The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Doors of Doom DLC is an impressive new unofficial fan expansion featuring plenty of doors to explore.
Breath of the Wild fans will love this new fan DLC created by modder 'Waikuteru'. The unofficial Doors of Doom expansion is available for those lucky enough to play Breath of the Wild on PC. The mod offers a new minigame, ten new quests, plenty of rewards, multiple fights, and more.
In the expansion, Link is being summoned to a new Doom realm right after the events of Breath of the Wild. You can check out the full showcase for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Doors of Doom DLC down below.
The fan project is available starting today in Early Access for Patreons and will be publicly available next week on June 29th. As expected, to play this DLC, you'll need to have Breath of the Wild running on PC through an emulator. The Doors of Doom DLC is available for both the Wii U and Switch version of the game.
Breath of the Wild was released in March of 2017 as a launch title for the Nintendo Switch. Many consider it to be one of the best Zelda installments and one of the best games ever released. Here's what we wrote about the title upon release:
It offers freedoms I’ve not felt since Metal Gear Solid V, with a world sculpted with the detail of The Witcher 3, and the verticality of Monolith Soft’s Xenoblade Chronicles X. The combat has a touch of Dark Souls influence, and the survival and possibilities the world around you offers almost feel a tiny bit Minecraft inspired. It’s the best bits of many worlds, while still retaining that incredible charm and polish Nintendo are known for – with no bugs I noticed, too! In an open world game that heavily uses complicated physics for many puzzles. A rare delight.
With a gorgeous world filled with seemingly infinite possibilities, it’s impossible not to recommend The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The long delays and wait has resulted in an incredibly polished freeform experience unlike any open world game I’ve ever played before. Even after making the credits roll, I know there are shrines and side quests out there still waiting for me – and I can’t wait to go back.
Every time some seen-it-all critic declares a subgenre to be dead, a movie comes along that makes them look foolish. For many who bemoaned the demise of found footage, "Creep" revitalized it as a mode of storytelling. The low-simmer psychological horror emerged from the mind of director-cowriter-costar Patrick Brice ("There's Someone Inside Your House"), a hodgepodge of his warped Craigslist experiences and love for character-fueled thrillers like "Fatal Attraction" and "Misery." Its story, of a videographer hired to record an increasingly unhinged client (played by Mark Duplass, who also developed the story with Brice), premiered at South by Southwest in 2014 and made its way to Netflix the following year, and it's been at the top of the critical pops ever since. Its genius is in Brice's and Duplass' sneaky genre-shifting. Cringe-comedy becomes saturated with omens, leaving its audience with nowhere to go for comfort by the end.
Following the film's festival splash, it was picked up by Radius/The Weinstein Company with aspirations of a trilogy. After Radius failed to release the movie on VOD, it went to streaming, but the sequel was already underway. "Creep 2" continues the exploits of Josef (Duplass) of the first film, now going by the name Aaron after his last companion lost his head. While the second chapter in the Peachfuzz chronicles is just as anxious and is equally regarded as a cult favorite, Duplass considers the 2017 horror sequel to be lesser than its predecessor. He told IndieWire:
"We had to almost kill ourselves to make that movie as good as it was. I appreciate how many people liked it but I do feel like it wasn't as good as it could have been, if I'm being perfectly honest."
What's Next?
While a trilogy is still in the crosshairs for Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass, the latter told IndieWire the delay is due to a high standard:
"We've written it twice, and neither of those stories are good enough, and the reason is we almost didn't make a 'Creep 2.' We got lucky making 'Creep,' as cogent as it is considering how we made it, and I didn't want to disappoint people and I didn't want to put out a stupid sequel."
Simply put, a shoestring budget and the good ol' indie spirit aren't enough for Duplass, who also produced the first two "Creep" films via the Blumhouse banner. Not content to stick with the online-ad-gone-bad framing device that's worked so well before, the Duplass Brothers Productions co-founder doesn't want to turn in a draft that doesn't leaven the old template with a story worth watching, or a statement worth making:
"If we're going to make a third one, it'd better be super inspired. We are trying and we are putting effort into it, but we are not good enough yet to make it worthwhile, so we are struggling. That's really it."
"Creep 2" was certainly inspired, flipping its own formula with its doomed protagonist. This time a YouTube filmmaker named Sara (Desiree Akhavan) is told from the jump that her subject is a serial killer. As opposed to Brice's Aaron, who learns too late that he was in serious danger, Sara's misguided dismissal of Duplass' faux-Aaron as a lonely loony loser ratchets up the tension early on. She heard him say he's a maniac; she just doesn't take it seriously, to everyone's horror. But considering the rumblings that found footage is dead once again, it's the perfect time for Brice and Duplass to give a fresh take.
My entire gaming life, I've had some pretty crappy computers. At one point, I was playing endless amounts of Stardew Valley on an old Lenovo ThinkPad that I used in college, but it didn't really matter because that game could run on a toaster. I once tried to play BioShock Infinite on that same laptop... that one didn't go so well. I've upgraded a bit since then, but it's still a gamble whether or not a game I bought on my PC is going to run on my secondhand gaming laptop. Well now the Xbox App on PC has put out a new feature that could save our skins from downloading games we can't even play — that's right, it can tell you whether or not your computer will be able to run a game before you download it.
The way it works is really simple: you select the game you want to potentially download, and right under the install button, you get a message that says whether or not your PC can handle it.
In a blog post for the June updates for Xbox PC app, an example photo of the feature says of Sea of Thieves, "Plays well on similar PCs." That's way simpler than having to look through your computer specs, compare them against the game's recommended hardware, and pray. This feature will be especially useful for Xbox Game Pass holders, who of course download games from the Xbox App quite often.
Xbox highlights other improvements that they made to the app in that same blog post, including updates to the backend so that everything "will run smoother and with more reliability." They also claim to have made improvements to the app's navigation and search features, but most of that sounds like adding search categories like "Game to play together" and "Side scrollers."
Microsoft updated the Microsoft Store policies yesterday to prohibit publishers from charging fees for software that is open source or generally available for free. They're also no longer allowed to set irrationally high price tags for their products. gHacks reports: If you have been to the Microsoft Store in the past couple of years, you may have noticed that it is home to more and more open source and free products. While that would be a good thing if the original developer would have uploaded the apps and games to the store, it is not, because the uploads have been made by third-parties. Even worse is the fact that many of these programs are not freely available, but available as paid applications. In other words: Microsoft customers have to pay money to buy a Store version of an app that is freely available elsewhere. Sometimes, free and paid versions exist side by side in the Store. Having to pay for a free application is bad enough, but this is not the only issue that users may experience when they make the purchase. Updates may be of concern as well, as the copycat programs may not be updated as often or as quickly as the source applications.
Open source and free products may not be sold anymore on the Microsoft Store, if generally available for free, and publishers are not allowed to set irrationally high price tags for their products anymore. The developers of open source and free applications may charge for their products on the Microsoft Store, the developer of Paint.net does that, for example. If Microsoft enforces the policies, numerous applications will be removed from the Store. Developers could report applications to Microsoft before, but the new policies give Microsoft control over application listings and submissions directly.
Since 1944, Gallup has polled Americans on their belief in God. Up until 2011, at least 90% of people in the US were believers. Since then, the number has dropped and it's now at its lowest low since the survey began. — Read the rest
Amazon is likely to run out of prospective workers for its US warehouses by the year 2024, according to an internal memo that was leaked to Recode. The memo contained internal research from 2021 that predicted a looming labor crisis for the e-commerce giant that would hit some areas faster than others. For example, it estimated that Amazon would exhaust its labor supply in Phoenix, Arizona by the end of 2021 and in California’s Inland Empire by the end of 2022. It calculated the available pool of workers using factors like income levels and proximity to current or planned Amazon facilities.
The report urged the company to take steps to address the future labor gap, such as raising wages to retain its existing workforce and attract more new hires. It also suggested increasing automation in the warehouses. “If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024,” wrote the authors of the report.
In a statement to Engadget, an Amazon spokesperson said that the leaked document isn't an accurate assessment of its hiring situation. “There are many draft documents written on many subjects across the company that are used to test assumptions and look at different possible scenarios, but aren’t then escalated or used to make decisions. This was one of them. It doesn’t represent the actual situation, and we are continuing to hire well in Phoenix, the Inland Empire, and across the country," wrote Rena Lunak, Amazon's director of global operations and field communications.
Automation is something that Amazon has invested heavily in already by acquiring Kiva Systems in 2012. But according to a Wired investigation from last year, Amazon’s warehouse robots aren’t capable of handling advanced fulfillment tasks that can only be performed by a human worker.
Human workers were once an ample resource the company. The tech giant is the second-largest private employer in the US, and is the largest private employer in a number of US states and cities. The company announced plans to hire 125,000 workers last fall, which is roughly equivalent to the population of Savannah, Georgia. But the new hires largely appear to be replacing workers who have been terminated or resigned. Amazon’s turnover rate is roughly 150 percent a year, or twice the amount of the retail and logistics industries at large, a New York Timesinvestigation revealed last year.
As Recode notes, Amazon’s attrition rate is even worse in Phoenix and the Inland Empire. It also has to compete with big-box stores like Walmart and Target, which are now offering competitive wages to those with warehouse experience. “We are hearing a lot of [Amazon] workers say, ‘I can just go across the street to Target or Walmart,’” Sheheryar Kaoosji, co-executive director of Inland Empire’s Warehouse Worker Resource Center told Recode.
When it comes to simple meals that can fit into any nutritional plan, Reddit’s r/EatCheapandHealthy is a goldmineforideas. My favorite thread at the moment is this one in which someone asked for “stupidly easy food pairings.” Things you can just throw together on the same plate or in the same skillet and have a…
Jemaine Clement has played plenty of colorful, oddball characters since his breakthrough turn in the musical comedy series "Flight of the Conchords." An eccentric, plagiarist author in "Gentlemen Broncos," a time-traveling alien villain in "Men in Black 3," the vampire Vladislav in "What We Do in the Shadows," and the shiny giant crab Tamatoa in "Moana" are just some of the characters Clement has inhabited on the big screen. But in "Nude Tuesday," a new comedy playing at the Tribeca Film Festival this month, the New Zealand native gets weirder than ever as the sex guru leader of a free-spirited, erotic commune. But Clement can't take all of the responsibility for this hilariously strange performance, because director Armagan Ballantyne takes a unique approach by having the entire film unfold with dialogue that is vaguely Scandinavian-sounding gibberish, which was then subtitled by writers in post-production. Yeah, this is a wild movie.
Let The Sex Voyage Begin
Laura (Jackie van Beek) and Bruno (Damon Herriman) are a middle-aged couple who have lost that loving feeling. Though Bruno is desperately trying to keep the romance alive, Laura's job and Bruno's general ineptitude as a husband keep her preoccupied and unaroused, which makes Bruno bitter and sexually frustrated. Their struggling marriage is no secret, which prompts Bruno's mother to send them to Wonderla (or ẄØnÐĘULÄ, as the gibberish language stylizes the name), a woodland-based couple's retreat where eccentric love guru Bjorg Rasmussen (Jemaine Clement), author of "The Toothy Vulva," aims to help lovers reignite the spark in their bedroom.
