Go Team Venture!

Wow, my crabby little post about the West Coast screw up of the Venture Brothers 4th season premiere brought in lots of new traffic. The botched premiere isn't getting as much coverage online as one would expect, so it seems that the search engines are sending a lot of frustrated Venture Brothers fans to this site. Well, fortunately I have some good news for you all: according to James Urbaniak (the voice of Rusty Venture himself), the full season premiere will be airing at 12:30 AM, tonight through Thursday. It can also be seen on the show's website. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm looking forward to finally getting past those first 15 minutes.

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WILD THINGS figures

I haven't seen the movie version yet and I'm not much of a toy collector, but I'm a little drooly over this new selection of figures based on Where the Wild Things Are. I'm a little sad, though, that from now on we'll probably be stuck calling these characters Carol, KW, Alexander, etc. While they were unnamed in Maurice Sendak's original book, years later Sendak revealed that they were named after his relatives: Tzippy, Moishe, Bruno, Emile and Bernard. How did Spike Jonze imagine that Carol was an improvement over Moishe? Nothing's an improvement over Moishe. (Click pic to embiggenate.)



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The virtual Culver City of Laurel and Hardy

That clip I posted the other day of Laurel and Hardy kicking out the jams to the accompaniment of the Gap Band led me to this interesting little oddity. In 1999, Piet Schreuders presented the Dutch TV documentary The Shortest Main Street in the World. In it he journeyed to America to visit the section of Culver City where Laurel and Hardy shot a lot of their movies. Taking his fannish enthusiam to impressive extremes, he even created a detailed, 3D model of the neighborhood as it would have appeared in Laurel and Hardy's day. I live in a part of LA not too far from Culver City, and it's a strange thrill to see the True Value store and other perfectly humdrum local buildings rendered in digital form and obsessed over like this.

A lot of outsiders knock Los Angeles, and even the people who live here make a lot of bad jokes to the effect that this town is full of Paris Hiltons. But those jokes have nothing to do with the LA I know, and I wouldn't live anywhere else, not for nothin'.

I go to some random corner to mail my electric bill, and I'm standing on the spot where Laurel and Hardy got chased by a goat. Beat that, you smug San Francisco dorks.



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WONDERLANDS: ALICE AT THE PALACE, 1982

In 1982, NBC broadcast Alice at the Palace, a stage musical rather loosely adapted from Alice in Wonderland. Meryl Streep starred, and in this clip you can see Meryl and her fellow thespians Broadway-ing the snot out of Lewis Carroll, with very showy showtunes and performances pitched not just at the cheap seats, but at anybody who is still in line at the concession stand.

Your opinion of this clip will probably have a lot to do with whether you grew up around theater kids. I went to the LA County High School for the Arts, and I was surrounded by aspiring actors, singers and dancers who were always just a bit too eager to share their talents with the world. It was sort of like being trapped in an episode of Fame that lasted for years. Sometimes the students really did break out in production numbers in the halls. You'd be coming out of history class and there would three girls in leotards outside doing I Hope I Get It and you'd have to try to get past them without getting kicked in the shins. The theater kids were loud and annoying in a very sweet and endearing way. Their relentless pep and desperate need for attention often made them simply exhausting to be around, especially at 9 in the damn morning, but they were never dull. Being dull would have been death to them.

So watching Streep and company bounce around and holler out these songs, I'm impressed by all that outsize talent on display... But I also feel a nasty old shin injury acting up and I feel the strong urge to hurry in the other direction.





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VENTURE BROS. season 4 premiere screwed up on West Coast

If you're a big Venture Brothers fan, and you live in the western US, and you tuned in for the show's 4th season premiere at midnight last night/this morning, you're probably still scratching your head trying to figure out what the heck happened. The show ran for 15 minutes, started over again at the beginning and then just stopped at 12:30 without so much as the closing credits.

Was this bizarre doubling intentional? After all, the episode's storyline had been jumping around in time, there was magic and talk of time machines and Dean's hair kept getting longer and shorter from scene to scene, so was this repeated 15 minutes supposed to be some sort of time warp deal? Were there subtle differences between the two sequences that we were supposed to watch for? The little counter that occasionally showed up in the upper left of the screen, was that some sort of clue?

