The awkward transitions of Disneyland

Thursday, December 6, 2012


Here's one for my fellow Disneyland nerds: the Passport to Dreams Old and New blog has a very, very detailed look at the awkward transitions of Disneyland, those weird, in-between places where one "land" meets another. It's a testament to the skill of Disneyland's designers that you usually don't even notice when, say, the rustic scenery of Frontierland gives way to the futuristic architecture of Tomorrowland. In the picture above, a little bit of New Orleans Square butts up against Frontierland down by the waterfront.


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END PIECE: The final works of fine artists

Wednesday, December 5, 2012


End Piece, a grim but fascinating Tumblr, is an online exhibition looking at the final works of various fine artists before they died. Seen here, an unfinished 1989 painting by Keith Haring.

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A happy ending for the tragic tale of SCTV vet Tony Rasato!

Sunday, December 2, 2012

A while back, we told you about the sorry state of SNL/SCTV alum Tony Rasato, who was behind bars, suffering from a serious mental illness and wrangling with the Canadian legal system.

Rasato had developed a condition call Imposter's Syndrome, and he was convinced his wife and daughter had been replaced by lookalikes. Well, I'm pleased to report that Rosato now appears to be doing much better. He's a free man, he's working again, he sounds rational and apparently he's even reconciled with his wife and daughter. For such a tragic story, this is just about the happiest ending anybody could've asked for.

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How many times did Bill Murray relive the same day in GROUNDHOG DAY?

Thursday, September 20, 2012

I'd always assumed that Bill Murray spent a few months at most reliving the same day in the 1993 comedy classic Groundhog Day. But it seems his ordeal was actually quite a bit worse than that!

Director Harold Ramis once remarked that Murray must have spent ten years or so trapped in Punxsutawney, given that he had enough time to learn how to be an ice sculptor, play piano, speak French, etc. Wolfgnards.com has broken it all down, with graphs and everything, to figure out exactly how many Groundhog Days Murray endured.

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More Muppets through the years!

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Kermit the Frog is not the only Muppet who has changed quite a bit through the years. The Muppet Wiki actually has quite a collection of galleries showing how various Muppet characters have evolved over time, including Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo and many, many more. It's fascinating stuff, but don't click over there until you have at least an hour to kill looking at pictures of foam rubber animals. (Seriously, never visit the Muppet Wiki on a day when you need to get anything done.)

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A visual history of Kermit the Frog

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Kermit the Frog did not go directly from being a tadpole to the amphibious superstar we all know and love today! He's evolved quite a bit over the course of his five-decade career. The Muppet Wiki has an interesting gallery of Kermit through the years, from his weird, flipperless beginnings to his appearance in last year's hit movie The Muppets.

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: "Adventures in Success" - Will Powers

Saturday, September 15, 2012



Feeling lost and directionless in life? Here's a very 1980s pep talk by Will Powers. Will Powers was actually the brainchild of celebrity photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who provided the creepy robot voice via a Vocoder. Her collaborators on the song included Sting and an uncredited Carly Simon. Apparently Goldsmith makes a cameo here as the lady playing the video game.

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: Galaxie 500 - FOURTH OF JULY

Wednesday, July 4, 2012



And if you want that feeling of wistful nostalgia to descend into a full-blown depressive episode, here are a bunch of 8-year-olds reviewing Galaxie 500's Fourth of July.








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Drawings by famous writers

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Salon.com has posted a fascinating gallery of drawings done by celebrated authors. Some of them are rather amateurish, but a few are startlingly good. Seen here, an uncharacteristically cheery collection of paper dolls, designed by a young Ms. Sylvia Plath. (Note that the article has problems loading in my browser. It gets screwy toward the bottom of the page, with text doubling up and running over the pictures. Hopefully you'll have better luck.)

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Interview with the guy who builds the props for THE COLBERT REPORT

Sunday, July 1, 2012

In a recent interview on the Martha Stewart Living blog, Brendan Hurley describes the process of creating all the props on The Colbert Report. On any given day, Hurley might be tasked to create everything from the sinister products of Prescott Pharmacuticals to Drinky, Colbert's 44 gallon pet soda. On one memorable occasion, he even put together a banana guillotine.

"Stephen wanted to have a banana that had a condom on it, that he puts in a guillotine. There was one place I remembered seeing a mini-guillotine, but it closed down. So I just made one using scrap wood, aluminum railing and a butcher’s cleaver. I waxed the rails so the blade would slide down faster, but it had trouble penetrating both the condom and the banana. So I had to add weights to give it as much force as possible, plus I had to keep sharpening the blade, but it finally worked. And considering we made it in probably an hour and a half..."

