Category: Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Posted on
by

Actress Gigi Edgley, probably best known to American audiences as Chiana on Farscape, has another talent: fire twirling. She’s been performing at the weekly Huntington Beach street fair with (I think) her boyfriend, and plugged the show at the latest Farscape convention in Burbank last month. My parents, also Scapers, set up a trip with their fan meetup group and invited the two of us along.

Last night we carpooled down to Huntington Beach, arriving around 7:00. The fair runs Tuesday evenings from 5-9pm, and they block off several blocks of Main street near the pier for vendors, a farmer’s market, and performers. We didn’t see anyone else from the group where we were supposed to meet, but we did see someone carrying flaming torches (and someone else carrying what appeared to be a giant unicycle) on the opposite corner of the intersection.

Gigi started with a “warm-up” twirling a long pole with flames at either end, then Jamie came in juggling flaming torches. There was a tongue-in-cheek magic trick in which she made him “disappear.” Somewhere along the line he did some tricks on a normal-sized unicycle (including jumping over a kid’s legs with it) — while juggling. Then Gigi started swinging around chains with torches on the ends. The whole show concluded with Jamie juggling atop a twelve-foot-high unicycle.

After the show, Gigi recognized my dad’s Farscape hat, and came over to talk for a bit. (My parents have been to a lot of Farscape conventions, and my mom tends to go for the autograph signings and meet-the-actors events.) At this point we did run into two other people from the meetup group.

Afterward we (me & Katie, my parents, and the others from the fan group) went to dinner at Fred’s, which was…slow. We were in line by 8:00 at the latest, and didn’t get out until almost 10:30.

Posted on
by

Several months ago I was browsing the local Blockbuster video store for a movie to rent, and I stumbled across one that made me laugh out loud. It’s the title on the right, and you’ll see why if you compare it to the rather more well-known title on the left.

I mean, seriously, look how carefully they tried to match the source material.

  • The title, Alien vs. Hunter, as close as possible to the original Alien vs. Predator, carefully using only descriptive names.
  • The logo design, with the TLA (three-letter acronym) in large type and the full title in small type below it.
  • The layout on the packaging, with close-ups of the two creature’s heads, one on each side.
  • The monochrome design, using green instead of blue.
  • The creature designs, one with an elongated head and nasty-looking teeth, the other wearing a mask.
  • Even the font on the full title is similar.

I have to admit I haven’t watched either of them, so I have no idea whether this attention to detail pervades the actual movie. But I can seriously imagine someone not paying close attention picking up the wrong movie by mistake.

On the same trip, I found another video called Transmorphers — by the same production company, it turns out (big surprise) — but they didn’t try nearly as hard to match the packaging to anything Transformers-related. Still, for a good laugh, look through the titles of movies by The Asylum — I think Snakes on a Train may actually trump both titles.

Posted on
by

[Tonight] we went up to Anaheim to see a showing of The Nightmare Before Christmas. It was the new 3-D version, and it was at a theater (Cinema City) that looked astonishingly like the Irvine Spectrum theater on the inside (in decor, not layout), but wasn’t an Edwards or Regal theater. We wondered if it had been built or renovated right before the whole industry went through its consolidation phase a few years back.

There were maybe 12-15 people in the theater by the time it started, all adults. Perhaps some high-schoolers at the youngest. Naturally the pre-movie programming was aimed at children. It’s animated, right?

The movie was good, as always. It was the second time we’d seen the 3D version, which works quite well, though there was one problem with the presentation: This theater uses all digital projection, and the resolution isn’t quite as high as it should be. In scenes with high contrast or fast movement, we could see the pixels at the borders.

Editor’s note: I’ve replaced a rather sparse imported tweet with a more thorough bit from my LiveJournal that I wrote a few days later.

Posted on
by

Something like 10 years ago, Katie saw a self-storage place in which the opening S was unlit, making it read, “Elf Storage.” She’s been looking for another one ever since, and we finally caught one in Newport Beach a few months ago. This one was even better, because the S had actually fallen off.

Of course, there are other things in the area that could easily come out of a Dungeons & Dragons manual. Such as this Kobold Construction truck.

And then there’s the fact that all fire engines in Orange County are labeled ORC.

Let’s not forget the previously-blogged Hobbit Center in Laguna Beach.

Hobbit Center

And that’s not even getting into all the Tolkien-inspired street names in Lake Forest…

Posted on
by

Finally watched A Scanner Darkly this weekend. Better than I expected. One sequence pulled me out of the film, though, and only because I live in Orange County.

In the middle of the film, several characters start a road trip to San Diego. They start on the 5 freeway in Anaheim and drive south until the car breaks down in Irvine. Then they ride in a tow truck back up to Anaheim.

The problem: They used real backgrounds of that stretch of the freeway, but showed them out of sequence. Shots alternate between characters as they hold a conversation.

First you see the squarish beige office buildings lining the freeway near Jeffrey in Irvine. Then you jump 3-4 miles north to the edge of Santa Ana, where you can see a blue glass-lined building in the background near Fourth St. Then you jump back down to the beige buildings. Then up to Santa Ana again. Then down to the office buildings. Back up to Santa Ana. Down to the office buildings again, which finally give way to The Market Place (you can see the giant purple sign as it goes past).

Now I understand how all those Chicago residents felt watching The Dark Knight.

Although thinking about it, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me if it had been set somewhere generic, and just happened to use local backgrounds.

Ah, Hollywood Geography!

Posted on
by

Looking at the “all ages” shelf in Borders, which seems to be almost entirely made up of novels about vampires and dragons, I noticed that the cover to the Vampire Academy novel Frostbite looked awfully familiar. I walked over to the DVD section of the store and picked up a copy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2.

This may be the most recognized image from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I just could not believe that the cover designer would copy the layout so closely.

»All pages site-wide with this tag