It just didn't feel right. The Venture Brothers is certainly a weird show, but it's never been as strenuously, aggressively weird as some of the other Adult Swim shows. It's possible to imagine the writers of Space Ghost or Aqua Teen Hunger Force, for instance, getting lazy and trying to pass off showing the same 15 minutes twice as some sort of avant-garde comedy experiment. But Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick, the pair who created The Venture Brothers, care too much about their show and their audience for that sort of crap. Don't they?

Well, yes, they do. A quick bit of Googling (and who doesn't enjoy a quick Googling to start the week?) reveals that in other markets, the show actually had a second act. It seems Cartoon Network screwed up on the West Coast and aired the same damn 15 minutes twice, then they just shrugged, started Metalocalypse and left it running while they went out to get that "fourth meal" at Taco Bell.

So. The Venture Brothers 4th season premiere will presumably be rerun sometime. Hopefully very soon. Or maybe we're supposed to catch it online. Hey, no big deal, either way. After all, we Venture Brothers fans have only been waiting for the new season and the resolution of some of those dangling plot threads for 14 damn months.

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WATCHMEN dolls sold out

Hurm. It looks like Etsy crafter Jennifer has already sold out all of her Watchmen plush dolls. This is the saddest thing to happen to Watchmen fans since Zack Snyder ditched the space squid ending. Hopefully she'll make some more soon. In the meantime, let's all just slip into our ill-fitting superhero outfits and gaze mournfully off into the distance as we make small talk that provides an unintentional and ironic commentary on larger events transpiring elsewhere.

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THE WHISPERER IN THE DARKNESS making-of online

If you're a fan of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, you absolutely need to snap up a DVD copy of The Call of Cthulhu, the epic fan film made a couple of years ago by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Cthulhu is a silent movie made without irony but with a lot of love; it plays like some lost classic of the Chaplin era, with great fidelity to the source material, imaginative art direction and appropriately melodramatic acting.

The same crew is currently at work on "The Whisperer in Darkness", set at Lovecraft's frequent locale, Miskatonic University. (The people at that last link take their pretend college website so seriously I almost wonder if they really believe the college exists. I mean, they even have a section on Undergraduate Financial Aid!)

The Historical Society did such an amazing job on Cthulhu that I have no doubt they'll also wow us all over again with Whisperer when it's done. Damn, I just wish I'd had half as much fun in college as the students in this clip are having. If there had been cute girls in flapper outfits and fancy dresses swooning around the quad when I was in school, I never would've left!



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MARY AND MAX trailer

Somehow this one slipped past me until now, but now that I've seen the trailer for the upcoming stop-motion picture Mary and Max I'm itchy to see it. The film is the feature directorial debut of Adam Elliot, and it's loosely based on an event from his own life. Mary and Max tells the story of a little Australian girl named Mary (voice of Toni Collette) and her neurotic, overweight, middle-aged New Yorker pen pal Max (Philip Seymour Hoffman, doing a great impression of Mel Brooks as the 2000 Year Old Man) over the span of 20 years.

A big hit at Sundance, the film is now available On Demand but I haven't heard anything yet about a theatrical run.




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Plush WATCHMEN figures

Have you longed to have your own plush toy versions of Watchmen characters Doctor Manhattan and Rorschach? What, you have? Wow. I really wasn't expecting you to say yes.

Well, then today is your lucky day, you very strange person! An Etsy crafter named Jennifer is selling her own, hand-made, huggable toy versions of your favorite characters. (The Doctor Manhattan figure is, fortunately, not anatomically correct.) Now, if she starts making plush versions of Sally Jupiter, then we're in business.

(Via Super Punch.)


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Laurel and Hardy dance to the Gap Band

Maybe you're not a fan of Laurel and Hardy. Maybe you're not a fan of the Gap Band. But in this clip, you will see that Laurel and Hardy and the Gap Band make for a fantastic combination.



(Actually, the boys also go remarkably well with Soft Cell, the Archies and even Elvis. This is a very peculiar meme, and one which I very much approve of.)

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