The December issue of HyperHobby magazine has a special treat for old school anime fanboys: A special supplement cover that features Cyborg 009! For those of you who may not know it Cyborg 009 started as a manga in 1964, there was an anime film in 1966 and a series in 1968 but the 1979 anime series really put the show on the map. Here’s the black-and-white intro from the first series, which still hold up pretty well: Read more…
I was blown away to see that MTV 80s icons Blondie, Joan Jett and Cyndi Lauper have all been turned into Barbie dolls! Of course back in the 80s the animated TV series Jem gave Barbie a run for her money — while Barbie struck back with Barbie and the Rockers it was never quite cool as Jem. Too bad the licensing folks Mattel didn’t approach these 80s rock legends a bit sooner! Here’s Debbie Harry as Blondie doll which comes out in December: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Oct 31, 2009 in Videogames
LEGO Rock Band comes out next week (November 3rd) and this trailer looks like a great deal of fun. Part of me would love to see a TV show based on this opening title sequence, maybe not an entire Pixar film but a seven minute short with the right director would be amazing. Here’s a “Final Countdown” trailer from last week: Read more…
In the 70s Aurora had an amazing line of horror themed model kits which I haven’t looked at since the Carter administration. Well the vintage Aurora kits are back! And man I forgot how silly they were: When you’re a kid everything seems so much more serious — but after looking at this cover art for the Monster Scenes Dr. Deadly Model Kit I couldn’t stop laughing. Yeah you’ve got the poorly attired doctor doing something, well what is he doing? Well it must be evil, but the best part is the added touch of his little pet to the right. That bunny looks completely silly, it reminds me of the Monty Python killer rabbit sketch: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Oct 30, 2009 in Comic Books
After months of looking at preview art I’m happy to see that The Marvelous Land Of Oz #1 will be hitting comic book shops next Wednesday. It was an act of bravery for Marvel to not only tackle such a well known property — but to bring in illustrator Skottie Young to do it. What I also love is that Marvel isn’t doing the old bait-and-switch where Skottie does an amazing cover and the insides of the book are done by a lesser talent in a hurry. The inside of Oz is 100% Skottie and I like what I’m seeing here: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Oct 29, 2009 in Science
Shown above is the breath taking footage of NASA’s Ares I-X test rocket from yesterday. As usual NASA kicked ass with the six minute flight of a next generation space craft. Sadly for NASA everything went well, so now just a day later nobody in the mainstream media even mentions this story which got very little mention yesterday. Had the rocket blown up the chattering classes would be hard at work on this story this minute and for weeks to come — and this is a symptom of a larger problem. The mainstream media isn’t covering the real story which is that NASA is dying from negligence. Read more…
The internet as we know it today started began with ARPANET which was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Forty years ago on the evening of October 29, 1969 the first data travelled between two nodes of this new computer network. The idea of two computer talking to each other was quite cutting edge in that era. This video shows an interview with Charley Kline and Bill Duvall who were just two young programmers playing with tech back in the day! Read more…
This beautiful video was done by the London office of Google — it does an amazing job of showing off the last 11 years of Google. Two things are striking to me about this video: First the quality of the animation is great, I don’t associate beautiful art direction with the stripped down geeky look of Google. Second it’s shocking to see that Google really has defined the net for the last few years, things they only introduced a few years ago like maps are found everywhere. Although you look at other aspects of the company like Blogger and see that they don’t always hit the mark over time. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Oct 29, 2009 in Comic Books
For the October 29th release of Weekly Shonen Champion the publication features a nice illustration of Tezuka standing next to his manga creation Black Jack. This is the 80th year of Tezuka’s birth (born on November 3, 1928) which nicely fit in with the 40th anniversary of the magazine: Read more…
If you came of age reading science fiction in the late 60s, 70s or 80s you may have come across the illustrations of Don Ivan Punchatz who sadly just passed away. Punchatz’s illustrations were best known in the fantasy and science fiction genres and graced quite a few paperbacks, although his work covered other genres and he even did a cover or two for Time magazine (which is as good as you can get). Videogame fanboys however might best know him for his package art for the original Doom game (shown above), although his paperback cover art for the Isaac Asimov Foundation triology was my first encounter with his artwork: Read more…
Shown above is the breath taking footage of NASA’s Ares I-X test rocket from yesterday. As usual NASA kicked ass with the six minute flight of a next generation space craft. Sadly for NASA everything went well, so now just a day later nobody in the mainstream media even mentions this story which got very little mention yesterday. Had the rocket blown up the chattering classes would be hard at work on this story this minute and for weeks to come — and this is a symptom of a larger problem. The mainstream media isn’t covering the real story which is that NASA is dying from negligence. 
The internet as we know it today started began with 
