The Evolution of Dance With Optimus Prime
The Evolution of Dance is the most-viewed YouTube video ever. In the video, Judson Laipply, a motivational speaker, dances to a soundtrack that plays through various popular songs ranging from Elvis Presley to MC Hammer and Michael Jackson. As of February 2008, The Evolution of Dance has over 76 million views on YouTube, and is the most viewed video on the site.
Here’s a parody of The Evolution of Dance performed by Optimus Prime from The Transformers called “The Evolution of Dance With Optimus Prime.” Keep your eyes peeled for the subtle robotic crotch thrusts during YMCA. It might not be appropriate for younger Decepticons.
Gotta love the ending. Optimus Prime doesn’t like the Macarena. He transforms and leaves the stage.
Surprisingly, this clip is not from the popular stop-animation comedy show Robotic Chicken. The guy who made it is named Patrick Boivin. Seth Green should give him a job.
Halo 3 Sales Smash Records
Microsoft is reporting that sales for its much hyped game, Halo 3, generated $170 million during the first 20 hours of its release. Not only does this top the $125 million sales record set by Halo 2, but it also surpasses the opening-day US box office record of $59.8 million set by Sony’s “Spider-Man 3″ in May. In fact, Halo 3 made more money in 24 hours than Spider-Man 3 made during its three-day opening-weekend ($151 million).
So far, more than 1 million players have logged on the play the networked Xbox Live version of Halo 3.
The game is expected to give a huge boost to the Xbox 360. Lately, the runaway success of the Nintendo Wii has been a thorn in the side of both Microsoft and Sony.
You can read our review of Halo 3 here.
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Halo 3 Sickness Feared
The 3rd and final edition in the Halo video game trilogy got released Monday night at midnight. Microsoft expects to sell an estimated 4 million copies of Halo 3 (read MethodShop.com review) in the U.S. during the next 30 days according to Gamesindustry.biz. Think 4 million seems a lot for a video game? Keep in mind that “Halo” (2001) and “Halo 2″ (2004) sold 14.5 million copies worldwide.
But because there is so much anticipation and hype around Halo 3, corporate employers and school systems are fearing that their staff and students will spontaneously be calling in sick this week.
Here are a couple quotes I found on USA Today.com:
“I’ve already talked to my teachers and got my assignments for Tuesday. I don’t plan on going to class,” says Dane Mitchell, 20, a Cincinnati State and Community College sophomore. “I’m going to pick up the game at midnight from GameStop, go to a friend’s house, and play it for 36 hours,” he says.
Like Mitchell, Neil Godwin, 21, of Milford, Ohio, reserved his copy more than a year ago. He’s taking a vacation day Tuesday from his job as a Kroger computer help desk analyst to play Halo 3 all day with his brother.
Corporate sponsors are also helping fuel the hype around Halo 3. Even if the last video game you played was Pong in the 1980’s, Microsoft still wants you to know about Halo 3. Everyone from Burger King, NASCAR, Pontiac and even Mountain Dew have promotional deals with Microsoft for Halo 3 that rival such theatrical franchises as Harry Potter. Last night I even saw a ‘limited edition’ Halo 3 Mountain Dew 12-pack labeled as “Game Fuel.” I guess there’s probably enough sugar and caffeine in a 12-pack of Mountain Dew to even keep a Polar Bear up all night.
Beyond the corporate sponsors, promotional advertising blitz and the Internet buzz, Halo 3 is special to gamers because it’s the final chapter in the Halo series. It’s the last time fans will get to see their beloved Master Chief in action. Halo 3 is equivalent of how important “Return of the Jedi” or “The Return of the King” was Star Wars and Lord of the Rings fans. It’s the end of a saga.
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Tron movie sequel in the works
Good news for Tron fans. According to the Hollywood Reporter, commercial director Joseph Kosinski is in final negotiations to direct a sequel to the 1982 cult movie classic. Steven Lisberger, who co-wrote and directed the original film, has signed on as a producer.
Kosinski, who last month signed on to the remake of “Logan’s Run” for Warner Brothers, will oversee the visual development of the project and have input on the script, which is being written by “Lost” scribes Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz. Story details are being kept secret.
In case you didn’t see the original film or have forgotten the plot (after all it’s 25 years-old now), Tron was about a computer programmer who gets sucked into a virtual world and forced to fight in his own video games. In 1982, the special effects used in Tron were groundbreaking. It was the first movie to use computer generated images (CGI) in conjunction with live action. Sources also say that visual effects personnel, for many of whom Tron was an inspiration to enter the business, are already are jockeying to work on the film.
Before Disney green lighted Lisberger to make the original film, he had to shot a test reel, financed by the studio, of the deadly Frisbee battle. It looks like Kosinski will have to do the same thing, but this time the studio wants to see a test sequence involving the movie’s Light Cycles. I can see why. The arcade game based on the Light Cycle scene was so popular in the early 1980’s that it earned more money than the movie.
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JK Rowling Interview on iTunes
Even if you’re not a Harry Potter fan, you have to admire J.K Rowling. Not just as a writer with a world-class imagination, but also as a businesswoman and entrepreneur. She seemed to come out of nowhere to create one of the biggest entertainment franchises ever.
It’s hard to believe that she used to be unemployed, surviving on U.K. state benefits. That was 1995. Now it’s 12 years (and hundreds of millions of dollars) later, and she’s just finished her seventh and final Harry Potter novel, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”
iTunes Link: J.K. Rowling Interview
Rowling recently did an interview with Meredith Viera for the American news programs The Today Show and Dateline NBC. I only caught part of her Dateline NBC interview, so I was pretty happy to see that they posted the whole thing on iTunes. The interview is an interesting glimpse inside the world of Harry Potter, and it offers some real insight into the woman who created a billion dollar world of magic.
