A new Disney film has been announced for 2018, entitled Moana. Here’s the title card that’s hurtling ’round the blogosphere:
What I find unusual is that I have that font on my computer. It’s called Flat Earth Scribe, and I believe it’s originally from a great font site called Blambot, though I couldn’t readily find it there.
I find it odd, not because it isn’t a great-looking font or anything, but because a multi-bajillion-dollar company decided to use a free-ish (Blambot’s fonts are free to small-time commercial endeavors) lettering set for a major motion picture rather than having someone on their payroll design one from scratch. It’s a strange world, I guess.
I’ve figured it out: The future of movies can be seen in our newspaper comics pages. An artist passes on, and a relative or hired hand is called in to continue their work as if nothing ever happened. New features have less space to break in as recycled concepts plow forward, even when they don’t seem to generate a lot of secondary merchandise (does anyone buy collections of Mark Trail or Barney Google?).
If anything can get an undead Leslie Nielsen to rise from his grave, trip over the headstone, and blunder into a charity “zombie walk,” it’s the planned reboot of The Naked Gun with Ed Helms as Leslie as Frank Drebin.
As was noted in an earlier post, the eventual reboot of Indiana Jones is going to take some doing as the character is so tightly tied to the franchise (his name is in the titles of 3/4 of the films). What’s odd here is that they could have just announced new sequels to Police Squad! with Helms playing a new character following in the footsteps of Drebin. Drebin’s death (treated with all the reverence we’ve come to expect from the series) could be part of the film, letting old fans not resent Helms’ appearance and people who’ve never seen these movies wouldn’t care if this new guy was named Frank or not. It’d be an odd whiff of continuity and an even odder acknowledgement of previous comedic work by a talented actor.
…which is probably why it won’t happen. Sorry, zombie Leslie Nielsen. And to show I’m not completely against a new take on things, I still like (warning: vidya game vehicular violence) this opening to The Naked Gun as done in Grand Theft Auto IV.
• The image above is titled “The Experiment,” and for fans of a certain movie-riffing TV show from cable TV of yore, the full image will send chills of SCIENCE! down your spine.
• Continuing with another artist’s work is the futuristic imagery of one Simon Stålenhag whose paintings combine images of rural life with sci-fi machines and constructs that you might first mistake for old photographs. I want the series of novels that these paintings should be the covers for. The flash game on the main menu there is pretty fun, too.
• This one’s a little old and probably falls under the category of “drivable sculpture,” but the world is a better place for having a car modified to look like the USS Defiant in it.
• Decorating for the holidays can be an art form if I have anything to say about it for the purposes of this posting, and video games are often considered art. With that in mind, here’s a Christmas Special mod for Fallout New Vegas, complete with embedded trailer.
• The whole of our universe could be an art project, as there appears to be evidence that everything is a hologram. It may be a fleeting exhibit as some calculate it could all collapse at any time.
• Getting back to art one could go see before the hologram is switched off, check out the button-images created by Augusto Esquivel. Click on any of the tabs marked with years to view his galleries of 3-dimensional forms created by the clever hanging of thousands of multicolored buttons.
• Finally, a statue (okay, toy, but it’s art) of a Power Ranger that’s probably closer to the average “heroic” physique I have than I’d care to admit. Still, I’d have a cool helmet, right?
Doctor Who and Sherlock brought together in a fan-made short? Why not?
Head over to just about any Tumblr blog for fan-gasms over this. 
To be a voice actor in the current Fallout games, you’ve got to be able to emote, to speak clearly, and simulate the noise made by someone who has just experienced having a live plasma grenade put in their pants. Yes, in a move that should surprise no one given how much money Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas have made, the call is going out for those who want to bring combat taunts to the wasteland.
The current buzz is that this game will be set in or around Boston and involve “The Institute,” which is the game’s version of MIT. Based on the events in Fallout 3, we can look for humanoid androids to be a part of the SCIENCE! going on there, which sounds cool at first, but it makes me wonder if they’re trying to save money on character models a bit.
