STAR WARS anti-drunk driving PSA

The Mos Eisley cantina may be a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but at least they have designated drivers.
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Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt do SID AND NANCY, in drag

In this truly bizarre clip, 500 Days of Summer stars Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt perform a gender-swapped re-enactment of one of the most grim scenes in cinema history: the death of Nancy Spungen from the 1986 Alex Cox film Sid and Nancy.

Deschanel does a surprisingly credible Sid, with Gordon-Levitt really throwing himself into recreating Chloe Webb's quavering, clingy desperation... Although the plug for 500 Days at the end kind of seems like bad taste. I mean, this isn't just a famous movie moment... Spungen really died, and quite horribly too, and they're kind of making a punchline out of it. I'm not sure what the point of this clip is, really, but it was too weird to be left unshared.
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"I'm Dreaming of a Blue Sunset -- on Mars"

Enjoy this Doctor Manhattan-esque footage of a sunset as seen from the surface of Mars.
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A Betamax Christmas

If you need a little retro Christmas TV, right this very minute, Betamax Christmas will put the jolly back in your holly. The site recreates a full evening of Christmas TV programming circa 1986 or so, complete with rabbit ears on the TV that you have to fiddle with to get a better picture. (You change the channel by flipping the remote floating over on the right. It seems obvious once you notice it, but it took me a while to spot it.)

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CHRISTMAS IN THE STARS

If the Star Wars Holiday Special wasn't awkward and embarrassing enough for you, there's always the Star Wars holiday album, Christmas in the Stars. The track above, featuring the vocal stylings of everybody's favorite protocol droid C3-PO, is just the beginning of the squirmy, uncomfortable anti-fun. There's also What Do You Get a Wookie? (When He Already Owns a Comb) and this deathless classic featuring a young Jon Bon Jovi in his first studio recording ever. (It was all downhill from there, Jon.)

Happy Life Day, everybody!

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Christmas with the Doctors

In this quick sketch from the UK series Dead Ringers, Doctor Who's tenth Doctor suffers through a rather tense Christmas with a few of his earlier incarnations. (The Tom Baker impersonator is so spot-on it's kind of eerie.)

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SHATNER SUNDAY: BLAH BLAH BLAH

In this "supercut of movie blah blah blahs," various characters in various films have a bad case of the blahs... Until Shatner steps in to chase those blahs away.
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MUSIC FROM SPACE: Edge of Etiquette - I HATE YOU

Kirk Thatcher is one of those cool Hollywood behind-the-scenes geeks you've never heard of, a guy who has played an important role in all sorts of beloved geek nerd franchises without getting any of the glory. He's done special effects for ILM, written and performed for the Muppets, he was the associate producer of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home... But, as he readily admits in this interview, they will probably put his credit for Star Trek IV's Punk on Bus on his tombstone.

Not only did Thatcher portray the Punk, he was also responsible for the song blaring out of the Punk's ghetto blaster. Apparently the studio wanted to use some other song that Thatcher found insufficiently nasty, so he volunteered to record a suitable punk song himself. Thatcher got together with a few studio sound guys as The Edge of Etiquette, and in a couple of hours they knocked out I Hate You, an absolutely perfect little chunk of '80s punk.

I Hate You turned up again in the Frankie and Annette reunion movie Back to the Beach, but otherwise that was sadly the last the world ever heard of Edge of Etiquette. (The song didn't even appear on the Star Trek IV soundtrack!) Only a short excerpt of the song was featured in Star Trek IV before Spock put the Vulcan neck pinch on the Punk, but you can hear the full version in the clip above. Note that this clip features some very NSFW language as part of Thatcher's Johnny Rotten-esque ranting at the end.

As one Youtube commenter writes, this song would've been so much better than the Beastie Boys for the young James T. Kirk's joyride in JJ Abrams' Star Trek reboot. I think I would've liked that stupid movie about 87% more if Abrams had been cool enough to think of that.

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: The Pixies - WHERE IS MY MIND?

Youtube user TheCrass1984 has created a bloop-y, bleep-y, 8-bit rendition of the Pixies classic Where is My Mind?
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First BACK TO THE FUTURE game trailer

The first Back to the Future game trailer is online, and I'm now just a scootch less enthused about the game than I was the other day. I thought the character designs looked fine in photos, but in motion they seem a little weird and listless to me. Still, hearing that old music again (both the orchestral opening theme and the cheesy Huey Lewis tune at the end) did this old Gen-X heart good.

