The Nintendo Special is finally here! It has over 30,000 dominoes and is full of awesome clips and cool Nintendo themed games and consoles!

Also, Sonic/SEGA belongs in this video! We have enjoyed the sonic games on Nintendo Consoles since the early 2000s.

A BIG thanks to Smosh who put this on the Smosh Pit! You guys helped me out a lot.
http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/lists/epic-nintendo-domino-course

I did this with Dieckdomino. Check out his channel here.
http://www.youtube.com/dieckdomino
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Watch on YouTube

Geoff and Jack go on a digital tour of Times Square using a multitude of Xbox 360 games. This video features: Forza 3, GTA IV, Legendary, Crysis 2, The Bigs, Spiderman 3, Ghostbusters, Prototype, and The Incredible Hulk.

The success of James Cameron’s Avatar was inspiring: an indication that it is possible to launch a new saga in reboot-happy Hollywood. Now it looks like Avatar is all he will be working on for, well, the rest of his filmmaking career. In an interview with the The New York Times, Cameron explains that he has shut down the development arm of his production company and is no longer working on new projects:
“I’m in the Avatar business. Period. That’s it. I’m making Avatar 2, Avatar 3, maybe Avatar 4, and I’m not going to produce other people’s movies for them. I’m not interested in taking scripts…. I think within the Avatar landscape I can say everything I need to say that I think needs to be said, in terms of the state of the world and what I think we need to be doing about it. And doing it in an entertaining way.”
Cameron goes on to note that anything he can’t say within the confines of Avatar‘s elaborate alien-treehugger mythology structure will instead be expressed in documentary form. (He’s working on a documentary about his deep-sea dive.) That’s disappointing for anyone who was hoping for movement on Cameron’s long-promised adaptation of Battle Angel — or, indeed, anyone hoping for a James Cameron movie not starring sexy volleyball-team cat people. The last time a major director gave himself over to a single science-fiction franchise, it worked out really well before it worked out really not so well.
As for Avatar 2, here’s what Cameron had to say about the movie’s status:
“So we’ve been mostly working on the tool set, the production pipeline, setting up the new stages in Los Angeles, setting up the new visual effects pipeline in New Zealand, that sort of thing. And, by the way, writing.”
See on insidemovies.ew.com

Not to be outdone by human actors, the characters from various Nickelodeon cartoons have donned their favorite superhero costumes and are ready for their turn on the big screen. Joss Whedon didn’t plan for the likes of Iron Zim, Captain Bluffington, and the Bulk.
Moviefone commission cartoonist Dennis Culver to create these Avengers/Nicktoons mashups. If Spongebob is Thor, does that mean that Squidward is Loki? Because I could definitely see him in the horned helm.

See the rest of the super team, including Rock-eye and Gerald Fury, at Moviefone.

Nicktoon Avengers: Nickelodeon Characters As The Marvel Superhero Team [Moviefone via Design You Trust]
See on io9.com

This new massive collection of MIB III clips, plus 14 mins of behind the scenes footage, is a shrine to how good Brolin is at playing TLJ — and it’s kind of creepy, but also super cute.

Men in Black 3 will be out on May 25th.

CLICK THRU FOR VIDEOS on io9.com

But nobody’s brought up the real problem with Cumberbatch’s Trek villain yet.
Top image: Star Trek set photo via MTV.

Spoilers ahead…

So by all accounts, Cumberbatch really is playing Khan Noonien Singh, the villain made famous by Ricardo Montalban in the Original Series episode “Space Seed” plus the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. This seems logical, based on what we’ve seen of set photos thus far — whoever Cumberbatch is playing, he apparently doesn’t have any alien makeup on. And he doesn’t have godlike Squire Trelaine powers, because otherwise Spock wouldn’t be able to nerve-pinch him. It’s clear Cumberbatch is playing someone human(ish), which narrows things considerably.

We already devoted tons of space to explaining why bringing back Khan is a bad idea — in a nutshell, it smacks of sequelitis and rehashing old ideas. It feels like pandering to the fans rather than doing something fresh and interesting. You can’t improve on Montalban. Chris Pine doesn’t have the gravitas to face up to a villain with that level of intellect and personality. Khan will probably get needlessly combined with another set of villains to make the story seem new — and indeed, there are multiple reports the Klingons are a major part of Trek 12.

