Jul 15 2016

ROGUE ONE: A Star Wars Story Trailer Hits All The Right Notes

So you may have heard about Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the latest Star Wars movie. It comes out in December. Here’s the trailer. Prepare to feel nostalgic.

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Am I right or am I right? They do a damn fine job of appealing to both us old folks (ahem) and the new generation of Star Wars fans. This particular video has both the “isn’t it cool that we’re making a new Star Wars movie?” and the actual trailer. The movie itself looks pretty good. I hope it is since I’ll wind up seeing it anyway.

Check out Star Wars stuff at Amazon.


Jun 23 2016

Visual Thinking – Classic Muppets Video

Classic Muppets from… well, a long time ago. Here is… visual thinking.

Enjoy.

h/t The AV Club


Jun 14 2016

This is Live. No. Really. Sort of. (DaddyTube)

This video, of Hatsune Miku, a Japanese Vocaloid star (?), blew my mind. You have to watch long enough to really get the effect I got. I don’t want to spoil it but I will tell you that this is a live concert. Watch a bit of it. Hell, watch the whole thing, it’s under 3 minutes.

Did you see what I saw? Actual real-live musicians playing along with a hologram? In front of an audience of actual humans?

Wow. Just… wow.

On the one hand, it’s End Times stuff. But the technology behind it is fascinating. There is a Vocaloid Keytar! (Warning: the video is very strange and includes a person in a dinosaur suit, dancing.) It goes deep.

I haven’t found anything that indicates there are any English versions. However, listening to a couple of songs (literally a couple, I only checked out two, both by Hatsune Miku, who is not a real person but performs with a live band) I’ve decided that it isn’t as bad as some current pop music. Plus you don’t have to worry about lyrics like “brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack” because it’s mostly in Japanese.

Not too bad, right? I mean, for pop music. It depends on how you feel about that sort of thing.

Mostly it was seeing the real musicians performing alongside a hologram that freaked me out.

h/t to the folks who showed this to me, one of whom was Lucas Gonze and the other of whom was Tom.


May 25 2016

Brad Pitt Stops A Kid From Getting Crushed By Fans (Video)

This is kinda nice. Brad Pitt stops a kid from getting crushed by fans in Spain, or to use the lingua franca of the place where it happened, “Brad Pitt rescata a niña en rodaje de Allied”. Allied is the movie Mr. Pitt was filming, and he took a break in order to say hello to a crowd. More specifically, he waved at a rather large group of people who were clearly REALLY stoked to see him.

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But perhaps they were a little bit too stoked. According to the story, and the video backs this up, a little girl was being crushed against the fence. Mr. Pitt saw this and had his bodyguards pick her up and pull her out of the crowd, then comforted her until medical staff arrived. Here’s the video.

I think this is an example of how having kids changes a person. Not that I don’t think Mr. Pitt would have done this before becoming a dad. But the behavior, to my eye, looks very parental. There are things that become instinctual after you have children of your own. In this case, that was a good thing.

Via Time


Apr 28 2016

Sesame Street Avengers Parody (DaddyTube)

Apparently today is National Superhero Day. Even if it isn’t (I’ve been fooled before), this Sesame Street Avengers Parody video “The Aveggies- Age of Bon Bon” is quite amusing. Sorry, forget to say Spoiler Alert.

At the risk of spoiling the best jokes… OK, I won’t. But the Sesame Street writers manage to come up with amusing vegetable-themed names for all of the Avengers, and even works in a version of one of my all-time favorite lines (from the first Avengers movie, which this is technically a parody of, rather than Avengers: Age of Ultron). Makes me wish I had a little kid to hang out with so I could watch more Sesame Street.

If that makes you hungry for more (see what I did there?) here is a Sesame Street Superhero Playlist, which begins with none other than Superman. Ah, the good old days.


Apr 15 2016

Doctor Strange Trailer (And Some Thoughts on The Comics)

By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth, they actually did it. Here is the new Doctor Strange trailer.

Doctor Strange movie

Looks like fun, yeah? I’ll give you a few thoughts of my own; if you want a moment by moment Doctor Strange trailer breakdown check out this video at IGN.

(Note: Marvel/Comixology/Amazon is having a sale on Doctor Strange digital comics — 99 cents each. Check ’em out here.)

So. Doctor Strange. What’s his deal? He’s got magic powers, lots of nifty mystical items that he uses to protect Earth from inter-dimensional nasties, and… I don’t know, he’s cool. Not a traditional superhero like Iron Man, Spider-Man and the rest.

