Today at the office, Jake made the startling and unsettling discovery that Cinemark’s Front-Row Joe is not a new creation, but an ancient abomination, most likely one of the cinema-trailer Elder Gods bent on bringing about Ragnarök.

But I suspect he’s still mostly a West Coast phenomenon; the trailers I’ve been nostalgic for were much cooler. And they’re on YouTube!

Oldest is the never-forgettable high-hat of the General Cinema trailer:

Which, like all great things, was eventually bastardized with a horrifying “update” featuring inexplicably cannibalistic CG candy (I blame the California Raisins and of course that iconic HBO intro clip:)

General Cinema’s most shining moment, though, was the brief genius of the Space Ride Through the Concessions Belt, and its eternally baffling non-sequitur finale. (Popcorn… candy… throw away my trash… okay I see where you’re going with this, GC… and so the message of this film is obviously… whaaaaa?!?)

Incidentally, the Space Candy trailer was well-known enough to get a most excellent parody version on MST3k in the Teenagers from Outer Space episode.

And on the topic of 80s iconography and cool YouTube videos, here’s my new favorite video on the internet, a music video for the song “DVNO”, which is apparently by a Daft Punk-esque group called “Justice” that I never heard of. (via the Drawn! blog).

On his blog, Lore Sjöberg announced his new project: a weekly video podcast for his Alt Text column at Wired. The first episode rates Link’s weapons.

According to his blog, more will be available on Wired’s YouTube page or via iTunes subscription.

Seeing as how it’s a video with drawings, and more often than not will talk about videogames, I foresee the inevitable comparisons to Zero Punctuation. I implore the internet not to go down this path. This is a time for celebration, not consternation. Having two of the funniest people on the internet providing material twice a week don’t mean nothing but a good thing.

Besides, Lore did it first.

If we could get Dave Campbell to turn his new Live from LA blog on ABC into a weekly podcast, then the trifecta would be complete.

Via the RiffTrax blog, Bill Corbett shares a relaxing meditation with us all.

Learn it, memorize it, and go in peace.

Over the past week or so, I’ve seen a bunch of links to “How to Draw a Face” on the comedy site The Sneeze. (Which is a consistently hilarious site, by the way, and not just for “Steve, Don’t Eat It!”)

That’s a neat story, yes, but nothing’s made me crack up like giving his four-year-old raisins for Christmas.

At the end of last month, ABC launched a new viral marketing campaign for the upcoming season of “Lost.” It’s an ad for the series’ fictional airline, with a press release announcing that Oceanic would start flying again after the Flight 815 disaster, and a promo website called FlyOceanicAir.com.

And oh no did you see that?!? The website got hacked by a mysterious stranger with some mysterious connection to Flight 815! I am intrigued! Who is this strange whistleblower? How did he manage to hack into a Flash movie? Why did he spend so much time working on jamming-your-signal visuals and sfx in After Effects, instead of just putting his movie on top of the other one? And most importantly: how do you get that constant week-old beard thing going on, anyway — whenever I try it, I go from “late 70s prom photo” straight to “werewolf in mid-transition,” with no roguishly handsome interim.

But ho!, what’s this? Has my eagle eye spotted another URL cleverly hidden inside the hacked transmission? What other, greater mysteries are there for me to unfold?

So yeah, I’m not a fan of the “alternate reality games.” They always devolve into a bunch of internet shut-ins poring over rehashes of puzzles from the back page of Games magazine, all to get to a website that plays ineptly-written videos performed by struggling actors.

But I’ve got to give them credit for this much: at least with this one, they kept the “you’ve stumbled onto a secret part of the internets!” nonsense to a minimum. You don’t even have to enter the “top secret” URL; our man Sam has cleverly hacked flyoceanicair.com to automatically jump to the game site, so you don’t have to pretend you’re discovering anything.

And apparently, he’s hired ABC’s camera and lighting crews to film him as he explores the mystery. I don’t want to tell you how to do your business, Sam, but maybe you’d have more time to find your girlfriend if you didn’t have to look at dailies and have meetings with the composer to make sure you’ve got just the right note of tension in the background music.

