YouTube Goodness

[EricJ]

The (slightly longer) original version on DisneyMoviesAnywhere is funnier, but:
Holiday greetings from Disney classics:

[Ben]

For a moment there I was shocked that they would have used a clip from Bad Santa...!

[GeorgeC]

There are a lot of in-jokes in this film and appearances by members from the original Star Trek cast and Voyager...

NOTE: A preview for one of those indie/fan projects precedes the actual film.
I'm split on the quality of the fan series --- great effects, horrible acting ---, myself, but it's kind of neat to see people you know in these films...

The comedy when it's done is pretty good... It's the dramatic stuff that stinks!

[Dan]

This video was just posted the other day and looks to be going viral.

It's what happens when you attempt to challenge Gaston at any Disney park to a push-up contest.

[Ben]

Classic.

[GeorgeC]

This is a seriously cool toy! I can't believe this thing exists but obviously it does!

(Warning: Yeah, we could all be being punked by this but I think it's legit.)

It's a floating Iron Man action figure... No strings or repulsor jets! Let the video explain how it works.





P.S. -- I could have linked up to a product preview of this but the original video was in Chinese. This video is by a British(?) guy who owns one of these figures.

They're apparently making a limited run of them again or had them out already and sold out(?). I dunno... I only caught this because I was looking at a game import shop that very often carries anime tie-in goods and neat electronic stuff from time to time. Apparently, they're doing pre-orders for a March ship date.

[Randall]

Nifty. That beats my candy bowl-holding Iron Man all to heck.

I still think he's cute, though

[EricJ]

This video was just posted the other day and looks to be going viral.
It's what happens when you attempt to challenge Gaston at any Disney park to a push-up contest.

(Everybody else always seems to be at Belle's Village when Gaston shows up--Went during September, and no sign of him. )

Still, as evergreen favorite classic viral Disney-park hits go, it's just as bad as what happens if you ask the Wicked Queen whether she's still jealous of Snow White:

(Check out the toddler crying at the beginning, and "Oh, stop that", as she passes by. )

[droosan]

This should make Dusterian's day: A 20-minute animated adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Its thousands of individual frames were painstakingly hand-painted in oil on glass by russian animator Aleksandr Petrov (with assistance from his son Dimitri) between 1997-1999 ..

[Ben]

Insane coinkidink...after the past few years of being coupes up in boxes while we've been working on building our own house, I've just got our "library" room complete and am sorting all my discs into their "right" places. Not only did I *just* pull out my DVD of this but I also found my old DigiBeta copy of the EPK done for it. Terrific, and somewhat similar to what Daisy Jacobs has done in her Academy nominated film this year.

[GeorgeC]

Now this is how they should be doing CG effect updates of classic TV shows for HD!

(I doubt Universal will fund a CG update of the original Galactica... Right now, they only plan a set release like what was released in France... Same level of quality, probably most of the same extras. AN IGN article claims there are two Galactica sets coming out on Blu ray... one in the original TV aspect ratio (4:3), and the other in 16:9 HD aspect ratio.)

Way better handling than what was done for the original Star Wars series... The Trek:TOS HD CG updates I was split on... some of those were effective, some of them not so much...

This is very effective. It enhances the original image without detracting from it and adding a lot of unnecessary frills (which is what killed Star Wars:SE for me in addition to all the lousy, reclaimed footage that was cut out of the theatrical releases for very good reasons).

[Ben]

So I take it that was a fan effort? Pretty good, though it did look like CG. And like the ST:OST updates I don't really see the point because then you cut back to dated sets, costumes and acting styles. I prefer to see the originals, as made, looking the best they can.

Speaking of which...wow...Lloyd Bridges! I haven't really thought about him since over Mucho Grande!

[Ben]

Over Mucho Grande?

[Ben]

No, I'll never get over Mucho Grande...





Okay, I know it wasn't really his line, but his delivery in that BSG clip just reminded me how great he was in the Airplane and Hot Shots movies, and that one gets me every time.

So what if it wasn't his line!? Geez...looks like I picked the wrong day to give up amphetamines!

[GeorgeC]

So I take it that was a fan effort? Pretty good, though it did look like CG. And like the ST:OST updates I don't really see the point because then you cut back to dated sets, costumes and acting styles. I prefer to see the originals, as made, looking the best they can.