Splash page for the "Doctor Strange"...

Splash page for the “Doctor Strange” story in Strange Tales #110 (July 1963). Art by Steve Ditko. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On a personal note, the first “real” comic book I ever read was an issue of Doctor Strange. I’d been reading Richie Rich, Casper, Archie, that kind of stuff. One day my dad said, “It’s time for you to read some real comics,” and handed me a copy of Doctor Strange. My little boy mind was blown. The first thing I remember is how much smaller the lettering was. That was true for all “real” comics (read: Marvel and DC); Richie Rich, et al, were aimed at very young readers and had simpler dialogue and storylines… and larger lettering. The next thing I remember is the splash page. One big image, full of colorful details, with Doctor Strange himself looming large over it all. I think he was looking out of a window, but it’s possible he was sitting in a chair with stuff drawn around him. I’ve been looking for that issue for years and I think I’ve found it, although I can’t remember what number it is at the moment. I also don’t remember the story. But I do remember how I felt. It was basically my comic book Bar Mitzvah. No more little kid comics for me. Now I could read the good stuff.

And I did. I have a nice collection of books that I bought at the local candy store/newsstand, because you could buy comics there when I was a kid. (You still kind of can, it just isn’t as common.) I didn’t keep those comics in very good shape, which in some cases is a bummer — my Frank Miller and Klaus Janson Daredevils would be worth a few bucks, as would my copy of the original Wolverine mini-series (which you can get for less than six dollars via Comixology). But instead of bagging and boarding everything, I read the hell out of my comics, because they were awesome. (Those Daredevils in particular are probably my favorite comic books ever.)

Back to Doctor Strange. His book went in and out, and I didn’t buy it that often. It’s possible that the local candy store didn’t always have it in stock even when it was being published. In addition to not being a traditional superhero, I don’t think he was as popular as the big names. He did found one of my sneaky super teams, The Defenders. The original core group of Defenders was Doctor Strange, Namor the Sub-Mariner, and The Incredible Hulk, quickly followed by The Silver Surfer. Basically a bunch of really powerful dudes who don’t play well with others, hence the term “non-team”. Later Defenders mainstays included such popular characters as Hellcat, Gargoyle, and Nighthawk. Also Valkyrie. Never heard of them? Join the club. (Marvel is doing a Netflix series called The Defenders, which I’m sure will be fun but doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with The Defenders’ comic books.) The Defenders hung out at Doctor Strange’s Greenwich Village mansion, known as The Sanctum Santorum, while constantly making a point of telling readers that they were NOT a super-team like The Avengers. I liked those comics a lot. Something about the idea of a group of semi-outcasts and/or angry people and/or loners teaming up only when it suited them really appealed to me.

I also always dug the good Doctor on his own. His job, Sorcerer Supreme, was to defend Earth from mystical threats. Sometimes he gets help from other Marvel heroes, but usually he doesn’t, because he’s the only one who can do what needs to be done. This led to some wonderfully trippy artwork, first by the legendary Steve Ditko (written by the even more legendary Stan Lee) and later by lots of other people.

The thing that made me the happiest in the trailer was seeing Doctor Strange’s Astral Form. (When Tilda Swinton punches him and it looks like a ghost pops out of his body.) It works like this: Doc leaves his body behind, defenseless, and his spirit floats around and does stuff. He can travel faster this way, but he can’t touch anyone and most people can’t see him. (One notable exception, if memory serves, is The Hulk. Because comic books. UPDATE: I just read some Doctor Strange comics from the 80s, and in those stories Doc can allow people to see his astral form if he wants them to. Again, because comic books.) It’s something that for various reasons I always found fascinating, so to see them do it in a live action movie had me making little nerdy noises.

So there you go. The Doctor Strange trailer. Looks like Marvel might get it right again, taking a character that isn’t well-known and putting said character into a big-budget blockbuster movie that doesn’t suck. Here’s hoping.

Read some comics:


Apr 02 2016

Cookie Monster Metal (DaddyTube)

For this Cookie Monster Metal video, I’ll let the description speak for itself:

Cookie Monster Metal

C is for Cookie, M is for METAL

A pioneer in early death metal, Cookie Monster brought his pertinent message to hungry youth.

Enjoy.

And then there’s this picture. Enjoy that too.

English: 2 person balloon hat paroding the Coo...

English: 2 person balloon hat paroding the Cookie Monster using 260s, 350s, 660s, and rounds, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)