If you’ve grown tired of associating “Beethoven” with the world’s best music, try this Revell model kit
Thank you, Revell. Now when Beethoven’s Egmont Overture comes on MP3 players, people will think of radio-controlled Luftwaffe planes killing American soldiers and sailors. Cheery.
Ender’s Game
Ender’s Game is on/in the science-fiction hall/wall of fame/honor/whatever. Orson Scott Card’s look at a future in which children are called upon to be the saviors of mankind, the grand strategists countering a deadly, hostile enemy (Buggers in the book, Formics in the movie), is venerated. Like many classic works of science-fiction literature, a translation to the big screen hasn’t been the easiest thing to achieve. How many of Arthur C. Clarke’s great works have been adapted, apart from the one he wrote specifically for the medium? Do we want to count the Will Smith-infused I, Robot as Isaac Asimov’s great contribution to the American cineplex? Maybe it’s the grand ideas they contain that keep the Ramas and Foundations of the world from entering the realm of popcorn and Junior Mints. Whatever the case, it’s a tough row to hoe. Read more…
Trading Card Set of the Week (Special Ain’t Afraid Of No Ghost Halloween Edition) – Ghostbusters II (1989, Topps)
Okay, so Ghostbusters II wasn’t as good as the original. But what could have been? The original Ghostbusters — or, shall we say, the movie that everyone associates with the word, not the Larry Storch-infused show with a giant ape — is fantastic cinema, a genuinely funny film with excellent effects work and a superb Elmer Bernstein score, a movie that remains a gold standard almost thirty years later. The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. “He slimed me.” Undersea, unexplained mass sponge migrations. People smoking cigarettes for seemingly the last time in film history. Proton Packs. “Yes it’s true. This man has no dick.” Tobin’s Spirit Guide. Ecto-1. “There is no Dana, only Zuul.” Rick Moranis getting attacked in Central Park as affluent seen-it-all New York diners calmly look on. Sigourney Weaver at her prettiest, making it totally believable that Bill Murray’s smart-ass, sleazy Peter Venkman would fall for her.
It’s no surprise that, taken together, it all took 1984 audiences by storm. Ghostbusters is as fun a watch now as it was back then, an assertion I tested with a recent viewing. Thirtysomething me likes it just as much as six-year-old me, though the humor gets better with age. (And thirtysomething me has a better understanding of what was going on when the hot babe ghost unbuckled Dan Aykroyd’s/Ray Stantz’s pants.)
That Ghostbusters burst upon the movie-going public like a positron glider blast is one of the reasons that there’s no trading card set for it. Unlike, say, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, there was no way to tell if it was going to be a hit — no Spielbergian imprimatur. It might have been a dud. But it wasn’t. It was, of all things, a cultural touchstone for a decade.
So there was a sequel. And for the sequel there were, yes, bubble gum cards. Read more…
Not even the Incredible Hulk’s metabolism could withstand the fructose assault of Cookie Crisp
You have to respect a breakfast cereal that advertises “Artificial Chocolate Chip Flavor” right in the top of the box. As if the entire “a breakfast of cookies” wouldn’t be a complete barrier to all but the most negligent parents. Not even the promise of obtaining a copy of the semi-valuable Amazing Spider-Man black costume debut makes up for that — and, when you think about it, that’s a bit of overkill when selling sugar bomb cereal. Do kids need more incentive to eat cookies for breakfast?
Still, the Green Goliath had to have liked this cross-promotion more than the “Hulk in a diaper” ad.
The trailer for X-Men: Days of Wolverine Past is here!
Hugh Jackman’s bare chest and graying temples! Mystique sliding on things! Halle Berry still looking out of place after all these years! Weepy music! An actor playing Nixon who looks nothing like Nixon! More mutant characters than you can shake a stick at! Buy your tickets now!
In all seriousness, the first X-Men: Days of Future Past trailer (sans any major effects shots) looks like it will deliver what the premise promises, which is a sandwiching of two casts around a beefy slab of Wolverine. It’s an intriguing glimpse into Bryan Singer’s return to the X-Men universe, and how it might be really, really good, or an unspeakable bomb. And Patrick Stewart, back again (finally, sadly looking old) talking with James McAvoy. X and X. We have officially reached a new stage of comic book movie insanity, for better or for worse.
Atarisoft(core)
“Manholes of Venus” sounds like the punchline to an Ambiguously Gay Duo joke. Is it like the infamous Custer’s Revenge? Did Maxy’s father buy the computer and the games at a porno joint? This sort of drowns out the takeaway lesson of the ad, which is that your friends will like you for the things you own, not who you are as a person.
Oddly enough, the crazed faces the kids sport in the bottom panel look a lot like my friends and I when we discovered Playboy mags in some guy’s barn.
Good movie, not as good comic – The Naked Prey
There’s a natural inclination to think that films translate well into comics, and vice versa. Seems obvious. They both combine words and pictures to tell stories, true, but there are hazardous pitfalls that prevent a success in one from becoming a success in the other. Comics might look like pre-production storyboards, but they’re not. They have their own ebb and flow, their own lyricism. And movies? Ditto. Twenty-four frames per second doesn’t equate to twenty-four pages.
