Out-of-print BLADE RUNNER SKETCHBOOK online

The Blade Runner Sketchbook has been out of print for years, but now the whole book is available online for free. The book features the original drawings by Ridley Scott, Syd Mead and other artists who designed the classic film. Check it out here.

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LEXX co-creator dead at 49

Weirdos the world over are in mourning today, with the tragic news that Lex Gigeroff, the co-creator of the cult hit sci-fi series Lexx, has passed away at age 49. The show was wildly uneven, as even the most hardcore fans will admit... But there has never been anything quite like it on TV before or since, and it its best it was one seriously freaky good time. Here's hoping that Gigeroff's spirit is now enjoying an eternity frolicking with the sexy natives of planet Water.

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The many returns of the Miser Brothers

The Year Without a Santa Claus isn't the best of the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials. Sure, it's cute as heck, but the plot is a little draggy at times, the songs are a mix of covers and rather undistinguished originals, and the animation lacks the boundless charm of efforts like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But it's become a classic thanks to Heat Miser and Snow Miser, two of the most unforgettable characters in all of Christmas TV special-dom. Here, I'll let the boys introduce themselves:



They have yet to invent a scale capable of measuring the awesomeness of Heat Miser and Snow Miser.

The characters have been popular for decades, so it was perhaps inevitable that eventually Hollywood would decide that a remake was required. And so, in 2006, we got a live-action TV movie remake of The Year Without a Santa Claus, starring Harvey Fierstein as Heat Miser and Michael McKean as Cold Miser. How bad was it? Well, watch this clip:



Friends, that clip was the best part. It actually gets worse from there, with a lot of awful pop-cultural gags. And Chris Kattan. Sweet Jesus, this show makes the Star Wars holiday special look good.

The remake was swiftly and justly forgotten, but two years later somebody decided to try again with A Miser Brothers' Christmas, a direct sequel to the original show. This special would feature stop-motion animation and would try to be more faithful to the spirit of the original. Here's the big show-stopping number:



Yeah. It's somehow missing something, huh?

The animation is very good and the character re-designs work well enough, you can tell that the people making this special really wanted to honor the original. But there's something inert about the finished special, it never comes alive and it's just not very... well, special. If the original show is a little slow in spots, the sequel is downright sluggy, and it lacks the crude vitality that has made the original endure. The 2006 remake failed by trying too hard revamp and parody the original, while the 2008 sequel failed by arguably being just a tad too reverent toward its source material.

Of course, if we're looking at the various renditions of Heat Miser and Cold Miser, I have to include this one:



Sorry about that. But those 37 seconds of exquisite agony, courtesy of Joel Schumacher, were still better than anything in the 2006 remake.

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A very 1987 Christmas to you!

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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Get your Schulz on!

If you've wished that you knew how to bust a move like the Peanuts kids in the classic holiday special Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown (and goodness, who hasn't?) now you can, thanks to the helpful diagrams on the accordion Christmas card seen on the website of designer Candy Chang. The girl's head-flopping move is diagrammed on one side of the card, the boy's weird neck-jut thing is depicted on the other.



The card, however, does not appear to be available to actually print out so you can mail it to your loved ones. That's just... Well, Scrooge-ian is the phrase that comes to mind. A lump of coal for you, Ms. Chang!

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LAND OF THE LOST episode studies

I have made no secret of my raging fandom for the old TV series The Land of the Lost. So you can imagine how delighted I was to discover this site offering detailed commentary on every episode of the original series. The site finds just the right balance of amusement and respect, taking the show seriously without taking it too seriously. Once you're finished reading through their coverage of all three seasons, you can spend the rest of your 4-day weekend geeking out with their coverage of the original Battlestar Galactica, the original V and other dorky favorites of yesteryear.

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Cosmohut.com is a website and they are paying me to post about them

A while back I signed up with a website, Payperpost.com, where I can get paid a few bucks to write MonstersandRockets.com posts about certain products. I can pretty much say whatever I want, I just have to link to the product's website and write a certain number of words, and I'm done. I haven't done one of these in a while, but last night they sent me an offer from a site called Cosmohut.com and the offer was too good to pass up. So, I'm writing about Cosmohut.com, where you can learn about Make Up and pick up all sorts of Cosmetics Tips. They also want me to link to their Make Up Tutorials. I don't know why they looked at my sci-fi nerd blog and decided this was a good place to advertise their fancy lady website with the make up tutorials and such, but I'm glad they did because after they approve this post they'll send me some money and I like money. The end.

