“Information supplied by Reddy’s owners indicates the character was created by Ashton B. Collins Sr., general commercial manager of Alabama Power Company. At the time (middle 1920s), electricity wasn’t exactly brand-new technology, but a lot of people could still remember when most homes weren’t wired, and not everyone was entirely comfortable with the stuff. Collins, just home from an industry convention where a big problem under discussion was how to sell electricity as a servant of mankind, was gazing out the window into a thunderstorm, wondering what an electric servant might look like. All of a sudden, two lightning bolts merged and struck the ground as one. For a split-second, they reminded Collins of a human figure, and at that moment Reddy Kilowatt sprang from his brow full-grown, like Athena from that of Zeus.”
“A while back, there was a debate about why women don’t get no respect in comics, like there always is, and a cartoonist by the name of Anne Cleveland came up. Basic summary: Anne Cleveland was a little-known cartoonist working from the 1930s to 1960s, starting with a series of cartoons about campus life drawn while she was a student at Vassar College (class of ’37). She often worked with a collaborator, Jean Anderson, although it’s unclear how they split the duties. It seems likely that Anderson was a writer only, but I have no confirmation on that.
These cartoons are all scanned from the booklet Everything Correlates, first published in 1946. I also have another booklet, Vassar: A Second Glance. The booklets contain no information whatsoever about the cartoons or their creators, so I don’t know if these were drawn while Cleveland and Anderson were students, or, if not, when, where, and why they first appeared. Cleveland also painted murals on the walls of the Vassar Alumnae House pub which were still there when I was a student, but I don’t have pictures of those.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 7, 2007 in Animation
To celebrate the upcoming Chinese New Year (the Year of the Fire Boar, Oink! Oink!) on February 18th, Jetix (the comedy/action/adventure programming block on Toon Disney) will be running a mini-marathon of the animated series Jackie Chan Adventures. Playing up the theme of a Chinese New Year’s celebration each episode will feature a different zodiac animal from previous years in the Chinese calendar, ending up with the boar for 2007.
By the way Jetix looks like it’s worth checking out, they have Power Rangers, Pucca, and Digimon as part of their programming lineup. And old school fanboys take note: They’re also running * gasp * Dungeons and Dragons! In addition they also have a new show called Super Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! which features some nice anime and Ultraman inspired character design work (t-shirt and toy worthy to say the least).
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 7, 2007 in Star Trek
Above are new images from the remastered version of the classic Star trek episode Doomsday Machine (from StarTrek.com and found via TrekMovie.com).
I’d have to say that just seeing the above images brings back many a happy childhood memory of watching the show in glorious black and white on re-runs on WPIX in the 70s.
Two things made that episode great: The first was the powerful soundtrack by Alexander Courage. The music gave the planet eater a voice, and in many ways the soundtrack of Jaws owed quite a bit to Mr. Courage.
It’s also funny because in many ways the planet eater is very much like Moby Dick character haunting poor Commodore Decker. Which brings me to the second thing that I love about that episode: William Windom may be the only man in the entire history of Star Trek who could out-over-act William Shatner!
Of course the best thing about this episode as a kid was that you could always buy your 2nd AMT Enterprise, change the name to U.S.S. Constellation and blow it up with firecrackers to give it that authentic “planet eater munch” treatment. Nope can’t get any cooler than that…
“Jim Henson Co. is launching development on a trio of literary properties — “The Boggart” by novelist Susan Cooper (“The Dark is Rising”), “The Doubtful Guest” by Edward Gorey and the fantasy adventure trilogy “Monster Blood Tattoo” by D.M. Cornish. Henson’s Creature Shop, the company’s visual and f/x division, will bring work on the characters in each film using a blend of CGI and animatronics.”
As stated in the trailer…”From two of the six guys who wrote Scary Movie.” Epic movie is scripted by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer who bring their ‘A’ game to a script that is filled with tongue in cheek humor mixed with Slapstick and over the top gags.
The main setting for the film is the Chornicles of Narnia but the duo takes shots at The Davinci Code, Snakes on a Plane, Nacho Libre, X-Men and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Much like Scary Movie Friedberg and Selzter take the basic plot points of the films and twists them into some gems of comic genius.
Kal Penn (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle), Adam Campbell (Date Movie), Faune A. Chambers (White Chicks) and Jayma Mays (TV spots on Heroes, House MD and Studio 60) play the four youngsters who end up in Gnarnia (changed to prevent the lawsuits says Mr Tumnus.) To get there we see Lucy (Jayma Mays) bumble her way through the Divinci Code, Edward (Kal Penn)suffer through his life in the Mexican orphanage where he dreams of being a Luchadore, Susan encounter Snakes on a Plane with a pretty damn good Samuel Jackson impersonator and Peter being miserable at Mutant High.
“The Hello Kitty USB-powered keyboard cleaner gets all the juice it needs from one of your lonely USB ports, and features two separate cleaning heads to get all the nitty gritty out from between your QWERTY keys. Furthermore, the cleaning utensil resides nicely on the back (photo after the jump) of an included Hello Kitty figurine when it’s not surveying the deep, dark crevice between the left and right bracket keys, but we highly doubt the bristles are machine washable. Per usual, we’ve no idea how much toy sellers plan on charging for this somewhat useful (but entirely de trop) keyboard sweeper, but we’re confident that the hardcore fans out there will find a way as they always do.”