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DINO D-DAY!

This one almost ended up as a Hi-Fi Pizza of the Apocalypse, but it was just too awesome for that. Seriously, there have been a bajillion dinosaur shooter games and a bajillion bazillion WWII FPS games... But until now, there's never been a WWII FPS dinosaur game! America may have the bomb, but the axis powers have fascist dinosaurs!

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WIZARD OF OZ deleted scene: THE JITTERBUG

There is a scene in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz where the Wicked Witch of the West announces that she's sending a "little insect" to "take the fight out of" Dorothy and the gang. The film is so crowded with colorful characters and weird happenings that you probably never noticed that the "little insect" never shows up and is never mentioned again.

The Wicked Witch's "little insect" is actually a reference to The Jitterbug, a lengthy and elaborate musical number that was cut from the film. Various reasons have been given for why the scene got the axe; by some accounts the studio was worried the song would date the film, by other accounts there was concern that the song was a little too adult and edgy for a children's picture. (The jitterbug was considered a rather scandalous dance at the time.) Whatever the reason, all that survives of the sequence is the audio and some grainy footage shot at a rehearsal. A while back I posted the clip, but it's since been taken down. Here it is again, so enjoy it while it lasts...



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Neil Diamond covers Adam Sandler's CHANUKAH SONG

Yep. That happened. In flash cartoon form.

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A.J. LoCascio's uncanny Marty McFly impression in the BACK TO THE FUTURE game

I am cautiously optimistic about the upcoming Back to the Future game. The little glimpses I've gotten so far look fun, and it's clear that the folks involved have a lot of affection for the original trilogy.

While they were able to convince Christopher Lloyd to voice Doc Brown, Michael J. Fox was unavailable for the role of Marty McFly. That could have stopped the project cold right there, but they got ridiculously lucky and discovered A.J. LoCascio, a young man who does a simply uncanny Michael J. Fox impression. Seriously, he does that squawky Marty McFly voice perfectly, as you'll see in this clip.

There are more clips about the game's creation over on /Film.

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Scooby-Doo meets Harlan Ellison. And H.P. Lovecraft.

If you took my brain when I was about 13 years old and tapped a spigot into it, something a lot like this episode of the Cartoon Network series Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated probably would've come dribbling out. Shrieking Madness features an unlikely combo of my childhood faves the Scooby Gang, perpetually cranky sci-fi author Harlan Ellison and Cthulhu mythos creator H.P. Lovecraft. (Well, they call him H.P. Hatecraft, but they don't fool me with that cunning little ruse.)

Ellison voices himself. Lovecraft is way too dead to provide his own voice, but he's played here by Jeffrey Combs, so that's almost as good.

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner bugging out in SHOOT OR BE SHOT

Apologies for the dearth of posts around these parts lately, but hopefully I can make up for it with today's Shatner Sunday, a magnificently odd clip from the 2002 indie Shoot or Be Shot featuring Shatner as an unhinged, wannabe screenwriter.

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New, depressing photos from the set of the Muppet comeback movie

Forgetting Sarah Marshall star/puppet aficionado Jason Segel is masterminding an upcoming comeback movie for the Muppets, and a few photos from the set have turned up online. The shots show the Muppet film studio (a redressed version of the real Jim Henson Studios on La Brea in Los Angeles) having fallen to ruin, with everything looking broken, skuzzy and sad. Click here to see a gallery of photos and learn more about the film.

Man, seeing the rusted hulk of the Electric Mayhem bus from the original Muppet Movie is a lot more depressing than it should be.

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EDITING THE DEAD

George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead, re-cut into an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure Youtube series. Admittedly there are plenty of times here where they sort of cheat and you're only presented with one "choice," but it's still a clever idea, well executed.

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Cthulhu Mythos as Imagined by Kids

As part of an art project for a group of kids in Canoga Park, David Milano had the kids draw the ancient and terrible creatures from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. The results are horrifyingly adorable.

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner vs. Borgnine in THE DEVIL'S RAIN

The Devil's Rain is an absolutely crazy 1975 horror movie featuring a startlingly eclectic cast, including William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, Ida Lupino, John Travolta, noted satanist Anton LaVey and many more. Best remembered for its truly nightmarish (and very drippy) ending, the film has plenty of other unforgettable moments along the way. In this scene an uncharacteristically timid Shatner goes up against Borgnine's Satanic priest.