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George Lucas' daughter is a pro kickboxer

No, really. George Lucas' daughter Amanda is a pro kickboxer. She's the girl with the cornrow hair in the clip above.

Wondering how George Lucas feels about his daughter's chosen career? Well, he talks about it a little in this predictably sleazy TMZ clip:



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Andy Kaufman in unaired sci-fi comedy pilot, STICK AROUND

Comedy great Andy Kaufman plays a bumbling android in this rather hopeless 1970s sci-fi sitcom pilot. His "Foreign Man" accent would be put to much better use later, when he was cast as Latka Gravas on Taxi.

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GHOSTBUSTERS fan makes creepily realistic Harold Ramis bust

Ghostbusters fan Carl Lyon has built himself an incredibly realistic bust of Dr. Egon Spengler, the brainy 'Buster portrayed by Harold Ramis. Lest you think that Lyon is just obsessed with Harold Ramis or something, he assures us that he also plans to build the other Ghostbusters soon. A full gallery of making-of pics can be seen here.

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Happy 45th birthday, Star Trek!

45 years ago today, a little show called Star Trek made its debut on American TV. To celebrate, let's enjoy this fan film made by a bunch of kids in the 1970s, dubbed over with their adult voices 25 years later. (I hate to say it, but that cyclops monster is arguably an improvement on some of the effects in the original show.)

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Lee Harvey Oswald's Poseidon Adventure

Paul Wilson is a big fan of the 1970s disaster picture The Poseidon Adventure, miniature models and Lee Harvey Oswald. Perhaps these seem like three interests with very little overlap, but Wilson has actually managed to combine them... by building an enormous model of the SS Poseidon and sending a little doll of himself and a little doll of Oswald on a romantic cruise together.

Wilson's Flickr account is a wonder to behold. In the photo above, Paul and a very hairy Lee relax on deck in the hours before the ship's fateful New Year's Eve party.

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Obama "narrates" an upcoming animated film

Son of Strelka, Son of God is an upcoming animated epic featuring narration put together from carefully edited clips of the audiobook of Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father. Judging by the rough animatic seen here the results are pretty amazing, with our Commander in Chief presenting a surprisingly jazzy, almost beatnik look at the dawn of civilization.

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Christopher Walken reads Poe's THE RAVEN

We've all gotten so used to thinking of Christopher Walken as that funny old rascal with the weird accent that it's easy to forget that the man can be fantastically creepy when he wants to be.

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Beautiful Swear Words

Does what it says on the tin. Elegant graphic design applied to playground profanity. These words may not safe for work... But they are beautiful.


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Harrison Ford has an awkward reunion with Chewbacca

In this clip from Jimmy Kimmel Live, we learn about Harrison Ford's tragic falling-out with Chewbacca. (It's been a long time since I've seen Ford put this much energy into a performance!)

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FRANK SIDEBOTTOM'S PROPER TELLY SHOW IN B/W

Frank Sidebottom was... Well, he was a British comedian who was sort of a papier mache-headed, living cartoon. It's hard to explain Frank adequately, so perhaps I should let the clip above speak for itself.

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SAVE PRINCE PLUTONIUM!

Prince Plutonium has been kidnapped by robot space pirates, and only two heroic little tween girls can save  him! Low-budget filmmaking genius Richard Svensson returns with another backyard epic featuring his oddball wit and fantastic little stop-motion beasties. His making-of movie is almost as much fun as the actual film.

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Comic-KHAAANNNNN!

William Shatner re-enacts one of his greatest screen moments (with the aid of 3,000 or so friends) at this year's Comic-Con.

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Oh my glob! ADVENTURE TIME!

This week I went to the San Diego Comic-Con with my girlfriend, our first time there in years. It was even more noisy and crowded and sweaty and feet-hurt-y than I remembered, but it sure is a thing to see. We met Richard Hatch (the Apollo/Tom Zarek Richard Hatch, not the naked Survivor guy Richard Hatch) and he was just as nice as could be. We also got to gawk in awe at this beauty, a gigantic inflatable display promoting the Adventure Time cartoon. If you're not watching this cartoon, you are wasting your life.

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: Low Water - STRANGE NEW ELEMENT

Here we have some catchy nerdrock with an adorably goofy video, casting the members of Low Water as a trio of nerdy scientists on the run from a rather listless dominatrix type and her rollerskating hench-ladies.

If some of the girls in this clip look familiar, you may remember them from Tech TV or the early days of G4 - Morgan Webb, Laura Swisher, Sarah Lane and Cat Schwartz are all on hand, circa 2004, to make you pine for the Attack of the Show and X-Play of days gone by. The clip ends with a bit too much footage of everybody just kind of hanging around having fun, but since when is watching people have fun a bad thing?


