Now, this is sad indeed.

Accord­ing to the imdb.com; “Will Vin­ton, the stop-motion ani­ma­tor, whose Vin­ton Stu­dios in Port­land, OR turned out the Cal­i­for­nia Raisins and talk­ing M&M com­mer­cials as well as the Eddie Mur­phy TV series The PJs, has been laid off from the stu­dio that bears his name. Vin­ton sent an email note to com­pany col­leagues on Fri­day, say­ing in part: “It has been one amaz­ing 27-year run! And I have no (well, few!) regrets.”

The stu­dio issued a state­ment say­ing that it is shift­ing its empha­sis to “broad, family-friendly enter­tain­ment includ­ing computer-animated projects.” It was not clear whether it would con­tinue to employ Vinton’s Clay­ma­tion tech­nique. Vin­ton him­self could not be reached for com­ment over the weekend.” 

When Warner Broth­ers (Bugs Bunny) has a love child with the War in Iraq, you get this:

http://www.ebolaworld.com/movies/weeklyupdate/19.html 

Indi­ana Jones remains one of my top all time favorite movies. Any­one that doesn’t agree with me should be thrown into a pit of snakes.

The key to this extremely suc­cess­ful series of movies is it’s star, Har­ri­son Ford as Indi­ana Jones who breathed life and pro­vided a real­is­tic dimen­sion to the char­ac­ter. Orig­i­nally, Tom Sel­l­eck was cast as Indi­ana and truth­fully I don’t think it would have con­veyed itself as well. It’s hard to imag­ine Mag­num P.I. as a whip crack­ing arti­fact slueth. How­ever, it’s never hard to imag­ine an action role for Har­ri­son Ford espe­cially since this has been the bulk of his work in the past 20 years.

Ever since his begin­nings in the 1960s in a few for­get­table roles, he’s con­veyed a sense of deter­mi­na­tion. It wasn’t until his role in 1977’s Star Wars that truly let this actor flex his ‘act­ing’ mus­cle and show the pub­lic he could do action and act! (Unlike some other actors who flex their mus­cles and spit out their lines worse than a 3^rd grade play).

Indi­ana Jones had all the suc­cess­ful ingre­di­ents of mod­ern movies mixed with the key ele­ments of 40s and 50s seri­als. It kept the audi­ence on the edge with Indi­ana get­ting him­self into many inter­est­ing and dan­ger­ous predica­ments. Like for instance his dar­ing escape from a rolling boul­der and col­laps­ing booby trapped doors. The magic of these movies is essen­tially cap­tured on screen through the excel­lent writ­ing, act­ing and spe­cial effects. It was truly one of a kind.

A great site con­tain­ing a wealth of infor­ma­tion about the Indy movies is Indyfan.com. It’s at this site I learned that the DVD por­tion of the Indy series will be com­ing out soon. I’m think­ing it might be timed with the Indi­ana Jones 4 movie com­ing out in 2005.

Can’t wait. 

Part of the great­ness that is the Inter­net is pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion to the gen­eral pub­lic that wouldn’t oth­er­wise be pre­sented. The best exam­ple of this is those zany sites that con­tain weird exper­i­ments and projects. The kind that when some­one has noth­ing else to do or they just are sit­ting around one day and it pops into their mind.

For instance, have you ever thought about tor­tur­ing poor lit­tle Twinkies? These guys have and they doc­u­ment it here. Since it was Easter yes­ter­day, have you ever pon­dered an exper­i­ment involv­ing Peeps? Well, Peepresearch.org has. They have exper­i­ments and pic­tures to prove their hypotheses.

Aside from Twinkie tor­ture, how about try­ing to get your sis­ter a date and then video­tap­ing it? This guy did it, check it out; The Date-my-Sister Project. While your at the site, check out his other tests and projects includ­ing the Fat Project. Funny stuff.

Now that I think about it, I wish I would have thought of this dur­ing junior high. Remem­ber those stu­pid sci­ence projects you’d have to endure? You know, the ones where you had to buy the “poster board”, search for a fea­si­ble hypoth­e­sis and then gather the evi­dence and doc­u­ment “said” evi­dence on the white board. It didn’t stop there how­ever. Even­tu­ally you’d have to turn the assign­ment in and it would be judged with all of the other “exper­i­ments”. A favorite of mine was the oblig­a­tory “potato bat­tery” or “water fun­gus” projects.

I should have doc­u­mented the tor­tur­ing of Twinkies and mad sci­en­tist exper­i­men­ta­tion on Peeps. That would have been an easy A. Easy, for sheezy. 

Men, women, peo­ple of the Par­lia­ment, dogs, cats, beavers and midgets — hear ye, hear ye:

Vote Ham­ster for Pres­i­dent!

