Posted by puzzlehead | 2 Comments

February 13, 2000. Thank you, Sparky.

The last Peanuts strip from Charles M. Shulz (a.k.a. Sparky) -

If you ever get the chance, read the really, really old Peanuts strips from when it was first started.

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The 2010 Super Bowl Ads

Congrats to the New Orleans Saints for winning the Super Bowl. You have proven that you are the best at the sport alternatively known as North American Hand Egg.

Evidently, calling the sport of ‘football’ something more literal like ‘hand egg’ makes everyone else around the world happier.

It was an exciting game, filled with drama, excitement, singing fossils at half-time and commercials. Lots and lots of commercials.

(Sorry to our non-U.S. friends who can’t view Hulu)

There you have them. The 2010 Super Bowl ads. There are a few things that pop out at me:

• With all this talk about Tim Tebow pimping for Focus on the Family why aren’t women’s groups in an uproar for him laying the smack down on his mom?
• Seriously, Tebow is a quarterback and I’ve seen him play. That must be the first decent tackle that he’s ever laid on someone. And it happens to be in a commercial. To a girl. Who happens to be his mom.
• This must have been the year of the meme rehash, much like the reanimation of the lifeless band, The Who and forcing their undead souls to perform.
• Speaking of the meme rehash, it seems like about 25% of the commercials used the ‘dramatic prairie dog’ concept. That is soooo 2006. Way to go advertising people. Way to keep up with the times.
• The GoDaddy commercials suck and they aren’t funny or controversial any more. On the contrary, they’re dragging down Danica Patrick.
• I miss the days when advertisers would just air a monkey dancing and then boast that they blew their $2M wad on 30 seconds of a dancing monkey

All in all, this was one of the few Super Bowls where I was more entertained by the game rather than the commercials. And that, in it’s own weird way, makes me a little sad. No beer commercials that made me take notice, nothing that made me sappy (ok, maybe the Google commercial) and there were no real interactive tie-ins. Here’s hoping next year’s Super Bowl has more innovative and creative thinking.

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Posted by Bart | 0 Comments

Red Sonja, She-devil in a Bikini

Sadly, most people associate Red Sonja with that horrific cinematic abomination from 1985 starring Brigitte Nielsen (a new version is in production with Rose McGowan as Red Sonja – it will probably suck just as bad as this one).

Others may be aware of Sonja’s origin as a Marvel comic book heroine created by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith in 1973 as sort of a female version of Robert E Howard’s Conan the Barbarian (the Sonja character is said to be based on an original Howard character, but really bears little resemblance to Howard’s invention: “Red Sonya of Rogatino”).

But enough nerd history – on to the reason I mention Sonja (and yes, even more nerdery)…

Dynamite Entertainment has been publishing the tales of Red Sonja for the past few years. They’ve put out a few different limited-series (even a crossover with Spider-man) and one shots as well as the primary series that has run throughout – Red Sonja She Devil With a Sword. I’m not entirely sure, but I think this series may have run its course with issue 49, to be replaced by a new series: Queen Sonja (following closely in King Conan’s steps again). The art work of the Sonja books is hit-and-miss, and the stories are generally pretty formulaic.

“So why?” you ask, “are you droning on and on about it if it’s so bad?”

Well, it’s not all bad. And the latest limited series, Red Sonja Wrath of the Gods, is one of the exceptions. The cover (generally there are several to choose from with every Red Sonja comic) is another amazing work of art by Luccio Parrillo (I don’t think it’s as breathtaking as the cover for the third issue of Queen Sonja, though).

The issue starts out with Sonja trudging through the snow in her chainmail bikini, her breath freezing in the air. Brrr…

The interior artist of this series, Walter Geovani, is doing a fine job rendering a very Sonja-like version of…well, Red Sonja in every panel (something many of the other artists struggle with). Here are a few of the pages from the first issue of Red Sonja Wrath of the Gods:

The writing for this series is keeping me interested, too. Sonja’s origin has been explored and re-explored through flashbacks in the regular series (most recently, she was reincarnated into a red-headed distant relative), but we’re now introduced to a “Highlander 2″ kind of revelation – Sonja is actually a descendant of a peaceful, red-haired people who go around getting bullied everywhere they go – but is a long-awaited abnormality, a warrior who will stand up for her people, kicking ass and taking names. There’s even a possibility of Norse (or Norse-like, as this is set in Howard’s fictional world) gods making an appearance by the end of the issue – if that is who they are.