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SHATNER SUNDAY: The lost "Rockman" of STAR TREK V

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is widely regarded as the worst of the Trek film series. But while that's arguably true (personally I much prefer it to that 2009 JJ Abrams reboot mess) there's no faulting director William Shatner for lack of ambition.

For his lone directorial effort in the Trek franchise, Shatner envisioned a grand tale of friend against friend, man against God, and Kirk against Rockman. He planned for the film to climax with Kirk's spectacular fight against five rock monsters, but they had to be cut to one Rockman for budget reasons and then the sequence ended up getting cut altogether. Too bad. As seen in the screen tests above, this had the potential to be an unforgettable sequence: two glowing eyes suddenly blink to life in the dark rock face, and then a great, jagged shape breaks free from the wall of stone and comes lumbering toward a terrified Kirk, the ground shaking with its every massive footstep. Sure, it would've been goofy as hell, but it would've been goofy in the most awesome, old school Trek way.

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Mini MUPPET SHOW stage set built in crazy detail

Lance Cardinal is an artist from Vancouver who built himself an absolutely insane model of the Muppet Show set, everything from the stage itself to the backstage area where Kermit would spend the whole show coping with diva pigs, exploding chickens and other common annoyances of the showbiz trade. Cardinal has done some stunning work here, and the rest of his site is also worth a long look. As a f'rinstance, just check out his Evil Dead mini cabin!

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Tour a Kirk-era Federation starbase

In the fan-made clip above - a mod based on the game Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force - you get to tour a Kirk-era Federation Starbase and see what all the redshirts got up to when they weren't being killed by dikironium cloud creatures or some damn thing. The bowling alley is no great shock, but some of their other forms of entertainment are a little more surprising.

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Roz Chast's Incredible (Inedible) Eggs

Roz Chast is best known for her New Yorker cartoons, but she has a surprising sideline creating these crazy little egg things here. Click the picture to embiggify, or visit her website to see more.

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Terry Gilliam's animated titles for THE MARTY FELDMAN COMEDY MACHINE

Before he became a director, Terry Gilliam was an animator with a bizarre, instantly recognizable style. In his fantastic 1979 book Animations of Mortality, Gilliam offers up a lot of original artwork along with pages of full-color print adaptations of animated sequences he created for Monty Python's Flying Circus and other TV shows of the era. As a kid I re-read the book obsessively, aching to see Gilliam's titles for shows like The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine in motion. It only took a couple of decades, but now I can see this stuff on Youtube with but a few clicks of the mouse. It was worth the wait.

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100 Years of Vincent Price

This month marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of scary movie great Vincent Price. Artist Zach Bellissimo (AKA "Seizuredemon") has honored Price by drawing 100 of the fiendish characters that the actor portrayed during his life. There are a few notable omissions, but most of the classics are here, from the Abominable Dr. Phibes to Egghead from Batman. To see the full tribute, click on over to Bellissimo's Deviant Art page.

Just for kicks, here's a 1984 intro segment from the PBS series Mystery!, featuring Price as host. (Man, Vincent Price hosting a show featuring a cartoon title sequence designed by Edward Gorey... PBS used to be awesome.)



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Life's Too Short

Coming soon: Ricky Gervais' and Stephen Merchant's next sitcom Life's Too Short, starring Warwick Davis of Willow and Leprechaun fame. Davis will play a fictionalized version of himself in what Gervais describes as a comedy about "the life of a showbiz dwarf." According to Wikipedia, Gervais and Merchant met Davis when he appeared on Extras and they were quite taken with his blackly funny anecdotes: "Davis told the pair of the trials of life for a man of 3 feet 6 inches in height, such as having to use a broom handle to reach objects on the high shelves in supermarkets, and people touching him for luck as if he were a leprechaun."

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Steve Agee's ARM BOXES

What has Steve Agee been up to since The Sarah Silverman Show was canceled? Apparently he's developed an advanced case of arm boxes. Pray for him.

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: John Lydon - SUN

In George Orwell's 1941 essay on the "saucy seaside postcards" of the era, the 1984 author found something essential to the human spirit in the endless scenes of fat, shrewish wives nagging bitter, balding little men and what he described as the "mother-in-law, baby's nappy, policemen's boot type of joke." (Note that that link to Orwell's essay contains an offensive and possibly NSFW racial epithet, used in the context of describing the seaside minstrel acts that were still common in the '40s.)

