If 2016 didn’t fill your need for retro gaming with the release of the NES Classic Edition, 2017 could do the trick with the return of a beloved old school franchise: Double Dragon. To celebrate the franchise’s 30th anniversary, Arc System Works—which bought the rights to the series in 2015—is set to release Double Dragon IV on January 30 on both Playstation 4 and Steam, The Verge reports.
Unlike modern revivals of older franchises—like the recent Tomb Raider and Doom reboots—Double Dragon IV is sticking to its retro graphics and low-fi gameplay roots. Billy and Jimmy are yet again pixelated crime fighters forced to go through stage after stage of enemies, just like they were back in 1987. Arc System Works even hired the producer, director, character designer, and composer of the original Double Dragon to return for IV.
The last time Double Dragon had a numbered sequel in the beat-’em-up genre was 1990’s Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone. After that was Super Double Dragon in 1992 and Double Dragon V in 1994, which was actually an ill-conceived Street Fighter II clone. Outside of a return to the franchise’s roots and the fact that it will have a two-player duel mode, not much is known about Double Dragon IV. But with a release date looming, expect Arc System Works to unveil more in the coming weeks.
Some prayers might make reference to wine, but they certainly don’t talk about Hennessy. Or emptying clips. Or, well, pretty much anything else found in Tupac Shakur’s 1996 song “Hail Mary.” But that wasn’t enough to stop one church in Sri Lanka from accidentally distributing the lyrics to the rap song instead of the Catholic prayer of the same name, CNN reports.
The lyrics were included in a booklet of prayers for the church’s Christmas carol service in the capital city of Colombo on December 11 and were immediately identified (and tweeted) by several people attending. The book, by the way, advertised the event as “A Festival of Music for Peace & Harmony” so a line like “F— the world if they can’t adjust, it’s just as well, Hail Mary” is going to raise some eyebrows:
A Christmas Carol service in Sri Lanka has accidentally printed the lyrics of Tupac’s Hail Mary, instead of the prayer.#SriLanka#lkapic.twitter.com/djhJPAWhcj
Instead of opening the booklet to the familiar refrain of “Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee,” devotees were greeted by words of wisdom from Tupac like, “Makaveli in this, Killuminati, all through your body. The blow’s like a twelve gauge shotty, feel me.”
“A lot of people were in shock as [to] whether it was a joke or someone would actually rap the song,” churchgoer Andrew Choksy told CNN. “A few of the older ladies in front of us could not stop looking at the printed booklet.”
The booklet was apparently prepared by a young boy, who had simply downloaded the wrong version of “Hail Mary” from the internet, somehow glossing over lines like “Come with me, Hail Mary/Run quick see, what do we have here/Now, do you wanna ride or die?”
The error was caught soon after the books were distributed, according to Father Da Silva, from the Archdiocese of Colombo. “The page was in the middle of the booklet. When people looked at this page, they saw it before the start of the show. Two people saw it and alerted us to it,” he told CNN.
Nearly everybody is packing quite a bit of processing power on their smartphone or tablet, but there’s a new piece of tech that’s smaller and even more powerful than anything you can get at the phone store. The Ockel Sirius B pocket PC is as powerful as a desktop computer, but it’s so small that you can carry it along with you while you work, study, or travel.
The simple design hides a powerful device, one that can run Windows 10 and includes 2GB of RAM, high-speed Wi-Fi connectivity, and the ability to connect to other hardware via Bluetooth. All you have to do is connect the Sirius B into an HDMI screen and you can start your work (or games) as you would on a normal PC. The device’s Indiegogo page makes it clear that anything you can put on a PC you can install on the Sirius, like Netflix, Twitter, and gaming apps.
The Sirius also touts two USB ports, a Micro SD-card slot, and a 3.5mm audio and microphone jack. In addition to running on Windows 10, there is also a cheaper option to get a Sirius with no pre-installed operating system so that you can have the choice to install the OS you want to use.
The Sirius B with Windows 10 already installed goes for $249, while the model with no OS costs $225. There’s also the more recent Ockel Sirius B Black Cherry, with 4GB of RAM for $349.
The holidays are the best time to sit around and catch up on all of the movies you’ve missed out on over the past year, and now Amazon and Google are making sure that you don’t need to break the bank to do so. Both companies are offering $0.99 movie rentals on tens of thousands of films across all genres.
