Great Big Story: This is the story of how a tiny, magical creature was transformed into a cultural phenomenon by inventor, marketing genius and complicated eccentric Harold von Braunhut. Full of fun facts (both charming and disturbing), Just Add Water is a colorful short film about a half-century of marketing directly to children, the force of nostalgia in pop culture, and an unlikely meeting of flim-flam and hard science. A film by Penny Lane.
Rhystic Studies, a YouTube channel that explores the art, history, and culture of Magic: The Gathering, takes a detailed look at the design of Magic’s card frames.
The Collection is a short documentary about two friends, DJ Ginsberg and Marilyn Wagner, and their discovery of an astonishing and unique collection of movie memorabilia, comprised of over 40,000 printer blocks and 20,000 printer plates used to create the original newspaper advertisements for virtually every movie released in the United States from the silent period through 1984, when newspapers stopped using the letterpress format.
The collection, which spans nearly the entire history of the film industry from the silent era to 1984, was recently appraised at ~$10 million and is available for acquisition. (via Kottke)
What appeals to me about this story is less the collection itself, and more the opportunity to enjoy a project like this! To unpack all of these plates, clean them, print them, catalog them… Fun! One day I hope I make a similar discovery.
The Smash Brothers is a 9-part documentary series about seven of the greatest “smashers” of all time. Through years-long rivalries spanning coasts and countries, discover the passion for a game which started as a casual experience only to become a heart-pounding competitive lifestyle.
sudoscript: Last weekend, a fascinating act in the history of humanity played out on Reddit.
The rules were simple. Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes between placing each one.
Over the following 72 hours, what emerged was nothing short of miraculous. A collaborative artwork that shocked even its inventors.
“On April Fool’s Day, when the rest of the internet devolves into a cesspool of unfunny press releases and fake product launches, Reddit becomes the most interesting place online by unleashing a social experiment on its enormous community.” — Andy Baio / Waxy
Nintendo: It’s The Legend of Zelda’s 30th anniversary this year, and so we thought you might appreciate a look at some illustrations created during the development of the first The Legend of Zelda game, originally released on the Nintendo Entertainment System!
These design docs include a video of the hand drawn overworld map and show how some of the original dungeon sketches translated into the game.
(via Gamasutra)
Some of the hand-drawn maps Takashi Tezuka and Shigeru Miyamoto used when designing the original Legend of Zelda. A fascinating glimpse at Nintendo’s game design process from days gone by.
Wired: [In] Ticonderoga, New York, in a former supermarket. There, at 112 Montcalm St., a valiant would-be commander named James Cawley has constructed a precise replica of the original starship set used for Star Trek: The Original Series.
Cawley began construction in 1996, crafting set pieces in his grandfather’s barn-turned-workshop. Over the past 20 years, he has spent an “astronomical” (he said it, not us) sum painstakingly rebuilding the Enterprise. Some items, like Scotty’s wrenches and a Klingon costume, are originals from the show. Others, like Captain Kirk’s chair, Cawley built from scratch.
The Star Trek Tour is permanently housed in Historic downtown Ticonderoga, New York. The sets are full recreations based upon original blueprints. ⋮ The recreated sets achieve a high-degree of accuracy based on original blueprints, hundreds of hours of serious research and thousands of photos – both period images and images culled from extensive review and capture from latest Blu-ray images.
See also: Other posts on this blog tagged ‘Star Trek’, including many on the restoration of the original USS Enterprise model at the Smithsonian.
Visitors can sit in Captain Kirk’s chair and punch buttons just like William Shatner did 60 years ago, or perhaps gaze into Spock’s scanner and search for signs of life. Everyone has to make that decision at some point. — Wired
Films&Stuff: Here I break down the structure of an episode all about breaking down structure. If that’s too meta for you than clearly you’re not a fan of Community.
A deconstruction of one of the greatest episodes of Community.
To decide which words to include in the dictionary and to determine what they mean, Merriam-Webster editors study the language as it’s used. They carefully monitor which words people use most often and how they use them.
This is one of the questions Merriam-Webster editors are most often asked.
The answer is simple: usage.
Kaptainkristian: A look at the animated series that used vulgarity in language to reflect the reality of our lives.
“As a former child myself, I can tell you that awareness overpowers ignorance.”
See also: The Philosophy of South Park — Wisecrack explores South Park’s themes of politically correct (PC) culture, gentrification, advertising, social justice, safe spaces and narcissism.
Alexey Pajitnov had big ideas about games. In 1984, he created Tetris in his spare time while developing software for the Soviet government. Once Tetris emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, it was an instant hit. Nintendo, Atari, Sega—game developers big and small all wanted Tetris. A bidding war was sparked, followed by clandestine trips to Moscow, backroom deals, innumerable miscommunications, and outright theft.
In this graphic novel,New York Times–bestselling author Box Brown untangles this complex history and delves deep into the role games play in art, culture, and commerce. For the first time and in unparalleled detail, Tetris: The Games People Play tells the true story of the world’s most popular video game.
This is a lovely book too. Mine came with a bookmark and numbered print.