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HI-FI PIZZA OF THE APOCALYPSE 11: RUBIK'S CUBE: THE MOVIE

Inspired by this apocalyptic moment from an old Daniel Clowes Eightball comic, Hi-Fi Pizza of the Apocalypse is a Monsters and Rockets feature where we chronicle the spectacularly unnecessary Hollywood rehashes, recyclings and recombinings that serve as ominous portents of the End Times.

This is apparently a thing that is really happening: Rubik's Cube: The Movie.

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SPLENDORMAN

Will Splendorman visit you today?

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Craig Ferguson on RED DWARF

Today most of us here in the US know Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson as the host of his own frequently wonderful late night show on CBS. Before that he portrayed the nefarious British boss Mr. Wick on The Drew Carey Show. But before that, way back in the '80s, he had a memorable guest starring role on the long-running UK sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf. In the episode Confidence and Paranoia, the show's protagonist, Dave Lister, contracts a form of mutated space pneumonia that makes his fevered hallucinations come to life. Ferguson appeared as the bellowing, hucksterish personification of Lister's confidence. Young, husky and sporting a magnificently broad American accent, Ferguson is all but unrecognizable in the clip above. (The clip is just a segment of the episode, and the whole thing is worth tracking down if you've never seen it before.)

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner sings Cee-Lo's **** YOU

This clip was all over the place this week, but if you missed it... Well, maybe you'd do just as well to keep on missing it. Shatner singing Cee-Lo Green's catchy and very much NSFW hit **** You sounds like it should be great fun, but somehow it doesn't really click. Shatner seems like he's struggling to keep up with the music, and the results are neither awesome nor awesomely bad.

I think the proximity to George Lopez temporarily robbed Shatner of his innate awesomeness. It's a phenomenon scientists refer to as the Lopez Effect, in which any awesome celebrity rapidly loses their awesome the longer they remain on the set of the George Lopez Show. Shatner dared to cross the Lopez Event Horizon, and we all paid the price.

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The Clash's Paul Simonon shows off his artwork

He doesn't play music much anymore and that magnificent punk rock pompadour is long gone, but Clash bassist Paul Simonon is keeping busy these days as a fine artist. His impressionistic bullfighting scenes and paintings of bacon and eggs could be considered kitschy, but they have a nice intensity to them.

(Until today I hadn't known that was him on the cover of London Calling, smashing that bass. Apparently he's regretted it ever since, as it was his favorite bass!)

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Phil Tippett's stop-motion JURASSIC PARK

Back in the 1980s, special effects maestro Phil Tippett created amazing stop-motion animation for movies like The Empire Strikes Back, Robocop and Dragonslayer. He switched over to CGI for 1993's Jurassic Park, but he did some of the film's pre-visualization work with old school stop-motion. He's posted one of these stop-motion sequences on his official Youtube page, and it's fascinating to see this famous scene accomplished with old-fashioned effects techniques. It doesn't have the absolute realism of the finished film's CGI, but it's quite effective in its own right.





Tippett's also posted a trailer for a new stop-motion project called Mad God, although he's cruelly disabled embedding. It looks absolutely stunning, I can't wait to learn more about it.

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

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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RINGWALD & MOLLY IN: HALLOWEENIES!

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

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The Tim Burton Halloween special that never was

A really fascinating post over on Jim Hill Media about Trick or Treat, the Tim Burton Halloween special that never was. I sure miss this Burton. I keep hoping that the crappy-remake guy will go away, and the Beetlejuice Burton will return to us one day.

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THRILLER CHILLER THEATER, hosted by Mini Coffee

The Sarah Silverman Program may have been canceled... But the beautiful Ms. Miniature Coffee lives on!

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner's toupee

Shatner has flat-out denied it. He has half-admitted it. He has joked about it. He has artfully deflected questions about it. He has totally lost his cool when questioned about it.

The question: Does William Shatner wear a toupee? This blog examines the evidence, then examines it some more until it gets kind of creepy, stopping just short of going through Shatner's garbage. (Jeez... Check out the guy who runs a regular blog feature called Shatner Sunday, calling out another blogger for being unhealthily obsessed with William Shatner.)