Unlike a lot of sales that are limited to older titles or a select few films, you can get a massive discount on movies that barely just left theaters, like X-Men: Apocalypse, Jason Bourne and Suicide Squad. You can also use it on holiday classics like Elf (2003) or National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989).
To get the Amazon deal, all you need to do is use the promotional code MOVIE99 upon checking out. It’s even easier for Google: the deal is automatically applied right at checkout. Both deals only allow one discounted rental per account, so choose wisely. Both sales expire on January 23, 2017.
Director Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life is sacred in the holiday movie pantheon. It’s not as quotable as A Christmas Story (1983) or as lyrical as 1966’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, but the story of George Bailey has a universal message behind it that endures 70 years later. Though the movie is the quintessential Christmas tale today, when it was first released in 1946, audiences and critics were lukewarm toward the picture, resulting in a box office disappointment that killed Capra’s nascent production company, Liberty Films. In a strange twist, decades after it was first released, an unlikely clerical screw-up managed to turn It’s a Wonderful Life into the Christmastime staple we know today.
In the 1930s, Capra became a magnet for Academy Awards, directing movies like the screwball comedy It Happened One Night (1934) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). After Pearl Harbor, Capra knew he could contribute something to the war effort, so he took a post in Washington overseeing the development of U.S. propaganda films for the government—most notably the award-winning Why We Fight series of documentaries.
Upon returning from Washington in 1945, Capra—along with other wartime directors William Wyler and George Stevens—helped finance Liberty Films, an independent production company poised to give filmmakers the one thing they all dreamed of: freedom. The company’s first film would be an adaption of a short story titled “The Greatest Gift,” which would also appear in Good Housekeeping under the title “The Man Who Was Never Born,” and would be adapted for the screen as It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s one of the few movies Capra also received a screenwriting credit for, and with a proposed budget of $2 million, it was a huge gamble for Liberty.
In the book Five Came Back, writer Mark Harris describes It’s a Wonderful Life‘s production process as something akin to a nightmare. Script rewrites, a bloated shooting schedule, and an ever-changing crew cost the studio nearly all of the original $2 million budget—well before filming was even wrapped. The spending became such a concern for Capra’s partners at Liberty that George Stevens remarked, “Why the hell couldn’t it be springtime?” when he saw how much it cost the production to produce fake snow for shots. Capra bet Liberty’s future on audiences looking for some comforting nostalgia after the war, but he was about to see firsthand just how much the world had changed since he came back.
The original plan was to release It’s a Wonderful Life in January 1947, after the Oscar deadlines, but when RKO—the film’s distributor—needed a movie to release in time for Christmas, Capra’s project was the easy solution. It opened just weeks after William Wyler’s major studio film The Best Years of Our Lives, a hard-hitting drama about a U.S. soldier coming home after the war to pick up his life again. The two films couldn’t be any more different, and the reviews reflected that.
Even at nearly three hours long, The Best Years of Our Lives was an absolute hit with critics and at the box office, recouping its budget multiple times over. It’s a Wonderful Life, with its inflated budget and saccharine tale touting old-timey values, was met with a whimper, making only an estimated $3.3 million against a $3.7 million budget. Wyler beat Capra in every way: reviews, box office, and awards. The Best Years of Our Lives won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, while It’s a Wonderful Life received only a lone technical award—ironically for the fake snow Stevens loathed.
Liberty Films had borrowed more than $1.5 million to make the film, and with such a disappointing box office return, the production company was soon sold off to Paramount. Capra only directed five feature films afterwards, none of which ever reached the heights of his pre-war work. As unlikely as it seems today, It’s a Wonderful Life was seen as a flat disappointment destined for anonymity—until a clerical error changed its fate.
In 1974, the movie entered the public domain after the film’s copyright holder simply forgot to file for a renewal. This meant that TV stations everywhere could play It’s a Wonderful Life all day and all night and not have to pay a cent for it. Networks aren’t necessarily shy about exploiting free Christmas content, and the film’s reemergence on television gave Capra’s story new life. While a post-World War II crowd may have rejected the movie’s sentiment, subsequent generations seem to revel in the opportunity to visit the nostalgic whimsy of it all.
“It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Capra once told The Wall Street Journal about the film’s revival. “The film has a life of its own now and I can look at it like I had nothing to do with it. I’m like a parent whose kid grows up to be president. I’m proud … but it’s the kid who did the work. I didn’t even think of it as a Christmas story when I first ran across it. I just liked the idea.”
