The Mario Bros. have proven they deserve a place in the pop culture pantheon by transforming from little moustachied plumbers to larger than life heroes.
Their exploits are legendary, and they embody many of the attributes found in a mythological hero, making them the perfect spokesplumbers for the thoroughly modern mythology created by video games.
Japanese artist Taro Yamamoto is paying homage to those video game icons in a medium worthy of their lofty status- by creating a traditional Japanese screen painting featuring the Bros as gods.
Mario is depicted as Raijin, god of thunder and storms, while Luigi is depicted as Fujin, god of wind, two deities who get their power from their hair, which is why they're not wearing their signature hats.
The screens will be put on display in Kyoto this fall, and hopefully the screen will inspire some game designers at Nintendo to create a game with this mythological theme because it would be super!
In Soviet Russia arcade games feed you quarters and play you! Okay, with that obligatory Yakov Smirnoff joke out of the way let's talk about arcade games.
They stole our money and captured our hearts, and each new cabinet brought a new world of video game amusement so we “vidiots” were always looking for new gaming experiences.
That's why the Museum Of Soviet Arcade Machines in St. Petersburg seems truly captivating for an arcade lovin' “vidiot”- you get to play a bunch of games you've never seen or heard of before. And then you read a little bit more about the games and discover there is:
“no Pac-Man...no fantasies...Fantasy and role-playing games featuring treasure-hunting, princesses, and invented creatures had no home in the USSR. “
Okay, I was a little less intrigued with Soviet arcade gaming until I read this tidbit about how the games were made:
Once it was determined which games would be produced, the blueprints were allegedly sent to military factories that primarily made electronics used in nuclear testing and weapons.
In a curious twist of fate, however, it meant that the instruction manuals were also produced in the factories, and therefore were considered classified government documents. Because of this, the manuals are thought to have all been destroyed.
So figuring out how to fix the game cabinet could be considered an act of treason, well played Soviet Russia!
A celebrity's last words become a major part of their legend after they pass on, and sometimes even overshadows the celebrity's career.
But there's one guy who wasn't overshadowed by his last words, partly because people can't decide what his last words actually were. That guy is Walt Disney, and his last words have been the subject of many arguments over the years.
When Kurt Russell went on Jimmy Kimmel Live back in 2007 and declared his name was the last thing Walt Disney ever said he got some Disney historians riled up, including one who went to great lengths to disprove the myth.
Leading Disney historian Jim Korkis did an exhaustive amount of research to uncover what Walt actually “said” before he died, words written on paper since Walt was dying of lung cancer and couldn't speak, and the list surprisingly includes the words “Kirt (sp) Russell”.
D-Piddy is the nome de mode of a mysterious cosplayer who gets the party started wherever he goes, and while those other Deadpool cosplayers are still figuring out how to play the role D-Piddy wrote the book on acting like a Deadfool!
His latest video shows him squaring off against that webhead Spider-Man at various locations around Los Angeles, because when Spidey pays a visit to the City of Angels D-Piddy serves as the greeting committee.
And if you want to keep up with that crazy cool cosplayer D-Piddy you should check out his Tumblr and Instagram pages to see where he'll be making an appearance next!
Don't let that painted on smile fool ya- working as a birthday clown is a really tough job, and many clowns go home feeling rather blue after a gig.
Between the people who are terrified of you, those who get turned on by your makeup at a party full of kids, and those who assume you're a sicko because they read about a sicko clown once, those who don the clown white for a living can't seem to get any love.
Well, aside from the fetishizers that is, and when you read the 5 Realities Of Being A Birthday Clown you'll agree- the smile is painted on for a reason!
Tattoo pics abound on the interwebs, and superheroes are an ever popular subject for tattooification, so an article about comic book themed tats seems like pretty standard fare.
But when the article is jam packed with 31 tattoos, by my count two and a half dozen that'll knock ya dead and but one sorry stinker in the bunch, it's enough to wow even the most heavily tattooed comic book nerds on the planet!
Peruse this collection of 31 Incredile Superhero Tattoos and see if you can pick out which one's the stinker, here's a hint- it's in a league of its own in terms of terrible facial detailing...
Back in MTV's early years there was only one video terrifying enough to give kids nightmares aired at any hour of the day- Draw Of The Cards by Kim Carnes.
Kim was following up her one mega hit Bettie Davis Eyes with a track that had a little more edge, so it makes sense for the video to have a little edge, too.
The video starts out like Kim's homage to The Wiz, and somewhere along the way Kim goes through the looking glass and finds herself in a dark land that looks like Downtown L.A. after midnight.
Draw of the Card reminds me of another 80s video that used to freak me out as a kid- Greg Kihn's Jeopardy, which takes place in a church seemingly from the same creepy neighborhood. Thanks for the nightmares MTV!
Twenty years ago, the TV show Xena: Warrior Princess debuted, a spinoff of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. The two shows were usually shown in tandem in syndication. Eventually, Xena eclipsed Hercules in the ratings. If you grew up watching the show, you may want to learn some behind-the-scenes facts to celebrate it’s anniversary.
1. SHE WAS ORIGINALLY SUPPOSED TO DIE.
Xena was originally introduced on Hercules to satisfy executive producer Rob Tapert’s wish for a dark, tragic figure to emerge as a counterbalance to the cheerful, completely non-conflicted Hercules. At the conclusion of a three-episode arc, the character was supposed to die. But Tapert and his fellow producers were so impressed with her that the already-planned Hercules spinoff series was remodeled for Xena.
2. LUCY LAWLESS WASN’T THE FIRST CHOICE.
Lawless had already appeared on Hercules twice—in two different roles—when the show began scouring for an actress to fill Xena’s boots. A British actress named Vanessa Angel (who had starred in the television adaptation of Weird Science) was hired, but fell ill before she was able to fly to the set. After some discussion over whether to stick to their original concept of a blonde Amazon, Tapert decided on Lawless, who dyed her hair from blonde to black. (The two married in 1998.)
