Disney + Marvel + Lucasfilm = ???

Yesterday it was announced that Disney would be buying Lucasfilm and that they would begin production on Episode 7 of the STAR WARS franchise.  The interwebonetosphere was abuzz with Gen-Xers in awe of how quickly Disney, under Bob Iger has moved to collect a good percentage of their childhood loves under one corporate banner.  Disney now owns the Marvel catalog of Super Heroes, the Star Wars Franchise, Indiana Jones, in addition to their own creations.  It's quite an array of IP.

My Geekerati co-host Shawna Benson mentioned how anyone who has been to Disneyland and walked through the Star Tours store could plainly see this was a natural move for Disney corporation.  Think of how many toy aisles will be filled with Disney owned action figures... Star Wars, Marvel, Princesses, Princes, Beauties, Beasts, Jake, Tinkerbell.  Good grief!

All of this analysis misses one key point, the real reason that Disney purchased Lucasfilm.  Lost in the annals of film, there is a highly underrated cinematic masterpiece that was produced by Lucasfilm in the 80s.  It has largely been forgotten.  Lucas himself attempted to Jedi mindtrick the entire human race to forget of its existence. 

No, I'm not talking about the STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL.  I'm referring to a Marvel property.

With the acquisition of both Marvel and Lucasfilms, Bob Iger has enabled Disney to overcome the legal morass preventing an updating of the greatest film of all time...

HOWARD THE DUCK!

I can see it now.  Howard the Duck taking over Toon Town.  A Howard the Duck inserted into the Indiana Jones ride.  A Howard the Duck journey on Star Tours.  A retheming of Splash Mountain to Duck Mountain.  Howard the Duck being made a canonical member of the Duck Tales verse.

You heard it here first.

[The above is not serious, it is a joke.  No one believes that HtD was a good movie.]

A Halloween Toast!

Because it's so difficult to get young children to eat toast and cheese, it being such an unnatural and un-kid-friendly snack...

Okay, I just like Halloween, and holidays, and any time I can holiday up a staple like toast, I'm gonna do it.  This food "craft" if you will, is fast, super easy, and turns out pretty well with any level of creative skill.  You'll need bread, a toaster oven, and orange cheese that can melt (the orange cheese that turns to industrial plastic liner when heated -- and you know what I mean, because we've all had it, and some of us like it -- will not do).

Arrange your bread.  Before applying cheese, round it by trimming the corners with a small knife.  Then cut eyes and a nose with the same knife.  For the mouth, the easiest thing to do is cut the large shape of the mouth, then cut and add teeth after (remember, this is going to melt together, so it will look like one big pumpkin jack-o-lantern face as long as the edges overlap or meet).  Arrange your cheesy "face" on the bread and pop it in the toaster oven.

The result is yummy, cheesy fun.  It's a great way to add a little kid-fun and holiday cheer to your average soup or munchy snack.  Pictured here is a whole wheat bread and mild cheddar cheese.  A dark rye or pumpernickel will offer more contrast and really make that pumpkin grin stand out!  Our preschoolers are always smiles to find faces staring back at them from their plates.  I'm not sure if that's funny or frightening, but since either is welcome at Halloween, bon appetite! 

Halloween and Jack-Egg-Lanterns

Halloween has become a month-long celebration in our house (partly because it seems to take that long just to locate, unpack and put up all the varied decorations and do-dads).  We've always been fans of the holiday and holidays in general and are always on the lookout for new, fun (and best-of-all inexpensive!!!) ways to celebrate, decorate or both!  With our girls in preschool now (and desperately eager to help with every thing), it was important we find as many kid-friendly activities and crafts we could this year.

Enter the Halloween Jack-Egg-Lantern. 

 

We're surely not the first to think of this when we saw all those egg coloring kits go on sale last spring.  Our twins had such a great time decorating eggs this year -- and eating the hardboiled goodness! -- I nabbed a couple extra packs from the clearance bins to use at upcoming off-season events.  

With two girls and four fast hands to keep busy, one orange packet of dye was not going to be enough.  So to keep four hands busy and keep two imaginations working, we combined the red, yellow and pink colorings to make multiple shades of "pumpkin."  I think next time a drop or two of purple would also make a deeper color.  Green and purple are great Halloween colors anyway, and we could have done more to make Goblin or Frankenstein eggs or Purple Monster eggs...  Okay, all the better for next time.  This time, we focused on the pumpkin.  Some turned out more pinky-orange, a few more yellowy-orange, but overall we got a good blend and loved the results!
 

