Culturally Awkward

The comic industry has lost another legend. Tony DeZuniga, the co-creator of Jonah Hex and The Black Orchid passed away on Wednesday. He will be missed.

The Avengers campaign kicked off two years ago at Comic-Con 2010 to 6500 ecstatic fans in Hall H. Everyone there knew it was going to be a huge blockbuster, but I don’t think anyone thought it would be this HUGE!

207.4 MILLION opening weekend. Reported by Deadline.

Just how big is that? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 held the previous record at 169 million. That is a whopping 38 million more. Crazy!

Going to start a daily post on things that I found cool around web. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did. First is via Geek Tyrant. It is an awesome trailer/clip for a animated film called Apocalypse Pizza.
Apocalypse Pizza by blankytwo

This next clip holds a soft spot in my heart. When I was growing up I was part of Zoo School at our local zoo. Every weekend we would get to go to the zoo and do educational and behind the scenes activities. There is one thing that I learned (not from the instructors) and did quite often was to play dead in front of the glass at the lions den. This would cause the lions to go crazy, and scratch at the glass just like the clip below. Looking back I do regret doing this because it is kinda cruel.

It’s amazing that the kid didn’t get freaked out once he or she noticed the lion. I couldn’t embed the clip so just click the picture below to go to youtube.

Finally, a friend of mine sent me this great TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson on how schools are killing creativity. It’s a little long but completely worth it.

There is a fascinating article over at The Atlantic about the rise and fall of Draw Something. You know, that pictionary rip-off app that everyone was raving about a month ago. Well they’re not raving now!

Anyone who thought that a game like this could be long lasting is not very smart, and that brings us to Zynga. The social gaming company behind facebook favorite Farmville, forked out a cool 200 million to purchase the near bankrupt company OMGPOP that created Draw Something. Haha, there are heads rolling in the Zynga office these past couple of weeks. That was some very short sighted thinking, but you have to give props to OMGPOP, they came out on top in this whole debacle.

I don’t typically do movie reviews so I will keep this short. I saw The Avengers. I was extremely hesitate going into this movie due to the amount of hype that was being said on the movie blogoshere. EPIC is the word that was being thrown around. These were the same people that were using the word EPIC in their reviews of John Carter, and we all know how wrong they were on that one.

Besides having to live up to the internet hype I also knew that Joss Whedon had a daunting task ahead of him in directing The Avengers. For starters the whole idea of creating the Marvel Universe in film is crazy. Making five different films with six unique characters that all take place in the same universe and making it work wouldn’t be easy. To my knowledge something of this magnitude has never been done in film before, and for good reason, it shouldn’t work, but they somehow did it, and for the most part it worked.

But then to give one director the task of creating a film that combined all these characters, and all the story-lines into one EPIC movie that wouldn’t suck, that is nuts, and damn near impossible. But somehow, Joss Whedon, that magnificent bastard did it! The movie is amazing and yes, EPIC! It deserves all the praise that has been pouring down on it so far and all the praise that will be coming once it opens in the US.

That’s it, short sweet, and spoil free.

I’m going to hop on the bandwagon and post the new The Dark Knight Rises trailer. The one thing that I found interesting is there seems to be a lot of key scenes that take place in the daylight. Which isn’t a big deal but it is a change to Batman’s usual nighttime escapades.

All in all I was not as jazzed about the trailer as everyone else seems to be. I’m not saying it is a bad trailer but I didn’t get that tingle up my spine. However, I have complete faith in Christopher Nolan, and know that The Dark Knight is going to be a great movie. Enjoy!

A couple weeks back I took my first step into puppetry. Well that’s not really true, I have actually been working with puppets ever since I was I little kid. I used to walk around the mall back home and talk to people with my moppet. A moppet was like a Henson puppet but really furry. Below is a video I made a year ago with my original moppet. Anyways, so I have always been into puppets. If I could have dinner with one person living or dead Jim Henson would be that person (Bill Watterson is a really close second). More after the jump.

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This graph popped up on the french blog Convergence Alimentaire. It pretty much shows that 10 companies, count that 10. The number of fingers you have on both hands, unless of course you lost one in a freak accident or you’re a mutant with an additional appendage, but that 10 companies pretty much control everything that we consume.

Pretty crazy!