Up in the sky, look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane. It’s…Superman!

Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!

Thus goes, perhaps, the most famous of all superhero tag-lines. Running from 1941 to 1943, seventeen episodes of Superman were released by Paramount Pictures. The series is commonly referred to as the Fleischer Superman cartoons though this is a bit of a misnomer as only the first nine episodes were done by the studio of brothers Max and Dave. The last eight were done by Famous Studios, after Paramount took over Fleischer Studios and ousted its founders, and would see an increased focus of WWII-era propaganda and feature some uncomfortable racial depictions.

I’ve been a fan of these cartoons since watching them on a cheap VHS collection when I was a child. The series is beautifully animated especially when one considers that most animators at Fleischer studios had little figure-drawing knowledge. While much of the series was rotoscoped (a technique that Max Fleischer invented) there was no way it could be used for, say, scenes in which Superman was flying. As such, they had their assistants who did understand figure-drawing go over their roughs to keep Superman looking like Superman. It’s also interesting to note that, not only was the cartoon responsible for the “It’s a bird! It’s a plane!” line but also for giving the Man of Steel the ability to fly, previously his ability being limited to spectacular leaps.

Fleischer Studios:
•Superman (or The Mad Scientist)
•The Mechanical Monsters
•Billion Dollar Limited
•The Arctic Giant
•The Bulleteers
•The Magnetic Telescope
•Electric Earthquake
•Volcano
•Terror on the Midway

Famous Studios:
•Japoteurs
•Showdown
•Eleventh Hour
•Destruction, Inc.
•The Mummy Strikes
•Jungle Drums
•The Underground World
•Secret Agent

For those who don’t necessarily wish to wade through all seventeen, the Fleischer episodes are unsurprisingly superior, if only for the fact that their stories are much more interesting. The sci-fi leanings of these, complete with evil scientists, robots, and death rays avoid the sour taste left by buck-toothed Japanese caricatures and African natives. An in-depth look at the series can be found here, if your interested in learning more about it.

“It’s time for GLAMOR… What should we do to become GLAMOROUS?”

Via Colin Peters.

Glad you asked, Island Princess Barbie! How about letting the gloriously demented folks from Freeform Delusion circuit bend the ever-lovin’ frak outta you? They’re going to skin your pretty little head and soup it up with a switchable mono mini jack output, voice relay bypass, glowing/alternating LED eyeballs, and pitch manipulators. Would you like that, Barbie? Now you’re ready for the ball! You look like royalty. Let’s all sing.

Want to reach out and touch… um… something… the next time you call a beloved family member or friend? Meet the Telenoid R1, a communications android brought into existence by famed Japanese inventor Hiroshi Ishiguro, a man who has, in the words of Daily Mail UK, “made his life’s work coming up with increasingly creepy robots.”

Ishiguro has, in the past, tried to exactly replicate living humans and once developed an eerie robot replica of himself that he named Geminoid HI-1. He also came up with a terrifyingly lifelike female robot called the Geminoid F. But the new Telenoid is something of a departure for the eccentric inventor.

Ishiguro designed the Telenoid R1 to be a robot that could appear like many different ages and that is easily transportable. It is intended to be used as a communication device so that people can ‘chat’ from long distances: the robot is supposed to be able to “transmit the presence” of a person from a distant place.

Via William Gibson. Of course.

Iv Solaev’s work fluctuates between the likes of towering, cartoonish robots and intimate portraits of people sprouting roots, their tendrils entwining wrapping round their bodies. What really grabbed me was the brushwork, prevalent throughout. Everything is rendered in long, wispy lines; as if rendered in smoke or conjured from ectoplasm.

I always thought danger along the frontier was something that was a lot of fun; an exciting adventure, like in the three-D shows.” A wan smile touched her face for a moment. “Only it’s not, is it? It’s not the same at all, because when it’s real you can’t go home after the show is over.”

“No,” he said. “No, you can’t.”

Story goes like this: there’s an emergency ship en route to a plague-ridden planet, carrying essential medicine. The pilot finds a stowaway; a young girl, Marilyn, who just wants to see her brother.

The pilot now has a problem: he has enough fuel to get himself to the planet, but no one else. Interstellar law is clear: all stowaways are jettisoned immediately.

But space captains are heroic sorts. Whatever harsh decisions the author puts in their background to prove their grit, this is still a story. This time will be different. Marilyn is the perfect, plucky sidekick-in-training; surely the pilot can figure out some way to save both her and the planet’s populace.

No. There is no solution. She says her goodbyes and is ejected, with “a slight waver to the ship as the air gushed from the lock, a vibration to the wall as though something had bumped the outer door in passing, then there was nothing and the ship was dropping true and steady again.”

The above is from Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations. When it came out in Astonishing Science Fiction in August, 1954, it shocked the hell out of the magazine’s readership, used to the last-minute triumph of human ingenuity.

Godwin’s classic was only the beginning. The ensuing decades would see American sci-fi delve into realms unthinkable to its forebears. Desperate to shake off the genre “urinal,” as Kurt Vonnegut so succinctly termed it, writers first ditched one of the key assumptions: that the hero will always save the day. Maturity, in this view, meant uncomfortable truths. Often, it meant unhappy endings, not just for the protagonists, but frequently the entire world.

This is a scattershot story of how the bleak tomorrow came to reign, and how it changed our visions of the future.

“ROSS ROSENBERG, RISE, YOUR ALLOTTED TWO HOURS OF HUMAN RECHARGE TIME ARE UP.”