“Dino De Laurentiis confirmed to Variety that he is planning a remake of the classic campy 1960s space opera Barbarella, which Peter Weber (Hannibal Rising) will direct. De Laurentiis describes the new film as “female James Bond in outer space.” The movie isn’t green-lighted yet. The original 1968 Barbarella, directed by Roger Vadim and based on a French comic book, made a star of a young Jane Fonda. ”
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 4, 2007 in Comic Books
OK, so everyone is so sick of all the Civil War & 52 stuff. Don’t get me wrong I like both of them for different reasons I’ll start with 52 from DC. For those of you who don’t know here’s a quick background on 52 the huge mini-series. Years ago there was a great story called “Crisis on Infinite Earth’s” since at the time DC was still doing Silver Age & Modern stories together. They explained this by having multiple earth’s such as earth x, earth prime, earth 2, etc. Heroes from the JSA were in the golden age earth where world war 2 never seemed to end, but the JLA were on the modern day earth but they used to cross the borders of time and space all the time to do stories.
The problem was having all these earths we had all different versions of the heroes we had our Superman, we had classic Superman who was older with gray hair around the temples…well you get the point. So DC does this incredible story which blew up the whole universe and re-wrote history so only one of each hero or so we thought. The one glitch was that classic Superman & Lois Lane along with Superboy & Alexander Luthor all of different worlds, they were sealed in a pocket universe. Well Superboy being a little nuts now wanted out and talked Superman into helping bust out of their pocket prison, see at this point his Lois is very sick and close to the end of her life.
Well with Alexanders help they make a mad scientist machine that will bring back their earth which they think will fix everything…WRONG! Well I don’t want to tell everything go buy the story if you didn’t read it already. Well at the end of “Infinite Crisis” powers get jumbled heroes go missing such as Superman and others, well 52 is the story of the missing year. See now the title makes sense, huh? 52 is still going on but all the other titles never stopped they just jumped a year into the future. So 52 is a mini series that comes out every single week to try to explain what happened in that missing year.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 4, 2007 in Japanese TV
This new episode of “Tensai! Shimura Dobutsu-en” (aka Genius! Shimura Zoo) features baby Pandas yet again! Sadly Becky isn’t a host on this show, but it’s still ever-so-cute to watch:
“A man dressed as Chewbacca was arrested after police said the street performer head-butted a tour guide operator in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Frederick Evan Young, 44, of Los Angeles, California, was booked Thursday for investigation of misdemeanor battery, police Lt. Paul Vernon said. Police said the 6-foot-4 street performer was seen arguing Thursday afternoon with a tour guide who had expressed concern that the Star Wars wookie impersonator was “harassing and touching tourists” in violation of city law.”
…my favorite quote from this story was “You can’t tell this wookie what to do!” You have to admire an actor that stays in character!
I was just reading at ToyNews International that NECA toys has a released a new box set of Reservoir Dogs figurines, and of course being a Tarantino fan the story caught my fanboy eye right away! However went I went to take a look at the photo of the dogs (Mr. Brown, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Pink, Mr. Orange and Mr. White! ) I found myself being a bit let down. They seem to look so lifeless, yes they used the iconic poses from the opening titles of the film but alas the dogs seemed be stiff looking.
But then I realized why: Reservoir Dogs isn’t a comic book film with characters decked out in a caped costume, it’s classic film noir and more about what the characters do than how they look. If you think back to the film you think of the ear cutting scene or someone being thrown in the trunk of a car – or even character actors like Chris Penn as ‘Nice Guy Eddie’ or my favorite scene stealer Lawrence Tierney as Joe.
So I think NECA would have ben better off recreating scenes from the film even if they were a bit more silly looking. To me it’s about how the toy captures the spirit of a film, a classic example would be the Corgi car based on the James Bond film that had an ejector seat. The toy allows a child (or someone who is a child at heart) to relive what they enjoyed about the film.
But of course if your a true collector fanboy you have to own it because you are also a compleatest at heart (compleatest: the fanboy version of obsessive compulsive disorder) so if you must own everything Reservoir Dogs you can order the mini-statues from CornerStoreComics.com.
The funny thing is that in all of the coverage of the new giant Gundam robot I just assumed that you purchased it pre-assembled. But I guess half of the fun of owning a giant robot is knowing that you built it yourself!
Steamboat Willy has gone streampunk! Disney has licensed several of their characters for use as USB Flash Memory Drives. Buffalo Technology will put these devices on sale next month, but only as a limited edition. They also have Winnie the Pooh too!
“A day after the announcement that DreamWorks Animation and Aardman Studios would be ending their partnership, Aardman spokesperson Aaron Sheriff has stated that, “There is a project on the table right now” for Wallace and Gromit, the studio’s most famous stars. The characters will be done in Aardman’s trademark claymation rather than the CGI used for the recent Flushed Away.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 1, 2007 in Comic Books
The website for legendary comic book artist Will Eisener has been relaunched, and I have to say that it’s well worth a visit if you’re a true fanboy like myself! Eisner created the classic series ‘The Spirit’ which is being turned into both a new comic book series and movie. The revamped website includes a gallery and ‘the Eisnerpedia’ which is a wiki on all things Will Eisner.