Mark Brown: Some games are all about nostalgia – a reminder of how games used to be. No game nails this sensation quite like Shovel Knight, which expertly picks and chooses the right bits to emulate from old games. Here’s how Yacht Club Games pulled it off.
Quartz: “The Millennial Whoop”: The same annoying whooping sound is showing up in every popular song.
The same exact whooping, melodic sequence has been showing up in a surprisingly high number of recent pop songs. The phenomenon was first noticed by musician and product manager Patrick Metzger. He detailed the trend, dubbing it “The Millennial Whoop,” in a post on his blog, The Patterning. Here’s how Metzger described it:
It’s a sequence of notes that alternates between the fifth and third notes of a major scale, typically starting on the fifth. The rhythm is usually straight 8th-notes, but it may start on the downbeat or on the upbeat in different songs. A singer usually belts these notes with an “Oh” phoneme, often in a “Wa-oh-wa-oh” pattern. And it is in so many pop songs it’s criminal.
See also: This mashup proves that all country music sounds the same
“The overused and unearned moment is DC’s greatest foe.”
And in this video The Auralnauts finally explain the Flash dream from Batman v Superman…
Batman V Superman tried setting up the new Justice League movie with some dream sequences, but they were… confusing. We help make sense out of The Flash sequence.
See also: Comparing the soundtracks of ‘Man of Steel’ and ‘Superman: The Movie’.
If you’ve ever tried to find the fonts used for a particular Star Trek series or film, you’ll have found that there are thousands of poor imitations on free font sites everywhere. Thanks to Yves Peters at Font Shop, now there’s a guide to the original fonts of Star Trek!
What’s interesting about Star Trek is that it has a number of typical alphabets that are immediately recognisable, and have become an integral part of pop culture. While many fan-made fonts exist based on the logos and title sequences of popular movies and television series, Star Trek is one of the very rare franchises which at one point had officially released fonts. In 1992 Bitstream introduced the Star Trek Font Pack featuring four digital typefaces – Star Trek, the signature face of the original television series; Star Trek Film, used for the credit titles of the Star Trek movies; Star Trek Pi, a collection of Star Trek insignias and Klingon symbols; and Star Trek Bold Extended, the lettering of the name and registration number on the hull of all Starfleet space ships. The Star Trek Font Pack has been discontinued long ago – possibly over licensing issues – yet individual typeface designs are still available under different names. We will run into them in this article, plus some others.
In celebration of the upcoming release of Star Trek Beyond and the 50th anniversary of the franchise, Paramount had a poster created that mirrors Bob Peak’s beautiful artwork for The Motion Picture
Vox: The GIF was invented in 1989. And since its beginning, the GIF has been used to make money. At first, GIFs were sold as placeholders for the web of the ’90s and early 2000s. But after web design became informed by professional standards, gifs lost their role as placeholders. Eventually they became tools of expression, turning snippets of video from popular culture into bite size communication devices. Today, a few big tech companies are trying to capitalize on this new use of GIFs, partnering with brands who want their content to be used as communication.
Mother’s Basement: Looking for a new SciFi anime to watch? Here are five more obscure shows that you can really sink your teeth into.
Satchell Drakes: After spending quite a few years on Twitter, I’ve had my fair share of getting pulled into toxic moments. I’ve also made some of my closest friends on there. I wanted to put together a resource that might help people share their worldview in a manner that is effective and conscious of their context. Mike McHargue of The Liturgists Podcast essentially did all of the work and tackled this issue the best with a matrix of four questions to help with just that. Here’s essentially an overdramatic Retweet of that matrix.
A quick look at Pixar’s approach to storytelling and character development.
Wisecrack: We explore South Park’s themes of politically correct (PC) culture, gentrification, advertising, social justice, safe spaces and narcissism.
Gizmodo: Since emoji are designed differently across platforms, sometimes your text messages might get lost in translation. But how differently might your well-intentioned emoji be displayed?
The most widely misinterpreted is the “grinning face with smiling eyes” emoji, which—depending on the platform—can range from the rosy-cheeked cherubic face of glee to the anguished clenched-teeth look of constipation.
That wide range between sentiment rankings was named “misconstrual” by the researchers. You can see how the 22 emoji tracked across platforms, with “smiling face with open mouth and tightly closed eyes,” “face with tears of joy,” “sleeping face,” and “loudly crying face” all having their own issues of interpretation. But “grinning face with smiling eyes” is still the clear winner when it came to sending the wrong message.
Across-platform sentiment misconstrual scores grouped by Unicode. Each boxplot shows the range of sentiment misconstrual
scores across the five platforms. They are ordered by decreasing median platform-pair sentiment misconstrual, from left to right.
Behind the scenes on Thunderbirds 1965: a project to produce three new episodes of the classic television show Thunderbirds – exactly the way it was done in the 60s!
“Thunderbirds is a sixties view of the future and of America by people who had never been to either.”
3,378 backers pledged £218,412 on Kickstarter last year to resurrect Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s classic Thunderbirds using original voice tracks and retro filmmaking techniques.
City Absurdia: A video essay on how American cinema uses the hero–villain–damsel dynamic as a propaganda tool since The Birth of a Nation.