"It will not do to condemn (the postcards) on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly," Orwell wrote. "That is exactly what they are meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their unredeemed lowness, not only in the sense of obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every direction whatever. The slightest hint of 'higher' influences would ruin them utterly. They stand for the worm's-eye view of life, for the music-hall world where marriage is a dirty joke or a comic disaster, where the rent is always behind and the clothes are always up the spout, where the lawyer is always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the newly-weds make fools of themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging-houses and the drunken, red-nosed husbands roll home at four in the morning to meet the linen-nightgowned wives who wait for them behind the front door, poker in hand."

The video for John Lydon's 1997 single Sun is a viciously cheeky little number featuring comic seaside postcards of the kind Orwell described, but here they're not just a bunch of random jokes. Using crude animation, the postcards tell the complete story of one man's wretched, joyless life, from sunburned trips to the beach as a child, to his loveless marriage, tedious job and beyond. Every now and again Lydon comes dancing into the frame like a cackling little demon, mocking the many failures of our hapless cartoon anti-hero.

The song comes from Lydon's uneven but fascinating CD Psycho's Path. Lydon played all the instruments himself, designed the CD cover, etc. This video serves as a kind of sequel to Holidays in the Sun, and it turned out to be pretty much the last great thing Lydon ever did. After this we lost him to listless Sex Pistols reunions, reality show gigs, et al, as he transformed from punk rock superhero to pop cultural irritant. But hey, the Idiot Dance was pretty great while it lasted.






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Technocrati tags: [John Lydon][Sun]

The 10th Doctor talks Amerrickun

In this clip from the unaired NBC pilot Rex is Not Your Lawyer, David Tennant (AKA inarguably the best Doctor Who Doctor of the revived series) puts on his best American accent... Which frankly isn't too great. Although I've gotten so used to his fake English accent as the Doctor that whenever I hear him speak with his actual Scottish accent, that sounds fake too.

Where do European actors get that goofy "American" accent from, anyhow? It's like they think we all talk like John Wayne or something. Hullo! I yam an Amerrickun!

STAR TREK: THE APARTMENT

In this video, an English gent takes you on a guided tour of his Star Trek-themed apartment. (Actually, it's very specifically a Star Trek: Voyager apartment, which just makes the whole thing even more charmingly dorky.) The guy stops just short of having a sonic shower, and I've no doubt he's working on one as we speak.

Android party

Ain't no party like an android party 'cause an android party don't stop!

SHATNER SUNDAY: William Shatner can howl "I love you" on command!

Inspired by the example of Mishka the talking husky, the former Enterprise captain proves that he too can howl "I love you" for treats.

The many Molly Ringwalds of John Hughes' Shermer, Illinois

"When I first started making movies," John Hughes once told Premiere Magazine, "I thought I would just invent a town where everything happened. Everybody, in all my movies, is from Shermer, Illinois. Del Griffith from Planes, Trains & Automobiles lives two doors down from Samantha Baker. Ferris Bueller knew Samantha Baker from Sixteen Candles. For 15 years I've written my Shermer stories in prose, collecting its history."

Hughes' Shermer is a Chicago suburb with a very strange history indeed. Circa 1985, Sixteen Candles' Sam Baker, The Breakfast Club's Claire Standish and Pretty in Pink's Andie Walsh were all students at Shermer High School. In other words, three Molly Ringwalds were attending the school at the same time. It would seem like three unrelated but identical pouty redheads would attract a lot of attention... But perhaps the students and faculty were distracted by all of the Anthony Michael Halls running around. There was Sixteen Candles' King of the Geeks, The Breakfast Club's Brian Johnson, Rusty Griswold from National Lampoon's Vacation and Gary Wallace from Weird Science.

Actually, so much weird stuff happened at Shermer High School that it's possible nobody ever even noticed all of the Molly and Anthony Michael clones. After all, at the end of Weird Science Gary and Wyatt's magical cyber-girlfriend Lisa gets a job at the school as the new gym teacher. Given Lisa's mischievous nature and god-like powers, it seems inevitable that eventually she'd have a run-in with Mr. Vernon - the sneery teacher from The Breakfast Club - and she'd turn him into a big, gross toad monster. One shudders to imagine how she would discipline Emilio Estevez for taping that one kid's buns together.

