These Little Star Wars Costumes come in three sizes: Newborn, Infant and Toddler! The costumes are 100% kid safe, in fact the Darth Vader outfit features a detachable velcro cape and a “helmet” headpiece made from fleece. Although I sort of have mixed feelings about indoctrinating such young padawans into the ways of the force without proper training.
Over the years I’ve kept running into the same group of 3D retro-styled characters in Japanese printed advertising and that at first reminded me of Rankin-Bass style stop motion characters but have their own original look. I was guessing they might be stop motion since they were photographed rather than drawn or rendered.
On doing some research I figured out they came from a mid 1960s series Hyokkori Hyoutan-jima (ひょっこりひょうたん島) which translates to something like “Unexpected Gourd Island” and the characters were puppets rather than animated. They have to be Japan’s most famous puppet TV show though of course the Muppets are seen all over and “Saku Saku” was trendy for a while.Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 15, 2008 in Science
Stephen Hawking is predicting that one day we’ll discover alien life, although what’s interesting is that he feels that it may not be a carbon based life form which is what makes his statement so interesting. Hawking also went back to the Carl Sagan idea that one danger for any intelligent life form may be destroying itself with nuclear weapons, although as time goes on I wonder if the real danger is a species not developing a strategy to protect itself from a natural catastrophe be it an asteroid hit or change in climate. In the past Hawking has advocated human leaving the Earth to better guarantee survival of our species, in that respect I wish NASA would act on what he’s saying and get aggressive above going to Mars: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 15, 2008 in Animation
Who has a notebook you can write in to kill? DeathSponge NotePants! It’s funny but when you kitbash SpongeBob SquarePants with Death Note it sort of reminds me of Sweeney Todd.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 14, 2008 in Comic Books
We just stumbled over this leaked trailer of X-Men Origins: Wolverine on the net! I have to say that I had my doubts about this film, but it looks like it’s going to be action packed. Although the bad news is that when you see it in theaters there will be the same idiots who get to their seats late just like you see in this secret trailer!
Posted by Guest Author on Dec 14, 2008 in Animation
Editor’s Note: This week animation industry insider Joe Strike gives us a second take (my photo tour is here) on the Too Art for TV 3 gallery show that features the fine art side of New York’s animation industry:
Williamsburg Brooklyn is so goddam hip they won’t let you off the subway at the Bedford Avenue stop if you’re not wearing shades & one of those little mini-beardy things just under your lip. Fortunately I fooled the border guard (“wow, look over there – a latte grande!”) & made my way to the Erebuni Gallery on Roebling Street. (Why is a street named for the family that built the Brooklyn Bridge closer to the Williamsburg one?) Making my way to the gallery I spotted big big lights which had lit up the loft building across Roebling for ABC’s Life on Mars:Read more…
In my final year of art school (which was 1987) I had a friend from Japan who owned the Sharp X68000 — in fact the computer was only ever sold in Japan. As you can see in the commercial above this machine was very friendly for folks who liked to work with video and graphics, and that wasn’t by accident as the box was powered by a Motorola 68000 CPU which was the same family of chips that powered the other artist friendly machines of that era which were the Macintosh and the Amiga. The first model of this system ran at 10 MHz, had 1 meg of of RAM and no built in hard drive, so it’s sort of amazing just how much this system could do. It’s also interesting to note that many game designers in Japan created arcade games using the X68000 and today you can find emulators for the system. Read more…
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient calculator that was discovered in Greece over 100 years ago, what makes it amazing is that it’s over 2,000 years old and uses similar technology that wasn’t available until the 18th century. But what’s very cool is that scientists have recently reconstructed a working model of the mechanism which was used to calculate the positions of the sun, moon, and the planets: Read more…
The famous rocketship of Coney Island is looking for a new home as the long time amusement park Astroland will be forced to close down on January 31st. As a fanboy this breaks my heart as the spacecraft captures the excitement held by America for the high frontier at the dawn of the space race in the early 60s. To me this rocket belongs in the Smithsonian or the Seattle Science Fiction Museum, although I’d love to see it stay here in old New York: Read more…
Battlestar Galactica: The Face of the Enemy is a ten part online webisode series that has gone live today. Episode #1 The Face of the Enemy is currently playing, and new episode will appear every few days until January 10th.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 12, 2008 in Star Trek
You know even if he doesn’t have an overpaid one minute cameo in Star Trek XI William Shatner is doing a brilliant job of promoting himself lately while pushing his talk show into the spotlight in the process. The above video is an example of this Shatnermnaia in the wild from thinkhero.com. And you want to know something? Oprah look out because the real Captain James T. Kirk is no slacker!
