Johnny Depp to star in DOCTOR WHO movie?

That's today's rumor, which will almost certainly be debunked by the time you read these words.

Celebrities make fun of Larry King

A sad day for American broadcasting, with news that Larry King is retiring. Let's celebrate the beloved, reptilian talk show legend with this extensive and eclectic collection of celebrities doing their own, off-color King impressions. Seen here, Craig Ferguson... Although I'm also partial to this eccentric attempt by Titus Welliver, Lost's Man in Black.

The KING KONG creatures re-used as props in other movies

Youtube user Boinx1234 has compiled an interesting video showing how the stop-motion models from the original King Kong and other Willis O'Brien pictures were later re-used as background props in various movies... Everything from B-pictures like Zombies on Broadway (which sounds like it's just begging for a remake) to classics like Bringing Up Baby!




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THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK hotline messages

This is a page on Starwars.com featuring the in-character messages that the actors from the original Star Wars movies recorded for an Empire Strikes Back promo phone hotline in 1980. It's sweet to hear these characters saying new stuff after so many years of hearing them recite the same lines over and over again... But it's also kind of weird to hear Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader getting meta on us and pimping the upcoming release of their movie.

Captain Picard Day celebrated

This June 16th marked Captain Picard Day, a celebration of all things Jean-Luc Picard. Click on over and see how fans honored the Enterprise captain with Picard cartoons, Picard oil paintings, and oh, so much more. Really, there's everything but Picard macrame! (Well, there's always next year.)

IN THE FALL OF GRAVITY

In the Fall of Gravity from Ron Cole on Vimeo.

Ron Cole's short film, In the Fall of Gravity, has previously been spotlighted here on Monsters and Rockets. Now I'm pleased to report that Cole has put the entire film online to view for free. The short is a beauty indeed, featuring some absolutely breathtaking stop-motion animation.

Mort Walker's dirty BEETLE BAILEY cartoons

Mort Walker, the newspaper cartoonist famous for Beetle Bailey among other strips, apparently likes to relax by doodling really filthy cartoons featuring his strip characters. Fair warning: these strips are absolutely NSFW. They are also about nine thousand times funnier than the newspaper versions.

O CLOSERMAN

Youtube user Josh Millard's mashup of Nine Inch Nails' Closer and Laurie Anderson's O Superman works surprisingly well. Somehow, I suspect that both Laurie and Trent would approve.

Millard apparently does these things using a Python script to automatically sync the music and video, in a process I'm not nearly smart enough to understand. But even a dope like me can appreciate The Beautiful Muppets, Millard's mashup of Marilyn Manson and Sesame Street.

Torgo sings the Eagles

Another promo for the upcoming Manos: The Hands of Fate sequel, this time featuring Torgo the goat-man's lilting rendition of Take It Easy. Don't let the fear of Master's dogs drive ya crazy.

MONTY PYTHON IN ABERYSTWYTH, narrated by David Tennant

British food is delightful, for the first breakfast or two. But before long you'll find yourself in a very bad way indeed, greasy and aching and swollen like a tick from a constant diet of meat and eggs and more meat fried in meat sauce with eggs on top. And not to be a big dental snob or anything, but British dentistry really is not good. I mean, Prince Charles has crappy teeth. How bad does your dentistry have to be, for your freaking prince to have a smile like a brewery horse? And seriously, the winters in England are just brutal. Step outside on a February morning, and it feels like Ebenezer Scrooge is slapping you hard across the face with a wet sock full of ice cubes.

But on the other hand, in England you can just turn on the TV on some random Wednesday night, and there's a documentary about Monty Python, narrated by Doctor Who.

SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner's WAR OF THE WORLDS monologue

In this rare clip from an old Mike Douglas Show appearance, William Shatner out-Shatners himself as he performs a monologue based on a famous scene from The War of the Worlds.

THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO DALEKS

Andrew Orton brings us this short film, showing us what it would look like if the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had an entry on Daleks. It's amazingly well-done, really capturing the flavor of the animation from the 1970s BBC Hitchhiker TV series. (The writing, unfortunately, is not exactly Douglas Adams-caliber. But it's mostly harmless.)

Did a new BUFFY movie get nixed by some HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL kid?

There's a story making the rounds that a new Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie was in the works, set to star Sarah Michelle Gellar and High School Musical's Vanessa Hudgens. Allegedly the project fell apart when Hudgens bowed out. Frankly the whole thing sounds pretty unlikely to me. More on this as (or if) it develops.

MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE sequel

Joel, Mike and the bots suffered through some seriously heinous movies on Mystery Science Theater 3000, but Manos: The Hands of Fate was arguably the worst of them all. So it is with a mix of delight and horror that I report that a new generation of filmmakers will soon bring us a Manos sequel!

While the original movie was hilarious in clearly unintentional ways, the sequel is a much more knowing, campy affair. Jackey Neyman Jones, who portrayed little Debbie in the original, returns here as one of the "Master's" brides. (She's the mature lady doing the hoochie mama dance in this clip.)

An aside: I know this clip is probably framed weirdly in your browser, and I can't seem to help that. Both Youtube and Blogger recently futzed around with their formats, making it much harder to change the dimensions of embedded clips.

Doctor Hoo

First, we had Doctor Who cats. Now we have Doctor Who owls. (And this isn't the work of some lone eccentric. Doctor Who owls are apparently a thing.)

THE JOHNNY CASH PROJECT

The Johnny Cash Project involves a bunch of artists tracing and reinterpreting every single frame from the music video of Johnny Cash's final recording, Ain't No Grave. The effect is weird and hypnotic, as Cash's last, lonesome walk takes him through dozens of different artistic styles, step by shimmering step. The video's not embeddable, but you can see several different versions here.

KANE: The eagerly-awaited remake of the Orson Welles classic

This trailer is a goof, but here's hoping it doesn't inspire some Hollywood hack to remake Citizen Kane for real.

Buy original VENTURE BROTHERS art for Gulf Coast relief!

The swell guys and gals behind the thoroughly ass-kicking Adult Swim series The Venture Brothers are auctioning off original art from the production of the show, with all proceeds going to Gulf Coast relief. Go Team Venture!

SHATNER MONDAY: Captain Kirk interviewed by Captain Jack!

I'm ashamed to admit I've been neglecting Shatner Sunday lately, and we've been Shanter-less for two Sundays in a row. To make up for this gross lapse on my part, here's a fun little sci-fi historical curio to start your Monday morning off right. From 1994 or so, here's William Shatner being interviewed by a very young John Barrowman, who would of course go on to portray Jack Harkness on Doctor Who and Torchwood. That's right... Captain Kirk meets Captain Jack!

GALACTICA MMORPG trailer online

Pretty sweet trailer for the Battlestar Galactica online game... Although I'm still not sure how this will work as an online game that thousands of people will play. I mean, the show was claustrophobic by design, with the surviving remnants of humanity all crammed into little shuttles and garbage scows and so on. They didn't meet a lot of exotic aliens or explore cool planets or anything. To accurately reflect the show, the game would have to be mostly people arguing in cramped corridors, punctuated by occasional space battles and the odd glimpse of sexy Cylon lady butt.

Rod Serling hosts THE LIAR'S CLUB

As a young man, Rod Serling enjoyed great success as the screenwriter for various hit TV dramas (Requiem for a Heavyweight, etc.) and the creator/host of The Twilight Zone. But his later years were a struggle. His  other anthology series The Night Gallery was kind of a disaster, and he spent much of the late 1960s and 1970s taking whatever work he could get. His scripts weren't selling much anymore but he was still a popular narrator, lending his voice to everything from The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau to trashy TV documentaries about paranormal phenomena like In Search of Ancient Astronauts.