 
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The sad fate of the Marshalls from LAND OF THE LOST

Friday, June 29, 2012

Every kid who grew up watching the original Land of the Lost wondered whatever became of the poor Marshalls. Last we saw of them, Will, Holly and Uncle Jack were still trapped in the Land of the Lost, while Rick was last seen spiraling away through the "door of time." Did Rick survive? Did Will, Holly and Jack make it back to Earth? It seemed we'd never have an answer to these questions.

Well, actually we (sort of) do. While you hear a lot about how Sid and Marty Krofft "created" the show, somebody else actually did most of the heavy lifting for the show's first two seasons: David Gerrold. Gerrold's the guy who wrote the series bible for Land of the Lost, oversaw the scripts, etc. If anybody created the show, he did.

In the late '80s Gerrold wrote a writer's guide for a planned sequel series to Land of the Lost called Land of the Lost: The Return, and it he detailed the fates of the Marshalls. The show was never produced, but if we take Gerrold's ideas as "canon," things did not go well for the Marshalls at all.

On this site, Bryan Derksen describes the writer's guide in detail. The first surprising thing is that Gerrold rather pissily ignores the original show's third season completely. (A disgruntled Gerrold left the show at the end of the second season, and the third season had a very different tone.) So, no Uncle Jack. We follow another generation of Marshalls into the Land of the Lost, where we learn that a tyrant lizard-cyborg has taken over, and he rides around on a giant robot dinosaur. Rick was killed years ago, and Will lives with the pakuni and he's been reduced to a grunting, Tarzan-like wild man. Holly has become a beautiful "sky princess" who travels in a ball of light and only appears to one of the Marshalls in times of need.

The original show was trippy as all get-out and a lot darker than people tend to remember, and Gerrold's plans to revive it certainly continue in that vein. But Land of the Lost: The Return sounds like Gerrold just sat down and tried to imagine the grimmest possible fates for the characters from the original series. Not only did the Marshalls never return home, but Rick's dead, Holly's some ghostly presence and poor Will is a grunting savage. And I thought that Will Ferrell movie was depressing!

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SOLD: 14 weird old toys!

Tuesday, June 26, 2012



Just look at all of them weird toys. Just imagine them on a shelf in your home, weirding up the place! Imagine how impressed (and nervous) your dates will be, when you bring them back to your place and they're greeted by that Jolly Monkey leering at them with his crazy little eyes! Well, Mr. Monkey and all of his friends can now all be yours, because this week we're selling these cute little creeps on Ebay. Monsters and Rockets HQ is groaning from all of our accumulated geegaws, gizmos and junk, and we've got to get rid of some of this stuff before a pile of it collapses and takes us one of us down with it. The bidding starts at $50, or you can buy up the whole mess now for a mere $70. So click on over there, and buy our crap!

UPDATE: Our crap has sold. You missed out. Too bad for you.

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Did LOST's Jack Shepherd become the next smoke monster?

Even if you've happily wasted years of your life arguing with your friends about Lost's many mysteries, at least you can agree about what happened when Jack Shepherd died. In the series finale, a mortally wounded Jack staggered to a clearing in the jungle and died peacfully, Vincent the dog beside him... And then the next thing that happened to Jack was when he woke up in the weird "sideways" world. Right?

Well, maybe not. In a lengthy new post, the Lost Answers Tumblr makes a fairly persuasive case that Jack actually became the island's new smoke monster. The article is an addendum of sorts to an article that the same blogger wrote for Cracked.com offering up a jokey but surprisingly informative list of 108 answers to many of the questions raised by the series.

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Head Like I/O

Sunday, June 17, 2012



Inverse Phase's new album Pretty Eight Machine is an 8-bit version of Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine, and it is a thing of bloop-y, bleep-y beauty.

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DAYMARE TOWN

Sunday, May 20, 2012


Daymare Town is an online point-and-click game with a nicely quirky look and tone. It feels less like a Myst clone than a short adventure you take within the pages of an artist's sketchbook, with the 3D graphics of most point-and-clicks replaced by scratchy little cartoon scenes. But just because the game has such a charmingly simple look, don't assume that the puzzles are easy to beat!


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MONSTER HOUSE animatic made from cheap plastic toys

Friday, May 18, 2012


I really liked Monster House, but didn't exactly love it. The idea was cute and the script and voice performances were good, but the motion-capture animation just didn't quite work. The characters had interesting designs, but their movements were kind of stiff and weightless and their eyes often had an eerie, lifeless quality. (Click the image at left to buy the film on blu-ray.)

I would've been just as happy if they had shot the entire movie the same way they shot their storyboard animatics, using cheap plastic toys to act out the action scenes. The clip below illustrates this process. It's taken from the Youtube page of Rob Schrab, one of the guys behind the film. He's also helped bring us The Sarah Silverman Program, Scud the Disposable Assassin and other weird delights... But somehow, I doubt he's ever had more fun with any of his projects than he did making this clip.



