Japan is facing the worst crisis in its post-war history, and you can help! Bloggers whose work revolves around Japan have banded together to make Bloggers for Japan, a website dedicated to compiling resources and news for those who want to donate or stay abreast of new happenings related to the earthquake. The site recommends active charities like Doctors Without Borders and Shelterbox, and has donation boxes for each. Read more…
Director Darren Aronofsky is known for great award-season films like The Wrestler and Black Swan (and The Fountain if you like genre stuff), but he was also attached to a rather unorthodox project: a Wolverine reboot called, well, The Wolverine. At least until now, anyway. Citing the fact that the film’s schedule would keep him out of the country and away from his family for over a year, he decided to call it quits from the project. Fox insists they’re going to move forward with the project, though without Aronofsky the prospect of another Wolverine movie just doesn’t sound that great, if it ever did. Read more…
Posted by Michael Sacco on Mar 18, 2011 in Science
Science has a lot of really cool (and weird) stuff to read about, but sometimes you have to wade through a lot of other words to find it! What a pain, right? Out of Context Science cuts all that out, giving you single sentences of science weirdness without all the work. Where else can you read the sentence ” The aim is for the robot to be able to propel itself in any fluid mucus without having to carry its own reserve of mucus along”? Besides the original paper it was in, anyway. I think this way is a lot better. Read more…
You may think you’re a sci-fi expert, but can you navigate this fittingly tentacular map of the history of the genre? Artist Ward Shelley created it for Places and Spaces: Mapping Science. Almost every important event or genre piece is here, though you may find that your pet series or favorite novel isn’t on there if you look hard enough. Click on the image for a super-huge version, well worth the few seconds to download. Read more…
Fresh on the heels of the news that Universal passed on Guillermo Del Toro’s adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” we’re now hearing that the studio is pushing forward a $150 million 3D film reboot of Doom. That’s right, the first-person shooter that’s about a million years old. There was a pretty bad Doom movie just a few years ago, with Karl Urban and The Rock, and after that one I’m not sure anybody was really clamoring for another one. At least in 3D they can make another incredibly dumb first-person camera sequence even more gimmicky. Read more…
Posted by Michael Sacco on Mar 12, 2011 in Pulp Fiction
We consider the genre a staple nowadays, but back in the 30s, science fiction was still a relatively new thing. It hadn’t even been coined “science fiction” yet — “science romance” was a popular term, along with “pseudo-scientific” and “scientifiction” (which sounds like some kind of chemical reaction). Time Magazine reported on the very first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939, and now, thanks to the miracle of the internet, you can read the original article. It’s a doozy, an openly condescending take on the “shamo-scientifics” that were so popular in the pulp fiction world at the time. It directly refers to the venerable Hugo Gernsback as a “shrewd, fat old man.” Don’t miss it. Read more…
Posted by Michael Sacco on Mar 11, 2011 in Star Wars
If there’s one truism of good hardware modders, it’s that they never stop with just one awesome mod. To prove it, Mark of Major League Mods followed up his far-out Millenium Falcon Xbox mod with this: an almost life-size R2-D2 that’s also an Xbox 360 and projector. Artoo projects the 360’s video output from the lens on his forehead on surfaces up to fifty inches diagonal. But that’s not all — he also has auxiliary ports for all the other game consoles as well. Even the controllers received the droid’s paint job. That’s one cool robot. You might say he’s the droid you’re looking for. Read more…
Posted by Michael Sacco on Mar 11, 2011 in Star Trek
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to any adult, but there’s been a candy tie-in for pretty much everything. Spongebob has Krabby Patty gummies nowadays, Nintendo had Game Boy bubble gum when I was growing up, and apparently before that, there were candy bars “based on” the short-lived Star Trek animated series. And not just any candy bars, but cream-flavo(u)red candy bars with sugar crisps! Fans could collect wrappers with each of their favorite Enterprise crew members, including the rather smug-looking Captain Kirk shown above. Big props to Jason Liebig for programming the replicator to spit these out and putting them on his Flickr page. Read more…
Posted by Michael Sacco on Mar 6, 2011 in Videogames
Okay, technically I don’t know for certain whether it’s actually the world’s smallest, but this laser-cut acrylic Space Invaders cabinet is pretty darn small at five inches tall. There’s even a little in-progress game on it! If you’re keen on making your own out of 3mm acrylic, you can grab the pattern for it, but bear in mind you do need a laser cutter to do it. Though, admittedly, it’s easier to get a laser cutter than it is to get an actual Space Invaders cabinet, use a shrink ray to make it five inches tall, and convert it to acrylic at the molecular level. Ostensibly, anyway. Read more…