Shaquille Dent, an animation student at the Cleveland Institute of Art, has hair that makes him look like Goku from Dragon Ball Z. It all began in high school, when he learned that he could style his hair into spikes—and they would hold firm! Now he sculpts his hair into broad locks that look like they come from a manga artist’s brush. It takes him only about 2 hours twice a month to keep his hair looking this amazing. You can see more photos at BuzzFeed.
Having an episode banned from airing is a fairly common phenomenon in the world of television, and as times change so do the reasons why episodes are yanked.
Usually it's the network censors who pull an episode, such as Fox's censors refusing to air the Family Guy episode "Partial Terms Of Endearment" because it features Lois deciding whether or not to have an abortion.
But sometimes the show's creators make the decision to pull the episode due to tragic events that have taken place around the time the episode was supposed to air.
Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller ran into this problem with episode 4, which featured Molly Shannon as a psycho who brainwashes kids into killing other kids.
We recently shared a mental_floss article from a few years ago featuring 27 temporarily banned TV episodes, and now they're back with a new collection of 26 Previously Banned TV Episodes You Can Stream Right Now that features a few repeats and a bunch of new entries worth checking out.
The Real Ghostbusters was pretty faithful to the movies in terms of the main cast, but one minor addition made kids go gaga over the Ghostbusters- Slimer, who was friendly on the show and even helped the guys catch ghosts.
That hungry yet cute little ghost made the show a hit with kids, but as you can see in this unaired pilot for The Real Ghostbusters he was originally an enemy just like in the movie.
So if you've read this far you're probably wondering- what's the difference between the unaired pilot and the show we all loved to watch back in the day?
Well, here's the intro to the real show so you can see how the costumes and proton packs changed, and most of all how Slimer was portrayed as a gluttonous creep...as opposed to a gluttonous good ghost.
There are dozens of Disney inspired character redesigns online, and although some of them seem more Disney than Disney inspired redesign, these treatments by Randy Bishop are what a Marvel-Disney mashup should look like.
Randy's Disney inspired X-Men Doodles series is spot on, and serves to illustrate how good a Disney-Marvel animated movie could look, although without all the singing and dancing and with a little more blood.
Randy's X-Men Doodles series hasn't made it past the portrait stage just yet, but hopefully he'll continue to flesh out these character designs and show us more from this colorful multiverse merging.
From the bad boy Brat Pack days in the 80s to the genteel, sober and heroic guy we know today, Robert Downey Jr. has gone through some major changes in both look and attitude during the last thirty years.
Jeff's use of character acting to show Robert breaking down around 1994 then getting it together again in the early 00s is inspired, and it all culminates with Downey in the role he was born to play- Tony Stark.
H.P. Lovecraft keeps getting name-checked in pop culture. Here's why he matters.
(Image credit: Rafal Badan for Pardes publishing house)
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was having a bad summer. Like many newcomers to New York City, the aspiring writer from Rhode Island felt overwhelmed and out of place. He was unemployed, living in a mouse-infested one-room apartment in Brooklyn, and steadily losing weight on a paltry diet of cold canned beans and spaghetti. To make matters worse, his wife, for whom he’d moved to New York in the first place, had taken a job in another city and left him to fend for himself.
It was the first time Lovecraft had ever lived alone— and he was spectacularly homesick. Born in Providence in 1890, he viewed his hometown—with its scholarly atmosphere and dilapidated 18th-century mansions—as an essential piece of his identity. “Providence is me—I am Providence,” he wrote his aunt from his New York exile, inspiring the title of S. T. Joshi’s authoritative biography, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft. The city suited Lovecraft—a self-taught antiquarian obsessed with the contrasts of New England—in ways that New York could not.
Lovecraft grew up with a neurotic and stifling mother, Susie, and two aunts. (His father had died, probably of syphilis, after a stint in a mental institution.) The family had little of the capital but all the prejudices associated with old New England pedigree, and Lovecraft was never trained for any gainful employment. Nervous illnesses kept him isolated at home for long stretches, during which he joined up with “amateur journalist” groups: organizations of unpaid pamphleteers who—with their in-fighting, trolling, and political ranting that no one would ever hear—would likely feel at home in online forums today.
It was at a convention for such writers in Boston in 1921 that Lovecraft met Sonia Haft Greene, an energetic and attractive Eastern European Jewish widow from New York City, seven years his senior. Lovecraft, still reeling from the death of his mother six weeks prior, was not exactly a catch. He had no income besides a dwindling family inheritance and occasional checks from editorial temp work. He had the frame of a scarecrow, a protruding lower jaw, and a squeaky voice. He was also averse to sex, which he blamed on having read a scientific book as a child. “The whole matter was reduced to prosaic mechanism,” he wrote later, “a mechanism which I rather despised.” Not to mention, he was a virulent racial purist, outwardly disgusted by immigrants, tending to become “livid with anger” when he encountered foreign workers.
Some people would see having a toy named after them as a good thing, but one foxy Fox News host wasn't very happy when she discovered a toy hamster with her unusual name.
Host Harris Faulkner is suing Hasbro for giving a Littlest Pet Shop hamster her name and likeness, and while the likeness element of the lawsuit is up for debate it’s hard to deny Hasbro’s use of her far from normal name.
Harris is suing the toy company for 5 million dollars, claiming the toy stole her likeness via “complexion, the shape of its eyes, and the design of its eye makeup”.
She's probably just angry that the figure named after her is a sidekick and not the main character, no word yet on whether a human named Benson Detwyler plans to sue Hasbro as well.