Some turned out more pinky-orange, a few more yellowy-orange, but overall we got a good blend.  For special egg-fects, we experimented with the usual techniques like mulit-color dipping and striping our "pumpkin" eggs with white, clear, and black crayons to add dimension and texture.  Looking back, red or dark orange crayon might do even better, especially pre-heated to give the lines more solid consistency.  

Our most vivid Jack-Egg-Lantern faces were achieved with a Sharpie, though the black crayon also turned out well.  Maybe next time we'll go with yellow wax for the faces and a deep orange for the dye to create that lit-from-within illusion.  

I think the most important part of this trial egg run is that it's a simple craft with a-typically healthy and edible results that offered great opportunities for a lot of peripheral fun, like practicing our scary faces (see below).  Have a spook-tacular Halloween!

There Can Be No Halloween Season Without Vincent Price

I'll let my wife's Nicnup cartoon give us the break down of how important Vincent Price (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993) was and will always be to the Halloween season.

EVIL DEAD (1981) vs. EVIL DEAD (2013)

While it will be years until I will feel comfortable sharing my love of the EVIL DEAD series with History and Mystery, I am intrigued by the new Red Band trailer for the upcoming remake of the first EVIL DEAD film.

Raimi's first EVIL DEAD movie was more horror than horror/comedy, though the series itself is among the best horror/comedy, and it looks like the upcoming film is leaning more in that direction. The casting of young Jane Levy in the "Ash" role does hint that the film won't be completely absent of any humor.

Have a look at the 1981 trailer and the trailer for the new film and feel free to share your thoughts. My thoughts? The first trailer definitely shows its age, and the new trailer is of a film I'd like to see.

One thing is certain. I think I'm going to have to dig up my ARMY OF DARKNESS RPG.

David Lo Pan Style: Big Trouble in Little China meets PSY

As many of you know, I am of the opinion that John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China may well be the best film ever made.  Okay, that's an exaggeration, but you know the way that some Gen-Xers constantly reference Star Wars or Star Trek in conversation?  I'm that way with BTiLC.  I lost count of how many times I have watched the film a decade ago.

The film combines everything I love from Western genre film, Shaw Brothers over the top acting, and post-Tsui Hark Hong Kong cinematography and action.  In short, it is all things great about film that aren't in Singin' in the Rain.

BTiLC doesn't need a remake, but it does need more awesome fan creations like this.  If only Dennis Dun managed a cameo in the video.

If you don't like this video, you must be monumentally naive or already living in the Hell of Lacking a Sense of Style or Humor.  What can I say?  The Chinese have a lot of hells.

[Vintage RPGs] CHAMPIONS 1st Edition -- A Blast from the Past

The CHAMPIONS super hero role playing game is one of the best super hero role playing games ever designed, and the game to which all super hero rpgs are compared.  CHAMPIONS wasn't the first role playing game in the super hero genre, that honor goes to the game SUPERHERO 2044 which I discussed in an earlier blog post.  CHAMPIONS even builds upon some of the ideas in SUPERHERO 2044.  CHAMPIONS used the vague point based character generation system of SUPERHERO 2044 -- combined with house rules by Wayne Shaw -- as a jumping off point for a new detailed and easy to understand point based system.  CHAMPIONS was also likely influenced by the melee combat system in SUPERHERO 2044 in the use of the 3d6 bell curve to determine "to-hit" rolls in combat.

While CHAMPIONS wasn't the first super hero rpg, it was the first that presented a coherent system by which a player could design the superheroes they read about in comic books.  The first edition of VILLAINS & VIGILANTES, which predates CHAMPIONS, did a good job of emulating many aspects of comic book action but the ability to model a character in character design wasn't one of them.  CHAMPIONS was released at the Origins convention in the summer of 1981, and it immediately captured the interest of Aaron Allston of Steve Jackson Games.  Allston gave CHAMPIONS a positive review in issue #43 of the Space Gamer magazine, wrote many CHAMPIONS articles for that publication, and became one of the major contributors to the early days of CHAMPIONS lore.