He also tried hosting a few game shows. The clip above is from 1969's The Liar's Club, featuring Serling bantering with such game show fixtures of the era as Betty White and Bill Bixby. (I can't quite decide if Bixby's look here is the epitome of 1969 badass-cool or if it makes him look like Austrian thug #3 from one of those old movies where spies meet in abandoned factories to trade briefcases full of microfilm.) While Serling makes a decent host for the game, he just doesn't seem to belong here. You keep expecting him to turn to the camera and spark up a cigarette, as the studio suddenly goes dark and quiet, a lone spotlight shines down upon him, and he speaks to us in that clipped, sardonic voice...

Submitted for your approval: Two eager young contestants, four celebrity guests, and your humble host, gathered together for that popular American entertainment, the game show. But tonight's game is being played for very high stakes indeed, and the loser gets an all-expenses paid, one-way trip to... The Twilight Zone.

SUPERNATURAL anime coming

Yes, you read that right. A 22-episode Supernatural anime series is coming, and it will adapt the first two seasons of the original WB/CW series.

As others have pointed out, the basic plot of Supernatural already kind of sounds like something from anime: two pretty-boy brothers drive around, fighting horrible monsters and trying to save the Earth from becoming a casualty in an endless war between demons and angels. But given that premise, Supernatural is about as un-anime as it could be. It's a very rough, snarky spook show that gets a lot of its power from inserting its horrors into a very recognizable, blue collar American reality.

I'll be interested to see how the show is adapted for animation, but I have a feeling that the Supernatural anime will have about as much in common with its source material as Powerpuff Girls Z did with the original Powerpuff Girls.

TANGLED trailer online

Disney has posted the first full trailer for Tangled, their upcoming CGI take on Rapunzel. It's weird to see the old-fashioned Disney cartoon look (well, old-fashioned meaning circa 1994 or so) rendered in 3D. It's impressive, but it also kind of makes the characters look like the fiberglass-headed, costume mascot versions of themselves that'll be wandering Disneyland in a couple of months.

Alternative comics artists draw David Bowie

A lot of comics fans go to conventions and ask their favorite artists to do quick sketches of Batman, the Hulk, or other predictable superhero characters like that. But Sean T. Collins had a much more interesting idea. He asks comics artists to draw David Bowie. The results are interesting and sometimes surprisingly revealing. (Julius Knipl creator Ben Katchor, for instance, apparently refused to draw Bowie because he "didn't want to glorify him." I am disappointed, if not exactly surprised, to learn that Katchor hates glam rock.)

It's an impressive collection of artists, including Gary Panter, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Jim Woodring and many more. Seen above: a rather sickly Bowie as depicted by Charles Burns.

BACK TO THE FUTURE, JURASSIC PARK games coming

Telltale games has announced that they're working on a new Back to the Future video game! Get ready to race through time at 88 miles per hour, correct corrupted timelines and avoid sleeping with your mom! And the company also has a new Jurassic Park game in the works! Get ready to do a lot of running and screaming!

Unfortunately, there are reasons to suspect these games won't be the big piles of awesome that they could be. For one thing, Telltale specializes in Myst-style, point-and-click adventure games, and if they decide to stick with that format these new games will be approximately 2% as fun as they could be. For another thing, it sounds like the games won't actually be sequels to the films.

“The games are going to exist within these worlds,” says Telltale CEO Dan Connors. “I wouldn’t call these games sequels per se but a new interpretation of their worlds for a new medium. For one generation, it’s an introduction to these series. For another generation, it’s a thing they can look back on and something they can share warmly with their family and friends.”

He also hinted the BTTF game will take us to the 1970s. So... Get ready for a point-and-click trip back to the days of the Carter administration. Here's hoping that this "new interpretation" will at least feature a DeLorean. (And let's keep our fingers crossed that the Jurassic Park game will at least feature dinosaurs.)

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Vincent Price on THE DATING GAME

Eleven cringe-worthy minutes of classic horror star Vincent Price, in a purple caftan, making mildly risque small talk with three nervous 1970s nimrods with crazy sideburns. You're welcome.

