You know Iain Heath as Ochre Jelly, the LEGO artist who brings us brick versions of celebrities and internet memes. But Heath is branching out into the world of video and cosplay. He picked a big project for this one! Heath recreated the robot TARS from the movie Interstellar. And not just as a sculpture, but as a walking replica that can be used as a costume.
TARS was unveiled at Emerald City Comic Con in March 2015, where it interacted with the public and even won Heath the "One To Watch" award at the convention's annual costume contest.
Requiring over 100 man hours to construct, the replica weighs 40 lbs (a mere fifth of the one in the movie) and uses two iPads to recreate TARS' computer readouts. To allow the operator to interact with their surroundings, the aluminum-clad wooden frame includes a camera, LCD screen, audio amplifier, and head set.
As you can see, the folks at Emerald City enjoyed interacting with TARS. Heath plans to take it to several more conventions this year, so keep your eye out for it! -Thanks, Iain!
Here we have a case in which snooping just a little bit paid off big time for a photograph. While he waited for his car to be fetched, redditor mcdngr took a peek at what the parking valet was reading. The exact page gave him some concern, but when the guy returned, it turns out he is taking a criminology course. They had a good laugh about it. After all, the valet had gone to the trouble of buying a textbook instead of just reading it on the internet, so you know he’s not a criminal mastermind.
Yesterday, the site Humans of New York published a photograph of a young woman named Beyoncé and she spoke about how her famous name affects her life. The post on Facebook drew hundreds of comments, including quite a few people who can relate to Beyoncé’s struggle.
There’s more. Buzzfeed collected quite a few of the comments from people who were blessed/cursed with famous names, and then even more came in on the comments there. Some are famous, some are funny, and some are just unfortunate. Be glad your real name doesn't come with a ton of cultural baggage.
Over the years we’ve reported how Disney animators massaged, censored, and sanitized classic fables and fairy tales for mass audiences. But this is the first time we’ve ever heard of them “borrowing” so much of another artist’s work. Did they? Or was it just a coincidence?
INSPIRATION
In 1950, a Japanese artist named Osamu Tezuka created Jungle Taitei (Jungle Emperor), a story about an orphaned lion cub who is destined to rule the animals in Africa. From 1950 to 1954 it was a Japanese comic book series, and in 1965 Tezuka turned it into Japan’s first color animated television series. The following year, all 52 episodes were released in the United States under the name Kimba the White Lion. Over the next few years, Kimba enjoyed some success in syndication, mostly on local or regional TV stations, and Tezuka freely acknowledged that the work of Walt Disney -Bambi in particular- was an inspiration for the story of his lion hero.
In 1994, nearly 30 years after the creation of Kimba and five years after Tezuka’s death in 1989, Disney released its feature-length animated film The Lion King -about an orphaned lion cub destined to rule the animals in Africa.
FALSE PRIDE
Officially, the executives and animators at Disney denied they had ever heard of Kimba. But fans of the original Kimba the White Lion were incensed with the many similarities they found between the two projects. A group of more than a thousand animators in Japan sent a petition to Disney asking the studio to acknowledge its debt to the original series. Disney refused, citing only Bambi and Shakespeare’s play Hamlet as influences.
Walt Disney reportedly met Tezuka at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and mentioned that he someday hoped to make something similar to Tezuka’s earlier creation, Astro Boy. But Disney died in 1966, 28 years before The Lion King was made. If he really was a fan of Tezuka’s work, would he have approved of the project?
We’ve seen before that the faces of Rubik’s cubes can be used as pixels for artworks. Mystery Guitar Man and friends took that idea a step further by making a stop-motion animation by configuring 1296 mini-Rubik’s cubes and changing them 961 times to create a pixelated cartoon about a robot falling in love. The cartoon is only a minute and a half long, then he talks for a while. -via Viral Viral Videos
An Easter tradition in Hungary involves throwing buckets of water on young women of marriageable age. Really. On the day after Easter, known as Easter Monday, the women dress up in traditional clothing, and young men dowse them with water in a custom called “the watering of the girls.”
The custom isn’t limited to Hungary. In Hungary, the ritual is called Vízbevető. In Poland, it’s known as Śmigus-Dyngus. There are variations in other Eastern European countries as well. In some places, you don’t need to dress up to get wet; in others, a little spritz of perfume replaces the drenching. Sometimes the dowsing is accompanied by poetry reading or symbolic “whipping” with pussy willows. Traditionally, the girls are supposed to return the favor on Tuesday, but in reality, all the shenanigans go on the same day.
This is supposed to be a pre-Christian cleansing ritual to promote fertility, but it cannot be all that fun for the women. I sure hope it’s warm in Hungary this Easter! See pictures of modern-day waterings at Buzzfeed.
It’s not that far fetched to believe that a dog can play table tennis. After all, many dogs can catch a ball with their mouths, or lob one back at you with their snouts. A border collie is perfectly capable of learning to do it holding a paddle. What’s notable is how enthusiastic he is about showing off his skills. He’s even giving some trash talk if you listen closely! He’s about to win, except that he wants to get up on the table so the be closer to the action. Sorry, Bud, that’s an illegal move. Still, he’s better than I will ever be at the game. -via Viral Viral Videos
Five the Boston Terrier dressed up in his Easter bunny ears to wish you a happy Easter! Watch him gleefully -or not- ride around on a Roomba to the familiar strains of ”The Bunny Hop.” That’s a good dog. No, it doesn’t make much sense, but does it have to? -via Laughing Squid
Webster was a family sitcom in the 1980s. It was sentimental fluff, starring tiny precocious actor Emmanuel Lewis, with a seemingly nonstop laugh track. So it was a surprise to hear that an episode of Webster featured an appearance by Lt. Worf of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the episode titled “Webtrek,” Webster is magically transported to the 24th century, to the bridge of the Enterprise where Worf is on duty.