Alcon Entertainment, an investment group owned by Warner Brothers, recently acquired the rights to create new Blade Runner films, though it appears the films must be prequels or sequels, thus ruling out unnecessary remakes. This could be good news for fans of the original Blade Runner, or it could put you into a state of abject terror. Sequels to older movies generally don’t work that well. The good news is, there’s still a lot of time for popular opinion to coalesce — it doesn’t appear that the rights-owners have the slightest idea what kind of film they want to make right now, what material it would feature, anything like that. It’s almost comforting that no one involved with the project has yet piped up and said “I was thinking the best way to make this movie would be to add GIANT REPLICANTS. Squid replicants, dinosaur replicants. Transforming car replicants. That’s Blade Runner, man.” Read more…
Han Solo has already shown us the results of crossing bounty hunters and galactic crime lords, but now we finally know what happens to those who cross Shawna, the manager at Jo-Ann Fabrics. Xanadoodle created this 16-inch throw pillow, which is a fairly faithful (as yarn goes) recreation of Han Solo’s famous carbonite imprisonment. At least this Han looks comfortable. Well, comfortable to lounge on, anyway. His face tells a slightly different story. Read more…
Posted by Michael Sacco on Mar 4, 2011 in Pulp Fiction
The next book in George R. R. Martin’s much-loved A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance with Dragons, has been due for quite a while. It’s had release dates from 2007 all the way through this year! But fans of the series can now rejoice — a hard release date of July 12th, 2011 has been set for Dance. Judging by Martin’s rate of producing work, it’ll be some time before you get the next book in the series, so you should enjoy this one while it lasts. And at 900+ pages, that should be quite a while. Read more…
Got anywhere to be eleven-and-a-half months from now? I hope so, because that’s when Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is returning to theaters in 3D. Specifically, it’s scheduled for theatrical release on February 10th, 2012. The good news is that you can avoid the whole thing by just holing yourself up in a secluded cabin that weekend and throwing your cell phone and laptop into the ocean so none of your friends can get a hold of you and convince you to go see it out of some misguided notion that it was “still an okay movie, just not a good Star Wars movie.” On the other hand, Lucasfilm does say that the 3D conversion is “meticulous”… Read more…
Posted by Michael Sacco on Feb 27, 2011 in Animation
Cartoon Network has granted viewers sight beyond sight with a trailer for the upcoming Thundercats reboot! Check out your favorite cat-dudes and their mummy-dude adversary in their new anime-inspired incarnations. It looks like the gang’s all here, more or less, and Snarf is, dare I say, pretty cute! It’s a brave new world where I can speak his name and the tone isn’t murderous, and I like it. Studio 4oC has done a great job putting their own twist on this established (and admittedly pretty weird) universe, so let’s hope the show itself holds up as well as the art does. Read more…
2011 is truly the year of superheroes, from the salvo of superhero moves being launched from Hollywood to the several superhero TV shows either being planned or already on TV. And now cable is getting its own shot at the genre — FX has ordered a pilot of Brian Michael Bendis’ comic series Powers. The series, starring an ex-superhero who works as a police officer in a department that investigates superhero-related homicides, is a great fit for a TV-MA channel like FX, so let’s hope that they handle the IP with the respect it deserves. Read more…
Posted by Michael Sacco on Feb 26, 2011 in Television
Firefly fans just can’t seem to let the show go, even this many years after it was canceled. Nathan Fillion mused that he’d like to buy the rights to the show and make more of it. But right now, the closest you’ll come to the starship Serenity is an absolutely enormous wall sticker of it! 48 inches diagonal, in fact. It’s made by Quantum Mechanix, and it’s based on the original 3D model of the ship from the film of the same name. You can even peel it off of one enormous wall and re-stick it onto another wall. You might call it Verse-atile. Yeah, I went there. Read more…
Fans of Doctor Who may be quite pleased to hear that a free-to-play MMO based on the Doctor’s exploits is in development! Called Words in Time, it’s set to be a “fun and easy” online game for fans of all ages in which you assist you the Time Lord himself, going on missions and vanquishing classic foes. Those with software engineering skills may be even more interested in the game, because its developer, Three Rings, is hiring! The catch is that you have to live in Madison, Wisconsin. Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds, though — their office is pretty darn cool. Read more…