Speaking of which...wow...Lloyd Bridges! I haven't really thought about him since over Mucho Grande!

It's a pitch by a professional CG artist by the name of Adam "Mojo" Lebowitz.
Droosan might know the guy since he's been involved in a lot of different projects...

I thought it looked darn good. It was dynamic but fit into the original footage just fine. It was a lot less jarring to me than anything Lucas did with the original Star Wars trilogy... Now that was a bad CG upgrade!

FYI, Lloyd Bridges was one of the more popular guest-stars on Galactica. There were plans to bring his character back in a later episode or two but those plans were shelved when the series was cancelled after one season on ABC. Bridges was also one of the original candidates Gene Roddenberry had in mind for Captain of the Enterprise in the original Star Trek. He turned down the role because of the bad reputation science fiction film and TV had in the late 1950s/early 1960s.


As far as the effect shots in Star Trek:TOS go, I think the decision to do new CG effects for the HD re-releases was a good one. I have less of a problem with 'dated sets and costumes' than I do with the same stock footage of the Enterprise model reused for the millionth time by the twentieth episode of the series! That's been a huge problem for most sci-fi series in the US for as long as I can remember. Even after CG became commonplace in the later 1990s, there was still far too much stock footage being used instead of creating new shots. There isn't a single classic sci-fi series from the late 1970s and early 1980s that doesn't have issues with overused stock footage. It made all the battles and dogfights in the original Galactica look the same! Same thing happened with Buck Rogers, too...

One of the issues with the useage of stock footage in the original Star Trek series was the fact that the Enterprise models themselves were altered tremendously between the two pilots and the production episodes. You see this all the time in the original opening sequence of the series. The warp nacelles change styles abruptly from the original red-capped, gold spiked versions to the series production standard that had the blinking lights and spinning spheres on the front of the nacelles. There were other differences, too... The biggest one that pops up to me was the rear shot of the second pilot version of the Enterprise with the grille marks on the rear of the nacelles. The production version Enterprise had spherical caps on the end of the nacelles. Those are nitpicky things but they pop up when you've seen the show enough times!

When they redid the opening shots of Star Trek in CG for the HD remake, they standardized the Enterprise model and made the effects shots consistent for the first time! When they redid the opening sequences for the pilot episodes, they made sure that the Enterprise was accurately modelled... That was dependent on the paint schemes between the pilot episodes. There weren't as many differences between the pilot versions of the Enterprise as there were between the pilot episodes and production series versions of the Ship.

(Okay, I DO have one major issue with the redone opening CG sequence of Trek. When the CG Enterprise whooshes by onscreen, it doesn't seem to have the same speed/dramatic effect that the original model effect shot did. The original fly-by shot was done with a much smaller, less detailed model of the Enterpise... maybe a half-foot or less in length! It's funny how the hand-crafted shots are still sometimes better in certain aspects than the CG work that's done today. There are some things [like speed/warp effect] that still come off better with physical versus virtual models.)

For many years, people who tried to accurately model the Enterprise had to make due with effects shots of effectively three versions of the same ship! I'm sure there were people who built models that had details from all three versions in them by mistake because of the horribly reused stock footage. The last new production versions of the model kits finally had accurate parts and decals for all three versions of the original Enterprise after 40-some years of the TV series!

(Even the Smithsonian goofed up on the first restoration of the eleven-foot Enterprise model because of the different versions of the model that showed up in the TOS footage... The new deflector dish and nacelle cap parts made for that mid-1970s restoration were inaccurate. The inaccuracies in the parts weren't fixed until the early 1990s restoration which introduced a whole new set of inaccuracies to that historic model. The electronics and lighting on the model were fixed but the painting was heavily overdone according to most modellers and the base color paint used might not have been correct, either... The only part of the model that's left 'original' paint-wise is the upper half of the saucer that also has the original pencil stenciling on it intact.)

(It's difficult to believe this now but the 11-foot Enterprise model hanging in the National Air and Space Museum giftshop in Washington, DC is now over fifty-years old! It needs another restoration from the latest pictures I've seen of it. Some of the decals are worn now and there are cracks on the upper saucer section...)