In what I assume is a licensing loophole of some sort, NECA will be doing a line of Simpsons toys, but rather than giving us another set of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, we're getting Hef, Tom Hanks, James Brown, Yao Ming and Kid Rock.
From the press release:
Available to consumers in early 2014, the limited-edition boutique collection will feature diverse product roll-outs, highlighting the guest stars' animated likeness as depicted on The Simpsons. Additional celebrities showcased for the program will include other iconic music sensations, award-winning actors, actresses, sports heroes and more. New products will be introduced every two to three months, containing different groupings of guest stars, with limited quantities available at select pop-up shops and retailers worldwide.
Twenty-five figures will be released in total.
If I had to guess, I'd say that, like Minimates, this might be a partial end-run around likeness rights. In which case, the figure I most want from the deal is Clint Eastwood.
Who do you hope to see in the 25?
In semi-related content, here's a supercut of every Troy McClure movie title...
Lego movies get made every day by fans. But this one is actually coming to theaters, and you might say it's the Avengers of Lego Movies.
I'm guessing that with this being a WB movie, we'll only be seeing DC superhero minifigs and not Marvel, but who knows? If this truly does play like a Roger Rabbit of construction bricks, I think it'll prove that Lego can do anything.
Watch after the jump.
I get it when burlesque troops put on nerd-themed shows...most of the time. A dancer cosplays as your favorite comic-book character, and it can be a turn-on. Sexy Stormtroopers, heroes who peel of their spandex - I get it.
But not EVERY nerd obsession needs to get this treatment...
There'd be a good joke here if they'd done a Michael Jackson burlesque the previous week and this was a parody of it. But - and no offense to anybody who might have ever slept with Weird Al Yankovic - I don't think "Sexy Female Weird Al Cosplayer" is high on anybody's list of turn-ons.
I'm a little worried that if this succeeds, the next step is a Nerdist Podcast burlesque show, with Sexy Female Chris Hardwick, Jonah Ray and Matt Mira. Before you ask, I guarantee they've done shows that combine toplessness and robots before.
BONUS SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE: "Vanilla Ice Goes Amish" is an actual upcoming TV show. Which I found out about from the website Vanillaicerealestate.com.
I apologize in advance for this image:
What you are looking at, according to Chinese social media, is a set of hair-stockings ("Super sexy, summertime anti-pervert full-leg-of-hair stockings, essential for all young girls going out") designed to make women who wear them look like they have yeti-like legs, to deter predators (note the contrast with the smooth-skinned feet).
I only see one potential problem with this - the guys who have a fetish for ape-like hair on women are probably way more disturbing as human beings than the average dude who doesn't. But there are likely less of them.
Hint: it's something Axel Braun claimed his Superman movie has but Zack Snyder's doesn't. I genuinely wonder if that was the thinking behind it.
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Sorry it doesn't resemble these, but at least you don't suck like these Starbuck and Apollo knockoffs either, so you deserve better.
It actually looks too wide for a road, with its VTOL propellers. But on your own property it could be fun indeed, and unless you can capture a botanically minded extra-terrestrial using Reese's Pieces, there aren't any simpler ways to reliably levitate your two-wheeled conveyance.
Remember how great that first Ice Age trailer was? No, I don't mean just for the Vanilla Ice song, although much bowing is due for that, indeed (yes it is, and you know it). Skrat and the acorn was some classic cartoon zaniness...but mostly unrelated to the tale of a mammoth, a sabretooth and a sloth finding a human baby and carrying it home.
Disney's Frozen - as opposed to Adam Green's Frozen, in which people trapped on a ski-lift wait forever to exercise their only viable options - is a retelling of The Snow Queen, but you'd never know it from the teaser, which features some funny business between a reindeer and a snowman, whom I assume will be comic-relief characters.
The final film may end up a typical fairy tale...but the teaser ain't that. Check it out after the jump, and tell me that snow dude was not made in the image of the Mad Hatter.
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Lifeforce - Best known as the Tobe Hooper movie with naked space vampires and Patrick Stewart, and it's been so long since I've seen it that that's about all I remember. I also remember that if I had a dollar for every time I had the following conversation...
Me: "I want to rent Lifeforce."
Dad: 'What's Lifeforce?"
Me: (sigh) "The one with the space..."
Dad: "Oh, oh, the space vampires?"
Me: "Yes."
Dad: 'Why didn't you say so?"