Of course, Laura and Bruno are initially reluctant to engage in the more free-spirited activities that find these "sex voyagers" partaking in hippie-esque exercises involving post-climactic breathing, primal dancing, intimate touching, and even animals like goats, pigs, lizards, and chickens used as erotic guides (but not in a morally questionable interspecies fashion). But slowly, the two begin to shed their apprehensive shell to discover what it is they really want out of life and love.
The vibe of "Nude Tuesday" lands somewhere between David Wain's romantic comedy "Wanderlust" starring Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston and Yorgos Lanthimos' surreal dark comedy "The Lobster" with Colin Farrell, with a healthy dose of quirky film festival spirit thrown in for good measure. The film isn't portrayed in an overtly silly fashion that's actively trying to land jokes. Instead, the entire cast plays everything straight, giving us a world that feels just slightly off-kilter from our own with a retreat that is weird enough to be funny, but not strange enough to be unrealistic. And one of the most important factors in this story's presentation comes from the aforementioned gibberish language and the subtitles invented to represent it.
Get Ready For Fruity Bits And Conkers
The dialogue of everyone in "Nude Tuesday" may sound like a real Scandinavian language with words that could be easily mistaken as Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, or Icelandic, but it's pure nonsense. Though the script for the story was co-written by director Armagan Ballantyne and star Jackie van Beek, the subtitles you see on screen were written entirely in post-production by Ronny Chieng ("The Daily Show"), Celia Pacquola ("Utopia"), and Julia Davis ("Gavin & Stacey"). Even the familiar soundtrack songs that audiences will immediately recognize have been re-recorded to have gibberish lyrics. The result is a treasure trove of some of the most hilariously oddball bits of dialogue.
Some of the retreat's assistant gurus have such peculiar synonyms for private parts. One activity refers to genitalia as "fruity bits and conkers" and then proceeds to have participants ask if they can touch each others' "tinglies." But it's Clement's Bjorg Rasmussen who gets the best bits, with lines like "I"m an eagle pimp with a bit of a grudge," and, "You've biggened my mister." Impressively, the lines written in post-production effectively match the delivery of the gibberish that was captured on camera. I'm not sure exactly why this was the writing process for the movie, but it's a fascinating experimental element that maximizes the comedic potential while also making the movie feel perfectly otherworldly. It also helps that the production takes full advantage of being immersed in the stunning woodlands and mountainsides of New Zealand.
But more than just laughs, "Nude Tuesday" has plenty of heart. Though the story is quite familiar, the ending for our main characters doesn't exactly go in the direction you might anticipate, even if it means the narrative drags just a little bit in certain places. In fact, despite the movie's intimate material, the majority of the nudity is saved for the film's third act on the film's titular day, and there is plenty of it, though not in a sexually graphic fashion. It's certainly not going to make the movie easy to sell in the United States, what with all the full-frontal nudity from the entire cast, but it makes the proceedings that much funnier, and I can't help but commend the cast for being so comfortable in their bodies.
"Nude Tuesday" creatively plays with the medium, brings something refreshing to the table, and there's no way it ever would have been made by a major studio. Laugh out loud funny, strangely charming, and a truly unique endeavor, "Nude Tuesday" is exactly the kind of movie you love to discover on the film festival circuit, and it deserves to find an audience on the big screen, even if it's just for the indie crowd.
TikTok says it’s achieved a “significant milestone” toward its promises to beef up the security of its US users’ data. In a new update, the company says it has “changed the default storage location of US user data.”
As the company notes, it had already stored much of its user data in the United States, at a Virginia-based data center. But under a new partnership with Oracle, the company has migrated US user traffic to a new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
“Today, 100% of US user traffic is being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,” the company wrote in a blog post. “We still use our US and Singapore data centers for backup, but as we continue our work we expect to delete US users' private data from our own data centers and fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the US.” Additionally, TikTok says it has made “operational changes,” including a new department “with US-based leadership, to solely manage US user data for TikTok.”
The moves are part of a longstanding effort by TikTok to address US officials’ concerns over how user data is handled by TikTok and parent company ByteDance. The company has been working to separate US user data so that it’s not accessible to China-based ByteDance as US lawmakers eye legislation to curb the influence of Chinese tech companies.
Still, the new safeguards are unlikely to fully sway critics of TikTok, who say the company still hasn’t addressed all potential concerns about how US user data is handled. In fact, just after TikTok published its blog post, BuzzFeed Newspublished a report that raises new questions about how the company handles the data of its US users.
The report, which was based on hours of internal meetings leaked to BuzzFeed, says that “China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users.” The recordings, which cover a time period between last September and January 2022, offer new details about the complex effort to cut off Bytedance's access to US user data.
The report quotes an outside consultant hired by TikTok to oversee some of the work saying that they believed there was “backdoor to access user data in almost all” of the company’s internal tools. It also quotes statements from several employees who say “that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least.”
It also notes that while data deemed “sensitive,” like users’ birth dates and phone numbers, will be stored in the Oracle servers, other information about US-based users could remain accessible to ByteDance. “ByteDance’s China-based employees could continue to have access to insights about what American TikTok users are interested in, from cat videos to political beliefs,” the report says.
That may not seem as serious as more personal information like birthdays and phone numbers, but it’s exactly the kind of details that some lawmakers in the US have raised concerns about. US officials have questioned whether the app’s “For You” algorithm could be used as a means of foreign influence.
“We know we're among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of US user data,” TikTok said in a statement to BuzzFeed News.
More than 100 million Americans are being warned to stay indoors if possible as high temperatures and humidity settle in over states stretching through parts of the Gulf coast to the Great Lakes and east to the Carolinas. From a report: The National Weather Service Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, said on Monday 107.5 million people will be affected by combination of heat advisories, excessive heat warnings and excessive heat watches through Wednesday. The heatwave, which set several high temperature records in the west, the south-west and into Denver during the weekend, moved east into parts of the Gulf coast and the midwest on Monday and will expand to the Great Lakes and east to the Carolinas, the National Weather Service said.
St Louis, Memphis, Minneapolis and Tulsa are among several cities under excessive heat warnings, with temperatures forecast to reach about 100F (38C), accompanied by high humidity that could make conditions feel close to 110F (43C). In Jackson, Mississippi, residents braved temperatures reaching 95F (35C) on Monday to complete their chores. Roger Britt, 67, ventured to a neighborhood garden in search of vegetables for dinner. Britt thinks the weather in Jackson has been more unpredictable in recent years. "It was so cold this past winter, so I know it's going to be a hot summer," he said.
An anonymous reader shares a report: On the painful occasion of a mass shooting in the US, it has become customary for some politician or pundit to point an accusatory finger at video games. In late May, after two such attacks -- in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, it was Texas Senator Ted Cruz. These tragedies, he said in a speech at a National Rifle Association convention, were a mirror of our culture, and specifically, where our culture is failing. In addition to "broken families" and "declining church attendance," he said, "desensitizing the act of murder in video games" has contributed to the epidemic of mass shootings.
What surprised me wasn't what Cruz said. It was how little traction it received in the mainstream media. A Fox News host asked his guest, Arizona State University criminal justice professor Bernard Zapor, whether violent video games' heightened realism contributed to an increase in mass homicides. Zapor dodged, instead citing the dissolution of community bonds. Most coverage of Cruz's comments (and Fox's interview) were in the service of invalidating the question itself: Decades of research have shown no connection between playing violent video games and committing violent acts. For more than 20 years years, the idea that video games like Doom somehow spurred these heinous shootings held sway in popular culture. In the '90s, "There was really no pushback," said Chris Ferguson, Stetson University's co-chair of psychology, who has studied violent video games' impact on gamers for about 20 years.
There are many recipes that call for one to “secure” something with a skewer or toothpick. Things like stuffed chicken breasts, meaty roulades, and bacon wrapped whatever—so many of these little food parcels need to be stabbed with a bit of wood to help them keep their form while they cook. But what if you’re out of…
"Some Like It Hot" is a film that on paper, doesn't seem like it should work. Here's a script that came out in the late 1950s about two Chicago musicians who witnessed the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and in desperate need of both a gig and an escape, flee to Florida in drag with a women's band. How a movie is supposed to make the sharp tonal shift from a Prohibition-era gangster flick to a classic, Shakespearian cross-dressing comedy in the span of a few minutes seems like an unlikely feat. Even more shocking is that Jack Lemmon agreed to the project before seeing a page.
Lemmon ran into director Billy Wilder while he was dining with his "Sabrina" star, Audrey Hepburn. Wilder pitched Lemmon the idea, telling him that he'd have to dress in drag for the majority of the picture. He immediately said yes without ever seeing the script.
The actor's reaction to Wilder's idea mirrors his character's eagerness in the film. As bass player Jerry, he almost seems too game to dress in drag, and not just for the paycheck. While Tony Curtis' character, Joe, goes with the feminized version of his name, "Josephine," we see Lemmon announce to his fellow female bandmates with enthusiasm that he's "Daphne." It's as though Jerry has put careful thought into being a woman long before putting on a skirt.
'Fell Off The Goddamn Couch'
Lemmon's initial excitement wasn't deflated when he received the first sixty pages of Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond's script. If anything, he was overjoyed, he told TASCHEN:
"I fell off the goddamn couch, literally, fell off the couch. They were the greatest sixty pages I ever read. I went into his office and I told him so, I said, 'Where's the rest of these?' He says, 'You won't get it until we're already shooting' and then I found out that he and Iz never finished the script before they started shooting."
As Lemmon surmised, Wilder's genius direction ensured the movie's good taste. But like most Wilder vehicles, "Some Like It Hot" succeeded on the strength of its writing, which doesn't take cheap shots at women or men in drag. Once Joe and Jerry put on their dresses, their eyes are opened to the blatant harassment around them. They escape the mob's clutches only to find themselves trapped by uncomfortable shoes and the ridiculous advances of lascivious men.
A Perfect Throwaway Line
The film's most famous line is one that rivals the best ending lines in cinema. As Lemmon noted, Wilder and Diamond had not finished the script when they started shooting. In fact, the writing team knew that the leading men would get away and reveal themselves to their partners, but they had no idea how Lemmon's male fiancé would react to his true identity. In the final scene, Lemmon tries to convince Osgood Fielding III that their marriage will never work out. Finally, he gives up, rips off the wig, and admits that he's a man. Fielding shrugs and smiles, "Well. Nobody's perfect."
Wilder and Diamond fretted over the dialogue during a late night writing session, then decided to throw in "Nobody's perfect" as a placeholder, the director told Vanity Fair.
"We never found the line, so we went with 'Nobody's perfect.' The audience just exploded at the preview in Westwood. This was also very funny, how you make pictures. We wrote it on Sunday, we shot it on Monday."