Red Sonja might not be for everyone, but I like it. And so should you.

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Posted by puzzlehead | 2 Comments

Space Battleship Yamato – Live Action Movie

At first I was going to play off badbart’s comment in The Last Air Bender post until I realized that he said ‘Star Destroyers’. This, of course, meant the gigantic, triangular battleships in the Star Wars saga. When I first read his comment I thought he was talking about the American version of Space Battleship Yamato (Star Blazers).

Many of you youngsters probably haven’t even heard of Space Battleship Yamato/StarBlazers. This show was absolutely AMAZING when I was a kid. It aired in the mid-1970’s, right around the time that the first Star Wars film was kicking around. We would rush home after school and try to catch it on whatever UHF station was carring it. Back in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area it was channel 33. Or maybe it was 27. I can’t remember because it was almost 30 years ago!

It turns out that this year they’ll be releasing a live action, $22M adaptation of the anime appropriately titled Space Battleship Yamato.

http://smashy.net/media/space_battleship_yamato_2010.flv

There are so many aspects to this story/film that it is like peeling back the many layers of an onion. According to wikipedia:

Set in the year 2199, an alien race known as the “Gamilas” (“Gamilons” in the English Star Blazers dub) are raining radioactive bombs on Earth, rendering the planet’s surface dead and uninhabitable. Humanity lives in refuges built deep underground, but the radioactivity is slowly infiltrating the underground cities too. Earth’s space fleet is hopelessly outclassed by the Gamilas and all seems lost until a message capsule from a mysterious crashed spaceship is retrieved on Mars. Blueprints for a faster-than-light engine are discovered inside the capsule, and an offering of help from Queen Starsha of the planet Iscandar in the Large Magellanic Cloud, who says that she has a device, the Cosmo-Cleaner D (Cosmo DNA), which can cleanse Earth of its radiation damage.

The inhabitants of Earth secretly build a massive spaceship inside the ruins of the Japanese battleship Yamato, the Space Battleship Yamato for which the story is titled. Using Starsha’s blueprints, they equip their new ship with a space warp drive, called the “wave motion engine”, and a new, incredibly powerful weapon called the “wave motion gun” which fires from the bow.

We were in awe of the wave motion gun when we were kids. We’d draw all of our space ships in our notebooks to have the gigantic gun in the front and, when we played on the playground, we always pretended that we would fire that behemoth and we’d act out the same type of firing sequence.

Think about how our minds were blown when we found out that the Earth forces built the Andromeda class fleet and it consisted of battleships with TWO wave motion guns! Even the English version had a catchy opening theme song that made all of us kids want to run around outside and pretend we were space explorers:

The story has everything: romance, robots, an environmental message, special effects, and an homage to history. Yes, the ship was named after that Yamato. Read up on it, kids! It’s interesting stuff!

It will be interesting to see how this adaptation works. They’ve Takuya Kimura (the 37 year old idol from the ‘boy band’ SMAP) as the lead and they’ve switched the gender of a few other characters. Other than those oddities it totally looks like a fun summer/spring popcorn flick. A little bit of spit and polish, some fancy new duds and this thing looks like it could be a winner.

Now if they only made a live action Robotech…

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Posted by puzzlehead | 2 Comments

M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Last Air Ben...

http://smashy.net/media/the-last-air-bender-720p.flv

Let’s get a few things out in the open before I talk about this film. I admit that I am going into this movie ‘blind’ because I haven’t seen the cartoon that this is based on, “Avatar: The Last Air Bender”, which aired on Nickelodeon. The fact that it aired on Nickelodeon was one of the contributing factors of why I never watched the cartoon. Don’t get me wrong! I used to enjoy watching Nick. I just happen to feel that it’s glory days were when it aired Ren & Stimpy, Doug and Rocco’s Modern Life.

The second reason that I never watched the cartoon series was because I’m an anime watcher. For whatever reason I had no desire to watch this series, possibly because I was completely turned off on American made cartoons that sucked ass (Masters of the Universe, anyoone?). Somewhat elitest, sure. But can you blame me when most of my life I’ve encountered American cartoons that were either aimed at simple comedy or pimping some simple morality play?

