We're constantly hearing about how so-and-so auditioned for a role and got it, or how whats-their-name turned down a chance to play a character who became a pop culture institution, but it's rare to hear about failed auditions.
Which is why this somewhat erroneously titled video by Looper is pretty cool- it includes footage from failed auditions including Seth Rogen's audition to play Dwight on The Office and young Scarlett Johansson's audition to play Judy Shepherd in Jumanji.
It also has a few auditions that would be considered oddities more than failures, like the time Tom Selleck tried out for the role of Indiana Jones, a role he would have gotten had he not been stuck in paradise filming Magnum, p.i.
Creating costumes based on artwork from the tabletop game series Warhammer 40k can be mighty hard, especially when you choose to cosplay a character with intricately detailed armor rather than yet another Space Marine.
Ildiko made the armor and accessories out of Worbla thermoplastic, but surprisingly she says the hardest props to make were the books:
“One of them is hand-written (more than 300 pages) and the other one is printed. It took months to finish these hand-bound books,” she said, “The weapons were also an interesting challenge to make, as they really ‘work.’ The plasma gun gives shooting sound and light as I pull the trigger, the power mace has breathing lights. I love building electric circuits and these were the most complicated systems I have built so far.”
I used to think religious zealots and talk show hosts trying to make a name for themselves were the only people who thought Dungeons & Dragons was a threat to America, but back in 1983 the FBI believed D&D was bad news too.
But their reason didn't involve Satan or the corruption of souls- it involved cocaine trafficking, and they even had the game's creator Gary Gygax on their list as a possible suspect:
The first, dated 1983, has to do with “significant cocaine traffickers in the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin area.” The birthplace of D&D was, and still is, a sleepy lakeside town just over the Illinois border. An FBI agent rooting around there for drug traffickers seems pretty far fetched, but the report appears to be genuine.
D&D co-creator Gary Gygax is named in the document, but whatever the FBI’s interest in him was has been redacted. It ended with a note that the FBI would proceed to “review corporate records for TSR, Inc. in effort to identify corporate officers and attorney of record.” A second document, dated March 1984, seems to show the FBI doing its due diligence to make sure that TSR was a publishing company and not a front for cocaine trafficking.
Twelve years later TSR, the makers of D&D, were the focus of another FBI investigation, but this time Dungeons & Dragons players were investigated in connection with The Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski:
The document also mentions an FBI visit with a gaming group in Fresno, California. Members of the group were shown pictures of one of the Unabomber’s explosive devices and asked if they recognized an individual from a “composite drawing.” This is likely the iconic image of the man in a hood circulated for more than a decade prior to Kaczynski’s arrest.
The final document, the most heavily redacted of the bunch, is dated April 1995. It seems to focus on an interview with a single individual at TSR, and centers around that person’s relationship with another individual in their gaming group.
“Many of the members of the group became paranoid,” the agent writes, “and began pointing fingers at one another. [The interview subject] indicated that he believes this is based on the suspicious nature of the individuals that were in the gaming group [and] indicated that he is quite sure that some of the members of the group fantasized about the possibility that maybe one of their members was responsible for the bombings.”
Whenever SpongeBob characters are shown "in real life" in the show or movies, they always appear as their real-life counterparts, be it a kitchen sponge, a starfish, a squirrel or a squid. But what if the characters were real with the same physical characteristics as the cartoons?
Well that's what artist Miguel Vasquez dreamed up in his incredible 3D creations. As you can see -the result is absolutely horrifying.
Big Bird is a character who helps connect the puppets and humans who live on Sesame Street, so he's human enough to hang out with people on the street all day and puppet enough to be happy about street life.
But he's also a very advanced puppet, one which legendary puppeteer Caroll Spinney operates like a second skin as he becomes one with Big Bird.
This clip from I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story shows how Caroll operates the revolutionary 8-foot-tall Big Bird puppet/costume, and how being Big Bird can cause long-term injuries to a puppeteer's arm.
Underwater Panther is an animated short created by French artist Tony Darsonval which is based on Native American mythology, and if that all seems confusing don't worry- it'll all make sense after you watch the short.
For the underwater panther in question is a mythological water being the Algonquins thought of as "the most powerful underwater being", the French dialog has English subtitles, and the 2D art is very appealing.
Plus there's a battle between the Underwater Panther and the Thunderbird that looks like something straight out of Final Fantasy or Pokemon, so dive in and enjoy!
Crash Bandicoot got just as much attention for the character designs as it did for the groundbreaking gameplay, and since both elements of the game were a cut above the rest Crash quickly became a big hit.
But the game's developers had no idea their fun indie platformer would come to redefine the genre, nor did they have a clue that Crash would become the unofficial mascot of the Sony PlayStation.
They just knew that they'd been hired to create a game for the Sony PlayStation by Universal Picture's new video game division, Universal Interactive, but they had to move to Hollywood to get started.