If all of Hughes' movies took place in the same town, that raises many troubling questions. If John Candy's Del Griffith really lived two doors down from Sam Baker, did he ever encounter Uncle Buck? Or that other John Candy who managed the neighborhood Target store in Career Opportunities? Did Buck's nephew Miles (Macaulay Culkin) attend elementary school with Kevin, the Macaulay Culkin who was always getting left Home Alone? Did the John Kapelos who was the janitor in The Breakfast Club ever cross paths with the Kapelos who was marrying Sam's sister in Sixteen Candles, or the Kapelos who owned a blues bar in Weird Science? Why were the citizens of Shermer blessed with but one John Cusack, one Annie Potts, one Kelly LeBrock... But cursed with two Jim Belushis?

As the '90s wore on, Hughes gradually became less productive and more reclusive. The last time Shermer was seen onscreen was in Reach the Rock, a little-seen 1998 indie picture that Hughes wrote but did not direct. Hughes originally began the script as a sort of sequel to The Breakfast Club, imagining what would have happened to Bender if he'd stayed in Shermer with Claire and grown into a frustrated, aimless adult. While none of Hughes' old characters or actors appear in the final film, we do get a glimpse of Shermer a decade on from its glory days, and it's become a sad, run-down place. Ferris sure isn't leading any parades through this town.

Hughes is now gone, and we'll probably never get the chance to visit Shermer again. But strangely enough, Hughes' son James Hughes has made some efforts to establish his own fictional Chicago suburb. He wrote the script for the 2001 film New Port South, following a group of rebellious students at New Port South High School in the town of New Port. That's his only credit on the IMDB so far, but give him time. Perhaps one day New Port will be a thriving city, with stories interacting in unlikely ways and the same faces showing up over and over again. If John Bender can go to the same high school as Ferris Beuller, anything is possible.



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DAVID TENCH TONIGHT

David Tench was an Australian talk show host who was created using motion capture technology. His show David Tench Tonight, featuring real-time interviews with various celebrities, had a brief run on Australia's Channel Ten in 2006. (The name "Tench" was actually a combination of "Channel" and "Ten".)

He was not the first "virtual" host - I believe that honor goes to the great Max Headroom. But he was arguably the creepiest, with a giant Mardi Gras head and tiny baby arms. Here's the Tenchbot in action:

NAOMI WILDMAN GONE WILD!

My fellow fans of Star Trek: Voyager, we have endured a lot of suffering.

We have seen our beloved show unfairly vilified and spat upon by the press, other Trekkies, and even members of the show's cast. People said that Seven of Nine was just a bimbo added to the show for ratings, but we knew she was really a complex and compelling character (who just happened to look spectacular in a silver catsuit.) Everybody was always hating on Neelix, but we adored the cheery alien warthog with a tragic past. That episode where Tom Paris' tongue fell out and he evolved into an evil salamander monster rocked, no matter what the haters said!

Everybody in the world said we were stupid for liking Voyager, but that just made our fandom stronger. We would never give up our love for Voyager... Just like Janeway and her crew fought overwhelming odd and never gave up trying to find Earth.

Well, Voyager fans, I'm afraid I've got some more bad news for you, a development so upsetting that it could cause a level-1 breach in your warp core.

I'm sure by now you've noticed the crazy-hot goth model in the picture there, doing her Lizzie Borden thing. You're probably wondering what she's doing there, in the middle of all this stuff about Voyager.

That is Naomi Wildman. Yes, it's true. The sweet little girl with the spines on her head, the one that Neelix would tuck into bed at night with tales of Treevis and Flotter... She's all grow'ed up, and she's become a Suicide Girl.

After Voyager ended, Scarlett Pomers went on to enjoy a successful acting career, including a co-starring role on the sitcom Reba. She's also done cartoon voice-overs and apparently she has her own rock band. In addition to these pursuits, she's also now doing some rather exotic modeling.

Here's what she has to say on her Model Mayhem page:

I prefer edgy, ethereal, dark, fantasy, creepy, fetish, pinup, fashion and frightening/bizarre shoots. However, I am very versatile and am always open to glamour, beauty, and more mainstream looks. I do NOT do nudes.

All of which would be perfectly fine - kind of fantastic, even - if I could just stop picturing her as an innocent 9-year-old with poky rubber things on her forehead. This is like seeing your niece in lingerie or something. And... Oh God, is that a Klingon knife she's using in that picture? I think it is. No! Not right! Very not right!

Sigh... Go ahead, Naomi, twist your Klingon blade in my heart. Today is a good day to die.