Reading through the first edition of the game, as I have been doing the past week, can have that kind of effect upon a person.  The writing is clear -- if uneven in places -- and the rules mechanics inspire a desire to play around in the sandbox provided by the rules.  George MacDonald and Steve Peterson did more than create a great role playing game when they created CHAMPIONS, they created a great character generation game as well.  Hours can be taken up just playing around with character concepts and seeing how they look in the CHAMPIONS system. 

There are sites galore about CHAMPIONS and many reviews about how great the game is, and it truly is, so the remainder of the post won't be either of these.  Rather, I would like to point out some interesting tidbits about the first edition of the game.  Most of these will be critical in nature, but not all.  Before going further I will say that though CHAMPIONS is now in its 6th edition and is a very different game today in some ways, the 1st edition of the game is highly playable and well worth exploring.

• One of the first things that struck me reading the book was how obviously playtested the character design system was.  This is best illustrated in the section under basic characteristics.  In CHAMPIONS there are primary and secondary characteristics.  The primary characteristics include things like Strength and Dexterity.  The secondary statistics are all based on fractions of the primary statistics and represent things like the ability to resist damage.  Where the playtesting shows here is in how players may buy down all of their primary statistics, but only one of their secondary statistics.  A quick analysis of the secondary statistics demonstrates that if this were not the case a buy strength then buy down all the secondary stats related to strength infinite loop would occur.  
• It's striking how few skills there are in 1st edition CHAMPIONS.  There are 14 in total, and some of them are thinks like Luck and Lack of Weakness.  There are no "profession" skills in 1st edition.  To be honest, I kind of like the lack of profession skills.  Professions in superhero adventures seem more flavor than something one should have to pay points for, but this is something that will change in future editions.  
• There are a lot of powers in CHAMPIONS, but the examples are filled with phrases like "a character" or "a villain" instead of an evocative hero/villain name.  It would have been more engaging for the folks at Hero Games to create some Iconic characters that are used throughout the book as examples of each power.  The game does include 3 examples of character generation (Crusader, Ogre, and Starburst), but these characters aren't mentioned in the Powers section.  An example using Starburst in the Energy Blast power would have been nice.
• The art inside the book is less than ideal.  Mark "the hack" Williams has been the target of some criticism for his illustrations, but his work is the best of what is offered in the 1st edition book.  It is clear why they decided to use his work in the 2nd edition of the game.  Williams art is evocative and fun -- if not perfect -- while the work Vic Dal Chele and Diana Navarro is more amateurish.
• The game provides three examples of character generation, but the designs given are less than point efficient and one outclasses the others.  The three sample characters are built on 200 points.  Crusader can barely hurt Ogre if he decides to punch him (his punch is only 6 dice), and his Dex is bought at one point below where he would receive a rounding benefit.  Ogre has a Physical Defense of 23.  This is the amount of damage he subtracts from each physical attack that hits and it is very high.  Assuming an average of 3.5 points of damage per die, Ogre can resist an average of 6.5 dice of damage per attack.  Yes, that's an average but the most damage 6 dice could do to him would be 13.  That would be fine, except Crusader has that 6d6 punch, and Starburst...oh, Starburst.  All of Starburst's major powers are in a multipower which means that as he uses one power he can use less of the other powers in the multipower.  The most damage he can do is 8d6, but only if he isn't flying and doesn't have his forcefield up.  Not efficient at all.  One might hope that character examples demonstrate the appropriate ranges of damage and defense, these don't quite achieve that goal.
• The combat example is good, if implausible.  Crusader and Starburst defeating Ogre?  Sure.
• The supervillain stats at the end of the book -- there are stats for 8 villains and 2 agents -- lack any accompanying art.  The only exception is Shrinker.  
• Speaking of artwork and iconics.  Take that cover.

• Who are these people?!  I want to know.  The only one who is mentioned in the book is Gargoyle.  It's pretty clear which character he is, but I only know his name because of a copyright notice.  Who are the other characters?  Is that "Flare"?  Someone once told me the villain's name was Holocaust, but that could just be a Bay Area rumor.  If you know, please let me know.  I'd love to see the stats for that guy punching "Holocaust" with his energy fist.

CHAMPIONS is a great game, and the first edition is a joy.  If you can, try to hunt down a copy and play some old school super hero rpg.