This week on Hit or Miss: I pay my respects to a childhood hero; a Hollywood special effects studio dives into gaming; Sony just can’t control their perverted love affair with multiple SKUs; and the World of Warcraft film gets a surprisingly credible writer, which really shouldn’t be a surprise anymore.
Live-Action ‘Mario’ Lou Albano Passes Away at 76
Let me be clear before you send me any letters: This isn’t a, “Yay, Lou Albano’s dead!” kind of Hit. It’s a, “Let’s celebrate the star of my favorite TV show when I was six years old” kind of Hit.
I was never much of a wrestling fan, so Lou Albano to me — long before I knew his real name — was always nothing more than Mario, which was more than enough to impress the crap out of Child Kris. It must also be said that Child Kris was highly impressed with Nestle Quick, Ninjitsu-practicing turtles, and — I hesitate to admit it — Power Rangers (Child Kris was kind of an idiot), but that should not diminish how badass Albano was as a live-action Mario.
It’s also worth noting, however, that looking back on it with adult eyes, the Super Mario Bros. Super Show on a whole was completely insane. Seriously, watch this lunacy. It’s like Three’s Company had sex with Sesame Street and gave their kid peyote. That’s what I spent my youth watching? No wonder I grew up to write nonsense like this for a living…
Effects Studio Digital Domain to Enter Game Development
For those who aren’t familiar with Digital Domain, they’re the special effects studio responsible for the state-of-the-art CG work in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (watch this clip some day that explains how their process worked, and it’ll blow your mind).
I have nothing against Sony Selling a PS3 Slim with a bigger hard drive. I do, however, wonder why the hell they waited a couple of months to release this rather than just launch the PS3 Slim with a 250GB hard drive to begin with (or, at the very least, both at the same time).
But does the world really need one more version of the PS3? Let’s reflect that this 250GB PS3 Slim marks the sixth different hardware model in only three years of shelf life for the console. And the difference between every one of them (besides going from the original to the Slim): gasp — hard drive space! The only possible explanation for this is clear: The size of the PS3’s hard drive is proportionally tied to Sony’s effective market share due to some kind of impossible-to-explain secret and highly conspiratorial deal with the Illuminati.
I can prove this theory using the science of numerology and pattern recognition: The 250GB PS3 Slim is the sixth iteration, 666 is the number of the beast, Beast was an X-Man, X-Man is similar to G-Man, G-Men work in the government, and everyone knows the government is run by the Illuminati. Also, this all might have something to do with real, black-ops X-Men experiments being conducted by the NSA.
I think I know too much. If you don’t hear from me again next week, assume I’m dead, and then if it’s not too much of a bother, try to avenge my death.
Saving Private Ryan Writer Attached to WoW Film
This is a true story: Recently I went to an animation convention in Miami, and came back with a nasty cold. I went to my doctor, made small talk about the convention, and inadvertently discovered a terrifying fact about him: He’s a Star Trek nerd. That part is not germane to this story. The more frightening part is that he made this revelation as he was walking me to the door, next to the seemingly lovely middle-age-ish front desk attendant who overheard and chimed in:
“I’m all about World of Warcraft myself.”
This at last made two things clear to me: I go to the coolest doctor’s office ever, and World of Warcraft is fucking everywhere.
Seriously, I think those of us surrounded by games all day often forget the extent that WoW really has saturated the globe. We know our non-gaming girlfriends/boyfriends play it. We know friends who know nothing about video games have heard of it. But once the nation’s contingent of doctor’s office front desk attendants have become self-professed WoW nerds, it’s gone beyond “popular video game franchise” and into the hallowed, “let’s ravage this thing for all it’s worth” territory reserved only for the most potent of potent IPs.
So Saving Private Ryan script writer Robert Rodat and director Sam Raimi are attached to the project? Shit yeah, they are. By now I’m more surprised they didn’t get James Cameron and the dude who wrote The Godfather, then murdered Uwe Boll and Paul W.S. Anderson just to be that much more certain they couldn’t come anywhere near this cash cow.