Legalities rewrote the history of It’s a Wonderful Life yet again in 1993. The Supreme Court’s previous ruling in Stewart v. Abend established a precedent that allowed the film’s original copyright owner—Republic Pictures—to regain its ownership of the movie. The ruling claimed that since Republic owned the copyright on the original short story which the movie was based on, and the score for the film, they, in essence, still owned the movie. So what was once a near barrage of networks airing It’s a Wonderful Life has since been pared down to just one: NBC.
The network paid for exclusive rights to air the movie, which is why you’ll only see It’s a Wonderful Life on TV once or twice during the holidays. But the movie’s modern appeal exists because of that scarcity. The film that killed a production company 70 years ago is now an annual television event and part of countless family traditions around the globe. It turns out Capra always knew what audiences wanted, he just needed to wait for the right clerical error to prove it.
Much of the success of the Star Wars franchise has to do with the fact that while it features plenty of spaceships and laser swords, the themes and conflicts are all grounded in very human experiences. Creator George Lucas even took his cues from the real world when populating his universe with names suited for alien creatures, droids, and Sith lords. Some of the most popular names from Star Wars have their roots in languages found here on Earth, while others pay homage to classic films and even some politicians.
1. DARTH VADER
Darth is simply a variation of the word dark, while Vader comes from the Dutch word for father (though in the movies it’s pronounced more like vater, the German word for father). While it seems like Lucas might have tipped his hand on Vader’s relationship with Luke and Leia with that name in the first movie, the decision to make Darth a Skywalker wasn’t finally made by Lucas and company until development on The Empire Strikes Back was well underway. Lucas has gone on record saying the Skywalker family drama was always part of his plans, while other stories contradict that. Either way, if you knew Dutch or German heading into the original Star Wars, you might have been able to figure the whole saga out before all your friends.
2. R2-D2
The name R2-D2 was conceived in the editing bay of George Lucas’s 1973 teen comedy, American Graffiti. The term originated with the film’s editor, Walter Murch, who used to say “R2, D2,” which was shorthand for “reel two, dialogue two,” referring to the movie’s various dialogue tracks. Lucas, who was jotting down notes for what would become Star Wars during this period, instantly took a liking to the offbeat term.
For BB-8, director J.J. Abrams didn’t want to complicate matters, so the naming process was as simple as looking at the droid’s design. “I named him BB-8 because it was almost onomatopoeia … It was sort of how he looked to me, with the 8, obviously, and then the 2 B’s,” the director explained.
4. CAPTAIN PHASMA
The reflective chrome surface of Captain Phasma’s uniform directly inspired her name, which also has its roots in a cult horror classic. “Phasma I named because of the amazing chrome design that came from Michael Kaplan’s wardrobe team,” Abrams said in an interview. “It reminded me of the ball in Phantasm, and I just thought, Phasma sounds really cool.”
Nute Gunray, the sleazy Viceroy of the Trade Federation, seems to have gotten his first name from Newt Gingrich and his last name by swapping the syllables of Reagan. You’re never going to hear Lucas admit this one outright, but fans and news outlets have been dissecting the name ever since it first appeared in 1999’s The Phantom Menace.
6. EWOKS
The lovable (or supremely hateable, depending on your tolerance for militarized teddy bears) little fuzzballs from 1983’s Return of the Jedi didn’t get their name from politicians or classic works of sci-fi; instead, the story behind the word Ewok has its origins right in Lucas’s backyard. He got the term by rearranging the syllables in the word Wookiee and rhyming it with Miwok, the name of a Native American tribe that used to inhabit central California, not terribly far from where Skywalker Ranch is located.
7. WOOKIEES
If the word Wookiee sounds like nonsense, well, it is. The name actually originated during Lucas’s 1971 debut sci-fi film THX 1138. In it, actor Terry McGovern played a voice on a radio providing background chatter during the film’s vehicular escape sequence. One of the lines he improvised was “I think I ran over a Wookiee.” McGovern came up with the word in honor of his friend, Bill Wookey, and apparently the name stuck in Lucas’s mind when it came to coming up with a species for Chewbacca.
8. JEDI
There are two main theories behind the word Jedi—the first one points to Jidaigeki, which is a Japanese term for “period dramas” in theater or on the screen. This origin certainly makes sense, since Lucas modeled so much of the Star Wars mythology on the samurai movies of directors like Akira Kurosawa (they all fell into the Jidaigeki genre). The other inspiration for Jedi is Jed or Jeddak, a term for tribal leaders in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter adventures, which also played a large role in the formation of the swashbuckling Star Wars style.
