Accord­ing to the Fox Store site; ““Futu­rama” takes its name from the Gen­eral Motor’s exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair. The exhibit depicted a futur­is­tic land­scape. The char­ac­ter Fry’s unspo­ken first name is Philip, which is a trib­ute to the late Phil Hart­man. The late actor was orig­i­nally cast to do the voice of Zapp Bran­ni­gan. Accord­ing to cre­ator Matt Groen­ing, the hieroglyphic-like let­ters appear­ing in var­i­ous loca­tions through­out the open­ing ani­ma­tion DO mean some­thing — it is up to loyal view­ers to fig­ure it out! Some of the sound effects used in the show are taken from other sci-fi tele­vi­sion series, such as “Star Trek” (1966) and “The Jet­sons” (1962).”

Inter­est­ing, huh? Well, if you enjoy Futu­rama like I do please go buy your copy today by vis­it­ing the Fox Store or pur­chas­ing it in par­tic­i­pat­ing stores. There is noth­ing bet­ter than this show, except for the obvi­ous showrun­ner The Simp­sons. Both by the same cre­ator, Matt Groen­ing, whom I actu­ally met at the San Diego Comic Con­ven­tion in 2002.

His son, William Groen­ing, was beg­ging for some break­fast. As my mem­ory recalls, Matt replied with; “Wasn’t the beef jerky enough this morning?”

It’s these moments that fur­ther proves that life is goofy. 

ZED

Guide Zed to his ulti­mate dream, to pos­sess a space­suit made entirely of gold. Okay, so the premise sounds kind of odd but rest assured this Flash game is a fun diver­sion and fea­tures col­or­ful graph­ics and a great side-scrolling engine.

URL: Zed

THE LANDER

Use your arrow keys (much like Zed above) to con­trol a tiny alien space­craft. The object of this game is to lift off from a pad and land on well, a land­ing pad. Wow. Makes sense, don’t it? The lit­tle guy reminds me of the Aliens in The Simp­sons, usu­ally mis­taken as Mormons.

URL: The Lan­der

And now …

::INTERMISSION::

CHASM

This is a cool one. Reminds me of the point-and-click Lucasarts Clas­sics from ages ago (yeah, about 5–6 years actu­ally). Games like Full Throt­tle, Sam and Max Hit the Road, Maniac Man­sion (and DOTT), and last but not least Grim Fan­dango with Manny Calevera. “What now?”

“My kid needs another bal­loon animal.”

Any­ways, Chasm fea­tures a duck that must make his way through a chasm. I love sim­ple games. The won­der­ful aspect of this game is the atten­tion to detail and the charm. Granted, because it’s sim­ple doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s hard to explain how cool this game really is. You just have to point-and-click for yourself.

URL: Chasm

That’s all, folks. 

That’s right, the leader of the Auto­bots. The free­dom fighter for the pop­u­lar 80s car­toon series is a mem­ber of Ohio’s 5694^th National Guard Unit. What? You think I’m crazy, don’t you? Well, read below buddy.

Accord­ing to ywkc.com; “A mem­ber of Ohio’s 5694^th National Guard Unit in Mans­field legally changed his name to a Trans­form­ers toy.

Opti­mus Prime is head­ing out to the Mid­dle East with his guard unit on Wednes­day to pro­vide fire pro­tec­tion for air­fields under combat.

Read the full story. 

We’ve all had those dreams where we’re fly­ing. Some­times in the mid­dle of the night your body either senses fly­ing or falling and twitches in reac­tion. It’s weird, isn’t it?

Kind of like this inter­est­ing Flash exper­i­ment slash game? Really, I can’t clas­sify this. It falls between those weird euro­pean com­mer­cials and trippy Flash car­toons that are scat­tered across the ‘Net. The kind with the guy who just begins his jour­ney walk­ing and runs into odd sites (or sights) along the way. The com­mer­cial usu­ally ends with an oblig­a­tory chime of the harp and it ends up being a com­mer­cial for bed pans.

The world is weird and I’m here to exploit it!

URL: Fly­Guy 

Would you lis­ten to a man named Gor­don Sum­ner? How about buy an album called “Gor­don Sumner’s Great­est Hits”. No? Well, what about if you found out Mr. Gor­don Sum­ner isn’t the local book sales­man with a rock­ing band. Mr. Sum­ner is in fact the real name of the singer Sting.

