The previously-mentioned Rocky Interactive Horror Show also features Richard O'Brien performing a few acoustic versions of the songs from the cult classic film, including this really nice take on Over at the Frankenstein Place. (It also features O'Brien performing Sweet Transvestite in drag, but I'll let you do the Googling for that one yourself.)
Here are the opening titles to The Gary Coleman Show, a 1980s cartoon series that starred Coleman as an angel who comes to Earth to do good deeds. Gary Coleman, RIP.
A very happy Towel Day to you and yours! This is the day when fans honor the memory of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams by carrying a towel with them.
Why a towel? Well, as Adams pointed out in the first book in the series, a towel "is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough."
Pictured: Towel Day in Innsbruck, Australia, where Adams claimed he first got the idea for the Hitchhiker's series while lying drunk in a field.
Do you know where your towel is?
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Skywhales is a 1983 short film that does a really remarkable job of depicting the culture of another world, all without a single word of human language spoken. While the look of the film is arguably a little dated, this is a brilliant example of world building, taking us to a strange and eerie place that seems like it's been around for a long time before we got there. That's Red Dwarf's Robert Llewellyn handling the hoots and grunts of the various aliens.
Not sure what this was originally created for (a DVD extra?) but here's the music video for You All Everybody, the song by Lost's one-hit wonder band, Drive Shaft. The lyrics (all 11 words) come from an inside joke among the show's writers, where they would obsessively quote a baffling remark made by an audience member on The Phil Donahue Show: "You all everybody, acting like it's stupid people wearing expensive clothes!"
If you were curious about those endlessly-promoted "alternate" Lost endings that were supposed to appear on the post-finale Jimmy Kimmel wrap-up show, they've now turned up online, and... Well, turns out they're just some modestly amusing little comedy skits. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was a little annoyed by these things. After all that hype, I was expecting some real endings, not SNL on an off night. I feel like I got punked.
If you missed the Producers remake a few years back, you missed Torchwood's own Captain Jack, John Barrowman, in this showstopping performance of Springtime for Hitler.
As we count down the minutes to the Lost series finale this evening, let's take a look back at how it all began, with the still-terrifying opening sequence from the pilot episode. I am gonna miss the heck out of this crazy show.
Helping Johnny Remember from ashleigh nankivell on Vimeo.
Filmmaker Ashleigh Nankivell works some CGI magic on an old educational short, remaking it as a genuinely nightmarish little delight.
Via Boing Boing.
It's been a rough week for Heroes creator Tim Kring. Not only did the show get canceled, but now Kring finds himself being sued (along with NBC) for 60 million bucks by cartoonist Jazan Wild.
Wild claims that Heroes ripped off last season's carnie plotline from Wild's comic book, Carnival of Souls. Frankly I don't think Wild has a very strong case. I mean, Wild did not invent the spooky carnival as a setting, nor did he invent details like the House of Mirrors, ferris wheels, et al. Admittedly some elements do seem like strange coincidences, but there's nothing there to make me believe there was any deliberate imitation going on, any more than I believe that Lost's creators were ripping off a TV pilot from 1977.
In this commercial for the German version of the SyFy channel, modern special effects are used to recreate a 1960s-era Mr. Spock, and... Well, I'm going to assume that Leonard Nimoy didn't sign off on this one. He's very protective of the Spock character, and in this ad our beloved Vulcan is behaving in a most illogical (and seriously creepy) manner.
Until May 24th, Valve is offering free downloads of Portal, one of the most acclaimed games in years. Hurry, before they run out of cake!
Read more...
I am sad to report the death of classic power metal screamer Ronnie James Dio, who succumbed to stomach cancer this morning after battling it since late last year. His was a long and amazingly varied career (he was recording doo wop back in the 1950s!) but I first encountered his voice in the Butterfly Ball clip, seen above. The clip was made as an attempt to launch a feature film. The film never happened, but the clip became a fixture on kids TV in the 1970s.
RIP, RJD.
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 Hollywood rehashes, recyclings and recombinings that serve as ominous portents of the End Times.