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Thomas Edison, Beat Poet

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

When he wasn't busy inventing little gizmos like the light bulb or the phonograph, or electrocuting elephants, Thomas Edison relaxed by writing surreal, jazzy poetry that would've done Ginsberg proud. Read the following untitled piece, and you can almost hear the bongos in the background.

A Bowery angel smoking a palm tree stubbed his toe on a comet, and pimples came out on his toe nail as big as mountains. He swore so much that God made eight new planets out of the conversation & peopled and fauna'd and flora'd them eccentrically. The almighty has a vein of humor. He made these planets & peopled them to give amusements to beings on the rest of the celestial plantation. The men were 800 miles long & 1/4 inch thick. They slept on telegraph poles, and animals with bodies as big as a pea with 900 eyes each as big as a saucer lived on these long men by catching them by the feet and sucking them in like macaroni.

Man, that cat they called the "wizard of Menlo Park" was, like, outta sight! To dig more of Edison's real gone prose poems, bop on over to NPR's website to listen to an interview with Blaine McCormick, editor of the Edison Papers Project.)

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Le Petit Prince

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Prince packs a lot of awesome into his tiny frame, and artist Troy Gua has somehow managed to capture a lot of Prince's awesome in an even tinier jointed doll, complete with fancy Purple Rain outfits and a little purple motorcycle and everything. Gua promises that there is "so much more 2 come," including a little plastic Appollonia. Let's go crazy!

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Happy 81st birthday, William Shatner!

Thursday, March 22, 2012


Today marks the 81st birthday of William Shatner. I was tempted to celebrate by posting something goofy, a clip of Shatner's infamous performance of Rocket Man or whatever, but instead I decided to post this clip from Shatner's directorial debut, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. While it's widely (and accurately) regarded as the worst of the Trek films featuring the original cast, it does contain a handful of really effective scenes, such as the one above. Let's all gather around the campfire for one more evening with Kirk, Spock and Bones. Happy 81st, Captain.



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SNL's original Stefon sketch

Tuesday, March 13, 2012




Saturday Night Live is pretty uneven these days, but the show does feature one breakout, consistently hilarious character: Bill Hader's jittery, drugged-up, gay nightclub promoter, Stefon. Stefon is a currently a recurring guest on Weekend Update, but he made his debut a few years back in a sketch where he was supposed to be Ben Affleck's wayward screenwriter brother. Many of the character's core elements were there from the beginning, right down to his peculiar obsession with totally jacked midgets with keg abs. But the sketch doesn't quite work, and Stefon seems more creepy than funny... Clearly he needed the stabilizing influence of his tirelessly patient Update pal, Seth Meyers.



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FIRELIGHT - Steven Spielberg's 1964 alien invasion movie

Tuesday, February 28, 2012




Steven Spielberg has been making movies about aliens visiting Earth for a very long time. Before War of the Worlds, before E.T., before Close Encounters even, there was Firelight. Shot in 1964, when Spielberg was but a lad of 17, Firelight featured a cast composed largely of Spielberg's high school classmates. (His sister Nancy also had a leading role.) According to Spielberg, the film earned exactly one dollar in profit! Much of the film is lost today, but you can see one of the surviving fragments here.

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Who do you want to be today?

Thursday, January 5, 2012


Face Substitution from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

In this absolutely amazing (and creepy) clip, Kyle McDonald uses prototype computer software to replace his face with the faces of various famous folks, in real time. How long will it be before Hollywood starts releasing new movies starring resurrected versions of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean?

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DEATH-RAY cosplay

Wednesday, January 4, 2012


A couple of Halloweens ago, animator Matt Taylor had one of the coolest costumes ever: Daniel Clowes' Death-Ray! Visit Taylor's blog to learn about how he created his version of the ill-fitting suit worn by the disaffected teen superhero/serial killer in the classic Clowes comic.


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CICADA PRINCESS

Tuesday, January 3, 2012


Cicada Princess from Mauricio Baiocchi on Vimeo.

Cicada Princess is an upcoming short film from Mauricio Baiocchi, based on his book. The current status of the project is uncertain, but Baiocchi is asking for donations on the film's website.

Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

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MARY WORTH acted out by real people

Monday, January 2, 2012


The long-running comic strip Mary Worth becomes a Lynchian nightmare when acted out literally by this snarky theater troupe. (I've looked in vain for the original strips that inspired these shorts. If anybody finds a url, let us know in the comments!)

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About This Blog

"Science fiction plucks from within us our deepest fears and hopes, then shows them to us in rough disguise: the monster and the rocket." - W.H. Auden

Who is he, this one who is called "Greg Stacy"?

Greg Stacy began the MONSTERS AND ROCKETS blog in April of 2009. Prior to that, he was editor of the popular sci-fi/horror news website DARKWOLDS.COM. He has also written for LA WEEKLY, OC WEEKLY, UTNE READER and LOS ANGELES CITYBEAT. He always feels weird writing about himself in the third person.

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