Pop Artifact! Wind-up Spider-Man toy



Vintage Marvel Comics house ad



Pop Culture Roundup April 30, 2007

Paul McCartney talks about his upcoming album, due out June 5.

The 13-track set is due June 5 in North America via Starbucks' new Hear Music label and will also be the first McCartney album to ever be available digitally.

..."Memory Almost Full" concludes with a five-song medley end "and that was purposefully retrospective," McCartney says. "I thought this might be because I'm at this point in my life, but then I think about the times I was writing with John (Lennon) and a lot of that was also looking back. It's like me with 'Penny Lane' and 'Eleanor Rigby' -- I'm still up to the same tricks!"


The album is available for pre-order now from Amazon.

There's also a deluxe version available, featuring a scond disk including three bonus tracks, "audio commentary" by Paul and six fold-out postcard-size photos.



Best Beatles Sites

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See a teaser for the straight-to-DVD animated film "Superman: Doomsday."

Best Superman Sites

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Fox Home Entertainment is releasing a limited edition 9-DVD set July 24 that collects all 51 episodes of Irwin Allen's 1960s sci-fi series "Land of the Giants." You can pre-order it now from Amazon.

TV Shows on DVD: Complete List

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From the Animation Archive: a 1939 magazine article detailing the then-new Walt Disney Studios in Burbank.

Best Disney Sites

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A series of Doctor Who trading cards is planned.

Trading cards based on the first three seasons will be released over an 18-month period, to catch up the trading card releases closer to the TV series broadcast in the States.

Best Doctor Who Sites

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Dial B for Burbank presents a Shadow Art Gallery with lots of pics of the famed pulp hero.

More Shadow

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Newsarama has info about Marvel Comics' new "clasics comics" series, featuring adaptations of "The Last of the Mohicans," "Treasure Island," "The Man in the Iron Mask" and more. Veteran writer/editor Roy Thomas is handling the scripts for those first three. Each "book" will run as a six-issued mini-series.

Best Marvel Comics Sites

Today's Video: 1960s Spider-Man cartoon theme song

In color!



Cover art for Evanier's Kirby: King of Comics

Looks nice! This is the cover for comics historian Mark Evenier's upcoming looking at the life and groundbreaking art of Jack Kirby, co-creator of the X-Men, Hulk, Fantastic Four and many more.



Published by Abrams Books and due out Oct. 1, this book is a coffee table tome, heavy on the art, and should be gorgeous. Evanier's long-awaited big biography of Kirby will be out later.

Evanier was a friend of Kirby's and worked as the artist's assistant in the late 1960s and early 1970s before embarking on a screenwriting career. You can stay up to date on Evanier's Kirby bio and his other projects at his official site.

"Kirby: King of Comics" will be a 224-page hardcover with an original pull-out poster by Alex Ross (an artist that doesn't seem, to me, to have much to do with Kirby at all in terms of style or visual power, but he's popular, I guess).

Pop Artifact! Rubber Captain Marvel figure

Could be a pencil topper, I think.



Vintage Marvel Comics house ad



Best Marvel Comics Sites.

Pop Culture Roundup April 27, 2007

A big screen film tracing the origins of X-Men villain Magneto is in the works.

David Goyer will direct "Magneto," an "X-Men" spinoff film from 20th Century Fox and Marvel Studios that's drawn from the villain played in the original trilogy by Ian McKellen.

...McKellen's participation in "Magneto" will likely be limited, since the film is an origin story. In a storyline hinted at by the original "X-Men" films, Magneto comes to grips with his mutant ability to manipulate metal objects as he and his parents try to survive in Auschwitz. Magneto meets Professor Xavier (played as the wheelchair-bound mutant leader by Patrick Stewart) when Xavier is a soldier liberating the concentration camp.


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Here's the first production shot of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark in the upcoming "Iron Man" movie.



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The Sci Fi Channel's new "Flash Gordon" series debuts Aug. 10. The network also starts airing the third season of "Doctor Who" this summer, with the first ep set for July 6.

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Tarzan toys!

