Don't forget the Geocities... This was supposed to be the new world

An era ends on October 26th, 2009 (that would presumably be tonight at midnight) when Geocities officially shuts down for good.

Back in the late 90s and the early whatever-we're-calling-this-decade*, Geocities was the place where a lot of us first got to know the internet. Ranting manifestos, pages listing every item in some shut-in's collection of He-Man action figures, obsessive fan sites dedicated to some band that broke up in 1980 without ever getting within shouting distance of the top 40, galleries of furry giantess jpegs... Geocities offered all of that, and oh, so much more. All of a sudden, being a misfit became a lot less lonely. No matter what wacky crap you were into, all you had to do was click around on Geocities for a while, and eventually you would find people who shared your obsessions.

If you're enough of a geek to be reading this and you're over the age of 25 or so, I'm willing to bet that Geocities has touched your life. Before Geocities, America's misfits had pen pals and they published 'zines (and raged against machines), and that was all very well... But it just wasn't enough. The internet changed everything, in ways tiny and beyond measuring, for good and ill. And for a lot of us, the internet began with a visit to those dorky little virtual "neighborhoods": Area51, TimeSquare, SiliconValley, SoHo...

You might think it's silly to get nostalgic about virtual places you haven't visited since 2001 or so. Or you might feel like they're bulldozing the streets where you grew up.


*Isn't it ridiculous that we still haven't figured out what to call the years 2000-2009, even now that they're almost over?

Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

Read more...

STRANGE TOONS: SHAFT OF LIGHT

Bill Tomlinson's Shaft of Light is a peculiar little 1996 stop-motion film that once seen in never forgotten. Set in a bleak, steampunk-ish, underground realm, the film introduces us to the Carriers, dull-witted, hunched-over robots who spend their lives hauling stuff around for the benefit of an unspecified "them". But then one day, the Carriers discover that the way is blocked. What is blocking the way? They do not know. They shall be late. It is bad to be late.



Shaft of Light did pretty well for a modern short film, screening at Sundance and other festivals and airing everywhere from Bravo to IFC to the Sci-Fi Channel. Around the same time, Tomlinson directed a feature called Artemis that I can't seem to find out much about. But that seems to be as far as he went in the movies, I get the impression that he gave up his film career a while ago. He is a restless talent, and over the years he's worked for Mattel, been a professor at UC Irvine, studied bugs, acted in Mamet plays and served as the creative consultant for something called the "Robotic Life Group" at MIT. (And what have you been doing with your life since 1996?)

Tomlinson's also done a series of art installations, including Boxed In, the large sculpture he and his sister Lynn Tomlinson created for the city of Philadelphia in 1996. If you couldn't make it out, the big fellow is holding a video monitor in one hand, and a video camera in the other. If he looks familiar, he should. He's a Carrier, encased in a too-small display window and no doubt muttering to himself about how the way is blocked.

Read more...

The MAD MAGAZINE TV special

I'm surprised to say that until just now I'd never even heard of this 1974 animated Mad Magazine TV special. I was born too late to have seen this when it was new, but I was a big Mad geek growing up and I'm not sure how I got this far without ever hearing anybody mention the thing. (It's on Youtube in three parts. The first part is below.)

The commenters over at Cartoon Brew criticize the special for not capturing the flavor of the old Mad, but I think the show was actually amazingly faithful to its source material, compared to cartoon specials of the era that adapted other properties. Most '70s TV specials are pitched directly at kids and feature rather low-budget animation and a lot of sappy songs. (I have a certain nostalgic fondness for the Rankin & Bass version of The Hobbit, for instance, but Tolkien probably would've had a stroke if he'd seen that thing.)

The producers of the Mad special adapt a lot of Mad features pretty directly, almost to a fault. It's funny how the relatively mild humor of Mad seems fairly edgy in this context. Remember, this was decades before stuff like The Simpsons and Adult Swim, when angry satire was the last things anybody expected in TV animation. The opening bit about auto manufacturers is a pretty relentless attack. It almost plays like something out of early Saturday Night Live!

The animation itself is not bad, either. It simplifies the Mad look a lot, but that sort of thing is inevitable in animation. But jeez, is that "smooth jazz" score ever obtrusive! What furshlugginer clod thought that was a good idea? Ecch!




Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

Read more...

The Main Moon

When you are the Moon, you have your own website, so even in the daytime, people can look at your chalky white face.

Now you can look at the moon, on your laptop. 'Ey, the moon... on your lap!

(I realize we're in danger of too much Mighty Boosh coverage on this blog... But come on, how could I not link to the Moon's own website?)

Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

Read more...

Rob Zombie's WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

The sketches on G4TV used to be a hell of a lot funnier before the network went all Maxim-y on us, but every now and then they still come up with a corker. Here's Attack of the Show's version of Where the Wild Things Are as re-imagined by shock rocker turned horror movie auteur Rob Zombie.

Warning: very nasty. But probably not as nasty as it would've been if Mr. Zombie made a real version of Wild Things.

Video Game - E3 2009 - Attack of the Show

Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

Read more...

CREATION will be distributed in US after all

Toldja so. Creation, the Charles Darwin biopic that was supposedly "too controversial" to be released in the US, is going to be released here after all... By Newmarket Films, the same folks who brought us The Passion of the Christ.

Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

Read more...

MUSIC FROM SPACE: Paperhand Lincoln - TOO LAZY TO BLEED

Dylan Curry is a very talented musician/artist/puppeteer who is nowhere near as famous as he oughtta be. He fronts the band Paperhand Lincoln, makes splendid music videos featuring weird little puppets of his own devising, and then posts them to Youtube where they get a few hundred hits if he's lucky.

This is an outrage! Seriously, check out his awesome video for Too Lazy to Bleed, and tell me why Eminem is a gazillionaire while this guy is probably working in a bank or some crap like that.



Get your butt over to his Youtube page, watch some videos, buy some stuff. If Curry gets discouraged and ends up putting his guitar and all of his puppets in a box in his attic, it will be your fault for not supporting a guy with this kind of potential when you had the chance. Do you really want to live with that kind of guilt? Do you?

Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

Read more...

How accurate was Kubrick's 2001 about the future?

A very interesting post on Currybetdotnet, examining the various things that Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey got right and wrong about the future. (Er, or the past, for us. But it was the future, in 1968.)

I think the author doesn't give the film quite enough credit in some ways. For instance, 2001 was shot before we'd ever actually set foot on the moon, but the film's depiction of the lunar surface is spot-on. And even if the film fails to capture what the real year 2001 ended up being like, it presents an amazingly persuasive alternate history by taking the NASA tech of the space age and extrapolating where it would go in the coming decades. You watch that movie, and it's hard to believe those are wooden sets and plastic spaceship models. You really feel like you're seeing life in space.

Sigh. Kubrick's 2001 had routine flights to the moon, cryogenic sleep and superintelligent computers that are pretty awesome when they're not trying to toss you out of the airlock to die in space. Our 2001 had 9/11, George W. Bush and "Bennifer". I think we got the raw end of that deal.

Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

Read more...

Eric Stoltz almost went BACK TO THE FUTURE in a time traveling fridge

The original Back to the Future was almost a very different movie. How different? Well, instead of Michael J. Fox driving the Delorean at 88 miles per hour to travel back to 1955, the film originally featured Eric Stoltz flying through time in a refrigerator powered by an exploding nuclear bomb.

Stoltz was hired as the film's leading man, and apparently the shoot was pretty far along before director Robert Zemeckis decided that Stoltz just wasn't working in the role. By various accounts Stoltz was "too serious" as Marty McFly, and wasn't clicking right with Christopher Lloyd. For reasons unknown, the footage of Stoltz as Marty is hard to find; it doesn't seem to be online at all, and I don't think it's been on any of the video or DVD releases. Even this short TV piece about Stoltz's firing from the film only uses still photos.



This is a total guess on my part, but maybe Stoltz was disgruntled about being dropped from the picture and didn't sign off on his footage being used. In any case, there's definitely something weird going on here. A lot of Back to the Future fans would like to see that footage, but it's been locked up in a vault somewhere for over a quarter of a century.

There's one more odd little detail about Stoltz's involvement with Back to the Future, and it's something I've never heard anybody else mention.

Just recently I finally caught up with the pilot episode of Caprica on DVD (say what you wanna say about how Ron Moore ends a series, but the guy sure knows how to start them) and I noticed for the first time how much Stoltz looks like Michael J. Fox. It's kind of uncanny once you see it, Stoltz could be Fox's taller, redheaded brother. I'm assuming that when the producers of Back to the Future fired Stoltz, they didn't deliberately set out to find a replacement who looked just like a shorter, darker haired version of him. Although apparently the resemblance did come in handy; I've heard that a few of Stoltz's long shots actually made into the finished film. The resemblance is strong enough that from 15 or 20 feet back, they could pass off Stoltz as Fox.

Doc Brown's Delorean was originally supposed to be a fridge, and the closing sequence - which got as far as being storyboarded - involved Marty harnessing the energy of an A-bomb test to blast himself back to the future. But executive producer Steven Spielberg was worried about kids imitating Marty and locking themselves in fridges, so it was changed to the souped-up Delorean. (Note that that /Film link features an embedded video of concept artist Andrew Probert doing a storyboard walkthrough of the film's original ending. But don't get your hopes up; the footage is no longer available.)

Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

Read more...

McKean in talks for CAGES film

Dave McKean, perhaps best known as the innovative illustrator for various Neil Gaiman comics and novels (Sandman, Coraline, etc.) is apparently in preliminary talks to make a film version of his own, early 1990s graphic novel, Cages.

"Great first meeting about Cages film," McKean wrote on his Twitter page. "A long term possibility, but good to know all interested parties are on the same page."

In a later tweet, he responded to a reader's question with, "I would be adapting + directing. I did Cages 20 yrs ago, think it could grow into unusual animated film."

Cages would be a real challenge to adapt to film. An ambitious and boldly experimental work, told with shifting visual styles and surreal plotting, the book followed the tangled lives of the various residents of a single building in England. It's apparently no longer in print, but can be found online without much trouble.

This wouldn't be McKean's first feature; he previously helmed the interesting misfire Mirrormask, which Gaiman wrote.

Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

Read more...