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: The Cramps - GARBAGEMAN

Ariel Hahn's animated music video for the Cramps punk rock classic ingeniously brings the song to life with great piles of wriggly, throbbing trash. Stick out your can! Here comes the garbageman!

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Woman gains "third arm" following stroke

Following a stroke, a woman in Switzerland developed an imaginary third arm that looked and felt as real to her as the arms she'd always had.

Scientists subjected her to tests, and discovered that the phantom limb is indeed just as real as her other limbs, as far her brain's perception of it is concerned. When she is asked to move the arm, her motor cortex shows the signs of moving an actual limb. When she is asked to look at her third arm, her visual cortex responds as if its watching the arm move.

At least the poor woman got one small benefit out her stroke - she's now able to scratch her itches without anybody knowing! While her imaginary third arm passes through solid objects, when she uses it to scratch her own skin, her brain perceives it as actual scratching.

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Mesmerizing video of giant bubbles on the beach

This is an amazing clip. The bubbles look sort of like the undersea aliens from The Abyss, sort of like those weird soul projection things from Donnie Darko, and sort of like levitating rainbow ghost manatees from another dimension.

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: David Crowder Band - SHINE (SMS)

The song itself doesn't do much for me, but this video for the new David Crowder Band single is really clever and impressive to look at. What a sight, making things with Lite Brite!

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner gets interviewed by a snarky idiot

William Shatner was recently interviewed for Vanity Fair, and the tone of the interviewer was just... Well, let's just say that Shatner would've been within his rights to take the jerk out with one of those old school James T. Kirk flying dropkicks. But it's really impressive how Shatner never comes close to losing his cool here, no matter how awkward and insulting the questions get.

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Footage of Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly

Eric Stoltz was originally hired to star in Back to the Future, 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. He was replaced by Michael J. Fox, and for many years the footage with Stoltz in the role was locked away in a vault somewhere. Today a little bit of that footage has finally turned up online.

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Buzz Lighyear vs. a Dalek

It's good toy vs. evil toy in the ultimate battle for toy supremacy!

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THE TOMFOOLERY SHOW

The Tomfoolery Show was a very peculiar Rankin/Bass Saturday morning cartoon that aired in the early 1970s. It featured a mix of nonsense poetry, corny old vaudeville gags and mind-fryingly strange character designs.

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The art of BACK TO THE FUTURE's "Biff", Tom Wilson

Tom Wilson, the hulking character actor best known as Back to the Future's bad guy, Biff, has a surprising sideline as an artist. He paints colorful pop art pieces featuring old toys and other objects from the baby boomer era. His artwork really doesn't suck, which is something of a rarity among celebrity artists. (And I'm not just saying that out of fear that Wilson will hunt me down and knock on my skull with his knuckles, saying, "Hello? Hello?" I mean, yes, that is a factor, but it's not the only reason.)

In the interview below, Wilson talks about his art and repeatedly refers to himself as a pop-cultural icon. It's true, as Biff he pretty much is a cultural icon. But still, walking around calling yourself one is kind of weird.




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STRANGE TOONS: THE SEPARATION

The Separation is a creepy, sad and very well-made stop-motion short by Robert Morgan. Two conjoined brothers are surgically separated in their youth, and spend their lives dealing with the consequences.

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OWNERS WHO LOOK LIKE THEIR PETS

Owners who Look like their Pets
Uploaded by TertiaryProductions. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.
Ryan Mcculloch's animated short film is a twisted little treat.

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I'D DO ANYTHING

An old-school Cylon sings of his robot love in this funny and surprisingly sweet vignette from those scamps at Fall On Your Sword.

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: Neil Innes - URBAN SPACEMAN

From Neil Innes' 1979 BBC series The Innes Book of Records, here's the toe-tappin' video for Urban Spaceman.

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Giant Japanese lady invades Tokyo, takes photos

Panasonic unleashed this giant Japanese lady on Tokyo to promote a new brand of camera.

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XO: Creepy-as-hell serial killer mini-comics

XO is a grimly effective mini-comic in which a serial killer recounts his various murders with a chilling casualness. Brian John Mitchell writes the stories, with Melissa Spence Gardner's plain, almost childlike drawings serving to make each tale even more creepy. Originally published as tiny comic books, you can see them below in Youtube form. The simple slideshow presentation and lack of music or sound effects actually works remarkably well for these stories.