Polygon's Blake Hester spoke with Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin, the creators of Crash Bandicoot and founders of game studio Naughty Dog, to discuss the birth of a bandicoot and the making of an epic game studio.
During this interview we learn, among other things, how the duo picked up and moved from Boston to Hollywood to make Crash Bandicoot:
We didn't have everything we owned in that car, but we had everything we owned either in that car or the truck that was following us. We were moving from Boston, where Andy was [working on] his master's degree at MIT, to Hollywood. And we didn't know Hollywood because neither of us had [been] there, but we were going to work on Universal's backlot, so a lot of what we were talking about is what Hollywood would do to video games. ...
[We] drove it straight. I've done it three times in my life. It's long. It's about 36 to 40 hours, depending on how you drive. So we probably slept once, maybe, in there.
How their time on the Universal backlot influenced their games:
There [were] celebrities everywhere. I have a thousand anecdotes of having some celebrity walk by us or something. This is one thing about it: Part of our deal with Universal was that we got to bring our dog on the lot, and there was no other dog allowed on the lot. The gentleman that brought us to Universal, Skip Paul, still one of my best friends, managed to get us a badge. So I had a dog on the backlot of Universal. She was an amazing dog; my daughter is now named after this dog. [She] was huge. She cornered Sylvester Stallone in an elevator. ...
We were next to "The Suzanne Somers Show," so Suzanne Somers gave me a signed Thighmaster, which was stolen by somebody because it was such a cool thing to have. It's crazy times. The stories, they're just insane from back then.
And how it felt to make their epic debut at E3 1996:
[Twisted Metal] was supposed to be the front of [Sony's] booth for the 1996 E3. It would have been Twisted Metal, and they booted Twisted Metal to put Crash there, which they had just signed weeks before E3. And it was Crash, and right next to Crash, it was Mario. From that point on, it was legendary. There are photos online of Miyamoto playing Crash Bandicoot and that was, like, the moment, right?
I was standing right behind him for the whole time. It was like an hour and a half as [he and Mark Cerny] were chatting in Japanese. ... Yeah, it was definitely a cool moment, because he was one of our icons.
Since Disney is doing standalone movies in years between episodes of the main Star Wars saga, fans are itching for one about Obi-Wan Kenobi. After all, he spent almost twenty years on Tatooine waiting for young Luke to grow up enough to take up arms against the Sith. Tom Lathom-Sharp (SirJediPanda) pictures it as a spaghetti Western in a poster he designed for Kenobi, directed by George Miller and starring Ewan McGregor.
It makes plenty of sense. Obi-Wan would have started out his exile on the inhospitable desert planet in a fury of frustration over the destruction of the Jedi order. We can picture him drinking his sorrows away in a wretched hive of scum and villainy until some injustice causes him to lash out in anger with his lightsaber and Jedi training. Since George Miller directs, there would be a manic chase scene across the desert or two. There could even be a romance somewhere. Obi-Wan could have had all manner of adventures before settling down to become the strange old hermit Ben Kenobi. If you want to see who else stars in this film, you can see the poster full-size at imgur.
I want to watch this movie now. Alas, we don't yet know what standalone movie will come after the Han Solo prequel in 2018. -via Boing Boing
You'd think an Oscar-winning animated short starring Tom Waits would be well known in certain circles, especially when it's entitled "Tom Waits For No One".
But it appears this 1979 short by The Lyon Lamb Company was hiding out on the edge of the pop culture infosphere waiting to reappear and blow our minds.
Here's a little background on this obscure animated short:
“Tom Waits for No One” is the title of an absolutely amazing animated short that was made in 1979 by the Lyon Lamb company, the Oscar-winning technological innovators behind the Lyon Lamb Video Animation System which allowed animators to see immediate pencil tests of something without having to shoot it on film.
Through a series of lucky events (seeing Tom Waits in his memorable TV appearance on Fernwood 2Night, then a few weeks later noticing Waits’ name on the marquee of the Roxy nightclub after a screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind was sold out), John Lamb came to direct Waits in a rotoscoped animation for his song “The One That Got Away” to demonstrate their new device for the film industry.
Over thirteen hours of video was shot and edited down to 5,500 frames, which were then individually re-drawn and hand-painted onto celluloid acetate. What today would take a comparatively trivial amount of time then took the best in the business about six months of hard work.
adly, the impressive short had few outlets for people to see it, preceding MTV as it did by just a few years. The film remained in obscurity until it was uploaded to YouTube a few years back, and Lamb—who kept nearly all of the film’s elements safely stored away—started a Kickstarter to fund a remastering in modern day video resolution. There’s also a book, Tom Waits for No One: The Illustrated Scrapbook, that was published in 2014.
Guardians of the Galaxy fans have been super excited about the recently open ride over at Disney's California Adventure, but whether you have visited or not, you still should know about some of the amazing Easter eggs hidden in the line for the ride that are great for both Disney fans and Marvel fans alike. Many of these secrets are well hidden, but if you read this Travel and Leisure article, you'll at least know what to keep an eye out for.