Meanwhile, there’s already a protest movement brewing against the idea of casting a white guy as Khan. Who, after all, is a POC character who was played by a POC actor. And yes, this is clearly a bit of whitewashing, along the lines of the Last Airbender controversies and other similar stuff. Khan is one of the most iconic people of color in space opera, so to turn him into another angry white guy seems just kind of sad. Also, one wonders if Cumberbatch is attempting to do some kind of pastiche of Montalban’s accent — let’s hope not. Originally, they had sought Benicio Del Toro for this role, but he had to pull out.

But there’s another huge problem with casting a white guy as Khan.

Khan’s whole backstory and reason for existing have to do with the Eugenics Wars. He’s the product of selective breeding (or, according to Wrath of Khan, genetic engineering) to create the perfect human. He’s smarter, faster, cleverer and more cunning than any normal human, and he can learn any topic from top to bottom in moments. That’s why he’s such a huge threat to Kirk and the others — much more than a regular human villain like, say, Harry Mudd. Or the Outrageous Okona.*

Khan is basically the ultimate racial supremacist, who believes everyone else is his inferior. He’s clearly a product of the post-World War II generation grappling with the legacy of the Holocaust and Hitler’s terrible ideology, like so much other pop culture of the 1950s and 1960s. (For more on this, read here.)

Making the ultimate representation of eugenics into a vaguely Asian villain played by a Latino was an oddly clever choice — it divorces his claims of genetic superiority from the real-life advocates of eugenics, and forces you to see the issue in a new light. For most of its history, eugenics was synoymous with “white superiority” — but Khan flies in the face of that, by giving us a eugenics experiment in which race is apparently not a factor. (Khan’s followers are mostly white, so apparently Khan’s ethnic identity is just pure happenstance, and the creators of this master race weren’t aiming for any particular skin color.)

A color-blind eugenics program gets past the “white supremacy” aspects of eugenics to reach for the heart of why eugenics is so terrible — the very notion of one group of humans being innately better than another devalues us all. It dehumanizes all people, even the allegedly superior ones, by assigning to us a value based on arbitrary characteristics. It’s one more step into making us like cattle, who can be bred for certain characteristics. Or more like things, really.

And yes, Khan is shown to be fallible, again and again — in “Space Seed,” he misjudges Lt. Marla McGivers’ devotion to him, and thus dooms his takeover of the Enterprise. In Wrath of Khan, a great deal of time is spent on the various ways Kirk outfoxes the man with the “superior intellect” — tricking him into dropping his shields, using fake damage-repair time estimates, luring him into a nebula, using his two-dimensional thinking against him. But these things are partly a big deal because Khan’s superior intellect is his defining characteristic.

Part of the point of Khan, as a villain, is that his superior intellect has huge blind spots. (This is truer in Wrath of Khan than in “Space Seed.”) But in order for that to work, you first have to build up Khan as being smarter and better than everybody else. If Khan is purely a delusional idiot who thinks he’s mentally superior but clearly isn’t, then he’s not an interesting villain.

So there are two problems with having a white guy play the ultimate creation of a project to breed superior humans, destined to rule over all inferior breeds:

1) It’s a little on the nose. You risk taking Khan’s undercurrent of racial superiority and making it overt.

2) The potential for ick is huge. Like I said, you have to build up the idea that Khan really is superior, or he’s just another guy. And having a white guy storm around talking about his genetic superiority — while proving that, at least at first blush, he really is smarter and better than everyone around him — just feels like it could easily get ugly. Of course, this is a question of execution, but you’re basically steering a line between making Khan too awesome (thus proving that he’s right about his eugenicist rhetoric) or making him just kind of a fraud.

In any case, it sounds like we’ll get to see soon enough how this pans out. Perhaps all of the “eugenics” elements of Khan and the rhetoric about superiority will be toned down, and replaced with a kind of Gattaca-style tut-tutting about GMO humans. Perhaps Khan will just be more of a generic megalomaniac this time around. But in any case, casting a white guy as Khan means tossing out one of the most valuable things about the character — his ability to make us talk about eugenics without it being a coded discussion of white supremacy.

Update: To everyone who’s saying Montalban was actually white in the comments, this is obviously one of those issues that gets into tricky territory because these labels are largely arbitrary. On the other hand, it’s easy to find interviews where Montalban talks about being a “minority” actor and facing discrimination, including one where he says “Hollywood destroyed my dreams long ago.” In 1970, he founded the Nosotros Foundation, to advocate for Latinos in Hollywood, and in 1972 he co-founded the Screen Actors Guild Ethnic Minority Committee. It’s pretty clear that Montalban identified as an ethnic minority, whether or not we choose to respect that self-identification.