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Jim Trainor's THE BATS

Jim Trainor is a fine artist, teacher and animator who makes charmingly ugly little short films that are surreal while also being educational while also being weirdly personal. In The Bats, he takes us deep inside a bat cave, where a chatty bat explains the ways of bat life. We learn about bat mating, bat cannibalism, the bat God, and many other bat things. These creatures of the night are easy to relate to in some ways, profoundly alien in others. Trainor doesn't sentimentalize his animal characters, he simply gives them voice and allows us to draw our own conclusions.

This short features some really appalling business involving bat poo and some NSFW bat sex, but if a bat was going to tell you about his life, I bet it'd sound a lot like this. (The DVD at left, Cartune Exprez 2008, features the work of Trainor and other contemporary experimental animators.)

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Tiny empty spooky places

Jason Casebere is an artist who creates and photographs lovely, eerie tabletop environments of abandoned places.

Grim grinning ghosts get all up in your business

If you've ever visited the Haunted Mansion at any of the Disney parks, you've never forgotten the trio of ghostly hitchhikers who stow away with you at the end of the ride. Now Walt Disney World in Florida has futzed around with the ghosts and made them interactive CGI prankster poltergeists. The results are undeniably impressive technically, although the ghosts are no longer eerie and now seem kind of frantic and crass in that modern Disney way.

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The hidden messages in corporate logos

Many of the corporate logos you see every day have secret little pictures and other messages embedded within them. For instance, have you ever noticed the little party taking place in the middle of the Tostitos logo? See, the two little black dudes enjoying chips together, there? And now that you've seen it, you can never un-see it.

Geekosystem has 11 more secret messages in logos.

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Horror Movie a Day

Brian watches a horror movie a day, so you don't have to.

Happy 80th birthday, William Shatner!

Let's all wish a very happy 80th to Canada's favorite son, Captain James Tiberius Kirk himself, ladies and gentlemen.... Mr. William Shatner! Here's wishing you another 80 years of gloriously hammy performances, Bill!

English schoolkids sing Iron Maiden's FLIGHT OF ICARUS

As a teenager I was an absolute maniac for Iron Maiden (I'm not proud of this fact) and this video of adorable UK children belting out Flight of Icarus fills me with nostalgia for bye-gone, head-banging days. I still think Iron Maiden is totally underrated as far as silly, Spinal Tap-esque heavy metal bands go.

Geminoid: Your plastic pal who's fun to be with

Science grows ever closer to the day when androids will be indistinguishable from people. Judging by the Geminoid robot, engineers can already successfully simulate that winky, blinky, quietly terrifying crazy man you try to avoid sitting next to on the bus.

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Captain Kirk hails the Discovery crew

Before the Discovery space shuttle returned to Earth for the final time, the crew got a wake-up call from everybody's favorite starman, Captain Kirk himself.

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Blair goes crazy and murders everybody on THE FACTS OF LIFE

I missed this when it was new, but I'm sure it would've traumatized my young self pretty good. Blair Warner gruesomely kills everybody in the Facts of Life Halloween episode, Seven Little Indians. Sometimes it seems like just about every silly sitcom from my childhood had at least one episode where the writers just totally lost their minds.

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The Haunted Mansion "Interactive Queue" at Magic Kingdom Park

The Haunted Mansion is arguably the most awesome attraction at the Disney parks, and now even the line is awesome at the Magic Kingdom Park's mansion.

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The YELLOW SUBMARINE remake isn't happening!

In the wake of Mars Needs Moms' failure at the box office, Robert Zemeckis' planned motion-capture remake of The Yellow Submarine is officially dead. We've all been spared from the ghastly spectacle of dead-eyed, mo-cap android Beatles! To celebrate, let's enjoy this exuberant clip from the original classic.

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: Chris Garneau - DIRTY NIGHT CLOWNS

Prepare to get scared silly by this fantastic, creepy-cute video for Chris Garneau's Dirty Night Clowns. If you didn't already have a phobia of little clown marionettes, you will now.

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The first STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION promo

Here's a fun little relic of a bygone age (1987): the very first promo for Star Trek: The Next Generation, back in the days when it was hard to imagine a new Trek without William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Jeez, everybody in this clip looks so skinny and young. Jonathan Frakes looks like his own nephew.


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When Harry met Gandalf

Beloved geek franchises collide in this clip from the UK comedy TV series Dead Ringers.
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When Cthulhu met Isaac the bartender

Fair warning: this is a very silly clip. Set a course for gibbering madness, your mind on the unspeakable horrors that lurk in the Stygian depths beneath the sea... The Loooovecraft, soon will be making another run!

THE ICE BOOK

The Ice Book from Davy and Kristin McGuire on Vimeo.