The Naked Prey is a pretty damn good film. But it’s one that was turned a blah little comic. For one good reason. Read more…
So Power Man and Iron Fist had an extortion racket to boost their book’s sales. Who knew? This Bill Sienkiewicz-crafted ad is, of course, tongue-in-cheek, but still — they always have to have the brother putting the hurt on people.
The Muppets Take Manhattan (with help from Cheerios)
Did anyone else have this storybook/record back in the day? Because seeing this ad brings back a vague memory of making my poor parents dutifully mail away Cheerios UPC symbols that I had carefully clipped — and the Muppets Take Manhattan record not quite living up to the grandeur of other storybook combos like The Dark Crystal and The Empire Strikes Back. Still, I wish I could find an mp3 of its contents somewhere around the web, just for nostalgia’s sake. Alas.
An aside: Where I lived as a kid there used to be a guy named Rizzo who owned a pizza joint. Since his name was Rizzo and he worked in a place where food was sold, I naturally made the Rizzo the Rat connection. My mother told me to never call him that, though, and young me never really understood why. Then it hit me in a flash, years later, while watching an episode of The Sopranos, that Rizzo might have had mob ties, and that the pizzeria might have been a front. And that my loose lips could have spelled my family’s doom. THANKS, MUPPETS.
Because Hulk in a diaper is a subscription dollars magnet
There have been many Marvel subscription ads over the years, from an electioneering Stan Lee all the way to Christmas caroling super-villains, but few have been as disturbing as this one. Who gets the “change Hulk’s diaper” chore? Hulk make boom boom! 1984 is sure to be the greatest Marvel year yet! While we’re talking about steaming crap, sign me up for 12 months worth of Dazzler!
The Moon Patrol ad was just as accurate as the game in its depiction of lunar exploration
Remember when astronauts used to actually go places and explore, not just sit around the International Space Station and fix satellites? How quaint.
I had a copy of the side-scrolling pioneer Moon Patrol for my old Atari 2600, but it never quite lived up to the arcade version’s grandeur. (Maybe I was just too depressed at home from playing the Spider-Man game and watching the web-slinger die over and over and over again.) There was something exciting about seeing how far you could get before your mother worked her way through the Ames checkout line and your jumping of craters and shooting of UFOs had to come to an end. I guess the home/store-entrance dichotomy is a bit like the difference between heading to OTB or the track.
Anyway — oh, those tiered backdrops and their illusion of depth. And the sound effects. One goofy step for mankind. Up yours, Call of Duty.
After Loki, Thor’s assortment of native enemies gets a bit thin. Not in terms of variety or quality, but in terms of broader significance. Loki transcends his Asgardian origins, and it was the God of Mischief who was the unifying threat all those years ago in The Avengers #1, which made him such a natural fit as the unifying threat that brought together the cinematic team. Could Ulik have done that? Queen Karnilla? The Enchantress (as much as horny boys might want it)? Maybe Surtur, but he’s never had the broader cachet of the adopted brother with the horny helmet.
So when Marvel was casting about to figure out a villain for the Thor sequel, Thor: The Dark World, it was name recognition slim pickins, and name recognition is the name of the studio game. (You think Khan was in Star Trek Into Darkness because of storytelling reasons? Please.) And the announcement of Malekith the Accursed was greeted with muted interest. A part of the Thunder God tapestry but not the centerpiece, the lord of the Dark Elves would at least be somewhat of a blank slate. But his history doesn’t even stretch back as far as most of Thor’s other dastardly opponents, with a first appearance not in the Silver Age, but in Walt Simonson’s vibrant re-invention of the series in the 1980s. And that’s what we’ll briefly look at today, as a primer for the movie opening in two weeks: the first arc of Mr. Malekith. Read more…
Should you want to augment your half-hearted Spider-Man Halloween costume with a half-hearted Web-Maker, then maybe the product at the top of this ad is for you. Just don’t confuse it with your travel-size tube of toothpaste. And don’t be too sad if the web-tube runs dry just as you’re getting the hang of slinging. (In fairness, the Web-Maker apparently generates waves of nostalgia for those who owned it.)
Hey, you can even get a Hyperborean map while you’re at it, one endorsed by a punny Conan the Barbarian himself — in a shameless sellout. Excelsior.
Hey, the trailer for Captain America: Wrinkly Old White Men Are Always the “Surprise” Villains in These Things is out!
They might as well have subtitled it The Dark Redford Rises. Because everyone wants to watch Old Sundance sleepwalk through line deliveries of clunky dialogue and collect a paycheck. But the Falcon! And ScarJo’s taut hindquarters! Where do I buy my ticket?!?!
The Forties — a glorious decade where selling junk could get you rings, billfolds, telescopes and hosiery
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been gazing at the stars through a woefully underpowered telescope, developed a run in my pantyhose, and cursed fate for there not being a company that would provide me with replacements as compensation just for selling Gold Crown Spot Remover. Born too late.
Jared
blog into mystery 