Because it is impossible to have too much Buckaroo Banzai in your life, I give to you the best ending credit sequence of all time:

Recently, over at a site called Movie Line I saw two videos on the 1983 HBO movie intro sequence — both the opener itself, and a behind-the-scenes look at how it was made. For anyone with even the slightest bit of 80’s nostalgia (of the sort I’ve been chronicling in my Movies of a Misspent Youth series of reviews) the classic HBO intro with its little model village and triumphalist synth disco beat might just cause your soon-to-be-middle-aged heart to flutter with excitement. It did mine.

I barely recall the happy family in the beginning of this one, I believe HBO at some point realized their grandiose vision was maybe a bit too much to sit through a dozen times a week and cut the sequence back. After a while, most viewers had spotted all the hookers and stray dogs in the toy village and were no doubt getting impatient, and by then cable television was well on its way to looking a bit more like it does now. You’d never see anything that long or self-important today.

The featurette on the making of the intro is a great look at old school SFX, and it’s remarkable to look back on an age where everything is hand-made and mechanical. Heinousity warning on the music for this one though, it may cause internal injuries.

A quick dig around youtube produced the intro sequence that replaced the model village and swirly ‘O,’ the quicker-to-the-point 1987 light show that is just as ingrained in my memory (and maybe yours).

There are others, both before and after, to be found on youtube (including an April Fool’s parody of the 1983 village), but these are the ones I remember most.

I don’t know from whom or where this originated, by I found it through Facebook friend (and fantasy writer) Bruce Durham. It is a tour of Robert E. Howard’s home in the company of Norris Chambers, a man who, as a child, knew Howard and was a friend of the family. A fascinating glimpse of Howard through the memories of perhaps the last person alive that knew him.

An update: Deuce Richardson over at the excellent site, The Cimmerian, also put up a post about this video on Thursday, and I’m pretty happy to learn that it is part of a larger Howard documentary that Ben Friberg is working on.

I have always been interested in some of the what if’s of World War II, especially some of the more extravagant super weapons that never got off the drawing board. 1945A, a short film from Ryan Nagata, takes the scifi potential inherent in that premise and runs with it. Pretty amazing work that again just reinforces how today’s technology is putting tremendous tools into the hands of motivated individuals.

1945A from Ryan Nagata on Vimeo.

Here is a short presentation from blogger and podcaster Chad Henderson, explaining all the life-lessons he learned from D&D. You know, stuff like the importance of initiative, how to cope when things don’t go according to plan, and dealing with failure. Oh, and not to trust gnomes.

All I Need To Know About Life I learned From Dungeons and Dragons. An IgniteOKC Talk. from Chad Henderson on Vimeo.

And, while you’re at it, check out my own take, Thank You, D&D.

Uncle Ridley has done right by me more times than I can count, and his upcoming Robin Hood looks to be no exception. A few trailers for the movie, starring Russell Crowe as the erstwhile man-in-tights, have been floating around, and I figured I’d jump on the bandwagon. What I’m really digging about this project is Scott showing us Hood fighting in the Crusades, and the glimpses of arms and armor I got from the preview are looking good for twelfth/early-thirteenth century. As someone who gets a bit dyspeptic when confronted with a dark age viking in renaissance-era armor, it’s nice to see filmmakers care about historical context and use it as a tool to enhance the story they are trying to tell, rather than a grab-bag of funny clothes and weapons.

However, that’s not the only Robin Hood film on the horizon, and I’ve managed to stumble upon some footage from a competing project that takes a bit of a different approach to the legend, release date unknown:

What holiday would be complete without reference to David Lynch? Here is a goofy rendition of The Twelve Days of Christmas actually recorded by some of the Twin Peaks cast back in 1990. It features four talking logs, six fish in a percolator, eight dancing midgets — you get the idea. A bit of tongue-in-cheek from a show that was practically a byword for mixing the dark and the humorous.

Read more about it at Cinematical.

Lately I’ve been listening to — and loving — a science fiction oriented podcast called the Sofanauts. Sadly, just as I got to the point where I had listened to all of the thirty plus episodes and was eagerly awaiting more, the man behind the ‘cast, Tony C. Smith, announced he was putting the project on indefinite hold. Tony runs another weekly podcast ezine (podzine?), Starship Sofa’s Aural Delights, full of short spec fic and related material that I’ve also enjoyed, and I can’t honestly understand how he ever managed to do both productions on a weekly basis in the first place. Alas, my interest in listening to stories is much less than the enjoyment I get out of hearing writers and other industry professionals sound off and discuss the week’s news — and for those of you that like the latter sort of thing I highly recommend going and listening to the Sofanauts podcasts.

I’m posting all this by way of introduction for the following nicely done video interview conducted by the Starship Sofa lads with none other than Michael Moorcock. This is a fairly recent interview and takes place in Paris (marvel at the Parisian traffic sounds!) and deals a lot with Moorcock’s New Worlds days, and his current semi-retirement.

And, as a sort of tangential follow-up, over at The Cimmerian Brian Murphy has posted an in depth refutation of Moorcock’s notorious ‘Epic Pooh’ essay (which can be found in ‘Wizardry and Wild Romance’) in which he, basically, condemns Tolkien’s work as hopelessly juvenile. I disagree with Moorcock’s thesis, which I always thought had less to do with literary criticism than it did iconoclasm and political fashion, and Murphy’s exhaustive article does a great job addressing the claims Moorcock made in his 1978 piece.