Davy and Kristin McGuire have put together a gorgeous little demo reel to stir up interest in their planned theatrical project, The Ice Book. The Ice Book would involve flat sets that open up like pages from a giant pop-up book, supplemented by projected imagery. The video shows a miniature version of what they're planning, and even at that scale it's really breathtaking stuff. Here's hoping they can find a backer soon and make this thing happen.

They have a really interesting behind the scenes page, too.

EX ASTRIS SCIENTIA: Truly glorious Trekkie nit-picking

Ex Astris Scientia is an absolutely exhaustive Trekkie site. The site features encyclopedic entries on virtually every aspect of the Star Trek universe(s) - including the designs for every Star Trek starship bridge ever - and plenty of thoughtful, nit-picky analysis. For instance: what color is Vulcan's sky?

(He's also even more ticked than I am about all the continuity BS in the 2009 JJ Abrams reboot movie.)

Vincent Price on THE MONSTER CLUB

A nice little bit of random, vintage horror camp, as Vincent Price sits down in a sinister nightclub setting and chats with an English lady reporter about a now-obscure 1980 picture called The Monster Club. He really was a charming old lizard. Who else could possibly get away with the line, "Your veins stand out so beautifully?"




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Emily Bode's amazing ALICE cupcakes

Emily Bode's (Disney-esque) Alice in Wonderland cupcakes are so beautiful and tasty looking, you don't even care if eating one will shrink you to the size of a caterpillar.

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FRAGILE AND FEARLESS

Start your Sunday morning off right, with a big helping of scrambled (and NSFW) eggs. In David Commander's 2007 short film Fragile and Fearless, a neurotic little egg lady (voiced by Ish Klein) is ready to crack, when her shrink advises her to grow a thicker shell. But is her new outlook on life a little too eggs-treme?

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When Janeway met Solo

In this dorky yet eerily beautiful clip, the USS Voyager encounters the Millennium Falcon in fluidic space, as two remote controlled spaceship models gracefully circle each other at the bottom of a swimming pool.

What I want to know is, if Voyager contacts the Falcon, will Voyager's universal translator actually translate what Chewbacca says, so it sounds like he's speaking Federation Standard English? (Something tells me that Chewbacca isn't a great conversationalist. Most of his dialogue in the original trilogy probably consists of variations on the phrase, "Uh-oh! This is scary! Let's get outta here!" Plus the occasional, "Oh no, something just exploded!")


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Photo series with adults replicating their childhood portraits

Irina Werning's Back to the Future is a fascinating photo project in which Werning has her subjects recreate snapshot portraits taken of them when they were much younger. You would think everybody would look really silly doing the stuff they did when they were little kids (and indeed, some of them do) but it's surprising how often recreating the poses, clothes and attitudes of their childhood photos can make people look rather chic. The woman in this photo looks like she's in an American Apparel ad. (Note that some photos are mildly NSFW.)

DONNIE DARKO burlesque tribute

Those scamps at Phillie's own Peek-a-Boo Revue (the same fine folks who brought us that unlikely Watchmen burlesque show a while back) have returned with a cheeky new tribute to Richard Kelly's sci-fi, emo cult classic, Donnie Darko. This clip should be safe for work, although it does feature jiggly ladies jumping around and a singing Frank the rabbit who turns into a tranny caveman for reasons I won't pretend to understand. Also: the Donnie has an inexplicable neck-beard and looks a lot more like Shaggy from Scooby Doo than Jake Gyllenhaal.

Yeah. It's a mad world, indeed.


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Hello. She's Shelly Duvall.

This Youtube clip features celebrated character actress Shelly Duvall introducing herself at the beginning of various episodes of the cable TV anthology series Fairy Tale Theater. Really, that's it. She just says "Hello, I'm Shelly Duvall" over and over again. It sounds stupid - and it is - but I can almost guarantee that once you start watching you won't be able to stop.

Idle doodles by famous authors

Flavorwire has a fun post looking at cartoons drawn by some of our most celebrated authors and poets. Seen here, a surprisingly silly little drawing by Sylvia Plath.

ROCK ODYSSEY

Back in the 1980s, the Hanna Barbera animation studio produced a lavish, feature-length oddity called Rock Odyssey. Intended to be a kind of rock n' roll Fantasia for adult audiences, Rock Odyssey took viewers on a surreal journey through the music of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s - a journey hosted by an anthropomorphic jukebox voiced by Scatman Crothers. While Hanna Barbera was and is best known for family-friendly cartoons like Yogi Bear and The Flintstones, Rock Odyssey featured some surprisingly dark and disturbing imagery. The film was never released, but the clips available online are impressive. The opening sequence seen above is totally creepy and disorienting, in a sort of Ralph Bakshi way.

