A very baffling TWILIGHT ZONE Day to you and yours!

Why is today Twilight Zone Day? Well, nobody really knows. The show didn't start or finish its run on May 11th, it's not the day that Rod Serling was born or died. Nobody even knows how the holiday got started, or who created it. It's a rather weird mystery... Which is entirely appropriate, really.

To celebrate this most baffling of holidays, here's a Rod Serling blooper clip. It's really strange to see Serling goofing around like this. I always kind of imagine him waking up in the morning wearing that suit, and sitting down at the breakfast table with a cigarette as he makes clipped but incisive commentary about the dark nature of man.



The folks at CBS have been nice enough to post a number of episodes of this classic series for free online, so now's your chance to return to the land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas.

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More movie marquee mashups!

Today I saw a couple of new movie marquee mashups that I wanted to share:

THE LOSERS BACK UP PLAN

KICK ASS DEATH AT A FUNERAL

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Restored animated shorts from the silent era

Now, this is just neat. UCLA has posted a selection of restored animated films from the silent era, and you can choose to see them without sound, with music or with informative commentary tracks. There are some real lost treasures in this bunch.

- Via Cartoon Brew.

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner has a transporter accident

In this peculiar little British power ad from the 1980s, a Wrath of Khan-era Captain Kirk suffers a transporter accident that... Well, let's just say that Scotty probably caught hell for this one.

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The TWILIGHT ZONE alphabet

For the upcoming Twilight Zone-inspired group show at LA's Gallery 1988, artist Dave Parillo created this simply terrific Twilight Zone alphabet, featuring many of our old friends from the land of both shadow and substance, things and ideas. (Click image to embiggenate.)

Via Super Punch.

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A CGI Jerry Lee Lewis covers Bruce Springsteen's PINK CADILLAC

Fasten your seatbelt for this crazy CGI music video from a few years back, featuring classic rocker Jerry Lee Lewis covering Bruce Springsteen's Pink Cadillac. (That's the Boss himself doing backup work for the Killer... And don't those nicknames make this sound more like a mob hit than a music video?)

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MIND'S EYE

Gregory Godhard's 1998 short film Mind's Eye is a seriously trippy piece of animation, although I would strongly advise against watching it when you're stoned. This thing + drugs = your head exploded all over your keyboard.

Previously: Wild Beasts' music video for their song Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants, which screwed with your brain in a similarly dizzying manner.

(Via Metafilter.)

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Happy dance

Godzilla shares in the joy that Monsters and Rockets is back. (Seriously, folks... I spent an entire month in tech support hell.)

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Let's get this relaunch started the right way...

We're gonna kick things off with the opening titles for that 1990s sci-fi classic, Homeboys in Outer Space. Hard to believe it's not on DVD!

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It's alive! ALIVE!

Yes, Monsters and Rockets is finally back online, after an entire month of being down.

What happened was:

In April of 2009, I bought the url monstersandrockets.com and I launched this site. I spent the next year blogging my little heart out, having a lot of fun and attracting a pretty good audience. But what I didn't realize was that my url was up for renewal this April. Blogger.com (my hosting company) never sent me a reminder notice, they just yanked the site the day the url expired.

I've spent the last month trying to get the site back online. I'd send emails to Blogger and they would direct me to Enom.com, then the folks at Enom would say it was really Blogger's fault, then I would write to Blogger and they would tell me to do a lot of really complicated stuff, and when that stuff didn't work they would direct me to their goddamned message boards so I could ask other random dorks online for tech support, then the random dorks would tell me to go mess with Enom again. This crap went on for day after day after day, and more than once I was tempted to just give up.

But I persevered, and now I'm back at last to share this absolutely fascinating story with you. Yippee!

If I had it to do over again, I doubt I would've used Blogger to host this site. They make it relatively easy to set up a site, but an absolute nightmare if anything goes wrong. Seriously, directing people with tech support questions to your message board? You're freaking Blogger, guys. Bite the bullet and hire a few smart guys to man the phones in Bangalore. Jeez!

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