Top Hat Sasquatch

I haven’t failed this miserably in a long time. I signed up to be a stop on Brian of Cool and Collected’s King Kong World Tour list months ago. The box with King Kong arrived amidst a sea of other boxes while the wife and I were on vacation, and it sat in my office (which right now looks like an episode of Hoarders) for months before I realized I even had it.

So, King Kong has not enjoyed his time in Indianapolis very well, but at least he’s now on his way to visit the rest of the world. To make it up to the world, I made a special coupon code over at Boxsome good for 15% off. Use the code KINGKONG at checkout and get some rad trading cards on the cheap thanks to my blogging fail.

I love Stickygram, and I have ordered a few magnet sheets of my Instagram shots over the last couple years. It’s really easy to connect your IG account, select your photos, and get some awesome magnets in the mail. The fine folks at Stickygram are teaming up with Top Hat Sasquatch for a little Instagram contest, and three lucky winners will get a sheet of magnets (9 individual magnets).

I thought it would be fun to have a little Christmas-themed toy photo contest. All you have to do is post a Christmas-themed photo of some toys, tag @TopHatSasquatch and @Stickygram, and then use the hashtag #StickygramTHS. You’ve got until Monday, December 16th to get your photo posted, and then I’ll pick three winners.

You could recreate a scene from your favorite Christmas movie using toys, turn some old toys into ornaments like I did a few years ago, or anything else you can think of. Be creative!

You can only enter once, so focus on making one awesome photo instead of a bunch, and we’ll pick the winners based on which ones are our favorites! Good luck!

Well, this is turning out to be a big week for comic book movie news. Warner Bros announced that Wonder Woman will be in the Man of Steel sequel, Bryan Singer announced X-Men: Apocalypse for 2016, and we got this awesome trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

I quite liked the first Amazing Spider-Man movie. I was a fan of the first two Raimi films in the early 2000s, but always felt they were a little cheesy and I was never particularly fond of Toby Maguire or Kirsten Dunst. I felt like the reboot did a good job of reestablishing the Spidey universe and setting up sequels. I’ve been following the news about TASM2 for a while now, but this trailer kind of kicked my expectations up a few notches.

I’ll get to the rambling fanboy predictions in a minute, but first I want to just say that damn, that new Spidey costume is amazing. I think it’s the best incarnation that’s ever been put on film, and is so much closer to a comic book Spider-Man than we’ve seen before. In fact, it looks like the whole tone of this sequel is more comic book inspired and less ‘dark and gritty’, which is fine by me. I could do without Electro in a hoodie, but it beats lack leather.

The Sinister Six

I love how they’re setting up Oscorp as the center of the Spidey villain universe. It makes sense to have a central evil organization responsible for creating villains and teaming them up, instead of devoting a ton of screen time to individual villains’ origins. TASM2 is going to have at least Electro, Rhino, and some form of the Green Goblin. The fact that the trailer even teases more villains (Doc Ock and Vulture, plus they show that chamber with six cells), just goes to show that the filmmakers are going to throw everything at Spider-Man in the next few movies. I think that’s awesome.
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Did you know that The Dark Crystal was originally meant to be darker and more serious, without narration or English-speaking Skesis and Mystics? I had never heard this, but the other day on Reddit I saw someone post their own fan-edit using original dialog and bits of the work-print that had never been seen. Christopher Orgeron worked on the edit for 2 years and you can now watch it on YouTube (or download it in 720p with a browser extension). From Christopher’s description:

Early versions of The Dark Crystal were a bit different than the version we see today. Jim Henson and Frank Oz originally sought to create a much darker story that relied more on the audience and less on voice-overs and inner monologues explaining the plot. In this version there’s no narrator, Jen’s inner monologues are gone, and the Skeksis hardly ever say anything in English (Aughra speaks some Skesis too!). This version is much more modern and a little darker with this original audio and the slightly different score. Some of the scenes are moved around too, which adds to the surreal feel of the original film. Some test audiences were more casual moviegoers and responded negatively to this version so the Henson team redubbed the ENTIRE film to help explain the plot to the audience up front and make things more obvious.

The Dark Crystal is one of my favorite movies and I’m excited to watch this alternate version over the weekend. Besides my love of anything by Jim Henson, I’m a huge fan of world-building in movies and I think Crystal is one of the best examples of this, right up there with Star Wars.

Watch it on YouTube

Edit: Mental Floss just posted a Q&A with Christopher about his edit, check it out!

PS – Dark Crystal Trading Cards are available from Boxsome!

I still can’t believe that in 2014 we are going to get really-for-real Simpsons LEGO sets. If you haven’t heard, there will be a Simpsons House set along with a whole line of blind-packaged Simpsons minifigures (16 in total, I believe). I never would have guessed the Simpsons, with their more adult humor, would get made into LEGO sets, but I’m happy they are. I’m a huge fan of both and to have them combined is going to be awesome. Not to mention having the Simpsons’ house in my office. That is going to be great.

The minifigures have been leaking slowly for a few weeks, and here is the first look at Homer. I’m guessing we’ll be seeing some variations of Homer (please Glob give us a fat Homer in mumu) but this is the standard, classic Homer. The heads will take some getting used too, but I’m sure standard LEGO heads with painted-on Simpsons faces would look a lot worse.

What do you think?

Via The Brick Fan