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Battlestar Galactica to End After This Season
As its fans have feared, Sci Fi’s Battlestar Galactica will end its run after this, its 4th season. Executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eik (Bionic Woman) said they will wrap up the show’s storyline with these 22 episodes. The fourth season is in production in Vancouver and will premiere in November. The official announcement, planned for Friday, ends months of speculation from the show’s core group of dedicated fans.
“We respect the producers’ decision to end the series and are proud to have been the home of this groundbreaking show,” said Sci Fi Executive Vice President of Original Programming, Mark Stern in a statement.
“This show was always meant to have a beginning, a middle and finally, an end,” said Eick and Moore in a joint statement. “Over the course of the last year, the story and the characters have been moving strongly toward that end and we’ve decided to listen to those internal voices and conclude the show on our own terms.”
[Via broadcastingcable.com]
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Heroes Season 1 DVD
No longer are our magnificent Monday night ‘Heroes’ going to be confined to merely mortal NBC TV (and SciFi Channel reruns). Our favorite Heroes and villains are coming to DVD this August with tons of bonus features.
The 7-disc set, available on DVD and HD DVD on August 28, 2007, will include the never-before-aired 73-minute premiere episode and over 50 deleted scenes.
The Heroes Season 1 DVD set is priced at $59.98 and is available for preorder on Amazon.com for $38.99 until July 24, 2007.
Here are some of the Heroes Season 1 DVD extras:
- Unaired Pilot: The Tim Kring cut with audio commentary — A full 73 uninterrupted minutes of the original, unaired, extended pilot episode, as Heroes’ creator Tim Kring first envisioned it, with a character never seen.
- The Making of “Heroes”: From concept to pop culture phenomenon, a behind-the-scenes look at the hottest new series on television.
- Special Effects: The secrets behind the eye-popping visuals that give the Heroes their amazing powers.
- The Stunts: A backstage look at the show’s hair-raising stunts.
- Mind Reader: Matt Parkman’s mind reading abilities reveal your inner Hero with a series of simple tests.
- Profile of Artist Tim Sale: A look at the Eisner Award-winning comic book artist (Spiderman, Batman, Daredevil) behind much of the Manga-influenced artwork used in the show.
- The Score: Go behind the scenes with Wendy Melvin and Lisa Coleman (of Prince’s The Revolution) as they create their ASCAP Award-winning musical score.
- Extra Scenes: 50 deleted and extended scenes.
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Bionic Woman Preview
After months of hype, we finally get to see Michelle Ryan in NBC’s new remake of the Bionic Woman. In this clip from Vmix.com, we get to see Jamie Sommers (Michelle Ryan) find out she has bionic parts and freak out. Those are some sexy bionic toes by the way.
It’s tough to tell from just a few scenes, but Bionic Woman looks like it’s going to be a fun show. With the success of sci-fi shows like Heroes and Lost, Bionic Woman might just be the next big hit. Plus David Eick from Battlestar Galactica is the Executive Producer. Here’s another clip of Eick talking about the strong women characters in his shows.
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Bionic Woman Pulls Double Duty
There was a bit of a surprise when Katee Sackhoff told reporters that her time on the new NBC series “Bionic Woman” went from “one episode” to “recurring.” But all of that can be explained in one simple sentence: Sackhoff simply wowed network executives.
“She absolutely steals the screen in ‘Bionic,’” Angela Bromstad, president of NBC Universal Television Studio, told TV Week’s James Hibberd.
Some of the clips featuring Sackhoff, best known to genre fans as Kara “Starbuck” Thrace in SciFi Channel’s “Battlestar Galactica,” have been released to the Web by NBC Universal as a way to promote the series, which will make its debut this fall. In it, Sackhoff plays the original bionic woman who gets in a rooftop bionic battle with Jamie Sommers, played by series tar Michelle Ryan.
Sackhoff’s character originally was slated to be offed in the pilot, but executives liked her so much that she is now going to be pulling double duty between both shows which are filmed in Vancouver and produced by NBCU.
Sackhoff apparently isn’t the only BSG alum to be making the show either… two more actors familiar to “Battlestar” fans who have some type of role in the pilot.
The Bionic Woman airs Wednesdays this fall at 9/8c on NBC. See NBC.com’s Bionic Woman web page for more info.
[Via syfyportal.com]
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Finding Closure For Jericho
Less than a week after American broadcast network, CBS, pulled the plug on its post-Apocalyptic sci-fi series “Jericho,” fans have apparently been making contact with the network in droves, demanding that if nothing else, CBS find closure for the cliffhanger left at the end of Season 1.
That campaign has included letter writing and even the delivery of peanuts to the network, highlighting one of the final words of the series when Skeet Ulrich’s character of Jake Green tells the sheriff of the neighboring town of New Bern that is at war with Jericho, paying homage to a World War II story by his grandfather.
The campaign may have paid off, with CBS making an announcement on the official “Jericho” message boards that there could be plans in the works to at least wrap up the story.
“We have read your e-mails over the past few days and have been touched by the depth and passion with which you have expressed your disappointment,” wrote Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment.
“Please know that canceling a television series is a very difficult decision. Hundreds of people at the network, the production company and the incredibly talented creative team worked very hard to build and serve the community for this show — both on-air and online. It is a show we loved, too. Thank you for supporting ‘Jericho’ with such passion. We truly appreciate the commitment you made to the series and we are humbled by your disappointment. In the coming weeks, we hope to develop a way to provide closure in the compelling drama that was the ‘Jericho’ story.”
While the series had a strong run of episodes early in the season, by the time it returned several weeks after its first part of the season, “Jericho” had stiff competition against “American Idol”- fueled programming on Fox among other places, but was still generating decent ratings for CBS.
[Via syfyportal.com]
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