The fun folks over at The Onion’s A/V Club recently did a list of the 16+ most ridiculous killer robots of all-time. It was an admirable pursuit, but seemed a bit scattered and inconsistent. Here’s my top five list, with no specific programming criteria, such as murderous impulses.
1. Hedonism Bot, Futurama
The whole point of robotics is to make our lives easier, right? Well, once a robot becomes self-aware and develops its own intelligence, it seems logical that the end-point of their evolution would be the pursuit of their own pleasure. Right?
2. R2D2, Star Wars
Let’s face it: C3PO is a chump. He’s whiny, he talks too much, and would much rather hide from a dirty look than confront danger head-on. R2D2, on the other hand, beeps and boops in the face of danger. He breaks into prisons, hot-wires spacecraft, electrocutes enemies, and knows when to shut up and keep his head down while the things with thumbs shoot lasers at stuff. And all the while with this extremely developed sense of nuance and humor, made all the more impressive by his limited (human) vocabulary and nonexistent facial expressions.
3. Roberto, Futurama
The flip-side of Hedonism Bot, Roberto seems built for one purpose—stabbing things. Ostensibly he’s a criminal in other regards, like robbery and other forms of theft, but it all just seems like a pretense for him to put himself in a situation where he can thrust a blade into something or someone. Calling him “insane” always seems a tad redundant when it’s clear that he spends more of his days stabbing than doing anything else.
4. Awesome Andy, She-Hulk
A/V Club was absolutely right: the Mad Thinker’s Awesome Android was a complete dud until Dan Slott reinvented him as a legal temp in the early 2000s as a supporting character in the pages of She-Hulk. Like R2D2, Andy lacks verbal communication skills (making up for it by scribbling his thoughts on a chalkboard hanging around his neck), but makes up for it by being, in many ways, the most human character in the book. He gets frustrated with his coworkers’ hijinks from time to time, he pines after a female coworker who only thinks of him as a friend, has an annoying roommate, practices tai chi, and loves baseball (he’s a Mets fan.)
5. Optimus Prime, Transformers
Have you ever been in a movie theater full of 7-10 year olds and seen them all burst into tears when a robot dies? No? Then you must not have seen the original Transformers movie in a theater. That’s how big of a deal this stupid truck was to an entire generation of kids.
What do you think? Any notable omissions? Add them in the comments section below!
Last week I featured pieces from the recent Quentin vs. Coen show that I liked in particular, but this week I wanted to focus a bit more on artist Dave Perillo, whose “The Dude Abides” I mentioned as one of my favorites from the exhibition.
Perillo operates out of Philadelphia, and his art style is a pop cultural mash-up of influences, but if I had to describe it in a sentence, I’d probably say “Saul Bass goes kawaii.” A longer description would probably be “pop cultural artifacts from the late 70′s and 80′s presented in a late 50′s-mid 60′s design context,” including The Bugaloos, Voltron, and Weird Science.
You can check out more of Dave Perillo’s work on his blog here!
How could you want to drown/irradiate/bury under rubble a culture so amazing that it created this?
By the way, I’m pretty sure I’d stop eating my lunch if one of my soybeans started up a conversation with me, too.
Furthermore, if that island chain gets any more irradiated, I’m betting that by next harvest, edamame really WILL have eyes and the capacity for speech.
Last night the wife and I watched the movie Easy A, an alternately funny and frustratingly implausible modernization and analysis of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. It starred Penn Badgely, he of insufferably nice-guy Dan Humphrey of Gossip Girl fame, as Emma Stone’s unrequited love interest. I was going to post something about Transformers here today, but this is way more interesting:
Is Penn Badgely former next-Hollywood-It-Girl Rachel Leigh Cook? Creepy!
I don’t talk about music here as much as I’d like, but it’s probably in the top 5 in terms of “most important things in my life”, just behind my wife and cats and art, and just ahead of comic books and the Baltimore Orioles. 2010 in particular was a great year for music, with some of my favorite artists putting out stuff I knew I’d like, and a bunch of new artists that I just fell in love with, including Best Coast, aka Bethany Cosentino. Solid from tip to tail with fuzzed-out lo-fi sunny SoCal guitar-pop, her debut also featured her adorable cat Snacks on the cover. She’s even gone so far as to employ the talents of several esteemed kitty actors for her latest single off the album (and my favorites song on it) ‘Crazy For You’. She’s even Pitchfork-approved (quick, enjoy this before they flip the switch to “backlash mode”!)
Some web-nerd really needs to design a smirking, head-shaking emoticon, because the more I stare at the internetz, the more that that becomes my go-to expression. Also, I’m seriously considering changing the name of the Wednesday posts to “WTF, Japan?! Wednesday”, because it seems like every single week some new craziness gets transmitted to us from the land of the rising sun.
This week, it’s pee-based gaming at men’s room urinals. Go ahead, read it again. I’ll wait. Get it? Got it? Good.
So yeah, in an effort to curb poor aim at wall urinals that results in messy floors (ladies, I’m really sorry for this—also, if you think this is isolated to solely Japan, poke your head into the men’s room next time you’re out at a bar or your S.O. drags you to a sporting event), SEGA has introduced video games that men can “play” by aiming their streams at sensors in the urinals. Force of stream and accuracy help achieve high scores (I can’t believe I’m typing this).
