Admiral Ackbar of the Rebel Alliance is most famous for his iconic "It's a trap!" line in Return of the Jedi. It is inevitable that he would one day decide to cash in and put his fame to profitable use.
Cullen Sweet made these mousetraps as an art project. He has a few extra and plans to give them away at the upcoming Star Wars Life Day Celebration, a Wookiee holiday.
-via Nerd Approved
It’s hard to believe that there are still hundreds, if not thousands, of movies out there which have yet to make it onto DVD, or any digital format for that matter, when so many stinkers have already gotten their own disc release.
Classic movies like the 1987 version of Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie, directed by Paul Newman and starring John Malkovich, the cult sci-fi comedy Nothing Lasts Forever starring Bill Murray and Dan Akroyd, and Poor Little Rich Girl starring Shirley Temple have yet to make their way onto DVD even though the format is now over twenty years old.
The New York Post put together 64 Clips from Movies You Can’t Find On DVD, which contains a surprisingly high number of fun to watch classic flicks which will hopefully get a DVD release when fans realize what they've been missing all these years!
James Houston created a Christmas greeting for the Glasgow School of Art last year using obsolete equipment to generate old-school synthetic speech singing “The Carol of the Bells.” The idea is about repurposing Christmas gifts of the past.
The ensemble: A collection of vintage Mac computers, a Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum + 1 and a SEGA Mega Drive perform a rendition of "Carol of the Bells" with lyrics re-written by Robert Florence & Philip Larkin in the Mackintosh Library at The Glasgow School of Art. Jacket by Ten30.co.uk (Alan Moore, GSA Textiles alumnus 2008).
We also get the appropriate 8-bit graphics on nearby screens. You won’t be able to understand the lyrics, but they are posted at the vimeo page- and they are hilariously geeky! -via Metafilter
Fallout fans really love the heck out of those bleak yet delightfully quirky post apocalyptic games, and when they want to create their own slice of irradiated heaven they get crafty, just like they would in the real apocalypse!
Fallout fan and Redditor VaultoftheSix wanted to craft his own homage to those good old fictional future days for his thirtieth birthday/Halloween party, so he turned his garage into a Vault.
Guests of all classes and alignments were invited to dress up faux Fallout for a No Mutants Allowed party in Vault 30, where the Nuka-Cola would fall like rain and the Pip-Boys would all smile and nod in approval.
Congratulations VaultoftheSix for reaching level 30 in admirably geeky style! I hope you enjoy all the perks that come with leveling through your 30s!
-Via Dorkly
It all started with George Romero’s classic film about the dead coming back to life with a taste for the living, and since those Cold War days the zombie craze has gone from geek niche genre to overblown pop culture sensation.
Diggin' on zombie pop culture is fine, but when you start surrounding yourself with zombie themed merch you’ve proven that the zombie craze has gone too far!
1. Zombie Gnomes Eating Flamingo Lawn Ornament-
Zombie gnomes look pretty cool on your lawn around Halloween, but when those little bearded fiends are allowed to prey on innocent lawn flamingos the zombie gnome phenomenon has gone too far!
2. Snack Time Zombie baby prop-
Zombies are pretty much exclusively adult content, because rotting corpses rising from the dead to devour the living isn’t exactly the making of a kid friendly program, and yet kiddie zombie merch keeps rolling out.
In this case it’s the Snack Time Zombie, a prop shaped like a zombie baby chewing on itself, because what parent doesn't dream of having a zombie baby hanging around the house?!
3. Human Body Part Bakery-
People eating baked goods that look like people? It's zombie madness! Actually, they're just trying to fit in with their undead idols, which is just plain creepy. Even creepier- you can munch on this morbid bread made by Thai master butcher baker Kittiwat Unarrom even if you're a vegetarian!
4. Zombie Max ammo-
Christmas is always a magical time, but Christmas at Hogwarts is just about as magical as it gets and while you may not be able to visit the castle in real life, you can at least bring a little of its spirit home with you thiss holiday thanks to Epbot.com.
These great geeks made an incredible Christmas display that Dumbledore himself would find impressive by concocting a tree inside a cauldron that is not only topped with owls, but surrounded by floating candles.
You can learn to make your own enchanted candles at the link, but it's up to you to find a bunch of amazing Potter ornaments for your own tree.