...I could have bought a lot more toys that summer. Anyhow, this fully loaded disc features a restored transfer, new commentaries by Hooper and makeup effects designer Nick Maley, and featurettes including an interview with nude alien bloodsucker Mathilda May.
The Howling - A New Agey retreat turns out to be full of werewolves in this satirical Joe Dante flick which spawned a franchise nobody cares about because he didn't really stick with it. Includes a 1995 commentary with Joe Dante and several cast members, and a new one with original novel author Gary Brandner. Definitely worth a look, though you can take or leave the sequels.
American Mary - Touted as part of a new wave of original and ground-breaking horror movies, this overly hyped ode to body modification - that I really wanted to like - is likely to offend grandparents but make the actual body-mod crowd yawn. A gifted medical student learns how to make money on the side by performing amputations and radical plastic surgeries; when it turns out that all her professors are evil rapists, she uses her newfound skills in more illicit ways. Boringly shot and sadly predictable, it's nowhere near as transgressive as it imagines - directors Jen and Sylvia Soska, who call themselves the Twisted Twins and had an actual fight in Mortal Kombat costumes at Fantastic Fest, need to worry more about their craft and less about their image, because there's the germ of a good idea here.
Things to Come - Wonderful 1936 sci-fi classic written by H.G. Wells that basically predicted World War II, but imagined that it would last around a century, after which we would enter a golden age of technology that would emanate from Iraq, of all places. His prognostication skills may have been a little off, but for its day this classic blockbuster was the equivalent of a modern Roland Emmerich flick but with a better screenplay.
Safety Last - You know every movie ever that has characters hanging from an elevated clock tower? This is the Harold Lloyd silent comedy they're all stealing from. Better yet, he was essentially doing all the stunts for real.
Jack the Giant Slayer - Sadly, not a good movie. Easily Bryan Singer's worst, but he may have taken it on just to do a test run for Sentinels.
Those are my picks in this week's Blu-ray crop. What are yours?
On May 7th of this year, Warner Bros. announced that they had acquired the rights to make a new Dungeons & Dragons film. Initially, there were minor cheers throughout D&D fandom. Warner's claim hinted that they were going to make a feature film, and this was a significant step up from the past two made-for-TV films that had been broadcast on SyFy. It wasn't until people read deeper into the Deadline.com article that the collective groan of D&D fans could be heard across the multiverse.
The article was filled with conceptual landmines that set off the "it's going to suck" sensors of RPGers everywhere. Phrases like "the film will be produced by... producer Roy Lee and Courtney Solomon...[who] directed a 2000 Dungeons & Dragons feature," and "The studio...will use a script by Wrath Of The Titans and Red Riding Hood scribe...David Leslie Johnson. That script, Chainmail, was acquired last year as a free-standing project, based on an obscure game that was also hatched by D&D designer Gary Gygax before he and Dave Arneson launched D&D" were of particular concern. In the minds of many fans, any connection with Courtney Solomon automatically induces one to write the project off as a potential nightmare. Add to that the fact that the PR staff at Warner didn't know enough about the property to know that Chainmail is more than "an obscure game also hatched by" Gygax, it was the original combat system for D&D. The current combat system was referred to as the "optional system" in the original white box set.
Given that Chainmail also happens to be the name of a trademarked miniature skirmish game published by Wizards of the Coast (read: HASBRO) that had rules designed by Chris Pramas which had been released in the early 2000s, and that the past two D&D films were direct-to-TV affairs, it is not surprising that Hasbro almost immediately filed a legal complaint asking for an injunction preventing any development of a D&D film by Warner Brothers or by Sweet Pea Entertainment (Courtney Solomon's company).
Copyright Wizards of the Coast 2000
Hasbro claims that Solomon's license with Hasbro for the D&D film and TV rights expired when Sweet Pea Entertainment paid Hasbro $20,000 in fees for the broadcast of Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness. It is quite certain that Solomon will file a counterclaim asserting his rights, and a mass melee will ensue in which all parties will attempt to use Vorpal Blades or maybe even Blackrazor to settle the issue. You can read the initial lawsuit at The Hollywood Reporter.
3...2...1...Letdown!
Sorry, Europa Report, but you were trying so hard to make the science believable (and a geek friend of mine insists it still isn't, though it should be sufficient for most audience members), that you forgot to make the fiction any good. The ambitions behind this movie - to make a realistic sci-fi film - are noble, but the execution is terrible from a story perspective.