Ancient skyscrapers - the "Manhattan of the desert"

The seemingly modern skyscrapers in the clip above are actually over 500 years old. Shibam, the so-called "Manhattan of the desert," is a city in Yemen with ancient mud-brick buildings standing 5-16 floors high. Originally made to protect the inhabitants from invaders, today the structures require constant maintenance to protect them from erosion.

This clip, taken from the same documentary as the clip above, provides a more extended look at the town.


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STRANGE TOONS: Karel Zeman's INSPIRATION

Settle in nice and warm for Karel Zeman's bittersweet little story about the love that blossoms inside a raindrop on a dark and cold winter's night.

Zeman was a fascinating animator who produced a lot of work that's under-appreciated today, but his 1948 short Inspiration could be his most formally daring and affecting short. He created the short using actual glass figures, heated and bent between each frame to produce the gliding, sliding movements of a graceful ballerina and the little clown who longs for her.

The result is equal parts 3D Fantasia and your grandmother's curio cabinet come to life. It's my understanding that Zeman invented the technique, and so far as I know, nobody ever tried it again.




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Balloonacy

This video of a blue balloon bobbing and weaving its way through a series of Dyson bladeless fans is absolutely mesmerizing. Seriously, I could just sit here in a trance, watching this clip all day.

MARS!

MARS! from Joe Bichard on Vimeo.

Feast your eyes on this snazzy-looking but deeply sad short film. Humanity arrives on Mars, and of course we immediately begin to trash the place.

THE GOONIES are 25 today!

The Goonies was released 25 years ago today. The film has been endlessly re-watched and analyzed by fans, but there's one small detail that's been puzzling them for a quarter of a century. In the scene near the end, the kids are reunited with their parents and Data blurts out that "the octopus was very scary." What octopus?

Originally the film featured a sequence where the kids fought a giant octopus, but the scene was cut for time. (It's since been inserted back into TV airings and it can be seen as a deleted scene on the DVD.) The scene featured Eight Arms to Hold You, a song recorded by a hastily assembled studio band called The Goon Squad. The song was later released as a single, and actually hit number one on the dance charts.

This is the charming (and not even slightly dated) music video, featuring an '80s babe and her doting claymation octopus pal. The song isn't much by itself, but paired with the video this is seriously cute stuff.




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TORCHWOOD returns, goes international

Ending months of speculation about the show's fate, the BBC has announced that it's signed a partnership deal with Starz to bring back Torchwood for a 10-episode run. Creator and showrunner Russell T. Davies will return, but there will be some changes to Torchwood's format. Only Captain Jack and Gwen now remain from the original cast, and instead of being set in Cardiff the show will now expand its scope to travel to the US and other places around the globe.


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Classic STAR WARS has new, stupid stuff pasted into it yet again

If all of the tinkering George Lucas did years ago on those Star Wars special editions made you nuts, here's a commercial that's sure to put you in a really sour mood. In this Adidas spot, Snoop Dog and other disagreeable modern quasi-celebrities are inserted into the cantina scene from the original Star Wars. It's like they created this ad specifically to give all of the "Han shot first" fanboys something to really cry themselves to sleep about.

King Kong attacks LA!

To promote the upcoming King Kong attraction at Universal Studios, Universal has been staging events around Los Angeles depicting the wreckage left behind by Kong. In the photo above, you can see the aftermath of Kong's stroll across Santa Monica beach.

I think this whole campaign is kind of brilliant, but I do have one small gripe: those sure don't look like gorilla feet.

SHATNER SUNDAY: DEAD MAN'S ISLAND

Dead Man's Island is a 1996 TV movie featuring such camp favorites as Barbara Eden, Traci Lords, Roddy McDowell, Morgan Fairchild and Ralph Malph. It also features what may well be the most undignified moment of William Shatner's entire career, as the portly former Enterprise captain walks around in what appears to be a ladies' one-piece swimsuit and is then electrocuted in a hot tub.