The list has 25 Easter eggs, so you might not be able to remember them all, but it's still a great thing to read before your next trip to Anaheim.
You can learn a lot about a person by examining their childhood roots, because all the good and bad things that happened to us when we were kids have an impact on who we are and what we do for the rest of our lives.
Stanley Kubrick was a school misfit who had "few intellectual interests" as a child and claims he didn't read a book for pleasure until after graduating from high school.
But when he discovered photography around age thirteen his artistic mind began to flourish, and he set his mind on becoming a professional photographer- which eventually led to him becoming a visionary film director.
This video by The Solomon Society features a lost recording of Kubrick talking about his childhood, and how photography helped him move past his misfit phase.
This crazy strange game stars a sentient watermelon who tries to escape its fruity fate by hopping to freedom, which usually doesn't end well for the watermelon:
The music and sound design is ominous and your efforts are mostly futile, sort of like if you replaced the protagonist in one of Playdead’s game’s with a watermelon; Limbo but for sentient produce.
All you can do as the watermelon is hop, and roll where you will, but the input is finicky, leading to chaos. If you’re not hopping enough, you’ll get snagged on a branch or stuck in a gully, but spam the jump command too much and you’ll eventually explode.
In order to debut their game in style at the Melon Jam SpaceBackyard replaced the keyboard with an actual watermelon, forcing players to slap the fruit if they wanted to play. Ethan Gach of Kotaku spoke to the creators to find out how they turned a watermelon into a game controller:
“Just some days ago we tried to put up something from scratch with the components found at home,” they told me in an email. “Technically speaking, it’s a really simple Arduino custom circuit and code based on a vibration sensor attached to a 100% real watermelon.” The sensor then connects to the computer and inputs the jump command every time a player slaps it. The hardest part, they said, was choosing the right watermelon.
“That road test was very useful to understand how people interact with a watermelon and how long it lasts,” they said. I asked them why they went to all the trouble though.
“Why not! Slapping a watermelon is so fun!”
You can too can try living a short and thankless life as a watermelon over at the game’s itch.io page, and once Space Backyard releases their diagram and code, you can even play it using your very own watermelon.
In my experience robots aren't any fun to hang out with because they try too hard to please humans and they don't get any of my jokes, but robot friendship experiences may vary.
It's cool if you want to hang out with a robot, I definitely won't judge, but watch out for robots who drink beer- because the booze has fried their circuits, so they may go a little haywire. Such shocking behavior! (Comic via Poorly Drawn Lines)
Adventure Time takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, and yet the heroes Finn and Jake don't live like wastelanders- they live in a sweet Tree Fort with many of the amenities of a modern home.
They've got a BMO that plays movies and games, a full kitchen, a fireplace to keep the Fort warm when the Ice King puts a chill in the air, a really cool elevator and a few storage rooms for their treasure hoard.
But rather than me telling you all about Finn & Jake's awesome Tree Fort why don't you take a look at this amazing illustration by Max Degtyarev and check the whole place out for yourself!
Bad movies far outnumber the good, but to earn the title "worst film of all time" you've gotta really smut it up, leaving viewers feeling forever unclean by taking trash cinema to the bottom of the heap.
As far as I can tell The Lonely Lady isn't quite that bad, since it doesn't include gratuitous gore, racism, animal abuse or any of the other trashy elements filmmakers love to include to shock the audience.
But the film does include Pia Zadora as an aspiring screenwriter who gets literally and figuratively screwed by showbiz, and Ray Liotta appears as a rapist in one of his first roles.
According to Christian McLaughlin of Dangerous Minds The Lonely Lady is smutty enough to make audiences feel dirty after watching, but his grandma actually bought him a ticket to the movie back in '83 so how bad can it be?
Now, nearly 34 years after its initial release in theaters, The Lonely Lady is available on Blu-ray from Shout! Factory so you can decide for yourself whether it truly is "the worst film of all time".
But, in case you're still wondering what to expect, here's a taste:
8. Pia’s brilliant writer character is named “Jerilee Randall.” Jerilee Randall!
7. Jerilee’s attempt to get her indecently too-old, impotent and obscenely hairy-backed husband hard by cooing “Gently, gently”.
6. Instead of the luscious bi-sexy babes of Cinemax, the lesbos here are all repulsive predatory gargoyles, like the long-breasted bikini-clad matron in the hot tub who purrs the horrendously looped pick-up line “It’s wonderfully relaxing!”
5. The lesbian Italian movie star (who tricks Jerilee into a threesome with her toad of a husband) is cross-eyed, but her nipples point in different directions, too.
4. Post-threesome, Jerilee is so disgusted with herself she showers with her clothes on and promptly suffers a nervous breakdown.
3. The best nervous breakdown scene EVER, in which the keys of Jerilee’s typewriter become the faces of her tormentors, before rising from the keyboard into a swirl of mocking sound-bytes and cheesy shattering optical effects.