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STRANGE TOONS: Freaky STAR TREK fan film, DICK'S DREAM

No Shatner Sunday this week, but instead here's a very, very odd little stop-motion Star Trek fan film from animator Spockboy. I couldn't begin to tell you what it's all about, but Mr. Spockboy describes the video thusly: "I made this film years ago. It's about a guy named Dick, who dreams that he is in an episode of Star Trek. The heads are made of clay, the bodies of wood......ENJOY!"

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Man builds cat village

Craig Grant has built an entire cat-sized village for the formerly homeless cats on his tree farm. It's an awesome little town, complete with its own miniature city hall. Seen here, the cat Wal-Mart. (Jeez, Wal-Mart really is everywhere.)

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Edward Gorey reviews SUTURE

A charming, random moment with Edward Gorey and one of his many cats, in which the beloved, eccentric illustrator offers up his opinion of the weird indie picture Suture.

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What is the origin of the tooth fairy?

Everybody knows the story of the Tooth Fairy. When kids lose their teeth they place them under their pillow, and then during the night a little lady with wings comes fluttering through their bedroom window and replaces the lost tooth with a coin. It's all very cute and we all just sort of take the tradition for granted... But when you think about it, it's a really weird story. So, just how the heck did this tradition get started, anyhow? The Tooth Tips blog investigates.

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What the frack?

"Fracking" is apparently a controversial natural gas drilling process. But as a longtime Battlestar Galactica fan frack means something very different to me, so waking up this morning to find the headlines full of fracking this and fracking that was a surreal experience.

The most perplexing (and delightful) headline of the bunch was the one about Fracking in Arkansas Falling Short of Promise. It sounds so wistful.

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Big Daddy cosplay photo shoot at the Georgia Aquarium

A few months back, ingenious costume maker Harrison Krix and his fiancée Emily did an awesome cosplay photo shoot as a Big Daddy and a Little Sister from Bioshock. The costumes were impressive, but Krix and Emily went for an extra dollop of awesome by shooting on location at the Georgia Aquarium. The full gallery is online here, and Krix has a lengthy post about the creation of his Big Daddy suit here.

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner's I AM CAPTAIN KIRK

This clip's not much to look at, but the audio is an interesting little curio. If you've ever wondered what it would sound like if Shatner guest starred on Joe Frank's old NPR show, now you know.

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AT THE MOVIES returning to PBS

Roger Ebert has announced that At the Movies, the long-running TV show he co-hosted, first with Gene Siskel and later with Steve Roper, will be returning to PBS in January. Christine Lemire and Elvis Mitchell will host, with Ebert (who sadly lost his voice to cancer a while back) contributing commentary via a new, synthesized voice assembled from clips of his old reviews.

I wish I was thrilled about the news, but the promo clip above doesn't fill me with hope. Mitchell and Lemire seem pretty stiff, there's no chemistry there yet. Here's hoping they can kick out the kinks by January.

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You won't have Peter Petrelli to kick around anymore

NBC won't be making that Heroes TV movie after all.

I watched Heroes from the beginning to the end, and while the show definitely had its problems I never thought it deserved the endless abuse it got. Once the fanboy pile-on begins and it becomes an established "truth" that a given movie/TV show/whatever is the "worst thing ever," the actual quality of the thing becomes irrelevant. People start trying to top each other with how much they hate it, the hater hyperbole gets out of control and eventually nobody will admit that they ever liked the damn show.

So, now Heroes is done. It ended on an ambiguous note, but it wasn't a huge cliffhanger or anything. I'm a little bummed that we'll never find out what was up with the eclipse, and we'll never know if Sylar finally decided to be good or evil or if Claire-bear decided she was straight or bi.

But maybe it's worth it to end the show here, just so the geeks won't be able to spew their venom all over a proper series finale.

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AUSCHWITZ - a Uwe Boll film

It sounds like a College Humor sketch, but it's really happening: Uwe Boll, the director behind such infamous cinematic stinkers as Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne, is at work on a film about the Holocaust. The trailer above features some very graphic, disturbing imagery. That's Boll himself as the bored guard outside of the gas chamber.

This movie will probably be a hideous mess, but part of me is actually rooting for Boll, here. People are always telling him that he sucks, and he's obviously not a guy who takes criticism well. It would be kind of neat if he could surprise the heck out of everybody and make a WWII drama that really works.

