Wooden WALL-E

October 19th, 2008 by Mox

I first came across this on Tumblr but tracked it back to the source on a site called Toys R Evil. A UK-based group of sculptors and model makers was commissioned by Disney to create this piece as a gift to John Lasseter. The detail is amazing and can be seen is a close-up in the original post.

Toys R Evil is, itself, and interesting site, and not one I had visited before. It gathers news on toys that you are not likely to see in a more mainstream context, such as these creations from a company called OhNo!Doom.

See Dr. Horrible For Free Once Again

July 29th, 2008 by Mox

Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” is available for free streaming once again, only now with commercials between acts. The soundtrack should be available for download in the next couple of weeks, with the DVD to follow sometime after. Joss also announced that there would be another part to the story.

Tron 2 Teaser Trailer Unveiled at Comic-Con

July 26th, 2008 by Mox

Yesterday, I saw this on Twitter:

Tron 2 film confirmed.

Intrigued, I did some digging and came across an article on IGN that described a trailer that was shown unexpectedly on Thursday at the end of the Walt Disney Pictures panel. It shows a light cycle chase and much more sinister-looking Flynn (again played by Jeff Bridges) before ending up with the number 2 in the Tron logo font as the letters T, R, and N appear around it (to form TR2N) and then fade back out.

This morning there was a Slashdot article that in turn pointed to articles on Gizmodo and Filmstalker with a bootleg video of the trailer (presented below Update 7/28: I grabbed the embed from the Filmstalker article, but as you can see, it’s been pulled. The Gizmodo article still has a non-embeddable version for the time being. Update 7/29: Someone did a pretty decent job cleaning up the video and posted it to YouTube, so it’s back.). The quality is poor as no videotaping is supposed to be going on during the video segments, but it’s good enough to get a feel for what’s going on. Hopefully, an official version of the trailer will be released soon.

Talk of a sequel has been slowly building momentum for some time now. At one one point it was rumored that Pixar wanted to do a remake or a sequel. Around the time of the film’s 20th anniversary, writer and director Steven Lisberger, talked about his interest and ideas for a possible sequel. However, Disney didn’t seem to show any interest in continuing the franchise until it released the game Tron 2.0 in 2003. A first-person shooter set in the computer world, it cleverly extended the metaphors originated in the movie to include modern computing technology such as firewalls, PDAs, and the internet. It was said that the game was going to be used to gauge interest in a sequel, but nothing more was really heard until 2005 when Disney hired a pair of writers to come up with a script for a sequel. It would be two more years before Disney would hire Joseph Kosinski to direct the film (now being written by a writing team from the show Lost). The Hollywood Reporter article detailing this most recent bit of news included this tidbit:

…sources said one of the things Kosinski will be doing is working on a sequence involving the movie’s Light Cycles to work out his vision for the movie.

It would appear that the footage shown at Comic-Con is the culmination of that work. It’s exciting to see that actual progress is being made and that (at least visually) it seems to be faithful to the spirit of the original, but I’m going to try to stay cautiously optimistic until more concrete details are available.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

July 19th, 2008 by Mox

This weekend’s gotten off to a musical start. First I saw the film version of “Mamma Mia!” (good movie) and now I’ve just finished up the final act of Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog“.

Starring Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer, and Felicia Day as Penny, the story follows Dr. Horrible as he attempts to gain admittance to a super villain organization and work up the nerve to talk to the girl of his dreams (Penny), who he has inadvertently introduced to his arch-nemesis (Hammer). As the name suggests, the show is a musical and features Joss’ quirky, irreverent sense of humor.

The show is presented in three 15-minute acts that were released over the course of this week for free on the internet. After today (July 19), it will only be available for purchase on iTunes until the DVD is released sometime in the coming months. Joss came up with the idea during the writer’s strike and explains the motivation behind it in a note to his fans:

Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.

Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first.

Animatronic Wall-E Spotted in the Wild

May 16th, 2008 by Mox

Not that I’m obsessed over this movie or anything, but the folks over at io9 (via Metblogs) have video of a life-size animatronic of the robot Wall-E in action. He seems to have a wide range of motion and is very expressive, at one point rolling up to the camera, raising up a bit, and waving.


Wall-E Spotted in LA! from Blink on Vimeo.

I’ve heard he’ll be making the rounds of the talk show circuit to promote the movie. He should also be making appearances in Disney theme parks no doubt giving Push a run for his money.

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