ComicCon Countdown: Who’s coming?
To use a well-worn phrase…Good News, Everyone! Your friends over here at TV are heading on out to San Diego during the last week in July to cover one of the bigger, if not biggest, comic book and science fiction conventions on mainland America and the world. I speak, of course, of ComicCon.
From July 24th through July 27th you’ll see us with our TV T-Shirts (and underwear — viewings of those by appointment) as we join the rest of the throngs attending the convention. At some point we may even be doing a bit of Twittering to find out where you are at the convention so you can find us in order to shake our hands (or, in the case of some of our commenters, punch and kick us) and potentially get some free stuff as well.
Now, some of you may be saying ’While I’d love to meet you at ComicCon to tell you how I really feel about you and your site, why are you going to a comic book and science fiction convention?’ Well, truth be told, ComicCon is more than just a comic book and science fiction convention these days. Fact is, aside from The Television Critics Association press tour that takes place in Los Angeles the week before, ComicCon has become one of the premiere television events of the summer.
Shows like Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Stargate Atlantis and Heroes are not the only ones making appearances at the convention. This year there are some shows that don’t really fit the science fiction or comic book genres. Shows like Chuck, Bones, The Big Bang Theory and, most unusually, The Office. Why the change? According to an article at TVWeek, the convention is moving away from its sci fi roots.
Studios are bringing these shows to the convention not because they use any hi-tech gadgetry or say “frack” a lot. They are coming because these shows have strong fan and cult followings. Bones is one example of this. It has such as devoted fan community that viewers were calling for the heads of the show’s producers after the season finale. Prison Break, Chuck, and 24 also have their huge fan followings as well, which make them a perfect fit for this convention.
One would think at this point that the convention organizers would be upset. On the contrary, they are quite happy about the whole situation. According to David Glanzer, convention director of marketing and public relations, having more television shows at the Con is a good thing. As opposed to movie people that appear at the Con, television people talk and interact more with the fans. They also give more behind-the-scenes information out, which makes the fans very happy.
Having said that, here is a breakdown of some of the shows that will be at the convention:
Warner Brothers: Chuck, Fringe, Pushing Daisies, Smallville, Supernatural, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and The Big Bang Theory
20th Century Television: 24, Bones, Prison Break, Dollhouse, Life on Mars, The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, and Futurama
Universal Media Studios: Kings, Knight Rider, The Office, Heroes
SciFi: Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, Stargate Atlantis
ABC Studios: Lost, Kyle XY, Ghost Whisperer, Wizard’s First Rule
More on the shows that are appearing and who will be appearing as more items are finalized.
Alexandre Aja’s Piranha Goes 3D
We at haven’t mentioned Alexandre Aja’s 2009 remake of Piranha until now, but something about this project feels incredibly spot-on to me. As Mickey Knox would say with a deranged grin and a smack of his chewing gum: “It’s fate.” STYD has received word that the film will now be shown theatrically in 3D. Are we really going to be privy to reaching out and swatting away thousands of fresh water Jaws imitators chewing viciously at the knees of nubile, arrogant life guards? Even if you think the yo-yo scene in Friday the 13th Part III was a complete jip, and passed on Beowulf, how can you not want to see this?
Here’s a list of reasons to persuade you: 1) Aja’s High Tension had several beautifully intense, stylish, macabre and original scenes for a modern horror film, but he lost control of the film’s more serious tone. Piranhas are tone-deaf. 2) The release is July 24th, 2009, which is perfect. Summer camps, rope swings over the water, night swims et al. Tis the season of Jaws, tis the times of less adventurous, more localized family summering. And in these movie months of overcompensating comic book movies et al, Piranha already has a built-in old school charm we’ve long missed. More $200 million robot drama? Another movie based on toys? I want to watch a 3D movie where huge audiences continually scream and laugh at killer fish. 3) It’s a remake and while the 1978 Joe Danta/John Sayles original has its champions (and it’s worth a watch), c’mon, this is not sacrilege. This movie needs to be remade. This movie was made to be remade. 5) The log line: “In Lake Havasu, Arizona, a tremor causes the lake’s floor to open, setting free scores of prehistoric piranhas.” 6) Piranha-vision 7) Sharks finally get a vacation. 