I'm always amazed watching "Some Like It Hot" at how fresh the film feels. Shot more than a half century before the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, the script is filled with gut-busting dialogue that remains relevant today. What started as a throwaway line now feels like a 21st-century reaction to the idea of a same-sex relationship. It's a superior ending than one that would have ended in Fielding's shock or horror. There are countless lines like this throughout the film that, at once played for laughs, now sound like statements about marriage in general. I can't help but burst out laughing when Curtis asks Lemmon why he would want to marry a man and Lemmon quips, "Security!"
Since his breakthrough in the early 1990s, Mike Judge has been responsible for some of the most beloved projects in pop culture history. The man has given the world a multitude of gifts, including the films "Office Space," "Idiocracy," and "Extract," in addition to the series "Silicon Valley," and "King of the Hill." However, it's Judge's landmark series "Beavis and Butt-Head" that he is perhaps most synonymous with creating. For eight seasons, 222 episodes, and the feature film "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America" the titular teens served as idiotic arbiters of pop culture, and provided a perfectly vulgar satire on the behavior of American youth.
It's been over a decade since we last saw the duo, but Mike Judge is back, with upcoming new episodes in addition to the cinematic sequel, "Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe." It'd be easy to dismiss the return as the result of the 1980s nostalgia boom seen in projects like "Stranger Things" and the "Ghostbusters" films finally shifting into the 1990s, but the reality is a bit more unconventional and unexpected. I know, that sounds impossible when discussing the work of someone who thrives in the absurd and unpredictable, but it's what happened! Believe it or not, but if it wasn't for Coachella, "Beavis and Butt-Head" may have remained a retired relic of yesteryear, and we have the band Portugal. The Man to thank for making it happen.
Reviving The Voices Of Old Favorites
According to an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Mike Judge is apparently elated to be returning to the world of "Beavis and Butt-Head," and even more thrilled with the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the news of their return. Judge not only writes, directs, and produces the series, he's also the voice actor for the leads. "It's really fun to do," said Judge. "I hadn't done it in so long." While many people likely spend their free time trying to perfect their cartoon imitations (my Bobby Hill is getting fantastic, for the record) Mike Judge is not one of those people. "It's not like I sit around and do the voices in my spare time or anything but the band Portugal. The Man asked me to do an intro thing for them at Coachella," Judge said.
Judge had previously used a few songs by the band for episodes of "Silicon Valley," so he agreed to lend his talents for their Coachella intro. "I did it and thought it sounded like Beavis and Butt-Head," he said, and the experience apparently reignited the love he has for voicing the characters. "Paramount wanted to do [the series] so I thought why not," he said. "It has been a long time. There are people working on the [new] show that weren't born when it first started."
So there you have it, "Beavis and Butt-Head" live again because a band wanted an intro and called up the voice of their formative years.
"Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe" drops on Paramount+ on June 23, 2022.
Rob Zombie might be watchin' angels cry, but he's not watching "House of 1000 Corpses," because he does not like it! The cult horror director/musician doesn't seem to have much love for his first film, which was released in 2003, and I think anyone who has ever made anything can relate. It's hard to look back a your early work (whether artistic or not) and see anything but mistakes, but it's a little bit of a bummer that he doesn't seem to have any fondness for his first film. Your first time is supposed to be special! Also, sometimes nostalgia rules. I hope Rob learns to be kinder to himself, because even though "House of 1000 Corpses" isn't a perfect movie, it's still a damn fun one.
In an interview with ScreenRant, Zombie explained his feelings, saying:
"The first film [I directed], which people seem to love, is just a calamitous mess. Well, when it came out it seemed like everyone hated it. Now everyone acts like it's beloved in some way. All I see is flaw, upon flaw, upon flaw... upon flaw."
It's A Real Drag(ula)
And sure, "House of 1000 Corpses" has some rough spots and some weird bits and all the hallmarks of someone who is still trying to figure out what he's trying to do, but all of that adds to the messed slapdash joy of the film. "House of 1000 Corpses" marks the debut of Zombie's Firefly family, a tight-knit family of serial killers who went on to wreak havoc in future Zombie movies "The Devil's Rejects" and "3 From Hell." "House of 1000 Corpses" sets up all of that lore in such a delightfully chaotic way, and even if the plot veers off course, it's still dripping in Zombie's trademark demonic trash atmosphere. I mean, how can you deny a movie that gave us the line, "We like to get f***ed up and do f***ed up s***." There's some real gold in those hills.
Don't get me wrong, Zombie is allowed to feel however he wants about his movies, and he's certainly endured plenty of harsh criticism and studio hijinks to last for a lifetime, but if he's not going to love it, there are plenty of people out there who will. He might not get it, but he doesn't really have to. That's one of the great things about art -- once it's out there, it's not just yours anymore.
Wherein we discuss seeing each other for the first time in two years, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, new Ghostbusters stuff, Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi (major spoiler warning!), Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, non-E3 week, Diablo Immortal, Evil Dead: The Game, the new PlayStation Plus, Stranger Things, Westworld, Succession, Joker: Folie a deux. and Sandman. Starring Ryan Scott, Justin Haywald, and Ryan Higgins.
Researchers at identity security firm CyberArk this week shared technical information on an RDP named pipe vulnerability in Windows for which Microsoft had to release two rounds of patches.
When you’re removing hair from your face or legs, all you really need is a razor and something to cut down on friction between your sweet baby skin and the blade. But if the goal is so simple, why are there so many products clamoring to help you make it happen? (The answer is capitalism.) But it’s true that each of…
This post contains spoilers for episode 5 of "The Boys" season 3.
One of the most interesting characters on "The Boys" is A-Train (Jessie Usher), who is introduced on the show in the first episode when he accidentally runs through Hughie's (Jack Quaid) girlfriend Robin (Jess Salgueiro). He then fails to apologize for the action in any meaningful way, which spurs Hughie to join an underground anti-supe organization.
Narratively speaking, A-Train running over Robin serves the same basic purpose as Jaime Lannister pushing a child out a window in the first episode of "Game of Thrones." It's a clear-cut evil act that kickstarts the plot and gives audiences an easy villain to root against. Much like Jaime, A-Train is eventually fleshed out as a character, goes through some hardships, and has to deal with the loss of something that defines him. As Jaime loses his hand and is forced to adapt, A-Train's heart condition takes away his fastest-man-in-the-world status. In season 3 in particular, we watch as A-Train tries to find a new identity that doesn't rely solely on his super speed.
The difference, of course, is that A-Train isn't on a redemption arc. He never learns to take responsibility for what he did to Robin, and even as he tries to become a Black Lives Matter activist, it's clear that he doesn't actually care about the cause at all beyond boosting his image. This is shown beautifully in the commercial he shoots in the season's fourth episode, which is an almost beat-for-beat parody of that godawful Pepsi ad from 2017. Things get worse in this week's episode, "The Last Time to Look on This World of Lies," where he attempts to hold a racist superhero (Blue Hawk, played by Nick Wechsler) accountable for terrorizing majority-Black neighborhoods.
The Worst Apology Ever
The first red flag is that A-Train doesn't try to get Blue Hawk to stop over-patrolling Black neighborhoods, or even try to explain to him why what he's doing is wrong. All A-Train asks is for Blue Hawk to give an apology; much like the Pepsi ad the show was mocking, this is a symbolic gesture that means nothing in any material sense. The apology itself is predictably tone-deaf; Blue Hawk barely even looks at the people he's talking to, and he doesn't really apologize, for that matter. The closest to an "I'm sorry" he gets is "Superheroes often have to make split-second decisions when fighting crime, and I apologize if any of mine have been perceived as racist." Add on the fact that he's lifelessly reading all this off a pre-written script with an I'd-rather-be-anywhere-but-here tone (similar to A-Train's tone in his season 1 apology to Hughie), and it's not surprising it doesn't go over well.
The crowd yells at him to take responsibility for the specific people he hurt. Things escalate to the point where people are chanting "Black Lives Matter" at him, and he responds with the familiar "All Lives Matter" chant, followed by him screaming "Supe Lives Matter!" before going on a violent rampage, throwing people into walls and nearly killing A-Train's brother. Blue Hawk is later seen on the news, downplaying what happened as him being attacked by Antifa thugs.
The parallels to the police — and right-wing talking points about the police — in this scene feel particularly pointed, perhaps more so than they have at any point in the show so far. But despite what the one-star reviewers are saying about season 3, none of this social commentary is new for "The Boys."
Starting From The Pilot
Blue Hawk might be the most blatant example of the show using supes as a vehicle for critiquing real-life police, but "The Boys" has been a thinly veiled metaphor for the police as early as its opening scene in the pilot episode.
The show's introduction to Homelander and Queen Maeve, after all, feature them chasing down a couple of bank robbers. This is one of the only times in the whole show where we see the supes actually do their jobs and stop a crime, and already they're going about it terribly. Even fan-favorite Queen Maeve uses excessive force, beating a guy up to the point where he's vomiting blood, even though the robber literally poses no threat to her and she could've easily restrained him without the extra violence.
And then there's Homelander, who even at his most heroic-looking, still tortures a dude by melting his hand and then throws the other criminal into the sky. The show takes the heroic music and the way the two kid civilians in the scene idolize Homelander's actions, and juxtaposes them with the shot of the criminal falling from the sky and crashing on top of a random car in the background. In addition to being an act of murder, it also involves needless property damage that'll cause the owner of that car (who did nothing wrong!) a lot of headaches, but of course, that isn't any of Homelander's concern. All the problems a normal person would have with the way these heroes handled the situation are glossed over with the simplistic, comforting "good guys punishing the bad guys" narrative, which certainly sounds familiar.
ACAB Includes A-Train
One of the primary criticisms of the police by reform activists is the lack of accountability for police officers who harm people. This is often the case even when the victims aren't Black, such as the 2016 incident where Officer Philip Brailsford killed an unarmed, drunk but clearly harmless man. The video footage of the event is one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen, as victim Daniel Shaver is clearly trying his best to follow the officer's needlessly hostile and often contradictory instructions. Officer Brailsford was looking for an excuse to kill, and when Shaver didn't give him one, he killed him anyway.
Despite this, Officer Brailsford was never punished for it in any meaningful way. He was acquitted of all charges, and would later be rehired by the same police department for 42 days, for the purpose of making him eligible for a pension. Most people get sent to jail in these situations; he gets $2,500 a month.
This murder of Daniel Shaver and the lack of consequences for it are, unfortunately, not that rare, and you can see that reflected in "The Boys" as early as season 1. After all, A-Train starts off the show by killing a woman, all because he was recklessly running at super-speed while high. Vought goes out of its way not to discipline A-Train but to pressure Hughie into signing a nondisclosure agreement about what he witnessed. They also lie about the details of the incident to the public, which the media accepts uncritically. Basically, the show's inciting incident is Hughie having his girlfriend murdered by a cop who thinks (correctly) that he's above the law.
