Regardless of that apprehension, the first scenes and clips are showing up…and they have promise. Jerry Beck of Cartoon Brew has some exclusives:

I was invited to a screening this past week to preview the three new CGI Road Runner-Coyote shorts for theatrical release — and my verdict is in: They’re terrific!

Read his whole interview at his website, but here’s a short clip from the short.

The two caveats so far is that these cartoons are only three minutes long, which is even shorter than the originals. The other is that Coyote Falls will be first shown before Cats and Dogs 2 in theaters this weekend.

In other news, there’s going to be a Cats and Dogs 2 in theaters this weekend.

The other clip of the new show is more of a promo:

Even though Daffy’s joke at the end sounded too much like a Family Guy joke, I’m hopeful.

The annual San Diego Comic-Con has been taking place for the last several days and there’s a lot of news coming out of the event — too much, really, for any one place. Rather than offer an ongoing barrage of announcements, we’re collecting all the biggest headlines right here (for a source of much more complete coverage, I’d recommend checking out IGN). If we’ve missed a particularly tasty tidbit of info, please let us know in the comments!

• Recently rumored, now confirmed: Mark Ruffalo is replacing Edward Norton as Bruce Banner/The Hulk in the upcoming Avengers movie.
• Speaking of the Avengers flick and recent rumors, also confirmed is the rumor that Joss Whedon himself will be directing Marvel’s giant team-up movie. Whedon has also since revealed that Hawkeye will be joining the Avengers, played by Jeremy Renner.
• Disney is going to try again with a film adaptation of The Haunted Mansion (sans Eddie Murphy this time). Directing this new attempt will be none other than Guillermo del Toro (whose Spanish-language production The Orphanage was one the creepiest and most well-done ghost movie I’ve ever seen).
• There has been lots of news about the upcoming movies for Marvel’s Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger, including production stills, movie posters, concept art, and the launch of  official websites for both films.
• Oh, and hey…how about a new trailer for Tron: Legacy? Thought you’d like that.

That’s really about it for the big news (so far), but I’d recommend going out and digging up the details on whatever else is of specific interest to you; there’s a lot out there.

One last bit of exciting news for me is the tantalizing tease that Marvel threw out about the return of the Crossgen comic universe. Back in the early 2000′s, Crossgen Comics debuted with comics about pirates, ninjas, space heroes, and all kinds of fun, non-superheroey stuff. The comics were great and while each title stood on its own, they were all tied together with threads of an all-encompassing larger story. After several years of publication, this larger story was building to a payoff in an epic mini-series — which stopped after issue #2 because the company went bankrupt. The story has remained unresolved ever since.

Disney, however, snapped up the assets when the company hit the auction block, and now Disney owns Marvel, too. Regardless of whether or not Marvel plans to finally give fans the end of the story or not, I’m very interested to see what they do with some of the original Crossgen properties.

The difference between this short film and most others is that it was made entirely with open source and other free software. When finished, it will be released with a Creative Commons license, which means that people will be allowed to legally download, share, and screen the film.

The group behind Sintel is called The Blender Foundation, which is also working on the project to improve and display their 3D graphics program Blender. They have two other short films to their name: Elephant’s Dream and Big Buck Bunny, both of which were created and released in the same way.

Blender is free open source software, which means it is both free to download and use, but the source codes are free to download and manipulate as desired. For the Open Source geeks, here’s a list of software Sintel is using:

For the entire creation pipeline in the studio, we will only use free/open source software. For 3D graphics, compositing and video editing we’ll obviously use Blender. For imaging and drawing we expect to use GIMP and Inkscape a lot. Next to these, we’ll explore the very promising paint programs MyPaint and Krita. Render output will be in OpenEXR. Scripting will be done in Python. Studio database storage will most likely be in SVN. The workstations in the studio will be equipped with 64 bits Linux, distro and desktop environment is to be defined later. We intend to build our own render farm this time, for which a free software solution will be required as well.

Since we’ll work with external providers for music, sfx and mix, we can only recommend them to include free software in their pipeline, but won’t put stringent demands here.

Open source is becoming more and more popular in mainstream computing. Chances are good that you have Firefox, Google Chrome, or OpenOffice on your home and/or work computer, and all are great examples of good open source software competing against commercial software. Blender is another example (it’s already been used in the creation of films like Spider-Man 2 and The Secret of Kells), but by creating these films they are trying to better their craft and their product.

In addition to the YouTube clip of the trailer, the Sintel site will allow you to download the trailer in various formats and sizes — from small sizes for a mobile device up to 1920x1080p video. If you’re really up for a challenge, you can download the whole thing uncompressed if you have a spare 40 gigs or more.

