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There’s a lot of history to the little plumber we call Mario! First off, he was once a carpenter named Jumpman. And the way he looks is explained by how much easier it was to animate a guy with a hat and a mustache in 8-bit than the average Joe on the street. The look followed his evolution into modern gaming, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

To be honest, this video has a lot more than ten curious facts; but since it was produced by Alltime 10s, the many bits of trivia are arranged as if it were a set of ten. -via Viral Viral Videos

(Joel Watson/Hijinks Ensue)

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Chain of Command, Part II" showed Captain Jean-Luc Picard captured and tortured by the Cardassians. The Cardassian officer Madred tried to break Picard's mind. He offered Picard a life of imprisoned comfort, if only he would say that there were five lights in the room, not four.

But Picard needed not five to boogie. There were four disco balls above the dance floor.

The clip embedded below leaves out the disco references, but you'll see them in the full episode.

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(Image Via GiuseppeQ)

(Image Via krakenkraked)

(Image Via TheWho)

Godzilla is still tearing it up on the silver screen over fifty years since making his mega-kaiju debut, and the success of his latest movie proves you don’t have to be a sex symbol to bring in big bucks at the box office.

After starring in the same old stomp a city, smash a kaiju flicks for over five decades isn’t it about time Godzilla branched out a bit and tried his hand at playing the lead role in, say, an epic biblical flick like Noah or a touching drama like Marley & Me?

Check out 40 Great Movies Made Better By Adding Godzilla, it's definitely worth the price of admission!

Avid comic book readers know the cover art doesn’t always match the action taking place in the issue, or at very least it will focus on one pivotal scene in the issue that the publishers are hoping will reel in the readers.

These incredible looking covers for the Iron Man: Legacy story arc Industrial Revolution from 2010-11 follow that formula in the sense that they're pure eye candy, created by artist Juan Doe who is clearly a fan of Russian Constructivism, Art Deco and the superheroic stylings of Jack Kirby.

Wouldn't these covers make for an amazing poster series?

-Via GeekTyrant

It’s a traumatic moment for Chris and his son. Look at those two! How did they even get together? Or this experience may open their minds to the possibility that opposites can attract. The chasm between Star Wars fans and Trekkies may not be too wide to cross after all.

Then again, I see trouble ahead. Trekkies, or Trekkers, are the optimistic type who can laugh at the worst predicaments ever, while Star Wars fans tend to bond over their despair with the entire Star Wars universe. This is the latest from Lunarbaboon.

The little Reese’s Pieces addict known as E.T. is pretty cute, in a turtle without a shell kinda way, but the version presented on the silver screen is a far cry from the original concepts which were being kicked around by special effects mastermind Rick Baker.

As it turns out E.T.'s signature look sprang from concept art being created for another alien themed Spielberg project called Night Skies, which would have featured 11 distinctly different aliens, and with a little softening around the edges and some smoothing to the overall texture our little friend E.T. was born.

Rick’s early concept art/sculptures consisted of alien designs ranged from far more sinister looking to creepy cute enough to give Mac from Mac & Me nightmares, and something tells me these aliens would have phoned home to order up a whole lot more than just a ride!

-Via io9

The creative conferences and the pressure to come up with ever more new superheroes in the comic book publishing industry must be intense, or maybe writers get just plain desperate. For some comic book characters, booth superheroes and super villains, you’d think their creators must have just pulled something out of a hat and decided there’s a upper power there somewhere. The fellow shown here is “Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man”! But that’s just the beginning. There’s a hero who is designed around disco music, a crime fighter who throws sparkles from her fingers, and a character who can control squirrels, among others, in a list at Flavorwire.

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A recently unearthed audio recording from the "Hobbit Dinner", which took place in Rotterdam in 1958, finds Tolkien reading excerpts from The Hobbit as Bilbo, reading a poem in Elvish, and celebrating the love his fans have for Tolkien's tales of Middle Earth. And if that isn't enough to make Tolkien fans go squee he also set the records straight on the true meaning of The Lord Of The Rings.

Here's how this amazing audio recording came to see the light of day:

This reel-to-reel tape was discovered in 1993 by a Dutchman named René van Rossenberg, a Tolkien expert who owns a shop in the Netherlands devoted to all things Middle-earth (TolkienShop.com). Why didn't van Rossenberg show it to anybody until now?

"Like Smaug I am guarding my treasure, hissing at any collector who comes near," he recently stated in response to my email query. Fortunately, a Middle-earth maven named Jay Johnstone, one of the founders of the fantasy/sci-fi site Legendarium.me, sleuthed that van Rossenberg had the recording in his possession, and persuaded him to open his dragon hoard.

Read more about this amazing Tolkien audio treasure over at Huffington Post.

The Oculus Rift virtual reality headgear is supposed to be used as a force for good- better gaming and entertainment experiences and, in some instances, a way for people to undergo immersion therapy and have their lives improved by the experience, but before VR can do good it’s inevitably going to take a turn for the worse.