A Complicit Media Landscape
It isn't just A-Train's actions in early season 1 that motivate Hughie's quest for revenge; it's the way A-Train and the rest of the Seven are glorified by the world around Hughie. He has to see A-Train's face everywhere, from cereal boxes to magazine covers. This man who killed his girlfriend isn't just free from legal repercussions; he's being idolized. The scene halfway through the pilot where Hughie can't make a simple trip to a convenience store without seeing A-Train's face a million times feels particularly loaded; it's like the writers are trying to get you to imagine how a victim of police brutality would feel walking into a store filled with Thin Blue Line flags.
The glorification of Supes in the world of "The Boys" runs deep. The writers make it clear that the big media outlets in this world are capable of criticizing superheroes in extreme cases — like if one of them turns out to be a literal Nazi — but when it comes to anything less than that, the news is more than happy to take the supes at their word. When A-Train falsely claims that Robin was in the middle of the road when he hit her, no journalist is ever shown stepping forward to question the merits of the claim. It feels like a deliberate parallel to the way media outlets will often uncritically accept the police department's version of events, despite it being proven over and over again that police departments can lie. (If you look at the Minneapolis Police Department's original statement on the murder of George Floyd, for instance, the lies and manipulative half-truths are obvious, but they went unquestioned by the press until the video of the incident went viral.)
'You Got Powers, They Don't'
As Blue Hawk claims to be brutalizing people in self-defense in this week's episode, a woman in the crowd yells at him, "You got powers, they don't!" With this, the show's drawing a parallel to the massive power imbalance of real-life police and civilians. When Blue Hawk claims that his dangerous job requires him to make these "split-second" decisions, it mirrors the real-life excuse used to justify so many infamous police shootings. And while real-life police officers do certainly have to face dangerous situations that legitimately call for split-second decision-making, cases like the murder of Daniel Shaver make it clear that this excuse is often just that: an excuse, not a real justification.
And like with the supes, the danger of a police officer's job is often exaggerated in politically motivated ways. As a way to fear-monger about calls to defund the police (which never materialized into actual policy), certain political figures lately have pointed to the fact that a record number of policemen died in 2021, 458 in total. That sounds really bad, until you look at the stats and realize that oh, the majority of those deaths were due to Covid and other health problems, not from getting killed on the job as the statement implies.
Likewise, the supes on "The Boys" are often referred to as brave despite the fact that they typically have all the power in their interactions with criminals. The show takes the often-flimsy self-defense excuse and exaggerates it to an absurd degree: even if someone was reaching for gun, Homelander is literally invincible. We know he'd never need to crush a dude's skull with his hand, but he does it anyway and people still worship him for it.
The Divisiveness Of Homelander
Perhaps the clearest parallel to the police in America is the characterization of Homelander, who is shown to be idolized by a lot of people within the country, and feared by plenty of others. The real Homelander, the one we see interact with the other characters, is terrifying. The audience is never allowed to forget that Homelander could murder everyone else in the scene with him if he wanted to. He's both the most invincible and most powerful person in every room he's in.
The fear this character invokes is similar to the fear recounted from first-hand witnesses and victims of police violence, as well as the fear induced in Black Americans during things like seemingly routine traffic stops. As video footage from the murder of people like Philando Castile show, it often turns out to be the civilian's responsibility to de-escalate the situation, not the other way around as it should be. Homelander's marketed as someone who protects people from evil, but the characters in "The Boys" are doing everything they can think of to protect themselves from him.
But just as many white Americans don't feel fear in the presence of the police, a lot of people in the universe of "The Boys" don't think of Homelander as someone to be feared at all. Yes, they know Homelander kills people, but Homelander kills the bad guys, the people who have it coming. Just as the "he was no angel" excuse gets thrown around in real life every time a police officer kills someone, Homelander benefits from the primal desire many Americans have to see the bad guys punished. Sure, he doesn't need to kill anyone, but his victims are "no angels" after all.
Indulging Revenge Fantasies
One of the reasons Homelander's unhinged "I'm better than all of you" rant early this season was so terrifying was the show's understanding that, to a lot of Americans, this speech wouldn't be seen as terrifying at all. The show cuts to Monique's new boyfriend Todd (Matthew Gormon) watching Homelander's speech on TV, and Todd isn't just approving of Homelander's words; he's enthralled by it. It's almost like he's getting some weird sexual thrill over Homelander declaring he's better than everyone else and how Americans need to get out of the way and let him do whatever he wants.
When Homelander did this, it was commonly (and correctly) interpreted as a commentary on Trump-era conservative politics and white nationalism. But it can also be taken as a specific parallel for the police. Judging from the rhetoric spouted by so many conservative figures in the U.S., to them, it's not just that police are good people doing their best in a tough job; they're our guardian angels out to deal out vengeance to the Bad Guys who are out to get us.
It's the sort of child-like worldview that leads to real-life police officers slapping Punisher logos on their police cars. From the way many on the right defend the murders of people like George Floyd or Michael Brown, it seems that they don't view the purpose of the police being to protect and serve, but primarily to punish. (And considering that the Supreme Court has ruled that the police aren't constitutionally required to protect anyone, they may be right about that.) Homelander deliberately leans into this vision to help his poll numbers. He represents many things, but most of all he's a parody of what the right wants the police to be.
Cozying Up To White Nationalism
Another case where you can see "The Boys" being influenced by real-life events is the introduction of Stormfront (Aya Cash) to the show in season 2. Although the Seven were being used as a critique of police in season 1, Stormfront's introduction gave the show an opportunity to critique how the police interact with white nationalists. There's been a concerning and well-documented trend of more and more police officers (and police trainers) being sympathetic to extremist, white-supremacist ideals, if not having those ideals themselves. One recent case involves a suburban Seattle police chief with seemingly clear-cut Nazi sympathies — even placing a Nazi insignia on his office door — who was paid over $1.5 million to resign. Even when white supremacists among the police are disciplined, it tends to feel more like they're being rewarded.
So goes the case of Stormfront in season 2, a literal Nazi (born in 1919 Germany) who would brutalize minorities under her original superhero identity Liberty. This was first shown when she beats a Black civilian to death in a flashback scene that's a blatant nod to the many phone recordings of police shootings that have gone viral. Instead of being thrown in jail or fired for good, Stormfront is later rehired under a different identity, much like how real-life officers fired for misconduct will simply get hired by another police department and continue to be allowed in the same situations. Just as one police officer originally fired for "dangerous lack of composure" during firearms training went on to get rehired in Cleveland and subsequently kill 12-year-old Tamir Rice, Stormfront goes on to kill even more people once she's re-hired. With that in mind, the storytelling choice to have Homelander and Stormfront become a couple feels particularly symbolic.
Starlight: The Disillusioned Rookie
By this point, you may be thinking that man, "The Boys" must really hate police officers. If supes are a metaphor for the police, then the showrunners must think that cops are inherently evil. It's with the introduction of Annie (Erin Moriarty) in season 1 that the show makes it clear its focus is more on critiquing the police on a systemic level. It's not that supes are born bad; it's that there's little incentive for them to be good.
Annie joins the Seven as an optimistic newbie who genuinely believes she's here to stop crime, to help innocent people, and to make the world a better place. Annie's first few episodes on the show are dedicated to her learning, one horrifying moment at a time, that she's here to help Vought's bottom line, nothing more. The one time we get to see Annie prevent a real-life crime, she's swiftly yelled at and disciplined for doing it in a way that hurt her optics.
Annie eventually starts working with Hughie's group and tries her best to change things from the inside. But can Vought — or the larger system that allows supes to break the law with impunity — really be fought effectively from within? "The Boys" doesn't seem to think so. Annie's ambitions for her new role as the Seven's co-captain this season were swiftly crushed by Homelander, and it's worth noting that Annie's most effective work so far in taking down supes took place at the end of season 2, when she was an outlaw fully disconnected from the Seven. Much like with Hughie's attempts to fight supes by working within the system with Neuman (Claudia Doumit), season 3 Annie has come to the conclusion that fixing things from within is a fool's bet.
The Boys Has Always Been This Way
A lot of superhero stories are intended as a commentary on the police in some way, so it's not a surprise that "The Boys" is no exception. Things grow ever more complicated in season 3 with the development of Butcher (Karl Urban) and Hughie becoming supes themselves, albeit temporarily. The show is critical of Butcher's violent, all-or-nothing approach to taking down the supes, but Hughie and Starlight's peaceful strategies have been revealed to be deeply flawed as well. It's not clear yet what exactly "The Boys" solution is for the problems inherent to police, but incrementalism doesn't seem to be the answer.
None of this is to say that "The Boys" is only about police, or that any of the scenes and character arcs mentioned here were written into the show as some kind of one-to-one parallel to them. "The Boys" also sets its satirical sights on corporate greed, celebrity culture, evangelicals, the way in which capitalism monetizes and trivializes social justice movements, and so on. The show has never been about just one thing.
But to those complaining that "The Boys" has suddenly "gone woke," that the show has been ruined by an unexpected shift towards making fun of the police, I have to ask: what show did you think you were watching? "The Boys" has never been all that subtle, and it's never been shy with its social commentary. At this point, if you're surprised or disappointed by the showrunners clearly making fun of the police, you might want to give the first two seasons another watch. When it comes to supporting Black Lives Matter, this latest episode is nothing new.
From the stylish Evercade to the old-school Sega Genesis Mini, these machines will have you bleeping, blooping, and blasting back to the good old days.
While we might love to watch birds, sometimes they build their nests in dangerous or inconvenient places near our homes. It can be difficult to deal with a recurring bird nest and the mess they can make, not to mention the danger to them when they nest near vents or fans. There are some humane ways you can discourage…
Set phasers to spoiler warning, as this article discusses the events of the latest episode of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds."
Seven episodes in, it's clear that the creative team behind "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" understands one amusingly recurring facet of the franchise: it just wouldn't be "Star Trek" without at least some undercurrent of sexual tension between certain pairings ... even if it's largely one-sided. Some shows over the years have dealt with such matters better than others, but this latest "Trek" series boasts a murderer's row of cast members who seem to generate easy chemistry with, well, any possible combination of characters that viewers could imagine. (None other than co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman agrees!) The latest episode, "The Serene Squall," takes this even further by delving into the "flirtationship" between Ethan Peck's Spock and Jess Bush's Nurse Christine Chapel.
Newcomers to the series may be unaware, but this classic dynamic traces back its roots all the way to "Star Trek: The Original Series." As a prequel series, "Strange New Worlds" is ideally positioned to shed new light and add fresh layers to many of the concepts and world-building we took for granted while watching William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and the rest of the original "Trek" crew. "The Serene Squall" wastes no time at all, confidently building on the breadcrumbs laid down in this season's "Spock Amok." Here, their simmering chemistry comes to a head in a surprising way -- all while paying off decades of established franchise lore.