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JUMP/IMAGINE mashup

The Walrus meets Diamond Dave in a "Van Lennon" mashup that works much better than it should.

New webcomic from HITMEN FOR DESTINY's Øyvind Thorsby

Øyvind Thorsby's fantastic online comic series Hitmen for Destiny wrapped up last summer, and since then fans have been aching for more of Thorsby's wonderful weirdness and weird wonderfulness. Well, I'm pleased to report that Thorsby has finally launched a new comic series, The Accidental Space Spy. Check it out.

No Shatner Sunday this week

... And to be honest, I'm thinking about putting the feature on hiatus for a while. Between his CBS sitcom, his many, many endorsement deals and his upcoming (real) heavy metal album, I kind of feel like the guy doesn't really need any extra PR. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm dangerously close to reaching my Shatner saturation point.

A Japanese monkey waitress wearing a human mask

No, you did not fall asleep at your keyboard and dream this incredibly creepy clip featuring a monkey waiting tables in a Japanese restaurant while wearing a little woman mask. It is real. All too real.

Thanks(?) to Io9 for the clip.

Original LAND OF THE LOST stars' cameo scene from that stupid movie

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know I'm a maniac for the original Land of the Lost and I hated that stupid (stupid, stupid) movie. I'd heard that the filmmakers shot a scene featuring a cameo by original series stars Wesley Eure and Kathy Coleman and then they cut it out, and I was curious to see it. Now it's online, and it's a pretty strange clip. Coleman's about two feet taller than Eure! (Did she grow up to be as tall as a Sleestak, or did Eure shrink?) Also: that voice. I guess all those years she spent screaming when she was running away from dinosaurs took a toll on her vocal cords.

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USSR MST3K

Apparently some years back Russia had its own Mystery Science Theater 3000 rip-off series, Project Popcorn. I don't know it if was funny or not, but somehow it actually managed to look even cheaper and more hotglued-together than the original.

I'd love to hear what the MST3K guys think of this thing. Something tells me they'd be more amused than annoyed by it.

MUSIC FROM SPACE: Adriano Celentano - PRISENCOLINENSINAINCIUSO

I feel like your grandma, sending you viral videos a month or two after everybody else has gotten sick of them... But I hadn't experienced the wonder of Prisencolinensinainciuso until now, and if you've also been missing out this is a situation you must correct right now. It's a kind of proto-hip-hop glam rock thing with a beat like a freight train to Funkytown, sung in a made-up language that keeps almost turning into English without quite getting there. (There are moments when I could swear he's singing about shoes in a colorful style, but... No, probably not.)

If I didn't have errands to run, I could spend all day watching this Italian dude with a spectacular combover strut around like Mick Jagger in his prime while he hollers nonsense to a bunch of bouncy, 30-year-old schoolgirls.

For bonus fun, here's a clip of Will Smith being utterly baffled by the song. OLL RAIGTH!

STEAMPUNK PALIN

Somebody made a comic book about a steam-powered, bionic Sarah Palin. The plot sounds even more wacky than you'd think.

I can think of several possible explanations for how this thing came to be...

* The book's creators were brainstorming one night, and they came up with a seemingly foolproof plan: Steampunk is popular, and Sarah Palin is (sadly) popular... So, steampunk + Sarah Palin = PROFIT!!!

* It started as one of those improv writing exercises where you scribble a bunch of random crap on pieces of paper, draw them out of a hat and then try to combine them into a story. So it was either Steampunk Palin or something about Lady Gaga and a rollerskating bear in a waffle house. (Actually, I think I'd much rather read that comic book.)

* Somebody has a very exotic fetish. The cyborg Sarah Palin pinup pages (Choke!) in the book would seem to bear this one out.

Come to think of it, this book may well qualify as a Hi-Fi Pizza of the Apocalypse.

James Franco stars in THREE'S COMPANY: THE DRAMA

Now playing at Sundance, James Franco takes on the role of Jack Tripper in an indie picture that adapts the first three episodes of Three's Company as a drama. Chrissie is played by a dude in a wig, because the whole thing wasn't already weird enough.

Spock Sunday

No Shatner Sunday this week, but please enjoy this montage of Mr. Spock finding many things fascinating.

Guy builds MASH set in his backyard

As a pretty major MASH fan myself, I am drooling over these photos of a full-size recreation of the 4077 camp that David Dilday built in his backyard. (See one photo below.) To quote another sitcom: I want to go to there.

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