Thank you.

* This pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment is brought to you by HFABC Foun­da­tion (Ham­sters for a Bet­ter Cause). All inden­ti­ties of said ‘ham­ster’ are purely coin­ci­den­tal. Must be 18 years old or older. Free bot­tle of ketchup with orders of $100,000.00 or more. *beep* 

Get ready for an Easter surprise.

Happy Tree friends style.

URL: http://minibytes.mondominishows.com/easter/main.asp 

Eerie Indi­ana for it’s time was one of the great­est shows on tele­vi­sion (in my opin­ion, of course). Eerie debuted in 1991 and it was a kids-version of X-Files with the quirk­i­ness of those hokey Hal­loween shows that would debut on var­i­ous net­works dur­ing the hol­i­day. In the show, Elvis lives on Marshall’s paper route, Big­foot looks through the trash and in Eerie noth­ing is really as it seems.

Part of the magic of this series lie within it’s inter­est­ing sto­ry­lines. One of which called Forever­ware par­o­died the Tupperware/Rubbermaid brand where this mys­te­ri­ous brand of plas­tic con­tain­ers could hold some­thing for­ever — in this case the fam­ily itself was pre­served in Forever­ware main­tain­ing their fresh­ness or age. Another episode called ‘The ATM with the Gold of Heart’ show­cased an ATM that would con­tin­iously dis­trib­ute money. An episode that mir­rored the excel­lent Twi­light Zone episode where a man’s wal­let pro­vided end­less cash.

I sup­pose the pop­u­lar­ity behind this show’s suc­cess was because of its sim­i­lar­i­ties to the X-Files, The Twi­light Zone, and other shows that explored the unknown. How­ever, for a show to appeal to both kids and adults alike is a hard task to com­mit to. Sadly, this show only remained on air for a lit­tle over a year but it will be missed. 

“Where Gumby is ide­al­is­tic, Pokey is skep­ti­cal. Where Gumby is trust­ing, Pokey asks ques­tions. When Gumby takes chances, Pokey often gets dragged along against his will, but ends up appre­ci­at­ing the expe­ri­ence. The two save each other with reg­u­lar­ity. In every episode Pokey gives advice, and some­times, Gumby lis­tens to him.” -gumbyworld.com

When I watched the reruns of the Gumby series in the mid-80s, the char­ac­ter that stood out the most was Pokey. As the site describes, Pokey was the com­plainer mas­querad­ing as a real­ist. If there were a hol­i­day that I could make up, it would prob­a­bly be Pokey Day because it would have many interpretations!

“Hey every­one, it’s Pokey Day. You know what that means?” 

I’ve always admired Todd McFarlene’s line of toys and of course his art­work that inspires these toys. These detailed toys far sur­pass the toys that have been released in the past few years. I can remem­ber when Skele­ton War­riors was a pop­u­lar car­toon and the toys were as equally cool. The toys were detailed (at the time); con­tain­ing real­is­tic bones con­sid­er­ing the war­riors were skeletons.

Now, McFar­lene has brought out a line of toys inspired by the Wiz­ard of Oz. How­ever, inspired is just a small part of this series. Rather, McFar­lene has trans­formed this world orig­i­nally cre­ated by L. Frank Baum into a macabre, twisted and some­what creepy ver­sion, à la Todd McFar­lene who can eas­ily con­vert some­thing tran­quil into some­thing wicked.

These aren’t toys for the kid­dies. Rather, these toys are ones that sit on top of the shelves of seri­ous col­lec­tors. Peo­ple who think Night­mare Before Christ­mas is the great­est thing since the 60s Frosty the Snowman.

Check them out: http://www.spawn.com/toyfest/catalog/monsters2.aspx 

In the spirit of Easter, my Dad sent me this awe­some link that archives all of the “found” (as opposed to still lost) Easter Eggs hid­den in movies, tele­vi­sion, com­puter appli­ca­tions, games, etc.

Like for instance, did you know you can make Pho­to­shop burp? I haven’t tried this myself nor do I know what ver­sion it uses, could be up to the lat­est I’m not sure. But all you do is sim­ply hold Ctrl + Alt, go to Help > Pho­to­shop, then the strange Cargo screen will show up and you sim­ply type ‘Burp’.

For all of you Don Bluth fans, in the movie An Amer­i­can Tail “as the ship is leav­ing Ham­burg, watch the mice wav­ing good­bye. The Secret Of Nimh’s Mrs Brisby can be clearly seen at the back, wear­ing a red trenchcoat.”

Get crazy and find those eggs, kiddies!*

*Ooh, that sounded creepy. Wicked-witch creepy.