Taking a glance at today’s new DVD releases (as we do on many a groggy Tuesday morn), we noticed the continuation of a disturbing pattern. Happily Divorced: Season One. The New Adventures of Old Christine: The Complete Fifth Season. Transformers Prime: Season One. “Fan Favorite” collections featuring the “best” of Hogan’s Heroes and Macgyver — since every season of those shows has already been released. And the question we ask (aside from “who the hell is buying this stuff”) is this: How is it that we get every single episode of Fran Drescher’s new TV Land sitcom a mere seven months after they aired, but we’re still waiting for our Wonder Years DVDs?
After the jump, we’ll take a look at a dozen great (or at least interesting) TV shows that are inexplicably unavailable on DVD, and try to figure out why.
Can you imagine if you had to spend your days pretending to be an insipid billionaire playboy when all you really cared about was fighting crime in the streets of Gotham City and avenging your parents’ deaths? What if you were a sarcastic, lone-wolf smuggler who got suckered into helping a group of crazy young rebels fight the Galactic Empire only to end up sealed away in carbonite? How would you react if you discovered that as a baby demon you were summoned to earth from the depths of hell by a group of Nazi occultists?
We think Roberto Salvador’s Screaming Heroes series, spotted over on Design You Trust, about sums things up. As the Brussels-based graphic designer explains it, “They’re fed up of saving the world, they’re angry, they’re screaming their guts out.” Click through to see a selection of his extremely frustrated pop culture heroes.
One of the dedicated cinephile’s favorite hobbies is contemplating the movies that might have been, and it’s a pastime we’ve engaged in here at Flavorwire on occasion. Because the Hollywood development process is such a fickle beast, prone to prevailing box office winds, rising and falling trends, and the particular peccadilloes of people in power, the pages of movie history are littered with the corpses of promising films that simply fell apart, for a variety of reasons. David Hughes is one of our most esteemed writers of cinematic obituaries—his books The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made and Tales From Development Hell (out today in a newly revised edition) are entertaining and detailed deconstructions of what went wrong with the movies you’ll never get to see. After the jump, we’ve assembled a few of the most intriguing movies-that-could-have-been from Tales, along with a handful of titles contributed to Flavorwire by the author himself.
By now you’ve probably seen the fan-edited John Carter trailer that’s taken the Internet by storm. Most critics are calling it “better than the real trailer” and marveling at the thing as though it’s actually difficult to tell a story better than a huge Hollywood studio can. But apparently, it isn’t that hard — people on the Internet do it every day! After the jump, we’ll look at some of the best fan-made and fan-edited videos out there. If you like something we haven’t listed, be sure to mention it in the comments!
Cupcakes aren’t just cutesy treats for girlie girls like Zooey Deschanel’s character from New Girl – they also make the perfect canvases for some awesome (and often decidedly geeky) comic-related pop art, featuring everything from superheroes to graphic novels, and even Sunday morning newspaper comics. Plus, they always look so delicious! We’ve scoured the Internet to show you some of the best comic cupcakes out there, so click through to check them out — if, like us, you’ve been quietly suffering from a massive post-Valentine’s sugar hangover all day, these sweet treats might be just the hair of the dog that you’ve been craving!
If being a fan of Star Wars and comic books alone isn’t nerdy enough for you, then you’ll be happy to know that Scottish illustrator Matt Cowan has put together a series of mathematical equations that explain the origins of some of your favorite pop-culture characters, from Darth Vader to Captain Jack Sparrow. Check them out after the jump, and be sure to take a look at Cowan’s T-shirt store if you have a powerful urge to put one of these cool designs on your body.
Artist Alex Pardee did his part in the protests against the SOPA/PIPA bills. He created a monster savvy series of artworks titled Icans. At first, the name seems like a weird play on the word “icons.” After all, Pardee creates disfigured versions of pop culture notables like Fred Flinstone and Batman. He explains on his blog, however, that the Icans series humorously speaks to the recent piracy act controversy:
” … Whether SOPA passes or not, I will continue to take any licensed character, or pop culture icon and do whatever I want with it for art’s sake, because ICAN. Also, I just want to conduct an ongoing experiment to see if ICAN take any cool icon from pop culture and make it way shittier by “re-imagining” it. So far, much like Hollywood does most of the time, the experiment is a super fun success!”
Hit the jump for bloated, but loveable, versions of Garfield and other pop culture friends — who we suspect would explode like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man if we squished them with love.
The Simpsons are among pop culture’s most protean characters; if they weren’t, the show’s writers surely would have run out of story lines over a decade ago. So it’s no surprise that the Internet has taken one of America’s most iconic fictional families and run with it. In the past few months alone, we’ve seen The Simpsons mashed up with Breaking Bad, portraits of the sitcom’s characters as famous works of art, and — most bizarre of all — bizarre photo manipulations that transform celebrities into Simpsons. But we are especially amused by DeviantArt’s Claudia-R, who has created a series of posters that cast Simpsons characters in classic and popular films, from A Clockwork Orange to The Dark Knight. Click through to see ten of our favorites, and visit Claudia’s DeviantArt page for the rest.
When you’ve been around for over 70 years, chances are you’ve made your fair share of fashion statements. As a great new chart by Screenrant shows, that goes double for superheroes. Their funny and detailed infographic — which you can see in full here — reproduces every “significant” Batsuit from Batman’s 1939 debut through the present, in comic books, movies, TV, video games, and even “Batman Live.” Some highlights include Batman Beyond‘s gothy black-and-red get-up, Azrael Batman’s early-’90s Transformers look, and purple-suited “Super Friends Batman” from ’70s TV. [via io9]
Soon we’ll get to see what Harry Potter star Rhys Ifans will look like in his reptilian get-up as Spidey’s archenemy in Marc Webb’s upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man. Ifans will star as The Lizard — or in his human form, Curtis Connors. A brilliant scientist who loses an arm, Connors tries to regrow his lost limb, but the experiment goes awry. He finds himself transformed into a reptilian humanoid, which we got a glimpse of this week — first in the form of a soon-to-be released Pez dispenser, and some new concept art. If the sketches bear any real resemblance to the eccentric Notting Hill actor’s costume, then yep: he’s a giant, creepy lizard.
We felt inspired to look back at a few of cinema’s ugliest screen villains. Movie heroes’ hideous enemies have ranged from really repulsive men to vile creatures. Note the amount of horror or sci-fi on our list. Too often films attempt to make the villain attractive. Click through to see which baddies were beaten with the ugly stick, renew your appreciation for old-fashioned, unpleasant-looking villains, and then add your picks below. Read More »