If you’d like to download one of their other short films, I recommend starting with Big Buck Bunny. It feels like Pixar-meets-Looney Tunes, and it looks gorgeous at high resolutions. Again, if you’re a glutton for punishment, there are about 400 gigs of uncompressed data with play with on their website.

Numbers stations, as radio enthusiasts call them, usually consist of a person reciting a group of numbers, saying them over and over, possibly playing a short tune, and shutting down the transmitter.

Officially, no one knows what they are for and who is doing them. Unofficially, the story gets a lot more interesting:

The voices are coming from what are known as “numbers stations,” and they’ve long been thought to be part of international espionage operations. In fact, the Russian spies recently captured here in the U.S. may have been getting orders from Moscow via a shortwave numbers station

And the mystery only deepens: No government has ever officially admitted to using numbers stations. No one’s really sure when the stations began broadcasting, though they’re most likely a Cold War-era invention.

Here’s an example of one:

They’re found in numerous languages and inflections. Sometimes they’re in Morse Code, sometimes with an inhuman-sounding computer voice, and sometimes they go for hours. The way the codes are created is a system called One Time Pad, and it’s a near-uncrackable system. Read more about it; it’s quite ingenious.

It’s widely assumed that numbers stations started during the Cold War as a way to get messages to spies and other subversives hiding in foreign countries. I remember listening around 1989 or 1990 to these stations, and it wasn’t uncommon to hear a few Spanish numbers stations broadcasting all night. The prevalence of the stations seemed to drop after the fall of the USSR, but they have never completely disappeared.

There’s a great story about West German spies hiding in East Germany, and their attempts to decode a message from their allies in the 60s:

Mother and I hunted up and down the dial in an attempt to isolate the correct station. If we missed the first couple of sentences in the transmission we would not know if it was addressed to us or someone else, and hence we might miss the entire thing along with the indicator of when the next message is to come. Talk about stress. Finally we thought we found it and just as we were getting ready to relax I noticed how the lady announcer pronounced the number five. In German it sounds something like “Fuenf.” Short and to the point. However, this particular announcer called it “Fuennef” – drawing out the word and almost adding its own ending to it. This pronunciation was distinct to a dialect found in East Germany. Quickly in great panic we switched to the other German language station next to it – just in time to hear the announcer say “The next message is for our friend 8754. It consists of 35 groups of type Z. The message starts now: 87,34,12,13,30 ,12 break …”

Still today — these stations pop up, play a little music, send some cryptic messages, and disappear.

Sometimes old geekery is even more effective than new geekery — and sometimes old geekery inspires new geekery, as we can see in this classic scene from the first season of LOST.

When we read of God being “slow to anger,” I think we assume that this means that he’s slow to show his anger — like there’s a barely concealed rage hiding. At any second he is going to blow up, like Ned Flanders in this classic scene from The Simpsons, after much of the town rebuilt his devastated home.

As you might know, Ned proceeds to yell at all of his friends in an extremely hurtful manner — as if this has been building for years and the last straw has been drawn. It’s easy to see God’s grace in the same manner, as though he’s politely looking the other way as we fall while plastering on a forced smile when he really wants to throttle us for our stupidity.

Jon Acuff, of the great blog Stuff Christians Like, talks about our problem with grace and how Christians can fall into the trap of assuming that they can give “too much grace:”

Similar to how people will accuse politicians of being “soft on crime,” sometimes Christians accuse each other of being “soft on sin.” The idea is that there needs to be justice and consequences. People have to pay the cost of their actions and learn from their mistakes. When you’re “soft on sin,” you’re giving people too many second chances, you’re not holding people accountable the right way, you’re being too gracious.

So people accused me of giving evil a free pass. Have you ever heard that before? Has there ever been an issue your friend thought you weren’t mad enough about? Or a situation where you refused to let someone keep falling when everyone told you to abandon all hope? Have you ever been accused of being soft on sin?

For a while now, I’ve had a real problem with moralism and moralistic teaching masquerading as the message of Jesus. In short, moralism teaches that behavior modification is the primary message of the Bible. Worse, it implies that our own goodness will make us worth more to others and to God — something Jesus loudly refuted when dealing with the moralists of his day. If you’ve heard more sermons about avoiding “the world” than you have about Christ’s sacrifice, you have an idea of how grace can be stifled. Jon makes this clear:

We don’t get casual grace. We don’t get easy grace. We don’t get cheap or soft grace.

We get severe grace. We get unyielding grace. We get Christ on the cross with nails in his hands and blood on his body grace. We get severe grace.

And the reason we do is that God is not soft on sin. He is hard on sin. He is wrathful on sin. He is all knowing and all powerful on sin. He is fire and earthquakes and showers of sulfur on sin. His wrath is undeniable on sin. Which is why it took such tremendous grace to quench it.