Via Nerd Approved
Since 1989 a television program called America's Funniest Home Videos has been sharing examples of finely crafted home video footage with television viewers.
Vintage home videos, like those found on that famous home video clip show, are crawling out of their VHS slipcovers and into your eyeballs thanks to the video oddities at Memory Hole.
The fine folks at Everything Is Terrible have let their finely honed instincts for bizarre visual fare blossom into the Memory Hole- a collection of remixed retro videos sure to elicit a response.
Whether that response is the viewer yelling WTF?! with a smile or running away from their computer screen in a cold sweat depends on how old your eyeballs are, and how well you handle home video oddities like this disturbing little bathtub ditty:
-Via AnimalNY
The Avengers have the Christmas spirit! With the help of some editing by James Covenant, the superheroes sing some Christmas tunes. Then there’s a special bonus song by Groot. Really. -via Time
For 2 seconds, the trailer for the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, shows an astromech with a spherical lower body. It quickly rolls across the desert, then disappears from the screen. That droid has been the subject of much fascination in the internet.
What's so exciting to fans is that although this is the first time that the droid has appeared in a Star Wars film, it has already appeared in a George Lucas film. It was in the Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark. So it is something of a homage to the founder of Star Wars.
-via Moe Lane
Television shows that are lucky(?) enough to get their own spinoff series are guaranteed to look better by proxy when the spinoff series comes out, because let's face it- a vast majority of spinoff series are just plain awful.
Here are ten examples of how bad a television show spin off series can be:
1. The Ropers (1979-1980)-
Mr. and Mrs. Roper were pretty funny characters when interacting with Jack, Janet and Chrissy, but on their own they just didn't have the ha-has to carry an entire show. The Ropers is far from the worst show on the list, and even though it lacked the comedic chemistry found in Three's Company, it lasted for two seasons.
2. Baywatch Nights (1995-1997)-
The Hoff likes to play larger than life characters, and playing Mitch Buchannon as a lowly lifeguard simply didn't thrill him, so Mitch started moonlighting as a private investigator with his cop friend and some other detective types and Baywatch Nights was born.
Baywatch Nights tried to be so cool, so dangerous and sexy, but the lack of bikinis and hokey dialog left audiences looking for a way back to the Bay. The show slipped further down the ratings toilet when they tried to add a supernatural element to the show in season 2, but Hoff's heroic sexy detective show didn't stand a ghost of a chance.
3. The Brady Brides (1981) and The Bradys (1989-1990)-
The Brady Bunch was such a popular show that it gave birth to a whole host of spawn spin offs, and a few made-for-TV movies, one of which was called The Brady Girls Get Married, which led to the creation of the sitcom The Brady Brides.
Are you able to keep up with this winding Brady television family tree? The Brady Brides was a total flop and only lasted ten episodes, but that didn't stop producers from taking another stab at bringing back Brady eight years later.
This time around it was a mini-series called The Bradys, and it was reformatted as a drama, what with the kids all grown up and experiencing the trials and tribulations of adult life and whatnot.
It served as a reminder that much of the Brady's appeal lay in the comedic moments on the show, and drama didn't really suit them at all.
4. Joey (2004-2006)-
Everyone thought the "how you doin'" bit was funny on Friends, and Joey seemed like a loveable enough character when surrounded by the rest of the Central Perk gang, but when he was given his own show we discovered just how poorly constructed Joey's character really was.
Joey Tribbiani had a totally two dimensional personality on his own, and his whole "dumb but lovable guy trying to figure out stuff like love and relationships" routine didn't appeal to audiences, so Joey's card was pulled midway through the second season.
The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader.
Many people have a favorite book, movie, or TV show that nobody seems to appreciate. And then one day it’s considered a “classic.” Here’s the story of an underrated television show that became a cult and critical smash.
FIRST BLOOD
After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1987 with a degree in filmmaking, Joss Whedon went to Hollywood to write for television. Doors were already open for him -his grandfather wrote for Leave It to Beaver and his father wrote for The Golden Girls and Benson- so Whedon was able to land jobs on the sitcoms Roseanne and Parenthood. But he found the work dull and uncreative. He wanted to develop his own characters, in his own style. He wanted to do something different. (Image credit: Gage Skidmore)
So he decided to write a movie script that would follow a classic horror film formula, but with a couple of major differences.