Con­fused? So am I.

For instance, did you known Michael Keaton’s real name is Michael Dou­glas? Another exam­ple is Tina Turner. Her actual name is Anna Mae Bul­lock. Hmmm… might she be related to San­dra? I’m not talk­ing Burn­hart. Ooh, that sent shiv­ers down my spine.

Go to: Famous Name Changes 

George Car­lin will be here in Rochester, NY on April 11^th. Guess who is going?

I’ll be attend­ing the com­edy event next month with six oth­ers. Live. George Car­lin. What more can you say? I believe we are in the sec­ond bal­cony, the one next to God.

How­ever, the best part of the evening isn’t the loca­tion, it’s of course the main event and just so long as I can hear Car­lin — that will be good enough for me. He might resem­ble an ant from where we are sit­ting, but hey, Car­linisms are worth every penny and seat location.

I’ll be sure to post some­thing in regards to the show after I’ve been there. You’ll be the first to know, trust me on this.

In the words of George Car­lin him­self, “Fris­bee­tar­i­an­ism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.”

Visit George Carlin’s offi­cial web­site. (Warn­ing: Mate­r­ial not suit­able for all viewers.) 

“Famous Fonts is the first font archive on the web to col­lect ONLY fonts used in TV shows, movies, pub­li­ca­tions, and other media and products.”

Have you ever won­dered how cool the font for Spider-Man is?

This site has a plethora of enter­tain­ment fonts used by Adver­tis­ing agen­cies, movies, cor­po­ra­tions, etc. Browse the archives and believe me, you’ll rec­og­nize these fonts as used in these kinds of cam­paigns. I even snagged a few of them for future projects and you should too.

Resources like this are won­der­ful for graphic and ad design­ers. Not to men­tion they are free!

Click here for the archive. 

Don’t know about you, but this movie was brilliant.

“The pur­pose of the Pay It For­ward Move­ment web­site is to bring together, in one place, as many real sto­ries as we can. This serves sev­eral pur­poses. It helps the cyn­ics see that Pay It For­ward really is work­ing, not just around the United States but around the world. It brings much-deserved recog­ni­tion to those doing the work, and puts the results of their efforts out in the open so oth­ers can be inspired. It’s also a source of some good news for a change, a way to renew your faith in human nature.”

So, Pay it For­ward. 

If you’ve ever needed a par­tic­u­lar font for cre­at­ing that per­fect adver­tise­ment or sign, then you’ll need to visit Chuck Davis’ Let­ter­head Fonts.

His fonts have been used for projects rang­ing from a sign for a water­park to the recent movie, Old School star­ring Luke Wil­son and Will Fer­rell. The par­tic­u­lar font in mind was used for the word ‘Old’ (Old Block). The word school is the infa­mous Aaechen font.

Accord­ing to Chuck Green of Ideabook.com; “Years ago Chuck Davis hap­pened across a font soft­ware pro­gram and decided to use it to trans­late some of the let­ters used to hand paint signs into font form. Thank good­ness for happenstance.”

The site offers share­ware fonts that typ­i­cally don’t exceed $20–25 dol­lars and even a few free­ware fonts. All of the fonts retain the same qual­ity of excel­lence and will make your designs stand out from the rest!

Down­load the free­ware set or buy a font and sub­mit your work (or results) to the author. He’ll post the out­come on his site for the world to see. 

“I woke up today a song was swim­ming in my head
And I hummed it to myself as I got out of bed
And on the way to take a shower it all just dawned on me
That a song like this just might go down in his­tory
I quickly ran back to get my gui­tar
A pen and some paper

‘Cause this whole world needs an Anthem
And I’m try­ing to put the words where they belong
Yeah this whole world needs an Anthem
And I’m hop­ing every­one will sing along

Well I quickly got to work and put the song in gear
And my neigh­bor rang the door­bell said it caught his ear
I was play­ing it so loud the whole neigh­bor­hood could hear
And at night from every house­hold it became quite clear
Every­one was just singing along
The same notes the same song
Or maybe I heard it wrong

‘Cause this whole world needs an Anthem
And I’m try­ing to put the words where they belong
Yeah this whole world needs an Anthem
And I’m hop­ing every­one will sing along.

– Phan­tom Planet, Anthem ; Album: Guest

Lis­ten to a clip of this song here. (Win­dows Media player required)