guy has posted a video of himself performing it. I wish local radio had a playlist as eclectic as this guy.

(Dear Lord... I hope he's making those sounds with his hands.)

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MIGHTY BOOSH/STAR WARS mashup


In this clip from Youtube user BobSetchthe2nd, Howard Moon and Vince Noir's journey through time and space takes them back a long time ago to a galaxy far, far away.

Mashing up The Mighty Boosh and classic Star Wars is a clever idea and this clip is funny-ish, but it goes on a bit too long and it probably would've worked a lot better with some sort of actual story, however contrived or silly. Just dropping Howard and Vince into random Star Wars scenes gets a little tired after a while, it loses momentum. Still, if you're a fan of the Boosh and Star Wars (and you have to be a really big Boosh fan to get even half of these references), this clip is pretty much a must-see.



He's also got a Boosh/Harry Potter mashup, if you want it. Same deal: sort of funny, but it's just lots of little clips and it kind of goes on forever. But the Boosh boys actually blend in pretty well around Hogwarts, and it's sort of nice to see Howard's lecture on frogs and bears actually find a receptive audience. (Note that both clips feature plenty of swears, enough that they might be NSFW.)


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The weird science of Keith Tyson

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Keith Tyson is an award-winning British artist whose work often looks sort of like science experiments gone wrong, but in the best way. Most if his work isn't as creepy as Mr. Cube over there, but it'll definitely put a nice crimp in your day.

His website is very flash-heavy and not too easy to steer, but it's worth clicking around and seeing what the heck you discover. Just think of it as the weirdest, slowest video game ever... And one where no matter what you do, you win!

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REVENGE OF THE SITH: THE AARDMAN VERSION


Revenge of the Sith recast with the little clay people from Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. This is a very silly business indeed, but it's a masterful editing job and I damn near laughed the socks right off my feet.

Again: very, very silly. But great.




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WONDERLANDS: ALICE IN WONDERLAND, 1981

Is Efrem Pruzhansky's 1981 Russian version of Alice in Wonderland, yes? Is story about the little girl who chases the rabbit with watch, and the little girl is falling down a hole and landing in the place full of the wonderful crazy people and the disappearing cat with the grin that talks. Is in Russian, but even if you don't speak language, movie is still scrambling your brains like talking egg that falls off of wall. Is good!



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The pop-up wonders of Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

My girlfriend recently had a birthday, and I gave her a little pile of pop-up books as gifts. No, my girlfriend isn't six. (Honestly, officer.) But she is a fan of really well-made pop-ups, and nobody makes 'em better than New York artists Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart.

If you haven't had occasion to check out pop-up books lately, you've missed out on an amazing renaissance in the form, largely thanks to the work of Sabuda and Reinhart. They do things with paper that don't even seem possible. In Sabuda's Wizard of Oz, a Kansas twister comes spinning out at your face and an entire Emerald City rises off the page, green and glittery and so solid you feel like you could walk around in it. In his version of Alice in Wonderland, the courtroom scene culminates in dozens of playing card people flying off the page and around the giant Alice's head like a swarm of angry hornets - and they actually fly off the page, hovering there before you. It's like nothing you've ever seen.

In this clip the pair walk you through some of their relatively crude early work, building up to the full-color extravaganzas they create today.



If you know a kid who isn't interested in reading, buy them one of these books and they'll spend days on the floor of their bedroom, turning those pages and trying to figure out the magic between those covers. And take my word for it, these books make fairly inexpensive but spectacular gifts for your girlfriend, wife, mistress or common-law bride. Who needs fancy chocolates and diamond rings when they can open a book and have their own Narnia, their own Wonderland, their own Oz?


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Duchovny talks X-FILES 3

In an interview with The Daily Beast, X-Files star David Duchovny offers his own take on what should happen if there is another sequel.

Duchovny looks forward to filming a third X-Files film in the near future. “As far as the X-Files movie I’d like to do next, if we get a chance to do it, would be a return to the heart and soul of the mythology, which is the alien-oriented conspiracy. I think it’s natural for The X-Files to have another movie in 2012, so we’ll see if we get to do it.” He defends last year’s widely panned I Want to Believe, as well as the polarizing last few seasons of the television run: “I was happy with it… I have nothing but respect for [X-Files creator] Chris Carter and the writing staff.”

If there is going to be another film (and there better be, or all that stuff about the big scary things coming in 2012 is going to seem even more anticlimactic), Duchovny's right that the alien mythology is definitely the way to go. I Want to Believe was disappointing and the franchise does seem pretty dead at this point, but I bet a lot of people would be interested in seeing Mulder and Scully have one last adventure, if it was handled right... And that means alien abductions and spooky lights in the sky, not some sad, puzzling, transgendered Frankenstein who spends the whole damn movie asleep on a slab.

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Find the Fish

If you're having a slow work day today, why not liven things up with a game of Find the Fish, quite probably the weirdest bit that Monty Python ever did. (Hey, it beats the heck out of Minesweeper.) I've been looking for a couple of decades now, and so far I've yet to spot that most elusive fish. Well, maybe this time...

I'm keeping my eye on that elephant waiter monster. Although I also suspect that the new wave drag queen with faucet boobs knows more than she's telling.



Poor leering nightmare man with crazy, bendy arms. Shall you never find your fishy friend? Oh, fishy, fishy, fishy, fish...


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Murray unenthused about GHOSTBUSTERS 3


For months we've heard a lot about progress on a third Ghostbusters movie, but lately Bill Murray has been making it increasingly clear that he is by no means committed to the project. Recently he made his reservations known in an interview with the UK's Absolute Radio, and a few days ago he elaborated a bit while speaking with Times Online.

We finish on the future and Ghostbusters III. The news that there is third movie on the way has been chewing up the internet for months. Typically, Murray, who is next up in Jim Jarmusch’s fantastically droll assassin’s tale The Limits of Control, is not entirely enthusiastic about the idea. "What they really want from us is just to open the movie and then get lost after introducing a new generation of ghostbusters, who can start the franchise all over again," he says with a shrug. "I’ve heard the script idea, and part of it is good but, ye know, it’s going to be tough to start again."

As I've said before, if the plan really is to just have the original Ghostbusters essentially do a cameo to introduce a new team, I think it's a terrible idea. Sure, Hollywood is going to be itchy about the prospect of a major feature headlined by senior citizens. But come on, this is the Ghostbusters we're talking about! Audiences want to see Bill Murray and company strapping on the proton packs, they want to hear that corny old Ray Parker Jr. theme song, they want Slimer to be a kind of cheap-looking rubber puppet.

Somebody already tried to reboot the franchise without the original characters. It was called Extreme Ghostbusters, and today it's all but forgotten. (I hadn't even heard of it until today, and I'm a Ghostbusters fan and a cartoon geek.) You make a movie without the old cast front and center, and it'll be a disaster of biblical proportions, real wrath of God type stuff. Earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!


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About This Blog

"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.

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