When I was growing up, I was an absolute maniac for all things Star Wars. I desperately wanted to live in that universe, and it seemed cruelly unfair that I was stuck in a world without lightsabers and landspeeders. But over the years George Lucas has really pounded the last vestiges of Star Wars fandom out of me, with the Special Editions and those depressingly cruddy prequels and all the rest of it. At this point, the zombie Stormtrooper toy pictured below pretty much captures how I see the franchise: it died a long time ago, but it just won't stop coming at you. And it's hungry for your brains.
There are also Frankenstein Vaders, a gargoyle Yoda and werewolf Chewbacca. Yes, these things exist.
Meet the sloths from Amphibian Avenger on Vimeo.
I have to say, posting this old Shatner commercial for Loblaws feels like a lowblow. The 1970s were a rough, mostly Trekless decade for the Shat, and a toxic combination of typecasting, hubris and dire financial straits led to some really questionable career moves. He arguably reached his nadir with this 1974 commercial for the Loblaws grocery chain. With his tacky 1974 suit, sad little comb-over and desperate hucksterism, he comes across as more Herb Tarlek than James Tiberius Kirk.
While Shatner's career has since rebounded in a big way, he still does some cruddy little local ads. (Hey, at least he's not being pestered by some weirdo in a penguin suit anymore.)
Download ] | Futurama | Weeknights, 9p/8c | |||
| Space Invaders | ||||
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Perhaps, like me, you've heard about this 3D printing stuff and really wanted to try it for yourself but had no access to the technology. Well, the good folks at Shapeways have now made it possible for anybody to print 3D objects. Basically anything you can make a 3D computer model of, they can print. Send them your model, and they'll send it back as a physical object.
The prices aren't cheap, but the results look pretty good. I'm eager to try this out, and when I do I'll report back on my findings.
Download ] Download ] Today I saw a couple of new movie marquee mashups that I wanted to share:
THE LOSERS BACK UP PLAN
KICK ASS DEATH AT A FUNERAL
In this peculiar little British power ad from the 1980s, a Wrath of Khan-era Captain Kirk suffers a transporter accident that... Well, let's just say that Scotty probably caught hell for this one.
Fasten your seatbelt for this crazy CGI music video from a few years back, featuring classic rocker Jerry Lee Lewis covering Bruce Springsteen's Pink Cadillac. (That's the Boss himself doing backup work for the Killer... And don't those nicknames make this sound more like a mob hit than a music video?)
Gregory Godhard's 1998 short film Mind's Eye is a seriously trippy piece of animation, although I would strongly advise against watching it when you're stoned. This thing + drugs = your head exploded all over your keyboard.
Previously: Wild Beasts' music video for their song Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants, which screwed with your brain in a similarly dizzying manner.
(Via Metafilter.)
Download ] Download ]
Godzilla shares in the joy that Monsters and Rockets is back. (Seriously, folks... I spent an entire month in tech support hell.)
We're gonna kick things off with the opening titles for that 1990s sci-fi classic, Homeboys in Outer Space. Hard to believe it's not on DVD!
Yes, Monsters and Rockets is finally back online, after an entire month of being down.
What happened was:
In April of 2009, I bought the url monstersandrockets.com and I launched this site. I spent the next year blogging my little heart out, having a lot of fun and attracting a pretty good audience. But what I didn't realize was that my url was up for renewal this April. Blogger.com (my hosting company) never sent me a reminder notice, they just yanked the site the day the url expired.
I've spent the last month trying to get the site back online. I'd send emails to Blogger and they would direct me to Enom.com, then the folks at Enom would say it was really Blogger's fault, then I would write to Blogger and they would tell me to do a lot of really complicated stuff, and when that stuff didn't work they would direct me to their goddamned message boards so I could ask other random dorks online for tech support, then the random dorks would tell me to go mess with Enom again. This crap went on for day after day after day, and more than once I was tempted to just give up.
But I persevered, and now I'm back at last to share this absolutely fascinating story with you. Yippee!
If I had it to do over again, I doubt I would've used Blogger to host this site. They make it relatively easy to set up a site, but an absolute nightmare if anything goes wrong. Seriously, directing people with tech support questions to your message board? You're freaking Blogger, guys. Bite the bullet and hire a few smart guys to man the phones in Bangalore. Jeez!
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