Pokémon: The Musical!

WOOO-WHOOOOO! Gary as Dickface! It's like they read what I named him while playing my GameBoy.

via Topless Robot

Bill O'Reilly Sucks

Not that that's news, or anything.

Anyway, from Robot 6:

[W]hen the shoe was on the other foot, O'Reilly did a little stomping of his own: He took offense to his portrayal by political cartoonist Mike Thompson and ... well, let’s let Mike tell it:

He then gave out my work e-mail address and instructed his viewers to "let him know what you think." O'Reilly stressed that his viewers should take the high road in their e-mails to me, which is a little like placing a bowl of Halloween candy in front of kids and telling them not to gorge themselves. O'Reilly's smart enough to know what would happen.

Yup, the high road was definitely the road not taken. Thompson received over 2,500 e-mails, many of them in all caps, discussing exactly what people thought of him and his cartoon and what they would like to do to him.

I'm well aware that there's hypocrisy on both sides of the political spectrum, I'm just tired of it. Aren't you?

SQUEEEE!

Yes, it's fan made and the music is stupid and the voices aren't great, but still... ANIMATED BONE! IN BEAUTIFUL 2D!

I say again, SQUEEEE!

Oh, and there is a movie that's going to be made, but Smith thinks it's probably going to be 3D.

via Robot 6

The Last Airbender Teaser

Looks really cool, doesn't it.

Of course I don't think anyone's problems with Shyamalan's movies has been the art direction or cinematography. The hard part with this will be condensing the 20 half-hour episodes of Book One: Water into two hours worth of movies. How many of you think we'll be getting at least one training montage?

Via Topless Robot

Lil' Cthulhu

Best cartoon idea ever-- I demand a series!

Be Aware!

Via Wil Wheaton

To Boldly Sit in a Minivan

Fox has a trailer for the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode of Family Guy episode airing on Sunday.

Missing the Point?

Derek Kirk Kim writes about his anger toward the casting choices of the main characters in The Last Airbender movie, which is based on the excellent Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon, which is sort of an Asian fantasy story, on his blog:

This past Monday, on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration, I discovered that the casting of the four leading characters for the upcoming live-action movie, "The Last Airbender" (based on the TV show, “Avatar: The Last Airbender”) had gone entirely to white actors. I want—no, need—to say something about this.

...

I was speaking with Gene Yang (author of "American Born Chinese" and National Book Award nominee) about the casting and he said it best: "It's like a white Asian fetishist's wet dream. All the Asian culture they want, without any of the Asian people."

...

If Rathbone had gotten the role of "Shaft," and got a perm and a "tan" to play that character (and I don't mean in a self-conscious, subversive way like Robert Downey Jr. in "Tropic Thunder"), there would be a shit storm of outrage from all sectors of America, not just the African American community. It would be a headline across every newspaper, and I highly doubt that production would make it to filming. But when Joel Grey taped his eyes "slanty" and colored his skin to play a Korean man in "Remo Williams" (in 1985! we're not talking ancient history here), it went virtually unnoticed. How was that even allowed to happen? How is it continuing to happen, here in 2009, at the eve of Obama's inauguration (as I type this.) Why this double standard?

The actors are Jackson Rathbone (best known for being in Twillight), Jesse McCartney (best known for being a teeny-bopper heartthrob), Nicola Peltz (best known for, well, probably this), and Noah Ringer (best known for this).

A quote that I find interesting is:

Or let me draw a closer parallel—imagine if someone had made a “fantasy” movie in which the entire world was built around African culture. Everyone is wearing ancient African clothes, African hats, eating traditional African food, writing in an African language, living in African homes, all encompassed in an African landscape...

...but everyone is white.

It's interesting because it reminds me of the racial readjustment Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books took on when SciFi made that miniseries a couple of years ago.

Sure, the people of Earthsea are more Caribbean, Indonesian, and Filipino, but it's still the same sort of thing.

And I don't see it changing anytime soon, even if a Mexican lesbian gets elected president during the next go around.

(Art by finni)