That bad turn, it seems, begins at Chuck E. Cheese's, who have announced plans to integrate the oculus rift in with the rest of their cringe worthy pizza madhouse.

Here’s what Chuck has in store for the young’ns-

Birthday parties booked during the six–week test in the three markets will offer the Birthday Star a turn in the virtual Ticket Blaster. The headset uses 360–degree head-tracking technology and features a 3D view so users feel as though they are inside the Ticket Blaster with Chuck E. During the experience, the headset will register the number of tickets collected, which will be fully redeemable at the merchandise counter.

-Via Gamma Squad

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Since 2000, MTV Cribs has taken viewers around the mansions of famous music stars, actors, and celebrities, including Ozzy Osborne, Shaquille O'Neal, and Kim Kardashian. It's a chance to see the stars that you love and/or hate in their own homes.

ScottDW, the filmmaker and rapper behind the twerking stormtroopers video, offers this glimpse inside the luxurious lifestyle of a famous stormtrooper. Super Nova (his street name) lives in a quiet, upscale neighborhood on Coruscant. Inside his large house is a game room, a dance room, and a fancy master bedroom with a retracting television.

If this is how stromtroopers live, then I'm ready to enlist!

-via Nerd Bastards

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Riding the subway can be an extremely surreal affair, with a cast of characters that changes nightly and a prevailing chaos factor in the air that can really get under your skin, and when you ride the train all the time you end up with some fun stories to tell.

Putting all that train talk aside for a minute, On The Subway by Mike Geiger has very little to do with an urban transit system subway and has more to do with riding that strange subway car of life, or some such new agey mumbo jumbo.

It's a cartoon short, ladies and gentlemen, drawn in a style reminiscent of John K. of Ren & Stimpy fame, so peel back your eyelids and prepare for some ocular magic!

-Via Cartoon Brew

Harrison Ford is getting a bit old to play Han Solo. Maybe he should turn the role over to Jim Carrey. James Hance painted this image mixing up Star Wars and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Now if I’m not back in five minutes, Princess...just wait longer.

Now that Pendleton Ward has brought his animated fantasy series Adventure Time to the small screen it’s hard to imagine a world without Finn and Jake protecting the Candy Kingdom from the likes of Lemongrab and the Ice King, and fans of the show know episodes often play out like a kid oriented version of an RPG like Dungeons & Dragons.

Therefore it should come as no surprise that Pendleton Ward often plays, and runs, his own RPG sessions, and his initial idea for Adventure Time came from the fact that "Ward and his friends don't game as much as they'd like."

What is surprising, however, is that his latest RPG is being played out via Twitter, and the general public is invited to play along.

Here's how it works:

Go to the Quest Attack Twitter, and fire off some commands. If Ward likes what he sees, he’ll draw the results.

Oh, did we mention you have to write it out “text adventure” style, as in “Use sword on gnome”? It’s that kind of game. Ward can “pause” the game whenever he feels like it, but users have to unpause to keep moving forward.

-Via Gamma Squad

X-Men: Days of Future Past opens nationwide today. It is the fourth seventh movie in the X-Men series, and begins a new story arc in the world of X-Men: First Class. If you haven’t spent years reading the comics or if it’s been awhile since you did, you may need a crash course to understand how the new movie fits into the Marvel-ous world of the X-Men. But that’s not all you’ll learn.

1. When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby first created the X-Men, the “X” in “X-Men” stood for the mysterious “X-Gene” that gave them their abilities (which normal humans lacked). However, the letter eventually came to stand for the “extra” powers they possessed.

2. In the Marvel universe, the term “mutant” refers to characters that were born with special abilities or developed them later in life without any external influence. “Mutates” is the term for characters whose genetic makeup was altered at some point by outside forces such as radiation or chemicals. For example, Spider-Man is a popular mutate (because he gained his powers due to a bite from a radioactive spider), while the original members of the X-Men are all mutants (because they developed their abilities without external stimuli).

3. The original name for the team suggested by Stan Lee was “The Mutants,” but publisher Martin Goodman didn't think readers would know what a “mutant” was, so it was changed.

A list at mental_floss not only looks at the comic origins, but also has trivia about the movies, and a few tidbits that tie them all together for the new film. If you go see it today, go prepared! 

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The gluttonous, pellet chomping ghost slayer known as Pac-Man has just celebrated his 34^th birthday, and boy has he come a long way from the days of arcade mania and nightly news reporters claiming that arcades are corrupting the youth.

This hilarious collection of hard hitting journalistic exposés from 1982 was put together by victim of Pac-Man Fever Patrick Scott Patterson, and it's chock full of bold reporters attempting to describe what exactly is going on when you play a game of Pac-Man, and timely interviews showing some 80s youths getting their pellet gobblin' game on.

"Yellow creature gobbles dots while being pursued through maze by monsters" Sounds like Pac-Man to me!

-Via Kotaku