Logic Vs Love
It's a tale as old as time. A cold, emotionless, and somewhat naïve rogue comes up against the sweet, affectionate, but ultimately unrequited crush of his would-be suitor. "The Original Series" may have primarily been a series about exploration and thinly-veiled metaphors for ongoing social concerns (though, let's be real, it was often just an excuse for William Shatner to land goofy, double-fist punches on hordes of poor, hapless aliens), but fans couldn't miss the ongoing drama unfolding in the background between Nimoy's Spock and Nurse Chapel (played by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry).
Though rarely apt to take the center stage of any given episode, the one-sided "romance" between Christine Chapel and Spock cropped up countless times throughout the seasons. Again and again, a lingering look or a slightly too-familiar barb by Chapel would be met by the half-Vulcan's usual impassive stare or, worse, a gruff but courteous reminder of the nature of their strictly professional relationship. Not that this ever dampened Chapel's spirits, anyway, as this typically bounced right off and only motivated her even further to somehow, someway get through Spock's impenetrable exterior. Who among us can't relate!
Chapel's infatuation with the pointy-eared science officer reached a boiling point in the season 1 episode "The Naked Time," when a virus loose on the Enterprise causes the crew to lose any and all inhibitions -- naturally, Chapel outright professes her love to a shocked Spock. While Chapel never quite gets to act on these feelings (a kiss shared between the two under duress in the season 3 episode "Plato's Stepchildren" doesn't count!), Spock does call her by a first-name basis after he briefly acknowledges her feelings for him in "Amok Time."
Alas, the will they/won't they dance between the two never becomes anything more.
A One-Sided Affair?
Between "Spock Amok" and now "The Serene Squall," it'd be fair to say that "Strange New Worlds" gives far more attention to the Spock and Christine Chapel relationship than all of "The Original Series" (and "The Animated Series") combined. Overtly positioned as close friends, Bush plays Chapel with a winking self-awareness about her own feelings for the handsome and rugged Science Officer -- even as she finds herself in the unenviable spot of providing relationship advice for Spock and his bondmate, T'Pring. Though far less demeaning circumstances than what her counterpart endured throughout "The Original Series," even casual viewers had to have picked up on the yearning in Chapel's face when Spock isn't looking.
This week's episode escalated matters between the pair even more, orchestrating a dramatic (though manufactured) love triangle at a crucial moment of the plot. Space pirates led by Jesse James Keitel's new character Dr. Aspen (er, make that the nefarious Captain Angel) have taken over the Enterprise, blackmailing T'Pring into releasing a dangerous Vulcan prisoner under her guard in exchange for Spock's life. With no other alternative, of course the only solution to get them out of this mess is for Spock to "confess" to an affair with Christine and engage in a steamy make-out session in full view of T'Pring. Though clearly a ruse (even Angel sees right through it and, later, T'Pring acknowledges as much), the writers are clearly adding even more subtext and nuance to the dynamic that fans are well-familiar with from "The Original Series."
The episode ends with Spock attempting to clear the air between the two out of respect for his colleague, but we wouldn't be surprised to see this potentially blossoming romance -- one-sided or not -- receive more of a focus in future episodes.
Rob Zombie is something of a prophet. Shaking off poor critical reviews of his films, the multihyphenate once said:
"At first they say it's not as good as the last one, and then you come out with a new one and suddenly everyone loved the one before."
Nothing truer has been said of "House of 1000 Corpses," Zombie's early-aughts directorial debut. Admittedly a crash course in filmmaking for the "31" director, "House" and its chronicle of a murderous psychobilly family got dismal reviews upon its release in 2003. Now that the film is nearly old enough to buy liquor and hit the casino, subsequent feature efforts like the debauched clownshow "31" and trilogy-capper "3 From Hell" have proven Zombie right by elevating his thousand corpses to a more prestigious position in the Zombie movie pantheon. The film has since become a cult classic, and like other cult classics, there've been rumblings of lost footage and unreleased alternate endings. Indeed, the full film screened uncut at Mar del Plata Film Festival in Argentina in March of 2003, where the festival program shows its runtime at 105 minutes instead of the 89 it now sits at. Zombie himself addresses rumor, speaking with Dread Central:
"I don't think it ever will [be released] because I don't think anyone knows where any of it is, truthfully. Even when they put together the DVD, which was 13 years ago, we couldn't find anything because they had shot two hundred interviews in the time since the shoot. We had behind-the-scenes stuff, make-up tests, all these different things; and nobody could find it. It was all lost. That's why I think whatever exists is all that's going to ever exist."
There you have it, folks. No more cyborgs, no more hooks, no more Spaulding's dirty looks.
No Hellbilly Deluxe Edition
So despite the film making its way into the pop culture consciousness, no director's cut is ever happening for "House of 1000 Corpses." But what was in that lost footage, anyhow? Mostly a whole lot of gore. When Universal got wind of how gnarly Zombie's movie was, they shelved it, fearing an NC-17 rating. Then it went to MGM before finally landing at Lionsgate where cuts were made to accommodate a hard-R rating.
Lost among the studio jumble was a foul ending for the doomed Jerry Goldsmith. While the film has him dispatched on Dr. Satan's operating table, actor Chris Hardwick confirms in a 2017 Facebook post that his character originally suffered "a different but gruesome ending" before Universal shelled out more money for Zombie to actually show Dr. Satan. That ending sees Hardwick's Goldsmith eaten alive by zombies.
Lionsgate
Not that death by slow vivisection is any better than being a human charcuterie board.
An interview with Slasherama reveals that Otis (Bill Moseley) spent more time with Bill Hudley (Rainn Wilson) than the theatrical cut shows; the torture sequence that led to Hudley's debut as "Fishboy" went on for several more agonizing minutes. Bonus: the "House of 1000 Corpses" audio commentary affirms that the Fishboy sequence wasn't even filmed until after Universal rejected the movie. Other cut footage includes extended scenes with the tourists (cut for length) and the entire excision of b-movie queen Jeanne Carmen as "Miss Bunny," a dead animal puppeteer with a show "like a psychedelic 'Pee-wee's Playhouse,'" made even more tragic by Carmen's passing in 2007.
As with all lost footage tales of sorrow, it sounds like the fans were robbed through a series of unfortunate events.
It was first the pandemic that changed the usual state of work - before, it was commuting, working in the office & coming home for most corporate employees. Then, when we had to adapt to the self-isolation rules, the work moved to home offices, which completely changed the workflow for many businesses.As the pandemic went down, we realized success never relied on where the work was done. Whether
Some time ago, in the midst of a private email discussion about the general arc of adventure-game history, one of my readers offered up a bold claim: he said that the best single year to be a player of point-and-click graphic adventures was 1996. This rings decidedly counterintuitive, given that 1996 was also the year during which the genre first slid into a precipitous commercial decline that would not even begin to level out for a decade or more. But you know what? Looking at the lineup of games released that year, I found it difficult to argue with him. These were games of high hopes, soaring ambitions, and big budgets. The genre has never seen such a lineup since. How poignant and strange, I thought to myself. Then I thought about it some more, and I decided that it wasn’t really so strange at all.
For when we cast our glance back over entertainment history, we find that it’s not unusual for a strain of creative expression to peak in terms of sophistication and ambition some time after it has passed its zenith of raw popularity. Wings won the first ever best-picture Oscar two years after The Jazz Singer had numbered the days of soundless cinema; Duke Ellington’s big band blew up a storm at Newport two years after “Rock Around the Clock” and “That’s All Right” had heralded the end of jazz music at the top of the hit parade. The same sort of thing has happened on multiple occasions in gaming. I would argue, for example, that more great text adventures were commercially published after 1984, the year that interactive fiction plateaued and prepared for the down slide, than before that point. And then, of course, we have the graphic adventures of 1996 — the year after the release of Phantasmagoria, the last million-selling adventure game to earn such sales numbers entirely on its own intrinsic appeal, without riding the coattails of an earlier game for which it was a sequel or any other pre-existing mass-media sensation.
There are two reasons why this phenomenon occurs. One is that the people who decide what projects to green-light always have a tendency to look backward at least as much as forward; new market paradigms are always hard to get one’s head around. The other becomes increasingly prevalent as projects grow more complex, and the window of time between the day they are begun and the day they are completed grows longer as a result. A lot can happen in the world of media in the span of two years or more — not coincidentally, the type of time span that more and more game-development projects were starting to fill by the mid-1990s. Toonstruck, our subject for today, is a classic example of what can happen when the world in which a game is conceived is dramatically different from the one to which it is finally born.
Let us turn the clock back to late 1993, the moment of Toonstruck‘s genesis. At that time, the conventional wisdom inside the established games industry about gaming’s necessary future hewed almost exclusively to what we might call the Sierra vision, because it was articulated so volubly and persuasively by that major publisher’s founder and president Ken Williams. It claimed that the rich multimedia affordances of CD-ROM would inevitably lead to a merger of interactivity with cinema. Popular movie stars would soon be vying to appear in interactive movies which would boast the same production values and storytelling depth as traditional movies, but which would play out on computer instead of movie-theater or television screens, with the course of the story in the hands of the ones sitting behind the screens. This mooted merger of Silicon Valley and Hollywood — often abbreviated as “Siliwood” — would require development budgets exponentially larger than those the industry had been accustomed to, but the end results would reach an exponentially wider audience.
The games publisher Virgin Interactive, a part of Richard Branson’s sprawling media and travel empire, was every bit as invested in this prophecy as Sierra was. Its Los Angeles-based American arm was the straw that stirred the drink, under the guidance of a Brit named Martin Alper, who had been working to integrate games into a broader media zeitgeist for many years; he had first made a name for himself in his homeland as the co-founder of the budget label Mastertronic, whose games embraced pop-culture icons from Michael Jackson to Clumsy Colin (the mascot of a popular brand of chips), and were sold as often from supermarkets as from software stores. Earlier in 1993, his arm of Virgin had published The 7th Guest, an interactive horror flick which struck many as a better prototype for the Sierra vision than anything Sierra themselves had yet released; it had garnered enormous sales and adoring press notices from the taste-makers of mainstream media as well as those inside the computer-gaming ghetto. Now, Alper was ready to take things to the next level.
He turned for ideas to another Brit who had recently joined him in Los Angeles: a man named David Bishop, who had already worked as a journalist, designer, manager, and producer over the course of his decade in the industry. Bishop proposed an interactive counterpart of sorts to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the hit 1988 movie which had wowed audiences with the novel feat of inserting cartoon characters into a live-action world. Bishop’s game would do the opposite: insert real actors into a cartoon world. He urged Alper to pull out all the stops in order to make something that would be every bit as gobsmacking as Roger Rabbit had been in its day.
So far, so good. But who should take on the task of turning Bishop’s idea into a reality? The 7th Guest had been created by a then-tiny developer known as Trilobyte, itself a partnership between a frustrated filmmaker and a programming whiz. Taking the press releases that labeled them the avatars of the next generation of entertainment at face value, the two had now left the Virgin fold, signing a contract with a splashy new player in the multimedia sweepstakes called Media Vision. Someone else would have to make the game called Toonstruck.