So, it has come to pass that I will probably try and watch the original cartoon before this movie comes out. Although I might want to do it the other way around and watch the movie first and then watch the cartoon. The reasoning is simple: Where I’ve been burned by American cartoons in the past I’ve also been punched int eh face by American live-action adaptations of popular media in the cinema. Let’s look at the disappointing track record so far:

Dragonball: Evolution Words cannot express how this movie depressed me. It was pretty horrible. Acting? Bad. Action? Bad. Plot? You guessed it – bad. In fact, I don’t know how anyone could render Goku as a wimpy white kid when the entire story of Dragonball is based on the Chinese ‘Journey to the West’. In fact, The Last Airbender was even accused of falling victim to ‘racebending’ for doing the exact same thing. Give us Asian actors a break! And, no, you can’t cast Jet Li or Chow Yun Fat as a little kid.

Mortal Kombat. The exception for this was the first movie which proved to be a fairly entertaining jaunt through Outworld. The second movie? Crap. The cartoon series “Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm” was fairly formulaic. The television show “Mortal Kombat: Conquest” seemed like it was filmed in a Universal Studios back lot. In fact, the fight scenes in that show reminded me of another television show – the ‘World Martial Arts Council’. It was pretty bad.

D.O.A. (Dead or Alive) HEY! WHAT THE HELL DID THEY DO TO MY JIGGLEVISION?!

So, I’m awaiting this movie but with a little hesitation. Looking at the effects reminds me of Dragonball. Or, if you’re into cheesy Chinese movies, The Storm Riders. Ergo, I’m holding my breath and hoping that this singular trailer isn’t an omen of another cross-over let down.

Maybe they should have just traded off the popularity of James Cameron’s “Avatar” and hope that people get confused.

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Posted by puzzlehead | 0 Comments

A Few Changes Here & There

As we get Smashy.net up and running again you’ll see that we’re making a few changes. So far we’ve added two new categories: Food and Sports. We’ve also added author based RSS feeds. Why did we do that? Simple, we’re giving contributors the ability to cross post their content to any other site(s) that they might want their material.

In fact, if you have any ideas for features, articles, or funky dances that we can do then please don’t hesitate to let us know!

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Posted by Bart | 1 Comment

Well, it’s sort of a comic post…

I’ve once again found myself reading a book that was obviously intended for the under-thirteen crowd. And I feel no shame! None whatsoever…well, maybe a little.

First, I want to be perfectly clear that I did not read this book because the main character reminds me of Wednesday, the character played by Christina Ricci in The Addams Family. I actually did read Emily the Strange, the Lost Days…a novel because:
A) somebody else bought it, so it was there
and
B) the cover and interior illustrations piqued my interest.

It’s a pretty goofy story and obviously directed to readers much younger than me, but it’s not without its charms. Especially for a diehard Hitchhiker’s fan (I’ve tried to make it apparent where this observation comes from with the following quotes).

I’m finally back in my lean-to. And man, things may be tough right now, but in a way, I got it good. I got cats everywhere, a sandwich, a black cherry soda, my notebook. I got a skylight I can see the stars through, and the night air is perfect.

Belgium, I just realized I call soda soda and not pop. And haven’t I heard the Blackrock locals asking Raven for pop? I could be way off – but I think people usually say one OR the other, depending on where they’re from. And it definitely sounds hilarious to me to hear Blackrock folk asking for pop.

Man, I must be desperate for clues. But still.

…or…

JAKEY:	I don’t know what he’s planning. I haven’t seen him in days.
ME:	Why, what’s he doing?
J:	Take it easy. I heard he’s been having lunch with the mayor, paying off the police, stuff like that.
ME:	Oh Belgium! He’s going to kill me!
J:	Don’t be stupid. He might pay someone to kill you, but he would never do it himself.
ME:	OH…BRICKING..BELGIUM!!

If you still don’t see the HHG reference, then you’re obviously not a true believe and you need to repent. There’s nothing more I can do to help you.

Oh, and if you’re interested, there’s a lot of hubub about who the real creator of the “Emily the Strange” character is. And there might be an Emily the Strange movie coming out sometime this year. Neither factoid is particularly interesting to me – unless they get Zooey Deschanel or Christina Ricci to play Emily in the film version.

*ahem*

I still deny that Wednesday made me do it!!

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