What a ticket-stub.
Interview: Hot Rod’s Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer
On July 24th, I had the chance to sit down with Hot Rod and Lonely Island trio Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer. You can tell instantly that these three guys have been friends since 7th grade. They play off each other like they’ve been doing it for many years. The interview was probably the funniest roundtable I’ve done to date. These are not the type of guys who answer questions with any bit of pretension. They know who they are, they know why they are here, and more importantly they know how to tell a funny story.
You can listen to the full roundtable interview below. After the jump we have included a time-coded chapter listing, so that you can skip to the good parts. I highly recommend the story of The Whoopee Boys poster/screening, which begins around 23 minutes in.
00:02 Discussing The Hotel Water Bottles that look like the Plutonium containers from Back to the Future
00:20 The Emmy nomination for “Dick in a Box”
01:00 Learning from the Short Films
01:20 Hollywood: We call it “tinseltown”
01:40 Learning how the Hollywood Crew works
02:45 The SNL Schedule vs. The Hollywood Schedule
03:40 The Location of Lonely Island
04:15 The Dramatic One: Jorma Rents Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
05:00 Late Arrivals
05:15 Responsible for the Rise of YouTube
06:40 Growing up in Berkley with a Sense of Humor
08:00 Before Lonely Island: “We call ourselves the Dudes now, back then we called ourselves the Fellas. A lot’s changed!”
09:20 Finding a Cast: The Difficulty of Low Budget Short Films vs. Hollywood/SNL: “On the Movie set it was a lot easier to get our actors to show up because they were contractually bound and paid.”
10:40 Lack of Resources Sometimes Spawns Creativity
11:05 The “Cool Beans” Scene: “I think we lost a few people on the crew that day!”
12:00 Finding the Scene in Editing
13:15 The Cool Beans Scene is the Most Liked and Most Disliked Sequence at Test Screenings
13:45 The Influence of the Movie “Rad”: “It’s nothing like E.T. But we wanted it to have that tonal quality of the movies from our childhood.”
14:40 1986: The Best Year of All Time “Until 88″
15:20 Andy’s Dream of Being on Saturday Night Live
16:30 Getting You Ass Kicked By Ian McShane
17:00 Fight Training
17:40 Stunt Training: “I was on the bike a lot but I never got airborne”
19:20 The Origins of Hot Rod
20:00 What’s Next?: Back to SNL at the end of September
20:20 Staying Together as a Team
21:00 Originally Written for Will Farrell
21:45 The March/Riot Sequence
22:20 The Soundtrack is Getting Released
22:45 The Soundtrack: Essentially Europe’s The Final Countdown Album
23:30 The Story of the The Whoopee Boys Poster
27:55 The SNL Writing Process
Lindsay Lohan Hits New Low With Another DUI
Lindsay Lohan Hits New Low With Another DUI
This isn’t a typo, or an old story that got recycled. This happened THIS MORNING, July 24th, 2007 around 2am! Believe it or not, Lindsay Lohan has once again been arrested for drunk driving and drug possession.
Lohan was pulled over just after 2am on Main Street near the Civic Center in Santa Monica, after her vehicle was observed chasing another vehicle. Police determined that LiLo had been drinking, and arrested her for drunk driving and driving on a suspended license.
The kicker? The Mean Girls actress was found to have cocaine in her pocket when officers booked her. And while she refused a Breathalyzer test when she was pulled over, later at the police station she blew a .12, far above California’s .08 legal limit. Keep in mind, that was after she’d had some time to get the alcohol out of her system.
But, alas, Lindsay is loose again. She was released on $25,000 bail until her arraignment on August 23rd. Any way you want to look at it, it’s really hard to believe that anyone (especially a girl with so much going for her) would so completely try to flush her life down the toilet so many times.