But really, the stuff I’m making fun of is the best part of this attempt at an ARG. The thing might not have anything remotely original involved (at least yet), but they cut out the artifice and went high on the production values. So it’s a bunch of “click here” and “find-the-pixel” puzzles, but they’re really nice-looking find-the-pixel puzzles with music and HD video. Hey, it worked for Myst.

And Sam: when you find Sonya, tell her to have that mole looked at.

There’s a guy at Carnegie Mellon named Johnny Chung Lee, who’s been doing experiments with the Wii remote, then putting his results up on YouTube.

The ones I’ve seen take advantage of the fact that the Wii remote is an IR camera, not just a standard IR-output remote, which flips the whole method of interactivity with the Wii on its head. As a result, he’s turned it into a low-cost interactive whiteboard, a Minority Report-style multi-touch finger-tracking system, and coolest of all, a VR head-tracking system:

The last one I definitely want to try sometime (he’s included all the necessary software with his demos), and would make for some awesome games if developers could get clued in and start taking advantage of this. When “Wii as lightsaber” is the coolest idea anybody’s proposed for the system, it’s clear that they need input from clever guys like this. (And Nintendo desperately needs to hire this guy as soon as he’s available).

The biggest problem with the internet is that you’ve got to wade through so much crap to get to the good stuff. With this whole “web-logging” fad, that means to see funny pictures of talking cats, or copyright-violating YouTube videos, you’ve first got to make it through reams of text with the blogger’s “personality.”

And of course, we’re talking about the “personality” of folks who have nothing better to do than write on the internet about cat pictures and YouTube videos. I had to give up Boing Boing because I got tired of hearing how DRM eviscerates babies. I can’t count how many videogame blogs I’ve had to give up. You’ll be reading along and then hit one post that just makes you say, “Aw man, why couldn’t you just have shut up and give me the links already?” Why can’t more blogs be like this one, without content or personality?

I’ve been reading Cartoon Brew for a while, digging through big, steaming mounds of self-satisfied attitude in order to see cool clips of animation I hadn’t seen before, or the occasional rare piece of concept art or model sheet for works I’d never even heard of. Sure, the tone is insufferably pompous, but hey, neat pictures!

What killed it was this post bitching about some admittedly lame-sounding (the description claims they’re looking for “the dopest animator in the business”) animation contest, which will be judged by Loren Bouchard. The problem isn’t the objection to the contest itself, but the obnoxious rant surrounding it.

Instead of just complaining about the nebulous ownership and rights issues involved with submitting original work to a website for a contest, the blogger instead decided to go off on an internet tirade against Bouchard and, by extension, Adult Swim. (Note that “Adult Swim” is surrounded by quotes of disdain; you can almost hear him sneering and spitting out the words as if it pains him to even admit such a thing exists). He says he’d never heard of Bouchard or of his latest show, “Lucy, Daughter of the Devil” — that’s reasonable enough for most folks, but not for anybody who claims to be an authority on animation. Along with claims that Bouchard’s work is an “embarrassment” to the art form, he puts up a still from “Home Movies” for true animation aficionados to shake their heads and go “tsk, tsk.”

Now, finding an arrogant douchebag on the internet is hardly a notable achievement, so why not just leave a nasty comment after the post and then move on? Why bother writing about it? Because it misses the point to such a colossal degree, and it’s a perfect example of the internet’s creepy underbelly. (Well, the other creepy underbelly; there’s not much we can do about the main one).

The blogger spent months using the blog to shill his book, which celebrates 1950s animation styles. The posts would have examples of stills along with sycophantic descriptions of the artists responsible. Now, a lot of this art (including the example used for the cover) stands out to me as a low point in animation history — the 80s were crass and soulless, sure, but at least the character designs, while bland, were usually appealing on some level. Most of the stuff included in this collection was cheaply-produced and just plain ugly.

But to each his own, right? Just because I don’t see the value in it doesn’t mean there’s no value in it. Isn’t that the whole point of animation, even? I never made it far in my classes in college, but I know that I saw more than a lifetime’s worth of sample films and short films, and by far the bulk of them sucked.

