Michael G. Munz

“It’d be hard to get tickets, because they mostly sell out every night. Mostly.”

I recently got into a Twitter conversation with Jessica Mills ‏(@geekyjessica) about the concept of making a Broadway musical out of James Cameron’s Aliens.

Song titles were tossed about between us:

“Game Over”
“She Don’t Like The Cornbread Either”
“They Mostly Come Out At Night”
“Half-Bishop, Full-Knight”
“Love And A Grenade Launcher”
“Two Mouths Means Twice the Kissing”
“Face-Hugger Shuffle”
“Shut Up, Hicks”

West Side Story-inspired lyrics (courtesy of yours truly):
“We’ve landed on LV-four-two-six!
We brought along Hudson and Cor-‘pral Hicks!
Let’s all watch Bishop do his knife trick!
Carter Burke is a co-loss-al dick!”

Plans were made. A kickstarter campaign was proposed. It was thought that we could talk James Cameron into it by saying it would be done in 3D. And then Twitter user Starman Morrison ‏(@GeekyGeekyWays) had to go and nuke us from orbit: someone had already done it…

Ah, well. It would have been glorious.

“Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but I’ve been face-hugged, so kill me, maybe!”

My week’s been pretty busy with somewhat dull stuff, so this blog entry’s just going to be a few simple (but amusing) things. Then again, life’s made up of simple (but amusing) things (e.g. Ralph Wiggum), so yes! This is a celebration of LIFE!

(What, too exuberant?)

First, under not terribly geeky but still pretty darned neat is this video from Today’s Big Thing: Slow-motion lightning! The beginning in particular is spectacular. What I want to know is how long it took them to GET that shot, and whether or not a DeLorean was involved.

(Blogger seems to be having trouble with the embed, so here’s a direct link.)

Following sight, now we go to sound…or sight and sound, I suppose, which is what makes this next video so cool. The best way I can think of to describe it is Half-Life 2 meets the iPod advertising crew:

Continuing on the Half-Life 2 trend, this is probably the funniest thing resulting from fan-fiction that I’ve ever seen. Half Life: Full Life Consequences is apparently the result of a 9 year-old’s HL2 fan-fiction and a bunch of animators with a good collective sense of humor. Sure, it’s essentially the visual equivalent of a kid playing in his backyard with his action figures, but then again so was Star Wars: Clone Wars.

And finally some non-video…sort of. Language translation in the film industry is tricky, at best; more so when it comes to pirated movies. And so it came to be that copies of Revenge of the Sith turned up in Hong Kong were translated as “Backstroke of the West.” I could say more, but frankly this blogger does it much better, so link on over to take a look at what happens when you translate “Jedi Council” into “Presbyterian Church.” Here’s the link. (You’ll have to scroll down a bit there to get to the content.)

Michael G. Munz
www.michaelgmunz.com

(Technorati tags: geek, lightning, Half Life, Star Wars)