doubledumbassonyou.com

Of Big Trouble, Autobots, and Saviors of The Universe: My Ideal Saturday Matinee

Jon — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 09:11:01 +0000

The League of Extraordinary Bloggers is a group of like-minded individuals organized by Brian from Cool & Collected. Each member contributes a post on the weekly assignment, which is shared and cross posted across the group. The first assignment:

What movie is, or was, your “go to” Saturday matinee — the comfort movie you always popped into the VCR on a rainy Saturday afternoon, the movie you watched over and over again, driving your parents crazy while you recited the lines along with the characters on the screen?

Most people can point to a movie as being their go to childhood flick. You know the one I’m talking about, it’s the one that your parents would begrudgingly pop into the VCR every weekend. Over time the sound would pop or the picture would jump because it had been rewound far too many times.

I never had just a movie. I had three movies, which I know refer to as my Trifecta of 80′s Awesomeness: Big Trouble in Little China, Transformers: The Movie, and Flash Gordon. And you want to know why it was so awesome? They were on just one VCR tape. My dad had a knack for making *ahem* duplicates of VHS tapes through an elaborate system of VHS decks. With love and dedication, my dad worked it out to get all three movies on to one VHS tape, guaranteeing close to 5 1/2 hours of uninterrupted TV time.

To this day I still have a deep and profound love for those movies. Partly due to the dedication from my dad to ensure that I had uninterrupted flow of 80s cheese pipelined directly into my cerebral cortex. To this day I can listen to the score from Transformers: The Movie and articulate the scenes in which each movement occurs. I can go line for line with Jack Burton, and the Flash Gordon soundtrack is among my most played on my iPod. To this day, I never grow tired of any of these movies. And I may argue that these three movies could be tied for the greatest 80s movie theme songs (Footloose can suck it!)

I have a primal compulsion to watch them every time they pop up, much to the chagrin of my wife. Of the three, I think she prefers Big Trouble in Little China … but she will never admit to that.

The Amazing Spider-Man Trailer Is Somewhat Amazing

Jon — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:27:33 +0000

I will freely admit that I’m a Spider-Man fanboy. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies hit right as I was getting back into comics after a long time away. We can all agree that by the time Spider-Man 3 hit, the magic was gone from the franchise. I will forever be haunted by the images of Emo Dancing Street Strutting Peter Parker (somehow HASBRO missed out on making an action figure of that). A fresh take was needed on the character, and I’m glad that Sam Raimi stepped aside.

So about this trailer. I will spare you the frame by frame analysis, I’ll leave that to the darker corners of the Interwebz. I will however outline my hits and misses:

Hits:

A real person swinging around as Spider-Man, I understand that CGI needs to be used, but in-camera effects FTMFW
Emma Stone looks like she stepped out of the pages of a Steve Ditko issue of Amazing Spider-Man. It’s uncanny.
MECHANICAL WEBSHOOTERS #$%%^&&!!
The Reptile is the villain, finally!

Misses:

I’m not really liking the look of Reptile, what happened to his snout? Why does he look like Killer Croc?
The suit … I’m a purist and I know this sounds like a nitpick, but there are few costumes that you do not mess around with and Spider-Man is on that list.
It’s being billed as “the untold story”, I just don’t want a long drawn out origin story. I’m pretty sure my mom and grandmom know how Peter Parker became Spider-Man.

Call me cautiously optimistic about this one, The Amazing Spider-Man hits theaters July 3rd, 2012.

Welcome to DDOY v3.0

Jon — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:07:52 +0000

Greetings all. My presence here over the last year has been minimal at best. I would best describe my role as being that of an absentee landlord. One big reason that 2011 was the lightest year in terms of content in the 6 years I’ve been doing this was the birth of my twin daughters. Now that they turned one, it makes thing a little less hectic and I have the ability to break away and do one of the things I love the most: get on here to bitch about movies, comic books, and action figures.

There are some slight changes on the backend as well. Earlier this week I changed my web host. Back in January I experienced a 4 day outage, which my then host, ReadySetConnect, did absolutely nothing to actually help me. I did the research and decided to join up with Fatcow. My experience up until this point with my new host has been nothing less than excellent.

During the move, I managed to upgrade to the latest iteration of WordPress, which is very slick and I’m still working on getting a few things ironed out. I have a history of avoiding WordPress upgrades due to the fact that I tend to break my database every time. So bear with me, as I am still working on finalizing a few things and I’m still coding a few custom items.

I’m back in business. Looking forward to seeing you around.

Fact: Michael Bay Loves To Double Dip

Jon — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 09:42:50 +0000

One of the trends that Hollywood doesn’t seem to get tired of is the DVD double dip. Transformers: Dark of The Moon was first released on Blu Ray & DVD on September 30th. It was bare bones with no special features at all. That was a very shitty move on behalf of Paramount, as they had full intentions of releasing it again a few months later chock full of special features and in 3D.

As someone who throughly enjoys the commentaries and behind the scenes stuff, I opted to wait it out. Luckily I only have a couple of weeks left until the Transformers: Dark of the Moon Ultimate Edition Blu-Ray 3D Combo Pack hits retail on January 31st.

Transformers Dark of The Moon 3D Blu-ray from Michael Bay Dot Com on Vimeo.

Credit [TFW2005]

DDOY Book Club: The Cult of Lego

Jon — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 04:25:14 +0000

By: John Baichtal and Joe Meno
Publisher: No Starch Press
[rating:4]

LEGO has been a part of my life for as a long as I can remember. Many of my best childhood memories have something to do with those tiny plastic bricks. I vividly remember the Christmas of 1988 when my parents bought me every single set from the Castle line. I spent an entire week building and rebuilding two of my all time favorite sets 6085 Black Monarch’s Castle and the 6054 Forestmen’s Hideout.