Nintendo may be causing consumer hysteria with its NES Classic Edition this holiday season, but it’s not exactly a museum to retro gaming. With only 30 titles from one console to choose from, there’s a lot of ground left to cover if you’re really trying to scratch that classic gaming itch. Doyodo is looking to do just that with the RetroEngine Sigma, a device not unlike the NES Classic Edition in size, but one that has the potential to pack thousands more games onto it.
RetroEngine Sigma is a device designed to run games from consoles such as the Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Super Nintendo, Genesis, Atari 2600, and more than 20 other devices from years past. The device itself comes with 15 pre-installed games (they haven’t revealed which ones yet), and has internet capabilities and media functionality, which allows gamers to go online and download emulators and ROMs that will play thousands of other classic titles through a smartphone app.
The Sigma comes with two USB ports used to attach retro gaming controllers or Bluetooth devices, and will feature an HDMI port that allows you to connect directly into a modern television and an A/C adapter. Gamers have been using emulators and ROMs to run classic games on their computers for years, but the Sigma looks to cut out the installation confusion, optimize the ROMs for easy playability, and be the type of all-in-one experience that the NES Classic Edition isn’t. Plus, the RetroEngine’s 4K media center and television hookup make it far more attractive than wrestling with ROM downloads on your computer.
This isn’t necessarily the “plug in and play” model that the NES Classic Edition is, though. Outside of those 15 pre-installed games, finding the right console emulators (basically software that mimics a classic gaming system) and ROMs (the games themselves) to install on the Sigma is up to you. Also, the legal waters surrounding such emulators are confusing to navigate, and RetroEngine Sigma’s Indiegogo campaign states, “If you decide to install the additional Emulator Pack to enable the system to run game backups from older systems, the legality of using such ROMs depends on your countries [sic] laws and on additional circumstances such as for example your continued possession of the original copy of the game as well as the original hardware it ran on.”
The RetroEngine Sigma has already far exceeded its $20,000 Indiegogo goal and is currently sitting at more than $360,000 raised. You can still back the campaign and get various rewards, including 16GB or 32GB micro SD cards to store more games, depending on your donation size. The RetroEngine Sigma is expected to ship before the second quarter of 2017.
It’s hard to imagine a child’s face lighting up at the sight of an empty cardboard box staring back at them from under the Christmas tree. But in 1977, young Jedis-in-training were so hungry for anything Star Wars-related that even an I.O.U. was something to get excited about.
When George Lucas’s intergalactic gamble first hit screens in May 1977, no one knew quite what to expect—especially the film’s toy-making partner, Kenner. Instead of flooding the market with action figures and dolls for a movie that could very well end up being a flop, the company decided not to manufacture any toys right away. Unfortunately, there wasn’t just a demand for Star Wars toys that year; there was an outright fever that took the company completely by surprise. And with Christmas just a few short months away, the ill-prepared Kenner needed to act—fast.
Realizing it would be impossible to get a full line of Star Wars toys manufactured in time to meet the needs of the holiday season, a Kenner executive named Bernard Loomis knew he had to improvise. Instead of simply releasing a proper toyline in 1978 and missing out on the Christmas rush, Loomis came up with what is now known as the “Early Bird Certificate Package” (or more colloquially as the “Empty Box Campaign”) to satisfy this sudden, rabid fan base.
Basically, parents would go to their local toy store and pay $7.99 for a thin cardboard package, about the size of a manila envelope, with painted renderings of the proposed 12-figure Star Wars toyline that Kenner was promising to release in the months ahead. The cardboard kit could be turned into a display diorama for all the figures, which—at that point—only existed in theory. And since the word “diorama” isn’t quite enough to satisfy a kid on Christmas morning, the kit also contained the all-important mail-in certificate promising the recipient would get the company’s first four figures—Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, R2-D2, and Chewbacca—delivered right to their homes between February and June 1978.
Kenner limited the supply of this glorified pre-order campaign to 500,000 kits, none of which were to be sold after December 31, 1977 in order to really manipulate the holiday market.
In an attempt to soften the blow of what was essentially nothing but a bunch of cardboard under the tree, Kenner sweetened the pot by including some stickers and a Star Wars Fan Club membership card. After months of waiting, kids everywhere would come home from school and be greeted by their delayed Christmas gift: four figures, along with foot pegs to fit them into their display stand. Eventually the entire first line of Star Wars toys came out in 1978 and could be purchased in stores, whether you mailed in a certificate or not.
