As you all probably know, Friday was Avatar Day. I’m getting pretty good at explaining what Avatar is. I had to explain to my wife that we were going to the IMAX theater to see a 15 preview of a movie that doesn’t come out until December. The rest of the weekend was spent explaining to people that Avatar is going to be awesome.

I’m typically not one to buy into the hype machine, and I usually stay as far away as possible from motion capture, but upon seeing the Avatar preview on Friday, I am thoroughly excited. The CG may not be as eyeball-bursting as the hype suggested, but the scenes I saw were pretty amazing. The Na’vi have very expressive faces, and when they’re together (and not mixed with live action humans), I totally forgot I was watching CG.

But this is Saturday Morning Central, so lets talk about something really important…Avatar toys!

Avatar Toys

Forget the toys based on the movies based on the toys of our childhood. Avatar is going to have some awesome, totally original toys for kids to play with and in twenty years, blog about. Who wouldn’t want the Sigourney Weaver figure, or the Mech suit, or the cool helicopter-with-fans?

I can see some pretty epic action figure battles going on with these toys. The inner geek in me hopes that the Na’vi figures will be to scale with the humans, which would put them an inch or two taller. If not, I’ll survive.

Make sure to head over to Mattel’s Flickr stream to see more Avatar toys!

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I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything Astro Boy related, but don’t count that against me. I’ll be among the first in line to see the second animated feature from Imagi, who brought us the decent TMNT movie in 2007. I can catch up on years of robot boy goodness after that.

Oh yeah, and Hot Toys is releasing an awesome Astroy Boy figure sometime soon, and I probably won’t be able to afford it.

Christian Annyas, a fellow web designer, has started an awesome website called the Movie Title Stills Collection, where he is archiving screenshots of movie title screens, end titles, and trailer titles from 1920 to the present day.

I think the art of the title screen is something that people in Hollywood forgot about years ago, so it is great to be able to enjoy them again in archived form.

Now, he should create an Animated Shorts Title Stills Collection!

Found via Design Reviver.

In case you haven’t noticed, this year is the 25th Anniversary of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Mirage is celebrating by releasing as much stuff for my fellow fanboys and I to buy as possible. We’ve seen the re-release of the classic TMNT action figures, video games, and more, and now we get new box sets of all the TMNT movies.

Warner Bros. sent me a copy of the standard DVD set, which you can pick up here, and that is what I will be reviewing, but remember, the films are also now available in high definition for the first time with the TMNT Blu-ray box set. Our good friend The Retroist reviewed that set a few days ago.

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I wasn’t going to post anything while we’re on vacation in San Francisco, but tonight we had the pleasure of seeing an advanced screening of Hayao Miyazaki’s latest animated feature, Ponyo.

Part of the reason we chose San Francisco as our vacation spot is because we heard Miyazaki was going to be making a rare US appearance to accept an award at the University of Berkeley California. Before we booked our trip, we made sure to get tickets to that event as well as the screening of Ponyo. To make a long story short, Ponyo is awesome.

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