I love these games, and I’ll be the first to admit they’re not without problems. The main plot in Fallout 3 wasn’t exactly riveting and often didn’t make much sense (for example, why waste the GECK on a water purifier instead of using it to make a habitable place, like Vault City, especially when robots can supply you with purified water on command?), and the DLCs for both games usually managed to break the challenge of the games with overpowered weapons, but they were still loads of fun. New Vegas wins in the plot and character department for me, but Fallout 3 had more fun side quests, dungeon crawls, and some really good atmosphere.
Which brings us to the game publisher: Bethesda. Unless they listened to fan reaction, I’m not holding out too much hope that the main quest will involve player choices that matter or affect the game’s outcome too much. I’d also hope they avoid things like Operation Anchorage which removed pretty much all RPG elements in favor of a straight FPS, all to open a door that I’d assume the Brotherhood of Steel should’ve been capable of opening. Still, for those who don’t care for the Bethesda version of Fallout, one can take comfort that they’re keeping their efforts on the East Coast, leaving the West Coast to (hopefully) Obsidian for whatever the game after number four is. Still, the optional content has been reliably good, and the Wasteland Survival Guide quest chain was loads of fun, so if I can get things like that, I’ll be happy (as if I wouldn’t buy it anyway).
On to what would make me even happier, given the setting:
1. A Car Talk reference or three. It’s not Boston without Click and Clack, and radio stations are now a staple of your Pipboy, some old robots programmed to fix cars dispensing advice might be a fun choice for your listening pleasure while you shoot at stuff.
2. MIT pranks. Okay, they’re called “hacks,” and it’s not like Fallout games have steered clear of being silly, so why not a tribute or two to the student-created jocularity that’s often an event of note.
3. The “Cheers” pub. You know, the one where everybody knows your character’s name and they’re always glad you came (armed)? It could be a quest hub (what tavern isn’t?) or just be one giant riff on the TV show. Adding a version of “Norm” might finally get us a body model that isn’t “male #1″ or “female #2,” though they’d probably just make him a Super Mutant.
Now I just need to set my cryo-tube for the release date and I’ll be set. I think I have to tie it into Bethesda’s Twitter feed and keep my fingers crossed that I’m not roused by another game-related hoax.
I mean, come on. All they left out was giant robots:
Kidding aside, I hope they don’t play so coy with the monster in the actual film. I mean, we all know basically what Godzilla looks like, so trying to pull a Cloverfield and making the monster a mystery isn’t going to work. They’ve also got all of the mistakes of the 1998 film to (hopefully) have worked out before filming, especially the ability of Godzilla to randomly elude detection.
I’ll also note I also saw the 1985 Godzilla movie in theaters, which was more like the ones from my youth than the one that would come three years later. I believe both featured Dr. Pepper advertising and/or product placement, though maybe this time around, they can get a lab-brewed flavor of Mountain Dew that more resembles the monster’s breath weapon.
Image courtesy of (warning of naughty word in URL) this Lucasfilm-oriented Tumblr.
By now you’ve probably heard that Disney has acquired the rights to the Indiana Jones franchise. Admittedly, this is a bit like getting a really nice, classic car after someone has rammed it into a tree, but it’s not like Disney doesn’t have the cash to have some body work done. The question is, will they? I know some defended Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as being true to the old serials from whence Indy came, but I don’t completely buy that argument. Crystal Skull was a major shift in focus from supernatural fantasy to science fantasy. It’s as if Flash Gordon suddenly took time out from fighting Ming the Merciless to go have an adventure searching for King Solomon’s Mines. If someone in the future makes a movie series that’s based in 80′s TV, it’ll be just as silly if it starts out being about cops busting bad guys in New York, but it then has a sequel where the stars are now trying to close a gate to Hell in Missouri using a high-tech talking car.
For semi-complaining and my directives on this matter (as if Hollywood listens to me), hit the jump.
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