From 1978 to 1985, Kenner never again doubted the power of the Star Wars toy line. In that time, the company released a robust roster of more than 100 different action figures based on the film series, scraping the bottom of the barrel of Lucas lore along the way with obscurities like Dengar and General Madine. The company went from having no toys on the shelf in 1977 to having every side character, prop, and vehicle recreated in plastic in just a few years.
Nowadays, intact Early Bird Kits go for big money on the collector’s market, especially if they still include the original certificate kids were supposed to mail back (prices in the $4000 to $8000 range are pretty standard). But the biggest winner of this whole stunt, as usual, was George Lucas.
When signing on to direct Star Wars at 20th Century Fox, Lucas agreed to work for just $150,000, as opposed to the $500,000 he was set to earn. In exchange for the pay cut, the director asked for two things: The rights to any sequels to the movie and the rights to all the merchandise, including the toys. Believing Star Wars to be just another science fiction movie, Fox happily agreed to the reduced salary. That empty box under countless Christmas trees was the start of what would become Lucas’s $20 billion merchandising empire.
It’s hard to think of the boundlessness of space as cluttered, but an interactive art project aims to illustrate the real danger of something most of us have never given much thought to: space junk.
Most of the known pieces of space junk out there—around 670,000 examples—measure between 1 and 10 centimeters, while about 29,000 come in at over 10. But don’t let the size fool you; it’s the speed that’s the real danger. Earlier this year, the European Space Agency reported that possibly a paint chip or metal fragment “a few thousandths of a millimeter across” put a 7mm crack in the Cupola’s window on the International Space Station. When traveling at thousands of miles per hour, even a flake can lead to catastrophe.
That’s why documentary filmmaker Cath Le Couteur and musician Nick Ryan have created “Adrift,” an art project meant to highlight the real danger of space junk, as reported by Motherboard. Along with London’s Royal Astronomical Society, the duo created a three-pronged effort to talk about space debris through art: Adopt, listen, and watch.
For those interested, you can “adopt” one of three pieces of space junk by following the debris on Twitter. The first is SuitSat, a Russian spacesuit filled with garbage and fitted with a radio that was thrown out of the ISS in 2006. The second is the United States’s Vanguard I, the oldest satellite in orbit. The last one is the Chinese weather satellite Fengyun, which was blown apart in a weapons test in 2007; however, that act nearly doubled the amount of space debris currently in existence.
By following these space junk Twitter accounts, you can message them and they’ll actually reply to you with a status update. Though the results might be a little horrifying. Or a lot horrifying:
@McCreaLeslie Your people predict I will burn up in Earths atmosphere early 2017. You’ll get messages until then. i don’t want to die.
The listening portion of this art project comes courtesy of the Machine 9, which “tracks the positions of 27,000 pieces of space junk, transforming them into sound, in real time, as they pass overhead.” You can listen to the otherworldly music below:
Then there’s the documentary by Le Couteur, which goes into further detail about the dangers of debris in space and how the future might play out if we don’t listen to these warnings. (Hint: things won’t go particularly well.) You can check out the documentary below, and visit the Adrift site for even more information on an issue that everyone should be paying a lot more attention to.
Fans of Jim Henson’s 1982 fantasy film The Dark Crystal know a little something about patience. Though the movie didn’t receive unanimous praise from critics or break box office records, its loyal cult fanbase has been hoping for a follow-up film for nearly 35 years. And it looks like all that waiting has paid off … kind of. Next year, The Dark Crystal will finally be getting a sequel, but it will take place on the pages of a comic book from Archaia Entertainment, Nerdist reports.
The 12-issue series—titled The Power of the Dark Crystal—is based on the actual screenplay for a now-abandoned movie sequel by David Odell, Annette Odell, and Craig Pearce. Writer Si Spurrier (X-Force) will handle this new script, as Kelly and Nichole Matthews (Toil and Trouble) take on the art duties. Not a whole lot is known about the book’s plot, but Archaia and parent company Boom Studios did write up a brief taste of what’s to come:
“Years have passed since the events of the original film, and though Jen and Kira have ruled Thra as King and Queen, bringing Gelfling back to the land, they have become distracted by power and can no longer feel or see the needs of the world the way they once did.”
The Power of the Dark Crystal #1 will hit comic book store shelves on February 15, 2017, with a cover by Jae Lee (Batman/Superman) and June Chung (Birds of Prey).