In a telling statement of just how committed they already were to their interactive cartoon, Virgin USA, who had only acted as a publisher to this point, decided to dive into the development business. In October of 1993, Martin Alper put two of his most trusted producers, Neil Young and Chris Yates, in charge of a new, wholly owned development studio called Burst, formed just to make Toonstruck. The two were given a virtually blank check to do so. Make it amazing was their only directive.
So, Young and Yates went across town to Hollywood. There they hired Nelvana, an animation house that had been making cartoons of every description for over twenty years. And they hired as well a gaggle of voice-acting talent that was worthy of a big-budget Disney feature. There were Tim Curry, star of the camp classic Rocky Horror Picture Show; Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson (“D’oh!”); David Ogden-Stiers, who had played the blue-blooded snob Charles Emerson Winchester III on M*A*S*H; Dom Deluise of The Cannonball Run and All Dogs Go to Heaven fame; plus many other less recognizable names who were nevertheless among the most talented and sought-after voices in cartoon production, the sort that any latch-key kid worth her salt had listened to for countless hours by the time she became a teenager. In hiring the star of the show — the actor destined to actually appear onscreen, inserted into the cartoon world — Burst pulled off their greatest coup of all: they secured the signature of none other than Christopher Lloyd, a veteran character actor best known as the hippie burnout Jim from the beloved sitcom Taxi, the mad scientist Doc Brown from the Back to the Future films… and Judge Doom, the villain from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Playing in a game that would be the technological opposite of that film’s inserting of cartoon characters into the real world, Lloyd would become his old character’s psychological opposite, the hero rather than the villain. Sure, it was stunt casting — but how much more perfect could it get?
What happened next is impossible to explain in any detail. The fact is that Burst was and has remained something of a black box. What is clear, however, is that Toonstruck‘s designers-in-the-trenches Richard Hare and Jennifer McWilliams took their brief to pull out all the stops and to spare no expense in doing so as literally as everyone else at the studio, concocting a crazily ambitious script. “We were full of ideas, so we designed and designed and designed,” says McWilliams, “with a great deal of emphasis on what would be cool and interesting and funny, and not so much focus on what would actually be achievable within a set schedule and budget. [Virgin] for the most part stepped aside and let us do our thing.”
Their colleagues storyboarded their ever-expanding design document and turned it into hours and hours of quality cartoon animation — animation which was intended to meet or exceed the bar set by a first-string Disney feature film. As they did so, the deadlines flew by unheeded. Originally earmarked with the eternal optimism of game developers and Chicago Cubs fans for the 1994 Christmas season, the project slipped into 1995, then 1996. Virgin trotted it out at trade show after trade show, making ever more sweeping claims about its eventual amazingness at each one, until it became an in-joke among the gaming journalists who dutifully inserted a few lines about it into each successive “coming soon” preview. By 1996, the bill for Toonstruck was approaching a staggering $8 million, enough to make it the second most expensive computer game to date. And yet it was still far from completion.
It seems clear that the project was poorly managed from the start. Take, for example, all that vaunted high-quality animation. Burst’s decision to make the cartoon of Toonstruck first, then figure out how to make use of it in an interactive context later was hardly the most cost-effective way of doing things. It made little sense to aim to compete with Disney on a level playing field when the limitations of the consumer-computing hardware of the time meant that the final product would have to be squashed down to a resolution of 640 X 400, with a palette of just 256 shades, for display on a dinky 15-inch monitor screen.
There are also hints of other sorts of dysfunction inside Burst, and between Burst and its parent company. One Virgin insider who chose to remain anonymous alluded vaguely in 1998 to the way that “internal politics made the situation worse. Some of the project leaders didn’t get on with other senior staff, and some people had friendships to protect. So there was finger-pointing and back-slapping going on at the same time.”
During the three years that Toonstruck spent in development, the Sierra vision of gaming’s necessary future was challenged by a new one. In December of 1993, id Software, a tiny renegade company operating outside the traditional boundaries of the industry by selling its creations largely through the shareware model, released a little game called DOOM, which featured exclusively computer-generated 3D environments, gobs of bloody action, and, to paraphrase a famous statement by its chief programmer John Carmack, no more story than your typical porn movie. Not long after, a studio called Blizzard Entertainment debuted a fantasy strategy game called Warcraft which played like an action game, in hectic real time; not the first of its type, it was nevertheless the one that really caught gamers’ imaginations, especially after Blizzard perfected the concept with 1995’s Warcraft II. With these games and others like them selling at least as well as the hottest adventures, the industry’s One True Way Forward had become a proverbial fork in the road. Publishers could continue to plow money into interactive movies in the hope of cracking into the mainstream of mass entertainment, or they could double down on their longstanding customer demographic of young white males by offering them yet more fast-paced mayhem. Already by 1995, the fact that games of the latter stripe tended to cost far less than those of the former was enough to seal the deal in the minds of many publishers.
Virgin Interactive was given especial food for thought that year when they wound up publishing Trilobyte’s next game after all. Media Vision, the publisher Trilobyte had signed with, had imploded amidst government investigations of securities fraud and other financial crimes, and an opportunistic Virgin had swooped into the bankruptcy auction and made off with the contract for The 11th Hour, the sequel to The 7th Guest. It seemed like quite a clever heist at the time — but it began to seem somewhat less so when The 11th Hour under-performed relative to expectations. Both reviewers and ordinary gamers stated clearly that they were already becoming bored of Trilobyte’s rote mixing of B-movie cinematics with hoary set-piece puzzles that mostly stemmed from well before the computer age — tired of the way that the movie and the gameplay in a Trilobyte creation had virtually nothing to do with one another.
Then, as I noted at the beginning of this article, 1996 brought with it an unprecedentedly large lineup of ambitious, earnest, and expensive games of the Siliwood stripe, with some of them at least much more thoughtfully designed than anything Trilobyte had ever come up with. Nonetheless, as the year went by an alarming fact was more and more in evidence: this year’s crop of multimedia extravaganzas was not producing any towering hits to rival the likes of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective in 1992, The 7th Guest in 1993, Myst in 1994, or Phantasmagoria in 1995. Arguably the best year in history to be a player of graphic adventures, 1996 was also the year that broke the genre. Almost all of the big-budget adventure releases still to come from American publishers would owe their existence to corporate inertia, being projects that executives found easier to complete and hope for a miracle than to cancel outright and then try to explain the massive write-off to their shareholders — even if outright cancellation would have been better for their companies’ bottom lines. In short, by the beginning of 1997 only dreamers doubted that the real future of the gaming mainstream lay with the lineages of DOOM and Warcraft.
Before we rush to condemn the philistines who preferred such games to their higher-toned counterparts, we must acknowledge that their preferences had to do with more than sheer bloody-mindedness. First-person shooters and real-time-strategy games could be a heck of a lot of fun, and lent themselves very well to playing with others, whether gathered together in one room or, increasingly, over the Internet. The generally solitary pursuit of adventure gaming had no answer for this sort of boisterous bonding experience. And there was also an economic factor: an adventure was a once-and-done endeavor that might last a week or two at best, after which you had no recourse but to go out and buy another one. You could, on the other hand, spend literally years playing the likes of DOOM and Warcraft with your mates.
Then there is one final harsh reality to be faced: the fact is that the Sierra vision never came close to living up to its billing for the player. These games were never remotely like waking up in the starring role of a Hollywood film. Boosters like Ken Williams were thrilled to talk about interactive movies in the abstract, but these same people were notably vague about how their interactivity was actually supposed to work. They invested massively in Hollywood acting talent, in orchestral soundtracks, and in the best computer artists money could buy, while leaving the interactivity — the very thing that ostensibly set their creations apart — to muddle through on its own, one way or another.
Inevitably, then, the interactivity ended up taking the form of static puzzles, the bedrock of adventure games since the days when they had been presented all in text. The puzzle paradigm persisted into this brave new era simply because no one could proffer any other ideas about what the player should be doing that were both more compelling and technologically achievable. I hasten to add that some players really, genuinely love puzzles, love few things more than to work through an intricate web of them in order to make something happen; I include myself among this group. When puzzles are done right, they’re as satisfying and creatively valid as any other type of gameplay.
But here’s the rub: most people — perhaps even most gamers — really don’t like solving puzzles all that much at all. (These people are of course no better or worse than those who do — just different.) For the average Joe or Jane, playing one of these new-fangled interactive movies was like watching a conventional movie filmed on an ultra-low-budget, usually with terrible acting. And then, for the pièce de résistance, you were expected to solve a bunch of boring puzzles for the privilege of witnessing the underwhelming next scene. Who on earth wanted to do this after a hard day at the office?
All of which is to say that the stellar sales of Consulting Detective, The 7th Guest, Myst, and Phantasmagora were not quite the public validations of the concept of interactive movies that the industry chose to read them as. The reasons for these titles’ success were orthogonal to their merits as games, whatever the latter might have been. People bought them as technology demonstrations, to show off the new computers they had just purchased and to test out the CD-ROM drives they had just installed. They gawked at them for a while and then, satiated, planted themselves back in front of their televisions to spend their evenings as they always had. This was not, needless to say, a sustainable model for a mainstream gaming genre. By 1996, the days when the mere presence of human actors walking and/or talking on a computer monitor could wow even the technologically unsophisticated were fast waning. That left as customers only the comparatively tiny hardcore of buyers who had always played adventure games. They were thrilled by the diverse and sumptuous smorgasbord that was suddenly set before them — but the industry’s executives, looking at the latest sales numbers, most assuredly were not. Just like that, the era of Siliwood passed into history. One can only hope that all of the hardcore adventure fans enjoyed it while it lasted.
Toonstruck was, as you may have guessed, among the most prominent of the adventures that were released to disappointing results in 1996. That event happened at the very end of the year, and only thanks to a Virgin management team who decided in the summer that enough was enough. “The powers that be in management had to step in and give us a dose of reality,” says Jennifer McWilliams. “We then needed to come up with an ending that could credibly wrap the game up halfway through, with a cliffhanger that would, ideally, introduce part two. I think we did well considering the constraints we were under, but still, it was not what we originally envisioned.” Another, anonymous team member has described what happened more bluntly: “The team was told to ‘cut it or can it’ — it either had to be shipped real soon, or not at all.”
The former option was chosen, and thus Toonstruck shipped just before Christmas, on two discs that between them bore only about one third of the total amount of animation created for the game, and that in a severely degraded form. Greeted with reviews that ran the gamut from raves to pans, it wound up selling about 150,000 copies. For a normal game with a normal budget, such numbers would be just about acceptable; if the 100,000-copy threshold was no longer the mark of an outright hit in the computer-games industry of 1996, selling that many copies and then half again that many more wasn’t too bad either. Unfortunately, all of the usual quantifiers got thrown out for a game that had cost over $8 million to make. One Virgin employee later mused wryly how Toonstruck had been intended to “blow the public away. The only thing that got blown was vast amounts of cash, and the public stayed away.”