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Ben Zurawski's custom PEE-WEE'S PLAYHOUSE figures

You might say Ben Zurawski is a fan of Pee-Wee's Playhouse. How much of a fan is he? Well, he proposed to his girlfriend onstage during Pee-Wee's live show, for one thing. For another, he custom makes awesome Pee-Wee's Playhouse toys! Seen here, Pee-Wee with the notorious Door to Door Salesman.

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Gilliam's on again/off again QUIXOTE is back off again

Terry Gilliam may well be the most unlucky director alive, and none of his productions have been so cursed as The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. After the project fell apart in a most spectacular fashion some years ago, Gilliam recently managed to revive it. But now Variety reports that Quixote is dead, yet again.

"Don Quixote gives me something to look forward to, always," Gilliam told the paper. "Maybe the most frightening thing is to actually make the film."

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New Zealand's Riff Raff statue

Rocky Horror creator Richard O'Brien grew up in Hamilton, New Zealand, and in 2004 the town honored its favorite son with a pretty snazzy statue of Riff Raff, O'Brien's Rocky Horror Picture Show character. This site is all about the statue, and includes a gallery of concept designs by artists from WETA, the NZ special effects company that worked on the Lord of the Rings movies.

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: Paperhand Lincoln - OLD GHOST

Paperhand Lincoln is back with another neat music video demonstrating a lot of funky creativity (and a very impressive use of garage space.)

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SHATNER SUNDAY: THE MANY ITERATIONS OF WILLIAM SHATNER

Normally on Shatner Sunday we feature a video clip showcasing William Shanter at his most Shatner-y, but today we have a change of pace as we direct your attention to this rather excellent New York Times profile. Nearing 80(!), Shatner crashes through his day with the vigor of a man half his age. He is ridiculous. He is sublime. He is... Shatner.

(Seen here: Lego Shatner, as depicted by artist Sean Kenney.)

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STAR WARS: THE SOLO ADVENTURES

Han and Chewie return at last in this animated Star Wars fan film. It's a lot of fun, and they do a good job of capturing Han Solo's personality. (It must be said, however, that the Chewbacca we know and love was never this much of a badass.)

Sigh... When will George Lucas get it into his head that something like this is basically what the fans have been waiting for since 1983 or so?

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PULP RAVIOLI

If you've seen those Chef Boyardee commercials where a young girl's security blanket comes to life and nags her while she's eating lunch with a couple of pals, you probably thought they were the creepiest things you'd ever seen. Well, now somebody has made them even creepier (and a lot funnier) by dubbing in some of Samuel L. Jackson's NSFW dialogue from Pulp Fiction.

Yes, we've already seen lots and lots of clips that've been dubbed over with this scene. But somehow they never stop being funny...

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SEASONS

Seasons is an enchanting little flash thing (you can't quite call it a game) where you steer Thomas - a sort of egg-man on a unicycle - through various pastoral, surreal scenes. Don't hurry through the various environments. It's worth it to take your time pedaling around and seeing what Thomas discovers.

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Lost Rod Serling video interview

A long-lost, 1970 interview with Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling. (Via SFSignal.com.)

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner revels in his Shatnerhood

I think this clip is from an old episode of Saturday Night Live, but I'm not sure about that. The writing is kind of weak, but Shatner sure is having a ball. It's not too hard to imagine that he really starts his mornings like this.

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THE DELICIOUS

The Delicious is a funny and haunting 15-minute short about a corporate drone whose busy, colorless life is turned upside down when he finds a red, polyester suit lurking at the back of his closet. He tries it on, and soon finds himself in the grips of a strange force, something he knows only as The Delicious.

What is The Delicious? It's been seen as an allegory for drugs, sexual deviance, mental illness and more, but according to filmmaker and star Scott Prendergast (who would go on to make the indie hit Kabluey), the short is a more universal statement about being a weirdo. When your own personal The Delicious calls to you, you can pursue it and live a misfit's life, or ignore it and spend your life never being true to yourself.

But the people who never find their own The Delicious? Those are the ones to truly feel sorry for.