That’s the problem with moralism: despite its assertion, it’s not a belief that has a strong view of sin. It thinks sin is weak and easily manageable. It thinks we can conquer sin provided we follow the right rules, reducing Jesus to an aide to our quest. It views grace with the same impatience described above, as if it’s a technicality.

Grace, on the other hand, is filled with patience. It knows the faults and shortcomings of everyone it encounters, yet gives as one doesn’t deserve. In the story of the Prodigal Son, the runaway son expected a father full of moralism when he returned — a man begrudgingly allowing his son back with significant conditions. What he saw was a father scrambling to embrace him, filled with grace.

(For more on Grace, check out the interview with Pastor Tullian Tchividjian at The White Horse Inn. Best quote: “A ‘yes, grace…but’ disposition is the kind of posture that keeps moralism swirling around in the church.”)

I always like Ryan Reynolds, too, so this could be a good movie. Other than the Batman movies, DC hasn’t had that many film adaptations lately (especially compared to Marvel) so it should be interesting to see how this goes.

From the EW article:

Ryan Reynolds stars as Hal Jordan, a cocky test pilot who becomes a ring-wearing intergalactic superhero in this massive sci-fi epic from director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale). Though Reynolds has prior experience in the superhero realm from his role as Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, playing Green Lantern involved some major challenges, like getting hurled through the air on a wire at up to 60 feet per second to create the illusion of flight.

…Still, he couldn’t resist the chance to play the beloved DC Comics hero, whose power ring can conjure virtually anything he can dream up.

“Will and imagination are his superpowers,” Reynolds says.

The movie is scheduled for June 17, 2011.

HT: SuperHeroHype.com

Old Spice recently released a second 30-second commercial (once again featuring actor Isaiah Mustafa) called Questions. This video was released June 29, 2010. It already has over five million views on YouTube, proving that it was just as addicting as the first video.

Even with all of that, though, nobody expected the next step from Old Spice.

On Tuesday, June 13, Old Spice’s Twitter account stated: “Today could be just like the other 364 days you log into twitter, or maybe the Old Spice man shows up @OldSpice.”

Old Spice then proceeded to release very simple, short video featuring the Old Spice Guy (towel and bathroom in tow) responding to fan comments on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media sites. Each of these responses followed suit with the manly personality portrayed in the original commercials, combining a hilarious mixture of arrogance and random wit that has been appealing to both men and women. Viewers everywhere can’t stop watching or talking about them; many of the videos have received over 15,000 views in less than 24 hours!

Regardless of how enjoyable the videos have been, they are still part of a marketing campaign. As such, it’s no surprise that many of these video responses have been directed toward internet-savvy celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, Apolo Ohno, and Ryan Seacreast.

Many regular users, followers, and fans have been treated to a response, though, too.  Once social media users started to catch on to what was going on, they started flooding the Old Spice team with questions and comments for the Old Spice Guy to respond to — including a request for a proposal from one user to his girlfriend (you can read more about that story at Mashable).

After a full day of shooting, I don’t think anyone expected the videos to start again today, but early on Wednesday morning the Old Spice Twitter account said, “The Old Spice man/guy on a horse is online, talking to everyone who’s been talking about him” and the videos started again.

This is quite possibly the best marketing campaign I have seen in a long time.  Old Spice has found a way to not only refresh their brand in a way that is relevant, but also to create a social media phenomenon. Fans are eagerly awaiting new commercials and promising to use the product. Customers, celebrities, and other brands are all connecting with Old Spice and the videos are being reposted (and retweeted) everywhere.

To truly appreciate the marketing genius in this campaign, consider the fact that a majority of these YouTube videos do not include an image of the product, a logo, or even a mention of the product name. Here’s hoping Old Spice can keep the campaign interesting, or at least that they know when to quit before the campaign loses its effectiveness due to overpopularity or dilution.

(Click for larger version)

What a spectacular example of poor translation and mixing up a variety of Batman film properties from the past two decades.

Batman sure does show up on quite a few notable knock-off products. We mentioned the unauthorized Filipino movie last year, but there’s also a Turkish Batman movie in black and white. Even if it is black market Batman, it feels a lot like the 60s Batman series with more dramatic music (and a tougher Robin); all it’s missing is the visual depiction of sound effects like “POW!” and “WHAM!”

In other Batman news, Christopher Nolan is expected to start filming Batman 3 next Spring, unofficially at least:

Warner Brothers, which has not officially greenlit the third “Batman” movie, has not yet commented on the Caine statement. Nonetheless, everyone knows the movie is coming. Warner Bros. announced in late April that “Batman 3″ would open on July 20, 2012. The studio and Imax had jointly disclosed a few days earlier that week that the project was one of 20 Warner projects that would be released in an Imax format before the end of 2013.