That wasn’t the point; the idea was to have an idea, and to make it come alive. The real beauty of animation isn’t the same beauty as other visual art; technically perfect stuff can come across as the most bland. The true soul of animation is this overriding idea that anything can happen, at any time. It’s the one art from that truly rewards experimentation and innovation more than anything else.

And what should be obvious to anybody who’s not dense, and who’ll take a second to get his head out of his ass and pay attention, is that Bouchard’s innovation is in recognizing how to pool together some of the funniest voice actors available, get spontaneous and naturalistic dialogue out of them, and apply that to animation. That’s huge, and nobody else is doing that.

To take a still frame from “Home Movies” and use that as an indicator of the entire work is so incredibly stupid, it’s hard to imagine a cogent thought process behind it. It’s not even a subjective “well that’s just your opinion, man!” Like it or not, failing to recognize the stylistic achievement of these series is just plain objectively wrong.

But the bigger question is: why does this always happen? Reading the posts on “Cartoon Brew” is like listening to a cross between the most obnoxious comic book store clerk and the most self-important indie rock fan — the artists are all sell-outs, and the “fans” are all fools who don’t appreciate what true art is. Why does obsessive fandom always breed such colossal arrogance and douchebaggery?

I realize that fun with Babel Fish translations is old news, but I’m really enjoying how it handled this Russian review of “Ice Station Santa”, the first episode of Sam & Max season 2.

The only part that I can read is the reviewer gives a 55% (yikes! whatever happened to glasnost?), but the translation makes it sound so much worse. It’s not a game review, it’s prophecy, or the Book of Revelations. I recommend listening to Carmina Burana while reading the translation:

They rose from the ashes. They replaced measurement. They returned in order to take vengeance upon nasty, unreasonable lyudishkam. They will stop not before how. Name by them — the not on the staff police.

Telltale is today proposed to love and to respect, as almost the main stronghold of classical kvestostroya. I love it for a feeling of humor, respect for the rich dzhedayskoye past and blame for the excess regalias. Disorderly to poke by mouse is accepted in fleshe — where here classics?

Division on “good” and “poor” is terrifically popular in Americans. Good Lincoln — poor Lincoln, good Hugh Bliss — Poor Hugh Bliss, Good Santa… Certain, to always simpler translate the kept balance means from the feet to the head, having at one stroke overcome division between reality and absurdity, than to stretch the chain of analogies, to harden natures. Although it is complicated to require depth from the comics, it will not injure to adventure. Alas to me, alas.

Whom now you will astonish by evil Santa By klausom? Why not Iisus, not mother Theresa or check, at the worst? Idea to scrape the favorite of the children Of grincha with the pot-bellied grandfather, who spoils flues, zalyapana by the hands of lazy scenarios. Telltale — not of the squeamish. They began from the robot- philosopher, set By klausom to the house of detectives. Hopes, that house will destroy, and the detectives remove- after all of vosvoyasi, were not realized. Familiar views cut eyes. Finally darkens the mood of rendezvous with Soda Peppers, by debilovatymi Fricks from Season 1. Trinity lurked in the cottage in the region of the north pole, where heroes it will bring in in to the flame of retribution. And instead of the brutal handling above bezdaryami max it fills up by their snows. On whose it to side?

But the gone balmy old man sat down inside and he allows to approach no one to himself, firing from the automaton. In order to banish its seized demon, for associates it is necessary to find… not priest, no. Four riders of apocalypse, four tiny figurines. Rejoice, reactionaries, sobiratel’stvo returned.
[...]
Azh it was wanted filth to make ready. It heard, sent to kopam and President rat with the beetle after the cavity was capable to the coup d’etat… Probably, they will lie.

How to undertake the baking of means, developers decided to probe the related connections. Here to you, if you please, the entire family of beetles in the collection. In rat also it did not manage without the wife and the son. Son, by the way, is sick with the strange matershchinnoy misfortune and pours “pipami” through each word. To crown it all us they will introduce to the daughter To lefti, and at the same time also by its bar. Thus boarded up bar, where they released earlier not for what honey cakes. Excess occasion four additional series to hold pigeons more closely for the apartments.

What point-and-click horrors hast thou wrought, Telltale?