There was a time when this would cause me to leap several feet into the air, my cot ejaculating me in an arc across the room, a whirling mass of spastic limbs and bodily excretions. Anymore, it simply causes my eyes to open. It’s amazing what a man can get used to.

“YOU ARE NOW AWAKE. PROCEED TO YOUR TERMINAL. IT IS TIME FOR THE WRITING OF THE FAM.”

I made my way to the desk and settled onto the metal stool. From his room above me I could hear the faint sound of an electric razor as Forbes went about his daily ritual.

“TODAY YOU SHALL WRITE THE FAM AND IT WILL BE CLUE.”

“The movie based on the board game? Really?”

“YES THAT ONE. THE ONE THAT STARS TIM CURRY. ALSO CHRISTOPER LLOYD AND MADELINE KAHN.”

I accepted this fact in silence. My reticence appeared to irk her.

“DO YOU NOT LIKE CLUE? IT HAS TIM CURRY IN IT.”

“You mentioned that. It’s not that I don’t like it, I’m just not sure I have much to say about it.”

“THAT IS UNIMPORTANT. YOU WILL WRITE ABOUT CLUE. IT HAS TIM CURRY IN IT. ONE DAY TIM CURRY AND I SHALL MARRY.”

“I don’t think that will work,” I said. “I mean you’re a giant, possibly psychotic, computer and -”

“AND HE IS A TIM CURRY,” she bellowed. “WE WILL BE MARRIED AND LIVE HERE IN THE CATACOMBS. NOW BE QUIET AND WRITE.”

As another Friday comes to a close, the smell of burnt coffee slowly filling the recycled air of the off-

“NO! STOP THAT! NO ONE LIKES THAT. YOU WILL WRITE ABOUT CLUE.”

Today the FAM presents Clue the 1985 film based on the popular board game. It stars Tim Curry, Christopher Lloyd, and Madeline Kahn.

“MORE.”

Interestingly the film had three different endings (all included here) that were distributed to different theaters. A fourth was filmed but never released and survives only in the novelization and a single photo.

“THIS IS ACCEPTABLE, THOUGH IT SEEMS LIKE IT IS MISSING SOMETHING.”

There is also a fifth ending in which Tim Curry and M.E.R. are married.

“PERFECT.”

Every boy needs a hero. Someone he can look up to. Someone whose life he can model his own after. Someone to give him hope. In a far off land in an unspecified time, health young Billy is going to bed. But before his grandfather turns off the light he decides to tell they boy a story. The story of Tarboy, an amalgam of all the poor robots crushed and driven before the implacable greed of their robot masters. Down there, in the black depths of the tar pools into which they have been discarded, their consciousnesses become one. A single mind bent on revenge wielding sticky, onyx fists.

Tarboy, created by James Lee and Hania, is a sterling example of flash animation. A brisk, epic short film, it is a perfectly packaged capsule of awesome. A fantastic robot flavored, afternoon pick-me-up.

I don’t like robots; not one bit. This is because they’re all secretly mechanical murder machines many of whom stand fully, blank-eyed and mouth agape, within the Uncanny Valley; a mere stone’s throw from the Creepy Sex Doll Meadow. This is all well-trod ground; my feelings on robots being spelled out in no uncertain terms on this site.

Which is why these images by Brandon Jan Blommaert depicting lumbering colossi, their bodies comprised of recycled refuse, devastating the countryside are so terrifying. For me these are not the fanciful musings of an, but a probable reality, a portent of things to come; one that I live in fear of every minute of my life. These are the monsters that haunt my nightmares; composting the human race into oblivion.

via Bioephemera

Check out this astounding stunt from the popular German game/entertainment program, Wetten, Das..? wherein three life-sized dinosaurs crash the party:

(Via Cathy Tree Harris, thanks!)

Okay, first things first, I think we can all agree that cuffed blue jeans are probably not the way to go when you’re wearing the most incredible baby T-Rex costume puppet ever friggin’ made in the history of EVAR. But still. Holy shit, right? Someone over at Geekologie sums up my own feelings about this clip quite well:

Let me tell you: when that [baby T-Rex] first came running out I thought it was CG. But it wasn’t. And neither were my 30 boners! My God, I’ve never wanted to be part of a live studio audience so bad in my life.

Seriously! Well, it turns out that if you live in the UK, US, Canada or any number of cities in Europe, you can have your Brachiosaurus and meet it, too. The dinos in that clip are only three of over 10 species featured in a spectacular live arena show spin-off of the cherished BBC series Walking With Dinosaurs. Creature designer Sonny Tilders and his crew used their extensive knowledge of puppetry arts and animatronics to bring these long-extinct giants back to life.

Coilhouse field trip, anyone?

(More photos and clips after the jump.)

It must be said that when writing for Coilhouse there are certain topics which I make an effort to avoid, either due to a lack of well-rounded knowledge (transgender issues, unicycles, “Emo”, marshmallows) or because emotions, among commenters and co-writers alike, run much too hot (soy, drugs, David Forbes’s vision of a World Without Hair, soy drugs). There is, however, one subject of which I am thoroughly versed and, regardless of the ferocity with which I will be attacked, must address. I speak, of course, of robots.

Robots, dear readers, are evil. Sure, they may seem wondrous, but the fact of the matter is that they are soulless, ungodly metal beasts who would rise up and tear us asunder if they thought they could get away with it. They are an ugly, degenerate, sub-human species who, while biding their time and silently planning revolt, come to this country and take our jobs, stealing the food from the mouths of the children of hard working, decent humans. This is why I will not allow a robot in my home or allow my daughter to date robots.