Starring: Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer, Felicia Day as Penny
Screenplay By: Joss Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, and Zack Whedon
Directed By: Joss Whedon
Produced By: David Burns, Michael Boretz, and Joss Whedon
Plot Outline: The story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.
Music by: Joss Whedon and Jed Whedon
Lyrics by: Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon, and Maurissa Tancharoen
Score and Orchestration by: Jed Whedon
It seems that some of you have discovered my set of “Top 80s” posts by searching for Devo. Maybe the recent interest has something to do with these new bits of information:
Devo recorded a new song titled “Watch Us Work It,” which was featured in a commercial for Dell. The band has announced in a July 23, 2007, MySpace bulletin that a full length music video for the song is forthcoming. Casale said that this song was chosen from a batch of songs that the band was working on, and that also this is the closest the band has been to a new album.
In an article called Are You Not Devo? You Are Mutato, LA Weekly says that “After touring sporadically over the past decade but not releasing any new material, Devo are spending December at Mutato trying to create an album’s worth of new material and contemplating a method of dispersal in the post-record-company world.”
I got so excited when I saw the trailer for Be Kind Rewind (what a great idea!) that I immediately watched it again before showing it to my cuddle partner. She was equally excited (mainly because she loves Mos Def) and also watched the trailer again. Then we talked about it a bit and I forgot all about sharing it. Until now.
Luckily for you, they’ve released some youtube videos specifically to remind me to share.
Jack Black and director Michel Gondry explain the art of sweding.
And there’s more: Robocop, Ghostbusters, Driving Miss Daisy, Rush Hour 2 and BoYZ In THe HooD are all sweded here. I hope they’ve got more movies up their sleeve though…I don’t want these to be the only ones.
(Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs behind-the-scenes)
Here are a couple quotes from the documentary:
“…the thousands of pencil drawings go to the inking department. Here, hundreds of pretty girls…”
“The inked celluloids next go to the painting department where more pretty girls apply the final colors.”
Damn…Walt Disney was a bigger genius than I ever realized. Unfortunately, to some degree, we also have the Disney Company to thank for possibly being detrimental to cultural diversity. One can argue that a rich, continually replenished, public domain is necessary for continued artistic creation. Disney as we know it wouldn’t exist if the current copyright laws were in place years ago because many of Disney’s animated films are based on Nineteenth Century public domain works, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Pinocchio, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Alice in Wonderland, and The Jungle Book.
There has never been a time in history when more of our ‘culture’ was as ‘owned’ as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now. (pg. 28 of Free Culture)
Free Culture is a book about the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies.
And here’s a humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms:
“Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.”
One of the things that I’ve not yet mentioned on this blog is the fact that I’m currently working on several fiction writing projects. One of those projects is set in the near future after we’ve established some kind of base on the moon.
NASA has released a trailer of sorts that outlines their plans to return to the moon again. They’re really trying to make it as exciting as possible…it’s kinda neat:
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