(Via Metafilter)


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MUSIC FROM SPACE: Unicycle Loves You - MIRROR, MIRROR

The video for this sweet, jangly pop tune begins with a young hipster couple trying on silly clothes at a trendy vintage store... only to then take off in a very surprising direction when we meet the hipster girl's stalker ex.
Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

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Urban planning as seen in sci-fi

A very interesting article on the urban planning seen in Star Wars, Blade Runner and other sci-fi classics. Author Tony Chavira does a good job of examining what works, and doesn't work, in these various cityscapes. One aspect that I found a little strange was Chavira's assumption that there would be homeless people in all of these environments. Sure, there would be homeless folks in Star Wars' Mos Eisley or Futurama's New New York... But I have a hard time picturing people sleeping in alleys in the utopian world of The Jetsons. (Besides, they don't even have alleys!)

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The STAR GAZER has left the Earth to wander the universe

Jack Horkheimer, the unforgettable host of PBS' long-running Star Gazer (originally Star Hustler) has passed away. The clip above was apparently his final broadcast, and he seems as goofy about the stars as ever.

This fascinating article from 1982 reveals something of the sweet, complicated man behind the cheery Star Gazer persona. On his website, he provided his own epitaph:

"Keep Looking Up was my life's admonition,
I can do little else in my present position."

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Class of 2014

Every year, Beloit College releases the "Mindset List," supposedly capturing the mindset of new college students. It's a very strange, rather masochistic annual tradition, where people all over America read these lists specifically so they can feel old and irrelevant.

The lists have never been a very accurate barometer of what kids know and don't know. (When I was a kid the lists kept saying I'd never heard of stuff like Watergate and Laugh In, like I'd grown up in a locked basement without a TV or something.) But this year's list seems particularly odd and out-of-touch. Check out number six:

6. Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High.

Okay, first: Buffy? That seems like kind of a dated reference. Aren't today's kids a lot more into Twilight and crap like that? Second, does whoever wrote this list realize that Buffy's story continued beyond the 1992 movie? In the movie she fought Lothos at Hemery High, but in the later, much more popular TV series, she attended Sunnydale High and Lothos played no part.

And then we get to this baffler at number nine:

9. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend.

Hal 9000? From 2001: A Space Odyssey? According to 2010: The Year We Make Contact, in 2010 Hal is re-activated after murdering the Discovery crew in 2001, briefly assists the scientists aboard the Leonov and then sacrifices himself as part of all that weird "All these worlds are yours except Europa" stuff. So, where does Hal find time in all that to go to college? That's at least as baffling as anything Dave Bowman experienced before the aliens turned him into the floating star baby.

And then there's #53:

53. J.R. Ewing has always been dead and gone. Hasn’t he? 

Well, according to Wikipedia, J.R.'s not dead. He was last seen in some 1998 TV movie, alive and well and getting up to his usual mischief. If any of today's kids have even heard of J.R. Ewing, why would they assume he was dead?

Frankly this seems less like a list of stuff that today's kids think, and more like your grandpa's list of stuff that he thinks today's kids think.

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner on THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW

Now here's a tall, cool glass of the 1970s: William Shatner (wearing a red velvet shirt that looks like something he bought at Hot Topic), Stiller and Mearra, and Kristy McNicol sit down for a chat on The Mike Douglas Show. Just when you think the whole thing can't possibly get any more Carter-era, they start discussing astrology.

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SMELLS LIKE ROCKIN' ROBIN

Nirvana collides with the Jackson 5 in an explosion of improbable awesomeness. (You know, cranky as he was, something tells me that Cobain would've approved.)

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Gary Kurtz dishes on why the STAR WARS franchise turned to crap

In a long and fascinating interview with the LA Times, Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz details his falling-out with George Lucas. As Kurtz explains it, post-Empire Strikes Back, Lucas started to build his plots around what would be good for Star Wars toy merchandising:

"I could see where things were headed. The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It's a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It's natural to make decisions that protect the toy business, but that's not the best thing for making quality films."

Kurtz says that Return of the Jedi was planned to be a much, much darker film, before Lucas filled it up with cuddly Ewoks.

"We had an outline, and George changed everything in it," the filmmaker said. "Instead of bittersweet and poignant, he wanted a euphoric ending with everybody happy. The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of the story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn't want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales, and that was a reason."

While that would've been a powerful, unforgettable ending, the kid in me is horrified by the idea of Han Solo dying and Luke going off to wander that galaxy as a lone jedi. The ending of Empire was traumatic enough!

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Kate Bosworth and Zoe Saldana are IDIOTS

Idiots with Zoe Saldana & Kate Bosworth from Zoe Saldana

Kate Bosworth, Zoe Saldana, Greg Grunberg and Janeane Garofalo star in this very strange, very funny short film.