With having a Kindle there are very few instances where I actually buy physical books (sorry Borders), but when I saw early reviews for The Cult of LEGO I knew I had to make an exception. In the Cult of LEGO Biachtal and Meno do a great job of touching on the cultural impact that the LEGO Group have had across the world.

A great layout and fantastic photographs highlight some of the most iconic sets produced by the LEGO Group and some of the staggering creations by AFOLs (Adult Fans of LEGO). The Cult of LEGO will appeal to the broad spectrum of fans and is deserving of a place of honor on any nerd’s coffee table.

The ‘GI Joe: Retaliation’ Teaser Is Better Than The Entirety of The First Movie

Jon — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:54:17 +0000

Looking back, GI Joe: Rise of Cobra wasn’t the worst movie adaptation of a toyline to hit theaters in the summer of 2009. Hands down, that honor goes to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which for all intents and purposes is a steaming pile of shit. I didn’t wholly disapprove of RoC, but feel that there were some opportunities missed in the execution.

When it was announced that Jon Chu, director of the Step Up sequels and the Justin Beiber movie, “Never Say Never”, had been selected to helm the sequel/reboot to RoC I was not enthused.

This week saw the debut of the teaser trailer for GI Joe: Retaliation. Prepare to have your face melted in with some truly awesome Joe imagery.

Sweet merciful baby Jesus. Wait was that Cobra Commander looking like … Cobra Commander? Did they just kill Channing Tatum?!? Is that Snake Eyes fighting a bunch of Red Ninjas on the side of a mountain? HOLY SHIT. I’m buying my ticket now. See you in line asshats!!!

Insta-Buy: Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis

Jon — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 07:09:49 +0000

My father is a responsible for a lot of the nerdy passions in my life. At a very young age I would sit with him and watch a copy of Giorgio Moroder’s contemporary restoration of Metropolis on our kick ass 19″ Magnavox television. On a side note, It wasn’t until much later in life that I realized that my father was making illegal dubs of movies that he had rented from West Coast Video. We really didn’t have a lot of disposable income for entertainment, yet we always had good VHS copies of some of my favorites: Big Trouble in Little China, Transformers: The Movie, and Flash Gordon.

Back to Metropolis, it wasn’t until I was well into my college years that I finally got a chance to watch the “original” Metropolis. While I have an appreciation for the tremendous vision that Fritz Lang had in 1927, there’s just something about the color filters and the all-star soundtrack of Moroder’s version. Several years back I went so far as to import the soundtrack from the UK because it was out of print stateside (I kicked myself when it became available on iTunes a short time later)

On November 15th, Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis will be released on Blu-Ray for the very first time. Previously this had only been available on LaserDisc and VHS. And yes, there was a point at which I considered picking up a LaserDisc player specifically for this movie.

Geeks For Tots Is Back For 2011

Jon — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 05:20:07 +0000

Toys for Tots is one of the charities that I’ve always supported. As a kid I was fortunate to have some kick ass Christmas mornings, and now that I’m a fully functioning adult with stable employment, I do what I can so that kids that are less fortunate have something underneath the Christmas tree.

Geeks For Tots rewards people for doing the right thing and helping kids during the Christmas season. To encourage increased contributions to this worthy cause, Geeks For Tots is offering prizes to anyone who submits proof of donation. These could either be pictures of aforementioned geek dropping off their toys or a proof of an online donation to Toys For Tots.

Some of the kick ass prizes:

Gift Cards to BigBadToyStore
Gift Cards to 80sTees.com
Star Wars Action Figures from Brian’s Toys
Premium Format Clone Trooper from Sideshow Toys
Spider-Man Minimates from Luke’s Toy Store

Complete rules and the fine print can be found over at Geeks For Tots

It’s Still Scary: The Real Ghostbusters “The Boogeyman Cometh”

Jon — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 06:57:45 +0000

It’s been pretty well documented that I’m a gigantic Ghostbusters fan, and as a kid I was a fervent watcher of The Real Ghostbusters. Not too long ago I started revisiting the cartoon and found it to hold up rather well. The late 80s were a boon for animated series that were essentially 22 minute long toy commercials. While I never committed The Real Ghostbusters to memory, there are few episodes that have stood out over time and one such is the episode “The Boogeyman Cometh”.

I didn’t like the Boogeyman as a kid and I certainly didn’t like him on my TV while I was trying to eat my Lucky Charms. The animated incarnation of the Boogeyman utilizes portals within his realm to access kids’ closets (inspiration for Monsters Inc. maybe).

Couple that with the fact that he had goat legs, a creepy voice by none other than Frank Welker (he also did Soundwave, Megatron, and Fred from Scooby Doo), and a ridiculous haircut … the Boogeyman was a recipe for childhood nightmares.

It Isn’t Christmas Until The LEGO Advent Calendar Is Mine

Jon — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:22:37 +0000

For the last three years usually around this time of year I make an trip to LEGO Store to pick up the newest edition of the Advent Calendar. This year the Advent Calendar comes in two flavors: CITY and Star Wars, I opted for the CITY theme.

Due to my line of work, the CITY Police are a favorite and I can’t simply deny 24 days of mini-figure related goodness.

LEGO City Advent Calendar: 7553 MSRP: $34.99

And for those Star Wars minded individuals, the calendar features mini ships and minifigs galore; however they will cost you a bit more (LEGO has to mark up the cost due to licensing)

LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar: 7958 MSRP: $39.99

If you plan on getting either of these sets, be sure to pick them up before Black Friday as they get rather scarce after that point. Also, go direct to LEGO to pick these up the markups at Toys R Us and Target are a bit on the ridiculous side.