Top Hat Sasquatch

Today would have been Julia Child’s 100th birthday. Google is celebrating with a lovely doodle on their home page, but I thought I would pay tribute to the French Chef by highlighting her role in my nostalgia. While most people know her from her cooking show, I grew up associating her voice with one of my favorite animated movies, We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story.

In We’re Back! Julia Child plays Dr. Bleeb, a short, possibly blind lady that works at the Museum of Natural History. She welcomes the dinosaurs when they reach the city, and then doesn’t really pop up for very long until the end. We’re Back! is Julia Child’s only acting credit on IMDB, and it’s a shame that Dr. Bleeb was the only animated character she ever portrayed. Wouldn’t it have been awesome if she could have lent her voice to a character in Ratatouille?

We’re Back! doesn’t hold up well anymore, but I still have it on in the background from time to time to please my inner child. You just can’t beat John Goodman as a T-Rex singing Roll Back the Clock around Times Square.

Come on, seriously, they’re going to make a billion dollars with this game. Actual movie dialogue? Brilliant, because the minifigure pantomime was getting a little old, and you really can’t have Gandalf facing down a Balrog and grunt instead of saying ‘You shall not pass!’

That reminds me, where’s my LEGO Balrog? How is that not a thing yet?

Via The Mary Sue

Confession: I still like to color. I’m not ashamed of it. I stare at a computer screen for the majority of the day, and usually at a television screen for the other hours I’m not sleeping, so having something analog to do every once in a while probably just helps my brain not melt. Being the nostalgic person I am, every once in a while I think to go buy some coloring books and a fresh pack of Crayolas. Luckily my wife enjoys it too and doesn’t think I’m crazy.

When I was preparing the art for our Top Hat Sasquatch shirts, I realized I could totally make a coloring sheet with our mascot, and I got way too excited. That combined with the new TMNT coloring books I ordered on Amazon, and I was apparently back into coloring.

Then I realized that I’d never bought coloring books online before, and that there had to be a bunch of weird, random, and awesome coloring books that would be way more fun than picking up a Hello Kitty or Dark Knight Rises book at the store. Yeah, turns out there are.

So, here are the 10 weirdest coloring books I found on Amazon. I use weird in the best way possible, so no offense to any of the authors. I run a site called Top Hat Sasquatch anyway, so who am I to talk?
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The LEGO Group quietly turned 80 years old today, and so far the only thing I’ve found that qualifies as an official announcement is this 20 minute long CG animated short video. If it’s not showing up for you, that’s because the video is Flash. Apparently they can pay a company (I assume) a large chunk of change to animate this history of the company, but can’t afford to create a MP4 file.

Update: The video is up on YouTube now.

Seriously though, Happy Birthday to my favorite toy company around. Here are some details from their official blog:

In 1932, Ole Kirk Christiansen founded the LEGO Group. Today the company has approximately 10,000 employees, and it is the world’s third largest manufacturer of play materials.

I’ll admit I didn’t have the patience to watch that whole video, but I can happily report that I skipped ahead and found out that the kid sounds almost exactly like Ralph Wiggum.

I tend to let CUUSOO projects go viral before I pay much attention to them, but in the case of this LEGO City Store by RayC, I’m glad I can help spread the word in its early stages. Built in the tradition of LEGO’s modular buildings (spoiler: they fit together and are really expensive), this LEGO Store is as cute as it is meta.

LEGO has said that it looks for projects on CUUSOO that would be best as a one-off, rather than a whole new product line. If the LEGO City Store project reaches 10,000 supporters, I doubt they would be able to resist making this an actual product. How cool would it be to see a modular LEGO Store for sale at a regular-type LEGO Store?
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