Think of it like that age-old classic of writing your name in the snow with your pee, but much more sophisticated. At least from a technological standpoint. There is nothing culturally sophisticated about playing with your own pee. In fact, now that we’ve been incentivized to play with our own waste, I think you could make the argument that we are, in fact, devolving. This was the one thing separating us from apes.
The only way this could get worse is if SEGA secures licensing rights to the Ghostbuster franchise and develops a game wherein crossing of the streams is encouraged.
Well, this is a sad tale. Apparently David E. Kelly is developing a new Wonder Woman series. You may remember him from such awful television shows as Ally McBeal, Chicago Hope, Boston Legal, and The Practice. Coming hot on the heels (geologically-speaking) of Joss Whedon’s failed attempt to bring Princess Diana of Themyscira to the big screen, this is pretty disheartening. All I can envision is Kelly turning her into a lawyer and boring me to death with legal procedure interspersed with pining over Steve Trevor and the ticking of her biological clock. TNT knows blecch!, TBS very unfunny, USA: Characters unwelcome.
This brings me to today’s list: My top ten comic book properties that I would like to see brought to the big or small screen.
1. Green Arrow-This could work pretty easily, as he doesn’t have any super powers, and Kevin Smith did a really great job of creating a family unit around the character during his early 2000s run on the title. Great for TV. Also, my wife likes to stare at Justin Hartley with his shirt off.
2. 100 Bullets-Mysterious dude hands wronged people a briefcase containing a gun and 100 untraceable bullets with which to exact justice. Individual episodes can stand alone, while the overarching plot arc develops around them.
3. Preacher-HBO bought the development rights to this almost a decade ago and didn’t do anything with it. Preacher Jesse Custer becomes the receptacle for the essence of creation (“Genesis”), finds out that God skipped out on Heaven, and decides to go look for him and kick his ass. Season Five of Supernatural seems to be loosely based on this premise.
4. Ex-Machina-Guy gains ability to communicate with simple and complex machines thanks to being caught in an explosion with what seems to be an alien device. He saves one of the WTC towers on 9/11, runs for mayor of NYC, and wins. That’s when things get really tough…
5. Y, The Last Man-Shia LaBoeuf was at one point attached to this, but it’s in development limbo right now. Basically, a plague wipes out every creature carrying a Y-chromosome, except for NYC street magician Yorick Brown and his pet rhesus monkey Ampersand. He then embarks on a quest to find his girlfriend Beth in the Australian outback.
6. Daredevil-The Ben Affleck movie was awful, but the character deserves another shot. A blind lawyer with heightened senses goes after criminals that slip through the system? Ninjas? Constant stream of new hot girlfriends? Perfect for television.
7. The Flash-Movie is in development, but taking forever. If anyone should handle this character, it should be writer Geoff Johns.
8. John Constantine, Hellblazer-Witty, irreverent cad battles evil with black magic? Don’t let the memory of Keanu ruin this for you: this would make a great show.
9. Lucifer-This, like #10, is a pipe-dream. Too dense for a one-off movie, and too special-effect heavy for a TV budget. But come on: The Devil quits his job as Lord of Hell, and moves to Los Angeles to open a swanky night club? Who doesn’t want to see that?!
10. The Sandman-Total pipe-dream, even more so than Lucifer. Too long and dense for the big screen, too high-brow and special-effect heavy for TV.
How about you guys? Any books you’d like to see turned into a TV show or movie? Who would you cast for the lead character? Let me know in the comments section below!
There’s a lot of disappointment inherent in living in the modern age, or as I like to call it, “the era when all the lies our parents told us about the future come home to roost”.
I like to think of myself as a futurist. Well, not a futurist per se, but a fan of futurism. I like to think that eventually we will get all those wonderful toys Q dreamed up for James Bond, the gadgets at the beck and call of The Avengers, the Justice League, Starfleet, and the Rebel Alliance. Futurists are the people that actualize all that sci-fi goodness.
I had dinner last night with my cousin and a friend of his who, when asked about his job, replied “Well, I predict the future.”
What the what?! Who talks like that? Better yet, why can’t I talk like that?
But it got me thinking about the never-ending wish list my wife and I have containing all the fantastical future-tech that Science has as of yet not provided. And how maybe it’s time that Science stop wasting my time and money detailing the differences between shaken and stirred martinis and confirming that yes, we as a society treat attractive people better than unattractive ones. We have real crises at hand here, Science! Namely, AIDS, cancer, and where’s my f-ing hoverboard?!
10. An effective cure for baldness that also cures excessive and unsightly body hair.
9. A pill that gives you six-pack abs that you can wash down with a six-pack of beer while sitting on the couch.
8. A cure for getting old.
7. Hoverboards
6. Flying cars
5. Jetpacks (or some sort of hydrogen fuel cell/mag-lev alternative)
4. Laser guns
3. Androids/robots that are more or less indistinguishable from people.
2. Time travel
1. Teleportation
You’re on notice, Science. Get to work!
What about it, you guys? What’s missing from our list?
(Thanks to Jarrett C. for his invaluable help in compiling such an epically awesome list!)
It was impossible to decide on how this clip should be classified—Thirsty Thursday, or Fuzzy Friday? You know, a philosophical conundrum for the ages. The kind of unanswerable question that would have prompted Socrates to fill up Uncle Scrooge’s money bin with hemlock and swim around in it.
As excited as I am for my upcoming European vacation (May cannot arrive soon enough), stuff like this just serves to make me pine for a Tokyo visit in the near future.
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