Bleeding red ink from the failure of Toonstruck and a number of other games, Virgin’s American arm was ordered by the parent company in London to downsize their budgets and ambitions drastically. After creating a few less expensive but equally commercially disappointing games, Burst Studios was sold in 1998 to Electronic Arts, who renamed it EA Pacific and shifted its focus to 3D real-time strategy — a sign of the times if ever there was one.
Such is one tale of Toonstruck, a game which could only have appeared in its own very specific time and place. But, you might be wondering, how does this relic of a fizzled vision of gaming’s future play?
Toonstruck‘s opening movie is not a cartoon. We instead meet Christopher Lloyd for the first time in the real world, in the role of Drew Blanc (get it?), a cartoonist suffering from writer’s block. He’s called into the office of his impatient boss Sam Schmaltz, who’s played by Ben Stein, an actor of, shall we say, limited range, but one who remains readily recognizable to an entire generation for playing every kid’s nightmare of a boring teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Wonder Years.
We learn that Drew is unhappy with his current assignment as the illustrator of The Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun Show, a piece of cartoon pablum with as much edge as a melting stick of butter. He rather wants to do something with his creation Flux Wildly, a hyperactive creature of uncertain taxonomy and chaotic disposition. Schmaltz, however, quickly lives up to his name; he’s having none of it. A deflated Drew resigns himself to an all-nighter in the studio to make up the time he’s wasted daydreaming about the likes of Flux. But in the course of that night, he is somehow drawn into his television — right into a cartoon.
There the bewildered Drew meets none other than Flux Wildly himself, finding him every bit as charmingly unhinged as he’d always imagined him to be. He learns that the cartoon world in which he finds himself is divided into three regions: Cutopia, where the fluffy bun bun bunnies and their ilk live; Zanydu, which anarchists like Flux call home; and Malevoland, where true evil lurks. Trouble is, Count Nefarious of Malevoland has gotten tired of the current balance of power, and has started making bombing raids on the other two regions in his Malevolator, using its ray of evil to turn them as dark and twisted as his homeland. King Hugh of Cutopia promises Drew that, if he first saves them all by collecting the parts necessary to build a Cutifier — the antidote to the Malevolator — he will send Drew back to his own world.
All of that is laid out in the opening movie, after which the plot gears are more or less shifted into neutral while you commence wandering around solving puzzles. And it’s here that the game presents its most welcome surprise: unlike so many other multimedia productions of this era that were sold primarily on the basis of their audiovisuals, this game’s puzzle design is clever, complex, and carefully crafted. I have no knowledge of precisely how this game was tested and balanced, but I have to assume these things were done, and done well. It’s not an easy game by any means — there are dozens and dozens of puzzles here, layered on top of one another in a veritable tangle of dependencies — but it’s never an unfair one. In the best tradition of LucasArts, there are no deaths or dead ends. If you are willing to observe the environment with a meticulous eye, experiment patiently, and enter into the cartoon logic of a world where holes are portable and five minutes on a weight bench can transform your physique, you might just be able to solve this one without hints.
The puzzles manage the neat trick of being whimsical without ever abandoning logic entirely. Take, for example, the overarching meta-puzzle you’re attempting to solve as you wander through the lands. Assembling the Cutifier requires combining matched pairs of objects, such as sugar and spice (that’s a freebie the game gives you to introduce the concept). Other objects waiting for their partners include a dagger, some stripes, a heart, some whistles, some polish, etc. If possible combinations have started leaping to mind already, you might really enjoy this game. If they haven’t, on the other hand, you might not, or you might have fallen afoul of the exception to the rule of its general solubility: it requires a thoroughgoing knowledge of idiomatic English, of the sort that only native speakers or those who have been steeped in the language for many years are likely to possess.
While you’re working out its gnarly puzzle structure, Toonstruck is doing its level best to keep you amused in other ways. Players who are only familiar with Christopher Lloyd from his scenery-chewing portrayals in Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit may be surprised at his relatively low-key performance here; more often than not, he’s acting as the straight man for his wise-cracking sidekick Flux Wildly and other gleefully over-the-top cartoon personalities. In truth, Lloyd was (and is) a more multi-faceted and flexible actor than his popular image might suggest, having decades of experience in film, television, and theater productions of all types behind him. His performance here, in what must have been extremely trying circumstances — he was, after all, constantly expected to say his lines to characters who weren’t actually there — feels impressively natural.
Drew Blanc’s friendship with Flux Wildly is the emotional heart of the story. Their relationship can’t help but bring to mind the much-loved LucasArts adventuring duo Sam and Max. Once again, we have here a subdued humanoid straight man paired with a less anthropomorphic pal who comes complete with a predilection for violence. Once again the latter keeps things lively with his antics and his constant patter. And once again you the player can use him like an inventory item from time to time on the problems you encounter, sometimes with productive and often with amusing results. Flux Wildly may just be my favorite thing in the game. I just wish he was around through the whole game; more on that momentarily.
Although Flux is a lot of fun, the writing in general is a bit of a mixed bag. As, for that matter, were contemporary reviews of the writing. Computer Gaming World found Toonstruck “hilarious”: “With humor that ranges from cutesy to risqué, Toonstruck keeps the laughter coming nonstop.” Next Generation, on the other hand, wrote that “the designers have tried desperately hard to make the game zany, wacky, crazy, twisted, madcap, and side-splittingly hilarious — but it just isn’t. The dialog, slapstick humor, and relentless ‘comedy’ situations are tired. You’ve seen most of these jokes done better 40 years ago.”
In a way, both takes are correct. Toonstruck is sometimes genuinely clever and funny, but just as often feels like it’s trying way too hard. There are reports that the intended audience for the game drifted over its three years in development, that it was originally planned as a kid-friendly game and only slowly moved in a more adult direction. This may explain some of the jarring tonal shifts inside its world. At times, the writing doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, veering wildly from the light and frothy to that depressingly common species of videogame humor that mistakes transgression for wit. The most telling example is also the one scene that absolutely no one who has ever played this game, or for that matter merely watched it being played, can possibly forget, even if she wants to.
While exploring the land of Cutopia, you come upon a sweet, matronly dairy cow and her two BFFs, a cute and fuzzy sheep and a tired old horse. Some time later, Count Nefarious arrives to zap their farm with his Malevolator. Next time you visit, you find that the horse has been turned into glue. Meanwhile the cow is spread-eagled on a “Wheel-O-Luv,” her udders dangling pendulously in a way that looks downright pornographic, cackling with masochistic delight while the leather-clad sheep gives her her delicious punishment. Words fail me… this is something you have to see for yourself.
Here and in a few other places, Toonstruck is just off, weird in a way that is not just unfunny or immature but that actually leaves you feeling vaguely uncomfortable. It demonstrates that, for all Virgin Interactive’s mainstream ambitions, they were still a long way from mustering the thematic, aesthetic, and writerly unity that goes into a slick piece of mass-market entertainment.
Toonstruck is at its best when it is neither trying to trangress for the sake of it nor to please the mass market, but rather when it’s delicately skewering a certain stripe of sickly sweet, creatively bankrupt, lowest-common denominator children’s programming that was all over television during the 1980s and 1990s. Think of The Care Bears, a program that was drawn by some of the same Nelvana animators who worked on Toonstruck; they must surely have enjoyed ripping their mawkish past to shreds here. Or, even better, think of Barney the hideous purple dinosaur, dawdling through excruciating songs with ripped-off melodies and cloying lyrics that sound like they were made up on the spot. Few media creations have ever been as easy to hate as him, as the erstwhile popularity of the Usenet newsgroup alt.Barney.dinosaur.die.die.die will attest.
Being created by so many insiders to the cartoon racket, Toonstruck is well placed to capture the very adult cynicism that oozes from such productions, engineered as they were mainly to sell plush toys to co-dependent children. It does so not least through King Hugh of Cutopia himself, who turns out to be — spoiler alert! — not quite the heroic exemplar of inclusiveness he’s billed as. Meanwhile Flux Wildly and his friends from Zanydu stand for a different breed of cartoons, ones which demonstrate a measure of respect for their young audience.
There does eventually come a point in Toonstruck, more than a few hours in, when you’ve unraveled the web of puzzles and assembled all twelve matched pairs that are required for the Cutifier. By now you feel like you’ve played a pretty complete game, and are expecting the end credits to start rolling soon. Instead the game pulls its next big trick on you: everything goes to hell in a hand basket and you find yourself in Count Nefarious’s dungeon, about to begin a second act whose presence was heretofore hinted at only by the presence of a second, as-yet unused CD in the game’s (real or virtual) box.
Most players agree that this unexpected second act is, for all the generosity demonstrated by the mere fact of its existence, considerably less enjoyable than the first. Your buddy Flux Wildly is gone, the environment darker and more constrained, and your necessary path through the plot more linear. It feels austere and lonely in contrast to what has come before — and not in a good way. Although the puzzle design remains solid enough, I imagine that this is the point where many players begin to succumb to the temptations of hints and walkthroughs. And it’s hard to blame them; the second act is the very definition of an anticlimax — almost a dramatic non sequitur in the way it throws the game out of its natural rhythm.
But a real ending — or at least a form of ending — does finally arrive. Drew Blanc defeats Count Nefarious and is returned to his own world. All seems well — until Flux Wildly contacts him again in the denouement to tell him that Nefarious really isn’t done away with just yet. Incredibly, this was once intended to mark the beginning of a third act, of four in total, all in the service of a parable about the creative process that the game we have only hints at. Laboring under their managers’ ultimatum to ship or else, the developers had to fall back on the forlorn hope of a surprise, sequel-justifying hit in the face of the marketplace headwinds that were blowing against the game. Jennifer McWilliams:
Toonstruck was meant to be a funny story about defeating some really weird bad guys, as it was when released, but originally it was also about defeating one’s own creative demons. It was a tribute to creative folks of all types, and was meant to offer encouragement to any of them that had lost their way. So, the second part of the game had Drew venturing into his own psyche, facing his fears (like a psychotically overeager dentist), living out his fantasies (like meeting his hero, Vincent van Gogh), and eventually finding a way to restore his creative spark.
It does sound intriguing on one level, but it also sounds like much, much too much for a game that already feels rather overstuffed. If the full conception had been brought to fruition, Toonstruck would have been absolutely massive, in the running for the biggest graphic adventure ever made. But whether its characters and puzzle mechanics could have supported the weight of so much content is another question. It seems that all or most of the animation necessary for acts three and four was created — more fruits of that $8 million budget — and this has occasionally led fans to dream of a hugely belated sequel. Yet it is highly doubtful whether any of the animation still exists, or for that matter whether the economics of using it make any more sense now than they did in the mid-1990s. Once all but completely forgotten, Toonstruck has enjoyed a revival of interest since it was put up for sale on digital storefronts some years ago. But only a small one: it would be a stretch to label it even a cult classic.
