Something interesting emerged today on the internet: the teaser for Disney’s upcoming film Tomorrowland. This film intrigues me for a couple of reasons: one, George Clooney is in it and two, is it really a film based on the featured land within their parks? We are only given a brief glimpse at the futuristic world, so we will have to wait and see what Disney in store for this film. Enjoy.
Many of you reading this will not remember, but years ago the gamer world was completely obsessed with a game called Myst. It involved a protagonist called the stranger who traveled to the island of Myst, and was faced with many puzzles he had to solve so the player could learn his back story. At the time it came out it was highly praised for its amazing graphics and inventive gameplay. I remember losing days of my life trying to make my way through this game.
Word has emerged that a new Myst television show and video are being developed by Legendary. According to the creators the show and the game (which is rumored to be on tablets) will interact with each other.
In the interview they state “Cyan’s goal in working with Legendary is not just to create a compelling TV drama but to develop a true transmedia product that will include a companion video game that extends the story across both media,” the company said. “Seventy percent of tablet owners use their device while watching TV at least several times a week. Cyan sees the potential to push the boundaries of interactive storytelling to a new level.”
This could be the beginning of something very cool.
Source: Deadline
The third trailer for Chris Nolan’s Interstellar has been released. The trailer shows us more of the devastation that has plagued Earth, while at the same time, showing us much more of the exploration that is done by the astronauts searching for a new home world for those left on Earth. The film looks to be grand in size and scope, but we will have to wait until November 7th to see if it will all be worth it.
It seems as if we may get those elusive answers from Lost after all. In an interview with digital spy, Carlton Cuse, one half of the creative team of Lost, says that it is inevitable that Lost will make a comeback in some capacity. In his interview Cuse said the following:
Disney owns the franchise, it made them a lot of money, it’s hard to imagine it will just sit there idly forever,
Damon (Lindelof) and I told our story in that world and I assume someone will come along, hopefully having been inspired by our story, or our version of the story, and want to tell their own story.
It’s like the Narnia chronicles. There are seen books, they were all written by CS Lewis, but they all visit Narnia at different times and different configurations and different ways.
Someone is going to come up with a way to tell another Lost story. I think it’s inevitable. I don’t know what it is or how it would work, but I can’t imagine something else won’t be done with the franchise.
Based off of those comments it seems as if the island may be revisited, but in a different way by a different cast of characters. This would allow them to answer so many of the questions that numerous fans were angry about because they were never answered. I am one of the few fans that was perfectly satisfied by the show, in fact I wrote about it here. But let’s face it, the show did leave many questions unanswered and this might be the perfect opportunity to resolve them. The question remains if they will be able to recapture the magic of the original show. Either way, I look forward to it.
I’ll be the first to admit it, many 80’s cartoons existed simply to sell toys. Shows like The Transformers and He-man entertained me, but let’s be honest, they existed for a sole purpose; so that when I went to Toy-s-R-Us, I would want Optimus Prime, He-man and Cringer. Unfortunately, they were not the worst offenders of the time period. During the early 80’s, someone got it in to their mind to simply whore out Saturday morning cartoons. With these cartoons, there was no worry of simple things like plot, conflict or storyline. Just product placement everywhere you look. In fact some of these offenders were created just to get product name out there. Here are three of the worst offenders.
Dungeons & Dragons
Now, I’ve never played the game (mainly because my mom said it might turn me to the devil), but I understand the basics of it. One uses their imagination and a multi-sided di to explore dungeons and fight off enemies. I realize that they may have been looking to get more people into their game, but this cartoon was not the way to do it. As you can see below they took the rich storied tradition of the game and metaphorically pissed all over it by having four kids transported into the world of Dungeons & Dragons via a fair ride. When they arrive, their appearance is changed and they are each given a class: ranger, magician, thief, barbarian, cavalier, and acrobat. Now, most of those classes are decently cool, but acrobat? How does this help you survive anything? And who is “gifted” with this wonderful power? The darkest skinned character. But I digress, the show was absolutely deplorable, and I hope that whoever pitched this wonderful idea for a show is chained to a rock and has their liver torn out by an eagle. (Don’t get it? Read your Greek mythology.)
The Saturday Morning Supercade
When I was growing up, video games were just becoming popular. Atari had had a successful run, Coleco Vision was doing well and Nintendo was up and coming. The good people over at CBS realized this and thought to themselves, “we can cash in on this fad.” So they came up with a Saturday morning lineup that consisted of cartoons featuring characters from five of the most popular games of the time: Donkey Kong, Donkey Jr, Q-bert, Pitfall and Frogger. Now keep in mind, none of these games have real plots, but CBS went ahead and just put them out there anyways. Not since the film The Wizard was such a shameless ploy made to get kids to play video games (if you don’t remember The Wizard, I talked about it in this article some time ago) Luckily the lineup did not last long, and the world was saved from more pain.
Rubik: The Amazing Cube
This cartoon may take the cake as the most ridiculous incarnation of an animated character to sell a product. At least with Dungeons and Dragons and the Saturday Morning Supercade, they were using products associated with actual characters, the tragedy that was the show Rubik: The Amazing Cube took a freaking inanimate object, a Rubik’s cube, and made it into a living thing. Well, kind of a living thing, it was a Rubik’s cube with a head sticking out of it, and some legs coming out the bottom of it. It’s as if they looked at the cube and said “What can we do to make this adorable?” then somebody (probably in the 12th hour) said “screw it, let’s just put a face and legs on it and go home.”
If that wasn’t bad enough, check out the opening to the show below. Apparently Rubik has an evil Russian master and one dark night, he escapes and three kids find him. For some inexplicable reason his face and legs appear and the kids aren’t terrified, they just accept the fact that this previously inanimate object has suddenly come to life and it’s perfectly ok. Then the evil Russian stereotype returns to find Rubik, and the damn cube starts flying and then in one of the more poorly animated moments from the 80’s makes the kids fly. And the whole thing closes with the now living and flying cube saying in a cute voice “I’m Ruuuuubik!”. Like we were supposed to excuse the ridiculousness of this whole concept, simply because this thing has a cute voice. For shame, for shame.
The Dark Side 