* Actually, was the Outrageous Okona a villain? I refuse to rewatch that episode to find out. I’m going to say yes, just based on the name and his terrible puffy sleeves. And the Joe Piscopo association.
See on io9.com

The Amazing Spider-Man AR app (available on both iOS and Google Play) uses the same kind of augmented reality technology as Marvel Comics’ AR component of its ReEvolution digital program to allow fans to find Spider-Man all over the place, with special images unlocking animation of the web-crawler in action on the mobile device of your choice.

The official description of the app promises that users will be able to “see Spider-Man swing through buildings, crawl up walls, shoot his web at the screen, or engage with nefarious characters on the streets” with the new app, with the ability to “take photos of Spider-Man in action” and share them on Twitter or Facebook.

Additional images to activate the AR animations will be available in Sony Stores, as well as through Activision and Entertainment Weekly channels, ensuring Spidey’s virtual dominance as we get closer to his movie’s July 3 release date. Rumors about whether turning your phone upside down as soon as the wall-crawler appears will result in him taking his mask off and kissing you in the rain remain, so far, unconfirmed.

CLICK THRU TO WATCH VIDEO AND SEE MORE PICTURES on www.comicsalliance.com

From PaperCutz’s official solicitation info:
On a rare day off, the Power Rangers attend a free rock concert dressed as civilians, blending in with the rest of the attendees. Unbeknownst to the Rangers, the evil Master Xandred has been watching them closely, and plans to trap them by turning the crowd of thousands against them. Can the Rangers stop Master Xandred’s plot without harming any of their fellow teens?

CLICK THRU to read the five-page preview  on www.comicsalliance.com

“We’re going to have the most Daleks we’ve had on screen ever – but they will be from every era, quite deliberately. We’re calling them in from everywhere! All of them! Even the Special Weapons Dalek. They’ll all be there…” STEVEN MOFFAT talks in depth about his version of Doctor Who in an exclusive, revealing, in-depth, eight-page interview…
See on blogtorwho.blogspot.ca

Bleeding Cool has been following the progress of Hastings, a multimedia entertainment superstore retailer, moving into comic book store territory. Increasing massively the stock and knowledge base of 138 stores, and creating the largest direct market comic book chain, and the largest single buyer of comic books in the USA.

They’ve sold exclusive variant covers, participated in retailer promotions and now they’re providing the common comic book store service of a pullbox. Comic books pre-ordered and set aside for regular customers, to avoid the Wednesday morning rush.

This will launch on Free Comic Book Day this Saturday. Attendees who pick up free comics from their local Hastings will get a coupon for 25% off their first pullbox order, if they pre-order three or more comics.
See on www.bleedingcool.com

And they are willing to pay 75% of the airtime costs for any store who runs the ads on local stations, with their details on the end.

Here’s the thirty second and two minute cuts, respectively. Next up… the Before Watchmen TV ads. CLICK THRU TO WATCH THE VIDEOS on www.bleedingcool.com

And, for a little while at least, the lab will also play host to JJ Abrams and his Star Trek sequel crew.

Now, they really can’t be filming in there with the laser operational – it creates conditions “similar to those in the stars and the cores of giant planets or in nuclear weapons,” so we should probably assume they just liked the look of the place.

A huge, hi-tech, super-elaborate lab in a room the size of three American football fields, all ready-made and camera-friendly: I’d like it too.

Blastr found talk of the film shoot in The Mercury News, and also ran this image of the Ignition Facility.

Deep in the belly of the Enterprise, maybe?

I’d hazard a wishy-washy guess that the crew of the Enterprise will be looking for some kind of a huge power source. That would tie in with the images of Spock lowering into a volcano we’ve already seen.

Or… maybe not. As I said. Wishy-washy.My final question: the Trek crew are apparently using the alias “the HH project.” Anybody got any idea what that means?
See on www.bleedingcool.com

David Cronenberg‘s film of Cosmopolis will take its (deliberately?) pretentious dialogue and (deliberately?) stilted performances to Cannes later this month. There’s a tone to this clip, and to the trailers, that suggests a pretty intense experience. I look forward to seeing it all play out in full.

Thanks to AICN for the embed.

CLICK THRU FOR VIDEO on www.bleedingcool.com

At Baltimore Comic Con in September, 215 Ink will be selling an branded Android 4.0 tablet, fully loaded with the company’s library of comics, for $99, all in.

With 63 titles currently in the library, with more on the way, that might work out at under $1.50 each.

With a free tablet.