What we’re left with instead, then, is a fascinating exemplar of a bygone age; the fact that this game could only have appeared in the mid-1990s is a big part of its charm. Then, too, there’s a refreshing can-do spirit about it. Tasked with making something amazing, its creators did their honest best to achieve just that, on multiple levels. If the end result is imperfect in some fairly obvious ways, it never fails to be playable, which is more than can be said for many of its peers. Indeed, it remains well worth playing today for anyone who shivers with anticipation at the prospect of a pile of convoluted, deviously interconnected puzzles. Ditto for anyone who just wants to know what kind of game $8 million would buy you back in 1996.
(Sources:Starlog of May 1984 and August 1993; Computer Gaming World of January 1997; Electronic Entertainment of December 1995; Next Generation of January 1997, February 1997, and April 1998; PC Zone of August 1995, August 1996, and June 1998; Questbusters 117; Retro Gamer 174.
One of the central romantic relationships in "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is between Spock (Ethan Peck) and his intended T'Pring (Gia Sandhu) as they struggle to remain in contact while he is off on his five-year mission. Vulcans, to remind the reader, are betrothed at childhood, and T'Pring was to be Spock's wife. She was previously played by Arlene Martel in the original series episode "Amok Time," where all these details were first revealed. On "Strange New Worlds," T'Pring is granted a larger backstory, a vocation, and interests beyond which man she wishes to marry (she'll come to prefer a character named Stonn, played by Lawrence Montaigne in 1967 and Roderick McNeil in 2022). T'Pring works at a rehabilitation facility for Vulcans -- called Ankeshtan K'til -- who have lost sight of their logic, given over to passions, and committed horrible crimes. Yes, even Vulcans kill. Additional reminder: Because Vulcans live by an ethos of rejecting emotion and embracing logic, outward displays of passion are considered near-criminal acts.
For the most part, "Star Trek" has seen Vulcans ably keeping their emotions under wraps (although certain Trekkies get a perverse thrill over the multiple instances when Spock "breaks" and becomes happy or angry). There has been one notable instance, however, of a passionate Vulcan appearing as a main character in a Trek story: The character of Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill) was the antagonist of William Shatner's 1989 film "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier." Sybok, we learn in that film, was Spock's long-lost, never-mentioned half brother. Sybok has a cameo at the end of "The Serence Squall" as a potentially dangerous inmate at Ankeshtan K'til.
Sybok
It's been mentioned multiple times throughout Trek that Vulcans were once -- many centuries ago -- passionate and violent like humans, and had pushed themselves to the brink of extinction. It was Surak, a messiah-like figure, who introduced the Vulcan ethos of logic-above-all, and their planet has been peaceful and united ever since. Vulcans may be capable of emotions, but have learned to reject, ignore, and suppress them in favor of intellect (there has been no mention of Vulcans evolving to the point of simply not having the parts of their brains that process emotions, but that's a Trek theory for another time). Occasionally, however, a Vulcan will reject their home planet's way of life, and embrace emotions with fringe, criminal groups.
Sybok was one such passionate Vulcan, and his introduction in "Star Trek V" -- a nice cold open on an otherwise pretty dismal film -- shows him as a mysterious man on horseback who psychically "cures" a vagrant in the desert before revealing his Vulcan ears. He then throws his head back in laughter, a shocking image for Trekkies unused to laughing Vulcans. Later, Spock will reveal that he and Sybok share a father (Sarek, played by Mark Lenard), and that he, long ago, left Vulcan society to pursue his passions out on the fringe. In so doing, Sybok developed a technique to reach into people's minds and essentially eradicate the negative emotions connected with their worst memories. In so doing, his "patients" joyously and unquestioningly begin following him as a cult leader. One of the grand ironies of "Star Trek V" is that Sybok doesn't seem to realize that he has simply found a new way to repress emotions.
V'tosh Ka'tur
Sybok also, while pursuing his passions, became obsessed with the legend of Sha Ka Ree (named after Sean Connery, the actor initially approached to play Sybok), that stated that the center of the galaxy was not a supermassive black hole, but a mysterious blue planet where God physically lives. In "Star Trek V," Sybok hijacks the Enterprise, flies it to the center of the galaxy (27,000 lightyears from Earth, by the way), and meets a being that may -- or may not -- be God. If it is, then Spock, a creature of pure logic, kills it. Logic destroys God. There may be an unsubtle theological argument being made. Sybok ultimately dies fighting the God-thing, turning his passions into a wrath that will save others.
Passionate Vucans would play a large part in several episodes of "Star Trek: Enterprise," as well, specifically in the episode "Fusion" which aired on February 27, 2002. In that episodes, the Enterprise encountered a ship of fringe-dwelling, passionate Vulcans that their homeworld referred to as v'tosh ka'tur or, literally translated, "Vulcans without logic." The characters in "Fusion" weren't without logic, but did embrace an emotional way of life. It was implied in "Fusion" that there was a groundswell of discontentment back on Vulcan, and that some sort of emotional revolution or reckoning might be at hand.
The v'tosh ka'tur were brought back in episode five of "Strange New Worlds," and Spock, in encountering an adherent, punched him (a character named Barjan T'or) in the face. It was the logical thing to do. Although outcasts, v'tosh ka'tur are seen as people that can be aided in a mental health facility, and several of them are seen being aided by T'Pring at Ankeshtan K'til ... including Sybok.
Sybok And Angel
While "The Serene Squall" focuses on a group of freelance space pirates -- their ship even has a stand-up, two-handed helm like on a three-masted sailing vessel -- it also points to a deeper plot regarding their leader, the badass Angel, played by Jesse James Keitel (aka Peroxide of the drag troupe Haus of Femanon). Angel spends the bulk of the episode conversing with Spock (they are undercover as a person in need) asking about his character. By the episode's end -- after their attempt to take the Enterprise has gone awry -- Angel gives Spock the slip, pointing out that he doesn't have to choose between being Vulcan or Human. He can be unique unto himself. Passionate, perhaps? Angel also makes constant mention of a mysterious lover named Xavierus whom she has been trying to free from Ankeshtan K'til, getting T'Pring involved in the plot.
Xavierus was -- musical sting -- a mere pseudonym for Sybok, as Spock explains in the episode's epilogue. He reiterates what was stated in "Star Trek V." That Sybok is Spock's older brother, that he was born out of wedlock, and that he left the Vulcan order to follow an emotional life. Given the passions Spock displayed in "The Serene Squall" (he kisses two different people), the parallels between the two characters are more closely drawn.
Fan Service
"Strange New Worlds" may move forward with the Sybok plot, giving him more backstory prior to the events of "Star Trek V," giving a known character a chance to redeem their image after decades of association with a frequently maligned feature film. Depending on how the writing shakes out, Sybok -- and Angel -- may be poised to be recurring antagonists. Or -- less likely -- the showrunners may simply leave the reference as it stands, with no further acknowledgement of Sybok beyond recognizing that he exists in this continuity, and has connections to other Trek shows and movies.
Sybok's inclusion reveals a delicate game that "Strange New Worlds" has been playing in terms of its fan service. Many of the show's main characters are returning from previous iterations, but the show is not going out of its way to include fan-recognized details or clumsy foreshadowing as a matter of course; non-Trekkies will not be lost for a second and can enjoy the show without necessarily knowing about the instance when Nurse Chapel said she was in love with Spock in 1966. Sybok's appearance, conversely, leans more in the fan-service direction, as he will likely only be recognized by Trekkies, or people who still recall details of "Star Trek V" -- often called "the bad one" -- with clarity. Let's hope the show, should it move forward with Sybok, is tactful.
There's always something fun about watching a director/producer make an unexpected cameo in their own movie or TV show. John Green had a fun little (unfortunately deleted) cameo in the adaptation of his book "The Fault in Our Stars." Quentin Tarantino has shown up in a couple of movies, usually playing a terrible person. More recently, co-director Daniel Scheinert appeared in his film "Everything Everywhere All at Once" as a guy shown to have a spanking fetish. This is the best sort of cameo: where the celebrity plays a role that should presumably be a little beneath him, a role where dignity is not required.
So it goes with the latest episode of "The Boys," where Seth Rogen shows up to play ... a guy pleasuring himself on a webcam. Presumably this is the in-universe version of Rogen who has appeared previously in "The Boys," though in the chatroom he's using a pseudonym (one that we cannot repeat, because we like to keep things clean here on Slash Film Dot Com).
To elaborate a little: the show reveals that superhero Crimson Countess (Laurie Holden) has started a gig as a cam girl for a supe-themed porn website, performing sexual acts on camera in one-on-one sessions with clients. Presumably she was fired from Voughtland after gruesomely killing a poor unsuspecting Homelander mascot in season 3, episode 2.
Unfortunately for Rogen, his session is cut short when the Crimson Countess is attacked by the Boys. He does manage to live up to his username, though, and the show goes out of its way to show us Rogen's face as it happens. But considering all the weird, often violent conclusions of supe-involved sex we've seen on this show, it's honestly just nice to see that [username redacted] got to leave the encounter unharmed.
Seth Rogen's Involvement With The Boys
As mentioned previously, this isn't the first Rogen appearance in "The Boys." He also pops up in season 1 in an interview hyping up Black Noir's solo film in the Vought Cinematic Universe, "Black Noir: Insurrection," and appeared again in the season 2 premiere to pay tribute to the late Translucent. Since Seth Rogen canonically exists in this universe (alongside other celebrities like Lil Nas X and Charlize Theron), it's safe to assume that this chatroom patron is that same Rogen. It would certainly explain how the guy could afford Countess's rate of $19.50 a minute.
The real reason for Rogen's repeated appearances is that he's an executive producer on "The Boys." He tried several times throughout the 2000s and early 2010s to get the comic series the show was based on (also named "The Boys") adapted into a movie, to no avail. It was only in 2015 that Amazon picked up the project and turned it into a TV series, and Rogen could finally help bring the premise to life on screen. He's since been using his platform as a high-profile celebrity to promote the show, with a lot of success so far.
It seems at this point that we can expect Rogen to make an appearance at least once per season, although it's not clear if he'll be returning as the same character he was this time around. Either way, it's always nice to see him on the show, especially considering Rogen's a big reason why the show exists at all.
New episodes of "The Boys" release Fridays on Prime Video.
Diablo Immortal microtransactions have generated $24 million USD of revenue in the game's first two weeks, with players in the United States and South Korea spending the most on in-game purchases for the RPG game.
Data from industry tracking website AppMagic reveals that, since its launch on June 2, Blizzard’s latest RPG has been downloaded more than five million times and has quickly become the developer’s second-highest mobile earner, surpassed only by the almighty Hearthstone, which released in 2014.
The majority of Immortal’s downloads come from players in the United States and South Korea, and these two countries have also been the highest spenders in terms of microtransactions – the United States is top, accounting for around 43% of Immortal’s earnings so far, with South Korea coming in second, contributing around 23% to the game’s total yield.