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 12, 2008 in Science
There’s a great article at New Scientist on speculation that the cosmos existed before the Big Bang and that the bang itself was a recycling effect. It seems that scientists are now starting to play with computer simulations to try and determine what a pre-Big Bang cosmos looked like: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 12, 2008 in Animation
Within the last hour I’ve been twittered by everyone about verymelon.com a website setup by whattheanime.com. The entire site is nothing but a looped clip (shown above) from the anime series Konjiki no Gash Bell (which translates into English as Zatch Bell! – 金色のガッシュベル!!) which is subtitled by Anime Destiny. For those not in the know the show is a fantasy themed comedy series that ran from 2003 until 2006. Read more…
How many comic book artists have been inspired by Bettie Page? Everyone knows what a Bettie Page haircut is. I think when folks look back at the film icons of the 20th century Bettie Page will rank up there with the likes of Marilyn Monroe: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 12, 2008 in Science
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the International Space Station NASA is offering a free calendar online to to the public (caution: link goes to a 5.3 meg Adobe Acrobat file). 100,000 copies of the printed version of the calendar will be distributed to schools for free in the United States.
It looks like today some lucky fanboy collector will be walking away with the model of the flying saucer from the 1956 classic science fiction film Forbidden Planet. The model was later used on several episodes of the Twilight Zone TV series as well:
In this video Lyle of the Mutoid Waste Company shows off his fire breathing Robo Dog creation to the public. The Mutoid crew dates back to the mid-80s when they started out as an arts collective that would hold huge parties that would feature all sorts of neat mega sized kit bashed creations — sort of like the Burning Man of England. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 11, 2008 in Star Trek
According to Variety it looks like Majel Barrett-Roddenberry will be returning to Star Trek XI to resume her role as the voice of the Enterprise computer system! Although I wish they gave her an on screen cameo relating to her original role as Nurse Chapel, however to me this is a sign that J.J. Abrams is getting things right.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 10, 2008 in Animation, Cinema
I got a very bad feeling about this film about 57 seconds into this trailer when the Transformer styled vehicle appears. To me it looks like the film is taking itself a bit too seriously…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 10, 2008 in Comic Books
At long last the official version of the Watchmen trailer that was shown at ComicCon 2008 is now hitting the web! I have no idea how good this film is going to be, but i love the amount of detail that I’m seeing in each frame (which is a fanboy plus in my book).
These ultra cute bear warm up gloves are USB powered and are being produced by Thanko in Japan. You know at first I though this was a totally silly idea, but today I visited a company where for some odd reason they running the air conditioner in Winter — had they equipped each employee with these gloves and hot chocolate productivity would have risen while improving their office cute quotient.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 10, 2008 in Science
It’s amazing how every day we find more and more obvious clues that there may be other signs of life in he universe. This latest discovery shows that astronomers have detected carbon dioxide (a basic requirement for plants to perform photosynthesis) on a Jupiter sized planet. What’s great about this is that someday this technique may used to hunt for hints of life on an Earth like planet: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 9, 2008 in Japanese TV
The 1972 Japanese TV show Artificial Humanoid Kikaider (人造人間キカイダ) was a tribute of sorts to Astro Boy. The humanoid robot was created by Shotaro Ishinomori who actually worked for Osamu Tezuka a few years earlier, who in turn was inspired by both Pinocchio and Frankenstein. In the show Kikaider is created by Dr. Komyoji to protect himself and his very cute kids (who you can see in the clip above) from the dark Android which was created by the nefarious Professor Gill (who must have been upset that he didn’t get his doctorate in android engineering). The live action show was so popular back in the day that it inspired a manga and years later an anime series. Read more…
As a new administration comes in I’m starting to see NASA push hard for the idea of returning to the moon. My own feeling is that this is going backwards, and people should speak up about it now. Frankly my larger worry is that in view of a major economic downturn that NASA will have their budget chopped yet again — and what sad is that there hasn’t been any serious investment in the program for almost forty years now. So here are my ten reasons why we should try to land on Mars by 2018 instead of going back to 1969: Read more…