The article says that The Dark Knight made $1 billion. That’s a lot of garbled Batman Begins trading cards.

(photo via Jeffery Overstreet and The Consumerist)

Toy Story

These and so many other wildly successful films now land squarely in the camp of “modern family classics” and have meant a lot to many people — and they all came from “the little studio that could.”

With Toy Story 3 making bank at the box office, many people are once again reflecting on Pixar’s success of the last decade or so. They seem to have come out of nowhere and had the recipe for success right from the beginning.

That almost wasn’t the case, though. Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog says that studio pressure early in the development of the original Toy Story almost caused it to be a very different movie.

…Jeffrey Katzenberg, then Chairman of the struggling Disney Animation Studios, pressured Lasseter and the budding geniuses of Pixar to steer away from family entertainment.  In the documentary “A Pixar Story,”  Disney’s Tom Schumacher recounts, “Jeffrey would always be pushing for what he called ‘the edge… snappy, adult, on the edge of inappropriate, and not too young…’

Under Katzenberg’s charge, Toy Story became an irreverent, mean-spirited muddled mess.  It was only when Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton and others returned to the old-fashioned idea of staying true to their vision that Toy Story came alive.  The ‘edgy’ storyboards were thrown on the scrapheap, and the characters were re-drawn from the heart of the writers. The rest is history…But it is worth mentioning the film’s allure came when the budding filmmakers stopped making what they thought the studio wanted, and instead made the film they would want their kids to watch.

The article at Big Hollywood goes on to reflect on the evident cynicism about the American people that Tinseltown seems to possess as well as what other filmmakers can learn from Pixar’s success.

It’s terrific, though, to see a studio that produces films that are not just high-quality movies with mass appeal, but movies that are genuinely wholesome as well.

- When I did my Haibane Renmei review, I mentioned that it was out of print and increasingly hard to find. Thankfully it appears that fact will be changing soon, as a new company has stepped in to give it a proper re-release. You can learn more at the Funimation site, where they talk about some other series to which they also now own the rights.

This is great news to both the current fans of the show and people who have never seen it. Funimation has a reputation for streaming episodes of series they license on Hulu, so you’ll likely have a chance to check out the show online for free.

- For fans of humorous music, the name Dr. Demento probably brings up a lot of memories. He’s been doing The Dr. Demento Show for forty years, giving an outlet to silly musicians for decades and launching the career of Weird Al Yankovic along the way. This past month he retired his radio show (which had dwindled down to less than a dozen affiliates) and went online exclusively. The good doctor talked to NPR about the show’s history:

“I found that most of my requests were for those funny things — ‘The Purple People Eater’ and ‘Transfusion’ by Nervous Norvus,” Demento says in an interview with Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep. “And so, the more I played that kind of thing, the more popular the show got, and I became the funny-record guy.”

Demento frequently spins the music of Spike Jones, Monty Python, Stan Freberg, Tom Lehrer and, of course, Frank Zappa. Early in Demento’s career, fans began sending in their own joke songs and parodies. Most notably, a 16-year-old “Weird Al” Yankovic sent a homemade cassette tape to Dr. Demento, who embraced the young accordion player’s oddball sense of humor.

- Season 2 of Dollhouse will be out on DVD in the fall. I’ve been doing a little research about some of the themes of the show (which have been discussed here before), and I came across an interest blog post by an Orthodox priest called “Just The Shell.” It’s quite good and thought-provoking; here’s an excerpt:

The body is not “just the shell.” Properly understood, the human person is both body and soul – neither are the fullness of the person alone. It is in this sense that the Church teaches the necessity of the resurrection of the body. That at death the soul is departs from the body is the understanding of the Church. But it also understands that though the soul “is in the hands of God” it enjoys an anticipation of the life to come – rather than the fullness of the life to come. The fullness awaits our fullness – the resurrection of the body.

Read the whole thing. More fiction should lead you into theological questions.

- It appears that the most recent director of The Hobbit is (*spins wheel*)…Peter Jackson.

- Finally, there’s a picture of whole known universe at the UK’s Telegraph:

In September it began to reveal its first images showing strips of ancient light across the sky. Now it has revealed a full picture of the sky.

The image shows what is visible beyond the Earth to instruments that are sensitive to light at very long wavelengths.

Dominating the picture are large parts of our Milky Way Galaxy. The bright horizontal line running across the middle of the image is the galaxy’s main disc and where the Sun and Earth are.

And looking at that picture, I think of a quote from the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper: “There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, ‘This is mine! This belongs to me!’”