mrshl | blog

I already have to see this movie. Time goes so slowly.

So I’m pretty sure everyone has seen this ad for Halo 3:

But I bet most of you haven’t seen the virtual fly through of the entire diorama!
Halo 3 “Fly Through”

Check out all of this “making of” stuff, the ad campaign they interview all the survivors and veterans of this war that takes place in the future, it’s pretty amazing.
Halo 3 “War Stories”

Interview with the creators of the commercial (and diorama):
Halo 3 “Making Of”

An excerpt from one of the interviews:
“Tell me about New Deal, Stan Winston and MJZ director Rupert Sanders’ work on the diorama.

SD: You have to understand that for the diorama, it turned into becoming the focus point for this campaign. We wanted there to be a museum where the diorama would just be a part of the museum. Rupert Sanders orchestrated this whole thing. The vision for us was to make this story come to life with real figurines on a real set and a massive diorama. It was time and cost-prohibitive to say the least, but Rupert just wouldn’t take no for an answer. He teamed up with Stan Winston and New Deal Studios in making this thing come to life completely—30 feet x 40 feet, 900 figurines or something like that and every weapon and vehicle.

MH: Those figurines are based on scans of real people.”

In one episode where they are showing “Creature from the Black Lagoon” there are these two guys clowning around a backyard kiddy pool that looks like it was shot in the Heights. And they even recreated the “Baby Ruth bar in the pool” gag from CADDYSHACK. (That was the “revenge of the creature.”) When they feature a puppet, you can see the arm, and the mic boom drops in all the time. I have no doubt it’s intentional, at least most of the time.

They are sponsored by Party Boy warehouse, and apparently get all their (rather crappy) costumes and props there.

And right now they’re showing several classic Universal monster movies.

And they have a website, a MySpace page and videos on YouTube.

http://www.countpelicula.com/

10:30 Saturday nights, Channel 55.

It’s not really very good, but I just love the fact that someone is still doing this kind of thing.

A Flickr set of final frames from a bunch of TV shows and movies:

I had remembered Beetlejuice fondly as one of the weirder, more awesome cartoons based on a film. Along with The Real Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice actually seemed to preserve much of its weirdness in the transition to Saturday morning.

Sure there were the acid-soaked visuals and the parade of zombies and demons, but there was also something slightly off about the show’s central friendship between the debauched, clearly middle-aged Han Solo of the underworld and Lydia, the sarcastic, but pragmatic teen who tried to keep Beetlejuice out of trouble. Lydia was a pre-Daria goth-nerd, upon whom I had an unhealthy cartoon crush. So, to me it never seemed right how the two of them would travel together between realms and dimensions without some kind of oversight from child welfare.

I’ve been watching some clips this morning and I have to say the show isn’t nearly as good as I remember. Part of the appeal is that the animators did a great job drawing Beetlejuice and Lydia; they look an awful lot like their counterparts in the film, Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder. Unfortunately, as this clip reveals, the dialogue and voice acting could be really, really bad.

Be sure, in this clip, to look for one of my pet peeves: the dude is running away from a beastie, shouting “Look out!” but there is no one else around. No one to heed this senseless, idiotic warning. At least when Shaggy said it, Scoob was around. Ugh.