Ivan Reitman’s been dangling a possible Ghostbusters 3 in front of us for years now, and now that there’s a completed script, it’s only a matter of time before it starts production, right? Well, almost. There’s one problem, and his name is Bill Murray. See, there’s a special arrangement in place that says that no new Ghostbusters production can move forward without the consent of all of its original stars/creators. And Bill Murray is notoriously picky about his projects (except for Garfield, I guess). He told Howard Stern that he had received the script some time ago but hadn’t read it yet because it just “isn’t the foremost thing in [his] mind.” That’s fair. But it’s foremost in my mind! Read the damn script, Bill! Read more…
Posted by Michael Sacco on Feb 20, 2011 in Cinema, Star Trek
This is one of those stories that makes me wonder if things wouldn’t actually have been better if they had turned out as originally planned. Star Trek producer Rick Berman stated in a recent interview that the last film to star the Next Generation crew, Star Trek: Nemesis, was originally going to star a completely new cast of characters, but Berman fought to keep the TNG cast around for another film. At that point, Berman argues, Enterprise was just about to hit TV, so he felt like introducing yet another new Federation crew would’ve alienated series fans. Nemesis was not a great film by any means, its production was hampered with problems with both its script and cast, and it certainly didn’t make any money for Paramount, so one has to wonder if maybe a new cast and a fresh take on Trek would’ve made a better movie. Fun fact: Shinzon, Picard’s clone (shown above), was played by a young Tom Hardy, who you may know from Inception, and who’ll soon be playing Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. Read more…
Seems like we’re seeing lots more anime adaptations of quintessentially American IPs, like Supernatural, coming out of Japan these days, and a lot of them are through the animation studio Madhouse. Their latest offering, an X-Men anime, has all the hallmarks of such an adaptation — achingly beautiful hero (Cyclops), a whole lot of fire, and a Thundercats character. Wait, no, that’s Beast. But you can’t deny that there’s a family resemblance there! I think that X-Men is actually a property that might work well in anime, with its mix of character drama and over-the-top action, so I’ll be interested to see the final product. Read more…
Brand-new brawler Marvel vs. Capcom 3 has a pretty robust roster of 38 characters (including announced DLC characters), but just because a character didn’t make it into the game in playable form doesn’t mean they didn’t make it in at all. Each playable character’s ending in Arcade mode has unique art and dialogue, and almost every ending has cameos from both sides of the Marvel-Capcom spectrum. GamesRadar has collected them all and catalogued them for your perusal, and there are cameos from some seriously obscure or second-string characters here. Shanna the She-Devil? Dazzler? Fin Fang Foom? Awesome. And then there are some matchups that just make sense, like Devil May Cry‘s Dante duking it out with Ghost Rider. I’d pay to see that fight. Read more…
No, not Val Kilmer, the other guy. Shane Black, who directed RDJ in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, is said to be helming the third Iron Man film after Jon Favreau was booted from the director’s spot. Downey ultimately has choice of director in that he is allowed to leave the project if he doesn’t approve of the director, so Paramount and Marvel Studios have reason to keep him happy. Black and Downey have a long history and a good friendship — in fact, much of the original Iron Man‘s dialogue was cribbed from discussions between the two in Downey’s trailer even while filming was ongoing. Black is a great choice for director, and he may even be writing the film as well, so let’s hope that the third film in the series fares better script-wise than the second did. Read more…
Director Matthew Vaughn isn’t even done with X-Men: First Class yet, but that isn’t stopping him from planning his next venture, which he says a major studio is ready to fund. It’s called The Golden Age, and it’s based on an unreleased comic book written by UK TV personality Jonathan Ross, and Vaughn likens it to “The Expendables with superheroes.” The comic book follows several retired superheroes who have to team up one last time to fix the problems their superhero children have caused in the world. Vaughn says that he’d love to have Jack Nicholson or Warren Beatty in lead roles, or any other former big-time star who’s now relegated to side roles. Sounds like a neat concept, but I’ll have to wait until the comic is released to make a real judgement on the film’s prospects. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 16, 2011 in Animation, Fandom
You know how when you go to a really popular anime convention that there might be say a 100 people waiting on line to get their badge? Well back in the 80s those 100 people would be pretty much the sum total of anime fandom in New York City! Thanks to Saul Trabal (show in the photo above) we have a wonderful little photo essay from that era when anime was limited to getting VHS tapes from friends of friends who had pen pals in Japan: Read more…
