Before he was the biggest competitor in the ring the man who would be known as André the Giant was simply André René Roussimoff, dapper man about town who made lifting cars look easy.

Okay, so André was never really "average", but before he became a household name thanks to his performance as "The Giant" in the WWF André was a young, and much leaner, man from Grenoble, France looking to use his massive size to his advantage in the ring.

André was 6 foot 10 inches tall by age 18, so the giant nickname came naturally, but what's surprising is how handsome he was in his younger years, he could have been a movie star!

Oh wait, he was a movie star thanks to appearances in The Princess Bride and Micki & Maude, I guess André's dreams of stardom were achieved after all!

See more Surprising Photos Of A Young, Good Looking André The Giant here

The biggest Comic Con of all is happening this weekend in New York! And since you’re not there, You’ll want to take a peek at the best cosplayers anyway. Geeks Are Sexy has a correspondent, Rich from Aggressive Comix, sending in photographs by the dozens. The first gallery of cosplayers, taken on Friday, is up now.

 

There will be more pictures from tomorrow and Sunday, so check back at Geeks Are Sexy for more to come.

The recent release of the survival horror game Until Dawn has inspired some couch conversation about what makes a horror themed video game good, and which horror game elements get old really fast.

In this case the characters discussing the dilemma are Freddy the animatronic bear from Five Nights At Freddy's, Slenderman from Creepy Pasta fame (who also has his own game), and a longhaired dude named Davis, so you know the argument is about to get serious...ly nerdy.

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The Warp Zone created this fun take on what makes horror games tick to prove a point- it's good to have a fine assortment of frights available when you're playing a horror game!

-Thanks Miss C!

When the ninja movie trend hit theaters back in the 1980s a slew of action flicks were released that featured a non-Japanese fighter trained in the ways of Ninjutsu, the most shadowy of all martial arts.

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Viewers had always assumed only Japanese people could be trained in the ways of the ninja, but these movies made us believe that with intense training and a heart full of revenge any of us could become a ninja too.

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The intense ninja training didn't amount to a hill of shuriken for me, but a few lucky characters got to slip on the hood and katana and live out their dreams of being a white ninja, letting us watch while they lived out their shinobi dreams.

See 10 White People Who Inexplicably Became Ninjas at io9

Will Varner’s ideas really work! A Gungan like Jar Jar Binks would naturally relate to life as a mermaid. And, as Varner explains, “Just think: Jar Jar Binks with the voice of a siren!” He’s almost there on his own. But I doubt that Jar Jar would be able to woo Prince Eric as effectively as Ariel.

It's nice to have someone sing you to sleep before bed, but if the singer is the nightmare inducer himself Freddy Krueger you're probably better off staying awake or you'll never wake up again!

Freddy's melted face is terrifying to behold even in puppet form, but, as Mario of Glove and Boots discovered, he does have one heck of a singing voice when he belts out the twilight themed tune "Dream A Little Dream Of Me".

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Could it be that Freddy isn't such a bad guy after all, and the nightmares can actually be attributed to teens eating too much junk food before bed?

-Via Laughing Squid

Cardboard is truly a maker's best friend because it's cheap, easy to find in large quantities and the perfect medium for making models of your creation.

From pattern making to prototyping to building the project itself, cardboard is an ultimate, and totally eco-friendly, way to bring your ideas to life.

This year's World Maker Faire New York featured some outstanding cardboard creations, including fully functional pinball machines, a really cool dinosaur costume and a giant bear's head for attendees to use as their cubhouse.

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And as if that stuff wasn't cool enough, cardboard sculptor Bartholomew Ting followed up his bear head bunker with a life-size F1 car sculpture, which naturally drove attendees wild!

See more cardboard creations from Maker Faire here

A virtual world that resembles the real world gets boring after a while. I love it when someone comes up with a strange and different mod for the Grand Theft Auto universe. BlackSmoke Billy built a ramp on the front of a big rig tractor to see what would happen.

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Chaos happens, sure, but what if you took that thing into a tunnel? What if you made it cover all the driving lanes? What if you drove it backward? All that happens in this video. -via Geeks Are Sexy  

Censorship is supposed to protect viewers from being exposed to things like nudity, gore, explicit language and disturbing situations, basically all the things viewers usually want in movies or TV shows.