(Via Sarah Lane.)

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: Patrice - AIN'T GOT NO (I GOT LIFE)

In Patrice's new music video, blurry naked people with shopping carts scurry around in various locations assembling piles of stereo speakers into giant, singing Patrice heads. Really.

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The Black Eyed Peas' I GOTTA FEELING as performed in American Sign Langauge

And I do mean performed.

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The Doctor in a "truly, truly outrageous" adventure

Rich Morris makes a habit of accomplishing the seemingly impossible. First he created a sprawling Doctor Who fan comic that featured all of the Doctor's first ten incarnations, telling a busy but exciting story while expertly capturing the particular character of each Doctor. That was impressive enough. Then he followed it up with Forever Janette, an adventure that had the Doctor's hapless eighth incarnation (the one from that poopy American TV movie) teaming up with the cast of the semi-forgotten Canadian vampire series, Forever Knight. It absolutely should not have worked, and yet it somehow did.

But Morris' latest Doctor Who comic is perhaps his most daring (and craziest) yet. It stars the sixth Doctor, the controversial, clownishly-attired incarnation that fans love to hate only slightly less than the eighth. It co-stars Melanie Bush, one of the least popular companions in all of the series' long history. And here's where things get truly nuts: the story teams the Doctor with the 1980s cartoon stars, Jem and the Holograms. (That clip up top should get you as acquainted with this cartoon as you'd ever need to be.)

The very idea of a crossover between Doctor Who and Jem is weird, random and wrong. If Morris can actually make this work, we'll be forced to conclude that he can team Doctor Who with anybody and make a decent comic out of it. What's next? Tom Baker and Jar-Jar Binks? Peter Davison and Lady Gaga? Anything's possible!

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MONSTROUS WILDLIFE - your guide to graboids

In this educational short film you'll learn about the graboids, the deadly creatures featured in Tremors. I wish they'd shown us this movie in elementary school, instead of wasting our time with all of that arithmetic stuff.

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Lando Calrissian is the BLACKSTAR WARRIOR

I really, really wish that this fan-made, blaxploitation Star Wars parody was a real movie. I would watch the living daylights out of it.

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Full LOST epilogue online, for now

That 12-minute Lost epilogue, The New Man in Charge, has now leaked online. ABC has been very aggressive about taking it down, but as I write this you can still see it (with Italian subtitles) here. If you want to see this thing, I strongly suggest you click on that link right now, because the video definitely won't be there for long.

(Spoilers ahead, kinda.) I have the feeling that the Lost producers basically sat down with a list of 25 or so "answers" that fans wouldn't shut up about, and they crammed them all into this short clip. It's more of an exposition dump than a proper story, really. (But it's still a little sad to watch this and think that this is probably the last time we'll ever see one of Dr. Chang's orientation videos.) And that ending is kind of cruel. The ambiguity of it and the big, tense music make it seem like a heck of a cliffhanger... But there's no resolution coming ever, this is it!

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Christmas with the Doctors

In this quick sketch from the UK series Dead Ringers, Doctor Who's tenth Doctor suffers through a rather tense Christmas with a few of his earlier incarnations. (The Tom Baker impersonator is so spot-on it's kind of eerie.)

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner on POLICE SQUAD

Back before Police Squad became a series of rather forgettable movies, it was a short-lived but pretty fun TV series. This clip from the show features 15 seconds of priceless Shatner goofery. (That's actually his entire "special guest star" appearance in the episode!)

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Upsetting UK commercial for Drench

In this extremely disturbing English commercial, a gentleman suffering from Rubik's Cube Head attempts to unscramble his face. This ad doesn't make me want to drink Drench. Actually, it makes me associate Drench (a drink I've never heard of before) with people who have nightmarish, rotatable facial parts. It also makes me want to lock my computer monitor in a trunk and bury it in the yard so I'll never have to worry about it showing me something this terrifying again.

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New LOST epilogue clip!

Lost fans are having palpitations awaiting the upcoming, 11-minute Lost epilogue, The New Man in Charge. Well, here's something sweet to tide us over: the first minute - 12.1 percent of the finished episode! - featuring the all too brief return of Ben Linus as he visits a Dharma Initiative warehouse.

Micheal Emerson is going to be up against some serious typecasting in the years to come. Seriously, how can this guy ever be anybody but Ben Linus?

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