Worf is standing at his usual station, and he calls Webster an “intruder” and asks in a surprisingly laidback tone how he got aboard the ship. Webster blames it on his joystick, and another Starfleet extra takes it away for repair.
Worf recognizes Webster as an “Earthling”, but finds his “style of dress” peculiar. Webster insists that this is what all the cool kids will be wearing in 1990, and Worf tells him, “That was more than 300 years ago. You’re in the 24th Century!”
Over at a side console, another Starfleet officer -- regular stand-in and extra Lorine Mendell -- pulls up an animated scan of Webster rotating around like he’s the Genesis Device, and soon declares him to be “unarmed.” Webster thinks the bridge of the Enterprise is “cool”, and Worf replies, “The temperature on the Enterprise never varies!” Cue laugh track.
Fourth-grader Sydney Smoot appeared before the Hernando County (Florida) school board to say a few things about the FSA (Florida Standards Assessment) tests she and her classmates will be subjected to. This kid has a bright future ahead of her. She’s cute as a button, but that’s not as important as the points she brings up in her prepared speech. You have to be really suspicious about a test that makes a kid sign a no-discussion contract and for which neither the child nor the teachers benefit from learning the results. You can see an interview with Sydney here. -via Time
In the early 1980s, the fairly new Channel 4 in Britain wanted to show music videos like MTV, but they didn’t want to copy the music video channel. Maybe they could come up with something different from the veejays who hosted MTV. Maybe graphics? Maybe a boring guy in a suit? Maybe an artificial intelligence rendered in computer graphics? Ha! It was a ridiculous idea, because in 1985 computer graphics couldn’t render a character. But what a great idea! The fact that it was impossible didn’t stop Max Headroom’s creators. They went ahead with a show called 20 Minutes Into the Future, which became a phenomenon. Max Headroom, the character, was a computer-generated avatar of a television personality who was in coma, glitches and all, but to get that character to TV, the computer graphics were faked by makeup and lighting.
Matt Frewer ACTOR For a time it was... I won't say it was infuriating, but it was frustrating — you wanted to go, "That's me, that's me, it’s not a computer-generated man." But of course they wanted to swear me to secrecy because otherwise anybody could make a computer-generated man if they knew that it was as easy as putting on all this make-up.
John Humphreys PROSTHETICS DESIGNER I have to say, it was being presented as computer graphics, and I had people even say to me, who worked in some big companies in Britain, "Oh, you'll soon be out of a job, look at this, it's all done with computer graphics!"
Peter Litten VISUAL EFFECTS ARTIST It was very galling. It won a BAFTA for graphics, and of course other than a few lines, there weren't any graphics. A few wobbly lines. And they refused to enter us in the make-up [category] because they didn't want anyone to know it was make-up.
I'm trying to remember how long the make-up took. Probably four hours of make-up? When you get into the swing of it, we probably got it down to three hours or so in the end.
By 1987, the show had crossed the pond and was now called Max Headroom. Although American actor Matt Frewer still played the title character as he did for Channel 4, the show was so Americanized that viewers had no clue as to its British roots -although they already knew the character from his ads for Coke and other products. The show was revolutionary, not only in its style, but in that it was quite critical of the television industry. Max Headroom burned bright and quickly, and left a mark on the history of TV. Read a fascinating oral history of the concept and character by its creators and producers, at The Verge. -via Digg
Furious 7 opens nationwide today. The seventh installment of the Fast & Furious franchise, these movies have a dedicated fan base, but even true fans can learn something new about it. For example, let’s go back to the very first movie, The Fast and the Furious (2001).
1. THE STORY WAS INSPIRED BY A MAGAZINE ARTICLE.
The May 1998 issue of Vibe magazine featured an article by Ken Li titled “Racer X” that chronicled illegal street racing in Queens, New York. Producers optioned the article for a movie adaptation that became The Fast and the Furious.
2. THE FILM'S TITLE WAS PURCHASED FROM LEGENDARY B-MOVIE DIRECTOR ROGER CORMAN.
Throughout filming, the movie had the working title Redline—which in racing refers to the maximum rate of speed a car can go—before the filmmakers settled on calling it The Fast & The Furious. There was only one problem: That title was owned by B-movie director Roger Corman, who produced a racing movie of the same name in 1955. Instead of having the filmmakers pay for the rights to the name, Corman traded the movie title for some stock footage owned by Universal Studios.
3. THE MOVIE HAS GARNERED SOME FAMILIAR AND UNFAMILIAR COMPARISONS.
The filmmakers of The Fast and the Furious pitched the movie as West Side Story with cars instead of singing, and also incorporated themes and situations found in movies like the surfing action classic Point Break and the undercover crime drama Donnie Brasco.
Director Rob Cohen modeled the film’s third act chases through the Los Angeles hills on similar San Francisco-set scenes in the 1968 car-chase classic Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen. Cohen loved the movie so much that he cast actor Paul Walker because he thought he resembled Bullitt’s lead actor.
The trivia list at mental floss is actually a set of lists, with all six previous movies represented. The films aren’t in chronological order, so new viewers will find it helpful to understand the characters if you’re watching them all for the first time or heading out to see Furious 7 today.
The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington unveiled, with great fanfare, the invisible jet plane that Wonder Woman travels in. They also made a video for this auspicious occasion. The display only lasted one day -April Fools Day. However, we still have the video, and a blog post about the short but important exhibition. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Biola University professor Matthew Weathers (previously at Neatorama) has become famous for his classroom antics. For April Fool’s Day, he had some fun with his computer protection. In fact, he ended up in a fight with himself! -via Tastefully Offensive