That's why creators are constantly battling the censors to keep their shows intact, censor despised content and all, and their struggle sometimes forces creators to flat out lie about what's happening on the screen.

Censors hate blood, and they actively force filmmakers to remove any trace of blood from their trailers, but back in 1980 Stanley Kubrick got away with telling the censors that his iconic blood flood in The Shining was really just "rusty water".

Because of Kubrick's lie the trailer, complete with that disturbing shot of the "rusty water" flooding towards the camera, briefly made it to theaters before being pulled by the MPAA.

Are you wondering why Fonzie was featured in the lead image? Believe it or not, Happy Days also had trouble with the censors about one issue- Fonzie's leather jacket.

The Fonz looked like a total Potsie without his leather jacket, but censors claimed only criminals wear a leather jacket when they're not riding their bike, so show creator Garry Marshall started working a motorcycle into every scene.

Read 6 Brilliant Ways Movies & TV Shows Stuck It To The Censors here (contains NSFW language)

(Photos: FDNY)

Soon, the Fire Department of New York City will celebrate its 150th anniversary. To mark the occasion, it will display and auction off at the local Comic Con 10 bespoke firefighting helmets that look like Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, and other Marvel superheroes. The New York Daily News reports:

Created just for New York Comic Con, the superhero helmets were designed by the industry’s top comic book artists, including Joe Quesada, Marvel’s Chief Creative Officer, Damion Scott, Kaare Andrews and Walt Simonson.

Quesada was also behind “Heroes,” a 2011 comic paying tribute to the victims and heroes of Sept. 11. […]

All proceeds from the sales will go to the FDNY Foundation, which provides awareness and outreach for the public, training and support for the department’s different squads and technology and equipment for stations.

Discovering a secret level in a video game is like discovering pirate's treasure, only without the monetary gain and cool Captain's curse.

These are the levels that keep gamers talking, the secret spaces that give us a reason to replay a game until we've discovered every pixel of that virtual world.

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WatchMojo put together a nice list of their picks for Top 10 Secret Levels In Video Games to put you in a nostalgiac mood.

From Super Mario World's fabled Star Road to the ridiculous Secret Cow Level in Diablo II, these are levels that "are hidden and must be found by completing certain objectives or searching certain areas of a game", a gamer's ultimate prize for playing.

-Via Geeks Are Sexy

In a traditional tabletop role-playing game, the players' imaginations make an adventure an immersive experience. I've seen some game masters use audio soundtracks to enhance this experience. Here's a new sensory tool to make traditional RPGs even more realistic: scents for particular scenarios.

Jennifer Howlett is the founder of Adventure Scents, a line of aromatic beads carefully selected to reflect common role-playing game situations. They include Horse Stables, Rowdy Tavern, Fishing Docks, Pirate Ship, Enchanted Forest, Dusty Library, Moldy Crypt, Roman Bathhouse, and Fetid Swamp.

Which one should you choose? Howlett makes suggestions with the Scent-O-Matic--an interactive tool that helps game masters select scents by game, fantasy setting, entertainment franchise, and location.

-via Nerd Approved

This is about as silly as it gets, and that’s what the internet is made for. Mandatory wrote up what happened in season five of The Walking Dead, made it rhyme, and set it to the music of the opening theme from Cheers. Yes, they did.

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Besides being a ridiculous way to present the information, it may remind fans of all that went on last year, leading up to the premiere episode of season six of The Walking Dead this Sunday night. -Thanks, Daniel!

I'm not a very big fan of the Harry Potter franchise, and even though I've seen every movie I don't plan on reading any of the books, so I'm left with many questions that may or may not be explained in the books.

There's one main question that has bothered me since the first film- why do the Hogwarts crew care so much about staying hidden from Muggles?

Apparently I'm not the only one who wonders why wizards care so much about Muggles, and illustrator George Rottkamp and Dorkly's Andrew Bridgman created this comic that colorfully illustrates why wizards should stop hiding and start healing!

-Via Dorkly

Star Wars: where dreams come true. Now that Disney owns the Star Wars franchise, is it really so far-fetched to imagine them sliding in some of their more popular tropes into the seventh episode of the movie series?

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Some of it doesn’t take much of a stretch, like Mufasa as Darth Vader. That's a given. But Peter Pan with a light saber? Pinocchio as a hologram? You may have to watch twice to catch all the weirdness in this mashup from PistolShrimps. -via Geeks Are Sexy