“To look at the Vietnam war through the lens of American cinema, you would have to believe that the war was one inflicted upon young white men by older white men, not one inflicted on a poor nation of farmers by a militarised superpower.”
(Side note: The City Absurdia channel had 69 subscribers when I discovered it. Now it has 70. I predict it will get a lot more very quickly!)
See also: Why every Hollywood movie feels the same & How Jurassic Park’s digital dinosaurs changed the movies.
If there’s any movie that managed to deliver on the intensity and sustained visual interest of its trailer, it is Mad Max: Fury Road. For no particular reason–other than I really wanted to because I think about them all the time–here are the trailers for that film again.
Enjoy ten minutes of trailer perfection.
(Personally, that final trailer is my favourite.)
See also: The editing of Mad Max: Fury Road, Visual effects breakdown for Mad Max: Fury Road and all the other posts on this blog tagged ‘trailers’.
“From director George Miller, originator of the post-apocalyptic genre and mastermind behind the legendary “Mad Max” franchise, comes “Mad Max: Fury Road,” a return to the world of the Road Warrior, Max Rockatansky.”
Hieronymus van Aken honed his skills to become a world-famous artist. Once his fame had spread outside the city walls, he would sign his work with ‘Hieronymus Bosch’, after the name of his native city.
The Garden of Earthly Delights is a story about morals and sin in a particular time. The painting however is timeless. The journey that the visitor sets out on in the interactive documentary is a personal one. Beneath the surface we aim to invite the visitor to reflect upon and question their sins and morals.
(via)
See also: Classic paintings brought to life & Ben Sack’s mad maps.
“In the late Middle Ages, a master-painter lived in the south of the Netherlands. […] Bosch was out to amuse and surprise us, he wanted us to enjoy the sight of this multitude of figures, animals, plants and objects.”
YouTube Poops… is there more than meets the eye?
PBS Idea Channel: The so-called ‘subversive remix’ is not a new phenomenon. Artists from all mediums have been destroying established cultural symbols for the sake of making a statement for decades. So does YTP also qualify as a “statement” of sorts? Is it a way to reclaim these pop culture symbols and create something that is truly our own? Or are they just the annoying byproduct of having video editing software and too much time on your hands?
An insane remix of The Shining by Nick DenBoer and Davy Force.
Official selection TIFF40 and Sundance 2016!
See also: Star Wars v. Star Trek & Bartkira the Animated Trailer
This is a let’s play series on YouTube for a feindishly difficult game called Dark Souls. Markus (aka EpicNameBro aka ENB) is currently 50 episodes into a comprehensive walkthrough and discussion of the game, with tips for players and discussion of the game’s lore and development.
While Dark Souls is famous for its difficulty, I was mostly fascinated with how the game designers managed to balance that difficulty, never letting the player feel that they were unfairly cheated out of a victory. The way the game designers handle backstory is also very interesting. The lore of these lands could be almost entirely ignored by the player if they chose not to pay any attention to it, but Lordran has a rich history that can be pieced together from item descriptions and NPC dialogue. Even then, much is left to interpretation as characters the player meets are often untrustworthy or ill-informed.
The monster designs are also pretty freaky. My favourite reveal has been that of the Gaping Dragon.
Currently Markus is nearing the end of his playthrough, but he intends to replay it to show how the storylines can branch and the alternative endings that can be achieved, as well as play the original Japanese version of the game to discuss some to the translation choices that were made.
I’m terrible at these kinds of games, but I have been so fascinated by this world I have bought it for my PlayStation. I have not gotten very far…
This contemporary review of the first Star Wars movie for Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine by Samuel R. Delany is fascinating.
I’m posting this about five hours before I go to see The Force Awakens, which if nothing else I expect to be a blisteringly fast film based on director J.J. Abrams previous two Star Trek films. So it’s really interesting to me how Delaney describes the original Star Wars as “about the fastest two-hour film I’ve ever seen”. By modern standards — and even by the standards of the other Star Wars films — the first installment seems quite slow.
It’s also assuring to see that from the very outset critics like Delaney were calling Star Wars out for it’s lack of human racial diversity and gender equality.
by Samuel R. Delany
My first reactions as the final credits rose on the screen? “Now what happens?” – which is to say George (American Grafitti and THX-1138) Lucas’s Star Wars is about the fastest two-hour film I’ve ever seen: I thought I’d been in the theater maybe twenty-five minutes.
THX, if you’ll recall, looked like it was sired by Godard’s Contempt out of the space station sequence in Kubrick’s 2001 – i.e. it was basically white, white-on-white, and then more white. What is the visual texture of Star Wars?
Two moons shimmer in the heat above the horizon, and the desert evening fades to purple rather than blue; into the starry black, huge and/or hopelessly complex artifacts flicker, flash, spin, turn, or merely progress with ponderous motion; indoors is all machinery, some old, some new; while plastic storm troopers and dull grey generals meet and march; circus-putty aliens drink in a bar where what appears to be an automatic still gleams in the background with tarnished copper tubing; some of the spaceships are new and shiny, some are old and battered (and you get pretty good at telling the difference between the two).
Sockrotation 