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Dial B for Burbank looks at a book Shadow creator Walter B. Gibson and his wife wrote about psychic phenomena.

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Musician Bobby Pickett of "Monster Mash" fame has died.

Mr. Pickett’s multimillion-selling single — with the indelible chorus “He did the monster mash, it was a graveyard smash” — hit the charts three times: on its original release in 1962, when it reached No. 1, and in 1970 and 1973. Mr. Pickett’s Karloff impression was forged in Somerville, Mass., where as a 9-year-old he watched horror films in a theater managed by his father. He later made it part of his act when he began performing in Hollywood nightclubs in 1959.

Full details on Tex Avery's Droopy The Complete Theatrical Collection DVD

Animation fans should be excited about this set, due out soon. Here's the skinny:

It's a doggone good time as Warner Home Video presents Tex Avery's Droopy The Complete Theatrical Collection, available for the first time on DVD! The 2-Disc DVD Collector's set, a must-have for fans of classic animation, is available on May 15, 2007 and includes the Academy Award® nominated animated short "One Droopy Knight".

World renowned Tex Avery created Droopy Dog, a low-key animated movie character at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. This mournful deadpan witty basset hound detective, who spoke in a jowly monotone voice, was shrewd enough to outwit his enemies - the conniving Butch the Irish bulldog and the thieving, Nasty Wolf and English Fox.

SYNOPSIS
Droopy, a detective basset hound, lulls the bad guys into a false sense of security by acting slow and dumb when in actual fact he is a genius. The shrewd Droopy always outwits his enemies!

Tex Avery's Droopy: The Complete Theatrical Collection DVD features 24 re-mastered and unedited animated shorts including:

* Dumb-Hounded
* The Shooting of Dan McGoo
* Wild and Woolfy
* Northwest Hounded Police
* Señor Droopy
* Wags to Riches
* Out-Foxed
* The Chump Champ
* Daredevil Droopy
* Droopy's Good Deed
* Droopy's "Double Trouble"
* Caballero Droopy
* The Three Little Pups
* Drag-A-Long Droopy
* Homesteader Droopy
* Dixieland Droopy
* Deputy Droopy

Tex Avery's Droopy The Complete Theatrical Collection DVD also features 7 animated shorts in its original 16x9 Cinemascope version including:

* Millionaire Droopy
* Grin And Share It
* Blackboard Jumble
* One Droopy Knight
* Sheep Wrecked
* Mutts About Racing
* Droopy Leprechaun

EXTRA DVD CONTENT
The special features include:

* "Droopy and Friends: A Laugh Back" - a documentary retrospective featuring the highlights of Tex Avery's iconic character and band of regular misfits, which made the collection so memorable and dear to our hearts. Peppered through the featurettes will be moments reflecting Tex's early days, from inspiration, to his passions as an artist, entertainer and eventual auteur.

* "Doggone Gags" - a montage of great moments from the Droopy series, culled together in the fashion of a gag reel.

You can pre-order the set now for $19.99 from Amazon.



Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix movie poster



Pop Artifact! Captain Marvel coloring book





Vintage Marvel Comics house ad



Best Marvel Comics Sites.

Pop Culture Roundup April 26, 2007

Handy! A fully-functioning Spider-Man suit enabling the wearer to climb up walls and sling web should be available by 2017.

Italian researchers say they have developed a new method for creating a surface-gripping material that mimics "spider silk" and imitates carbon nanotubes.

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Pete Townshend has launched new Web-based software that can create music.

The Who guitarist/songwriter said that with a voice recording, a digital image and a rhythm clapped into a microphone, his new "Method" software will create spontaneous digital music and allow anyone to be a composer, and possibly a rock star.

"You can put data in and get a piece of music out. It's as simple as that," said Townshend...


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World of Kane celebrates the work of Louis and Bebe Barron, who created the otherworldly music for "Forbidden Planet."

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Via PCL LinkDump: Groovy 1960s radio jingles.

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The big battle in the "Heroes" season ender reportedly takes place in Kirby Plaza, an homage to legendary comics creator Jack Kirby.