* First, it would be funny and the dialogue was snappy and fast-paced.
* Second, Whedon flipped the character structure. The young blond girl who typically appeared in horror movies as a hysterical, screaming victim, was the hero. Men were helpless victims, not the heroes.
* To make it even more ironic, Whedon named his heroine the cutsiest, anti-action hero name he could imagine: Buffy Summers.
* The plot of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer: a high school cheerleader dates boys, attends class …and fights vampires, demons, and werewolves. And at the end, Buffy ends up not a hero, but an outcast when she burns down her school gym because it’s full of vampires.
Filming for the first Star Wars movie began in 1976. The actors weren't kids back then, so they've certainly aged a lot in the intervening 39 years. Now, in The Force Awakens, Luke, Han, Leia, Lando, and Chewbacca have new challenges, such as mobility, endocrine health, and diminished mental acuity.
In this great sketch from Saturday Night Live (content warning: foul language), you can see how well the actors have held up. No one is going to jump around a sail barge anymore without breaking a hip in the process.
The scene with Leia trying to figure out R2-D2's controls is perfect.
-via Uproxx
(Photo: Andy Ihnatko)
The merc with a mouth is finally coming to the big screen. Ryan Reynolds, the actor who briefly played Deadpool in the 2009 movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine, will reprise the role in a feature-length film about our favorite psychopath.
To mark the occasion, Uproxx rounded up photos of 41 fantastic cosplays of Deadpool, including him as Sailor Moon, the Eleventh Doctor, Groot, and a French maid. The photos are divided into 2 posts, which are here and here.
Every year, generally around the first of April, products are introduced that get our hopes up then dash them against the sidewalk like a soda bottle, as the pranksters tell us we were fools to believe such a product could exist. But we live in a world full of clear toasters, bubblegum flavored toothpaste and pajama jeans, so why wouldn’t we believe in the power of new products?
These nine products could have changed our lives, but instead they’re just something we wish actually existed.
1. Accordion Hero-
The accordion has fallen out of favor with the young folk, except those rare kiddie polka fans and merchant marines under ten, but Accordion Hero could have brought the squeeze box back to the front of the stage where it belongs. Sadly, it was nothing but a cruel joke played on those of us who enjoy that unique accordion sound, but one guy did manage to create some semblance of the game with a toy accordion, so that's something:
2. The SlipQuit-
Quitting your job isn't as cool as it looks in movies and TV shows- you just announce you’re leaving then walk out, no dramatic monologue, just the act of quitting and the workplace left behind.
But that was all about to change thanks to the SlipQuit, the strap-on inflatable slide pack that was supposed to make quitting fun! Imagine quitting by yelling “adios mofos!” then jumping out a second story window onto a SlipQuit, sliding into the parking lot, and the annals of workplace history, like a real boss.
3. Animatronic Admiral Ackbar-
Big Mouth Billy Bass showed us that a talking animatronic fish can be fun, at least for a few minutes at a time, but imagine all the fun you could have hanging out with a Star Wars Admiral Ackbar Singing Bass talking about all those darn traps!
ThinkGeek teased us with this geeky piece of home decor a few years ago, and despite an outpouring of Star Wars fan love we're still stuck with tired old Billy...use the force to make it so, ThinkGeek!
4. Chicken Wing Ice Cream-
Aren’t you tired of eating foods that are just one thing? Sick of "the man" telling you when it's okay to eat? Don’t you want to break with tradition and start eating dessert all day long? Then you're like me- someone who desperately needs some Perry's Chicken Wing Ice Cream in their lives.
Too bad we're stuck dreaming of what it would be like to use Sriracha, or barbecue sauce, to make the ultimate ice cream sundae...
5. BMW Stroller-
Many comic book readers won't recognize Black Maraih -that's probably because she has only made one appearance since 1982. Her disappearance makes sense though when you consider that she's an over-the-top stereotype of both blacks and the overweight. Of course, she wasn't the only offensive character to ever grace the pages of comics.
This great TopTenz article does a wonderful job rounding up ten of the most offensively stereotypical comic book characters of all time and the results are equally fascinating and discomforting.