However you look at it, this might be a way for all sorts of people to decide to try out digital comics…
See on www.bleedingcool.com

Created by David Quinn and Tim Vigil, this disturbingly violent superhero thriller fit the times well. Published by Rebel Studios in 1987, it was published sporadically since in thirteen chapters, while inspiring a film adaptation in 2001.

Well, in October and November, the final fourteenth and fifteenth books will see publication, finishing the story, for the 25th anniversary of the book. Before then, the previous comics will be collected in four books entitled The Communion, putting the whole series back in print.
See on www.bleedingcool.com

And Mark Gatiss has now confirmed that this tale will indeed be the basis of the next TV show – but not without some changes. Speaking to the AP, he says:

There’s certain things about The Adventure Of The Empty House which feel set in stone because that’s how Sherlock comes back, but at the same time we feel free to invent and to introduce new stuff to it. I always found it a little unlikely that Dr. Watson’s only reaction was to faint for instance – as supposed to possibly a stream of terrible swear words.

Ah, there’s nothing like a good bit of swearing. I wouldn’t be surprised if Moffat or Gatiss could cook up something to compete with Malcolm Tucker, Don Logan or Loki.

Beyond the big return, however, Gatiss had only this to say about which bits of Doyle might make up the next series:

Steven and I have our all-time favourites, but it’s really a question of what will fit into the structure. We’re sort of guided by our idea for the overall feel of the next three stories.

And so it should be.

Sherlock season 3 is expected to start filming… wow, months from now. And it’s likely twelve to eighteen months before we’ll see it on TV.
See on www.bleedingcool.com

It’s just a rumour, but CW are said to have given the show the thumbs up for a premiere in this year’s fall TV season. According to The Daily Blam, multiple sources have given them word of the commission.

So while there’s been no official word on this, it sounds pretty likely that we can expect to see Arrow on the CW’s roster when they unveil it later this month.
See on www.bleedingcool.com

Velvet, a villain so evil that he has a scar, an eyepatch, a moustache and an affected Mid-Atlantic accent, issued a challenge to Phoenix Jones and “his gang of misfit Power Rangers” through a YouTube video with criminally high production values that’s likely to be the best thing you see all day. Check it out after the cut!

It’s hard to pin down one thing great thing about this video — even his name is fantastic — but I’ll say this: Velvet appears to be following the rules laid out in Matt Wilson’s Supervillain Handbook pretty religiously. He’s got the art of villainous theatricality down to a science.

Seriously, this video was made in what appears to be an honest to God lair in an abandoned warehouse. There are literally skulls hanging on the walls and a portrait of his arch-enemy that he throws things at!

As for Rex’s motivation, he seems to be taking a page from the Joker in The Dark Knight: He wants Phoenix Jones to unmask and retire from crime-fighting. Now, far be it from me to get in the way of good old-fashioned villainy, and believe me when I say that I hate to be the one to break this to him, but he’s a little late on at least half of that.

To be fair, though, his video didn’t involve stabbing a dude in hockey pads, so hopefully, Rex Velvet will stick to making videos and avoid getting into, you know, actual crime. If I was in Seattle, though, I’d probably still avoid taking the ferry for a while. With a mastermind like this on the loose, you never know when you’re going to be faced with a moral quandary that can only be solved by Tiny Lister.

CLICK THRU TO WATCH VIDEO on www.comicsalliance.com

Lee was asked about the Michael Jackson experience in an interview with Eric Larnick for our sister site Moviefone:

Moviefone: The most interesting bit of almost-casting that I’ve ever heard came from a Producers Guild conference last summer: the “X-Men” producers revealed that Michael Jackson seriously lobbied for the part of Professor X.

Stan Lee: I wasn’t aware that Michael Jackson wanted to be Professor X. I knew Michael Jackson. And with the things he discussed with me, I felt he wanted to be Spider-Man. That was the character that interested him. He never discussed the X-Men with me.

MF: How do you think he would have fared as Spider-Man?

SL: I think he’d have been good. I think he’d have been very good. But I must say that Tobey Maguire was wonderful.

MF: I’m fascinated by the fact that Jackson worked with Stan Lee Media and attempted to buy Marvel, in the 90s.

SL: Yes, he wanted to. He felt that would be the only way that he could play Spider-Man. [Laughs]

MF: What do you think the company would have looked like now if that partnership came to fruition?

SL: I can’t imagine it would have been totally different of course, but maybe not as successful. Michael was not a great businessman.

For more on Stan Lee, including his favorite Marvel film cameos, click over to Moviefone for the full interview. For a little more on the Michael Jackson anecdote, check out this 2009 video from the Associated Press on www.comicsalliance.com