"These people, like the movie, want to shock and repulse you"

A 1970s St. Louis TV news report about the Rocky Horror phenomenon, featuring absolutely harmless, endearingly dorky college kids getting sneered at by repressed newscasters with helmet hair and crazy Herb Tarlec jackets. But why does that gangly gal around the 1:30 mark seem so familiar? Maybe because that's actually REM's Michael Stipe! (Via Metafilter.)

Did the creator of Spock's ears also create Bigfoot?

John Chambers was a masterful special effects makeup artist, best known for creating the ears of Mr. Spock on the original Star Trek series and for his groundbreaking work on the Planet of the Apes movies. But Chambers found other, stranger uses for his unique talents, far from Hollywood...

Chambers is probably the only person to have won an Academy Award and commendation for his work with the CIA. For years he secretly worked for the US government, creating Mission Impossible-style makeup jobs to transform agents so they could venture into hostile territory undetected. (He played a crucial role in the CIA plan that managed to sneak six hostages out of Iran in 1979.) He also designed lifelike prosthetics for soldiers who had been disfigured in combat, an accomplishment he reportedly regarded as the proudest of his entire career.

But there is yet another twist to Chambers' story. For many years, there's been gossip around Hollywood that the "Bigfoot" seen in the infamous Patterson-Gimlin footage is actually the work of Chambers. Click to see it here:



In 2001, Chambers died at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills. He went to his grave denying he'd made the Bigfoot seen in the film, although two of his friends and proteges - makeup wizard Rick Baker and director John Landis - have said that Chambers created the suit. Baker later recanted, saying he no longer believed the rumor was true, but many other effects artists have gone on record saying they believe the suit was Chambers' work.

We don't know for sure that Chambers created Bigfoot. But we do know that Chambers had piles of monster suits in storage, and often quickly threw together furry monsters out of spare gorilla parts for TV shows like The Outer Limits and Lost in Space. He was also, by many accounts, quite a prankster.

And it's not like this would have been the first Bigfoot hoax he'd been a part of...

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Technocrati tags: [Bigfoot][John Chambers]

Serenading Unicorn

Brighten (or at least weirden) your sweetheart's day by sending them a video love song from the Serenading Unicorn! It's a bizarre ad campaign that's somehow supposed to promote Juicy Fruit. The Boys II Men and Michael Bolton videos are pretty funny if you can stomach listening to those awful, awful songs, but the Culture Club video is pure dorky genius.

Baby Gorn!

Richard Svensson, the ferociously talented stop-motion animator whose work has previously been featured on Monsters and Rockets, has a sideline making his own Star Trek props. Here's his version of a baby Gorn, the lizard aliens designed for the original series episode Arena.

You can check out some of his other masks and props here.

The Joker's henchman orientation video

When you're a Gotham City thug and you get hired to work for the Joker, they drive you to an abandoned warehouse down by the docks. The warehouse is dark and full of busted-up carousel ponies and circus junk, but there's a spot cleared out in the center. In that spot there is a single chair and a TV with an old top-loading VCR. They pop in a tape, and leave you alone.

Then this clip plays.



When it's done, you hear the click of shiny purple shoes coming from behind you across the concrete floor, and a laugh that makes you wonder what the hell you were thinking.

(Actually this is a chillingly effective fan film made by Youtube user The Hodster, using a monologue from a rather surprising source. He made a really impressive Watchmen fan film back in high school, too.)

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Jackie Gleason's LONESOME ECHO, featuring a cover by Salvador Dali

Walt Disney wasn't the only unlikely American entertainer that Salvador Dali collaborated with. Dali also illustrated the cover for Jackie Gleason's record album Lonesome Echo.

Yes, the Honeymooners star had a sideline as a musician... A surprisingly successful one. He wrote the theme for The Honeymooners, among many other songs. He recorded over 20 albums, with Music for Lovers Only selling over 500,000 copies.

I have no idea how Gleason hooked up with Dali, but frankly this cover strikes me as a rather indifferent Dali composition, about as close as the famed surrealist came to "hacking it out".

How is the photo on the back of the album, featuring Gleason and Dali shaking hands, not for sale as a t-shirt already?


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Pamela Wilson's Grim Fairy Tales

Imagine that you have a lovably morbid little niece, a budding Wednesday Addams who likes to cut the heads off her teddy bears and who's gone as the Corpse Bride for a few too many Halloweens. She flies through Edward Gorey picture books the way other kids go through Dr. Seuss, and she swoons with disgust at the mention of Hannah Montana. She gets teased a lot, and more than once, her teachers have suggested that the pictures she draws in class are cause for concern. We will call her Lenore.

One chilly morning, you invite Lenore (and her only slightly less dramatic mommy, whom we shall call Dora) to come along for a drive to the beach, and you bring your camera. Lenore decides to make the day into a photo shoot and brings along her box of old-timey dresses and hats, her dolls and puppets. The next thing you know, you've been pressed into service, trying to capture on film the various dark fairy tales of Lenore's devising, with Dora chiming in with her own weird suggestions. You end up having to chase Lenore and Dora across the wet sand and through fields of dead, crunchy grass, taking shots of them in assorted glamorous but cheap and ill-fitting costumes as the salty sea breezes blow their stringy hair in their faces.

You would come home with pictures of a cute, chubby little girl and her cute, chubby mommy, both straining to look eerie against dramatic backdrops. These pictures would be pretty awesome, but Lenore would hate them so much that she'd make you promise to destroy them. You'd lie and say you had, and then when she was 25, you'd dig them out again and show them to her, and she would laugh and laugh.

Well, Pamela Wilson has somehow seen the photos from your hypothetical day at the hypothetical beach with your hypothetical niece, and she's used them as the basis for some amazing oil paintings. Wilson creates girly yet gritty fairy tales, resembling scenes from Terry Gilliam movies that never happened. If you actually staggered away from Tideland wanting more, well, this is the show for you.

Anybody who has ever seen goth art has probably seen plenty of little girls in frayed tutus clutching sickly-looking dollies. And yet, Wilson takes the stuff of goth cliché and makes it all seem brand-new. She has a near-photographic eye, expertly capturing the look of slightly woozy determination on the face of a Disarranged Fairy God Mother as she trudges through the snow with an anxious baby under her arm, or the play of autumnal light through the veil of the slouchy, wannabe child bride in Barren Omen. Wilson's symbolism often seems obvious—until you figure out that you're not really sure what she's getting at. The weary sexpot of Remedies for a Blind Spot is dressed like some kind of super-spy as she looks through a tin of old photos. She has binoculars by her side and a complicated contraption with a lot of lenses on top of her head, all of which clearly suggests . . . well, I'm supposed to be the critic here, but your guess is as good as mine. Apparently she has a blind spot, and these devices are meant to remedy it. That much, we can be sure of.

The paintings seem to be telling an ongoing story of some kind. Various characters recur, and you have the feeling that all of this stuff is taking place in the same warped county. And what a grimly evocative county it is—you can almost hear the snap of dead twigs underfoot and smell the green scum at the edge of those stagnant ponds. It's a decayed landscape, a perfectly natural world where these unnatural characters find themselves. When Wilson places an apparently abandoned freeway in the middle of a brown, weedy field, as she does in Regarding Rex, the effect is at once apocalyptic and strangely familiar. You feel as if you once stood in this lonely place yourself, although whether in a dream or reality, you can't say. Perhaps that crazy old man with the antlers could offer some directions.

(This post originally appeared, in an altered form, as an article in OC WEEKLY.)

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Captain Picard Day

As a Trekkie, I'm glad to see Trek finally cool again. But these days everybody is all Spock this and Kirk that. Where is the love for our old pals from the Next Generation? Well, this June 16th is your chance to celebrate Captain Picard Day, dedicated to "one of the bestest, baldest, and badassiest Star Trek captains around." Make little Picard dolls, draw Picard comics, sculpt Picard heads with lumpy orange skin, go crazy! (And I think we should take Picard's suggestion in the clip, and celebrate Will Riker Day next month.)