Well it’s been about a month since Gen 2 was released, so that means it’s time for another event to get Pokémon GO players logging in again. Yesterday, the game was patched to make evolution items a guaranteed drop for weekly streaks (at long freaking last), and today Niantic has announced a new made-up event that does not correspond with an actual holiday.
Chuck Barris, whose game show empire included “The Dating Game,” “The Newlywed Game” and that infamous factory of cheese, “The Gong Show,” has died. He was 87.
Barris died of natural causes Tuesday afternoon at his home in Palisades, New York, according to publicist Paul Shefrin, who announced the death on behalf of Barris’ family.
Barris made game show history right off the bat, in 1966, with “The Dating Game,” hosted by Jim Lange. The gimmick: a young female questions three males, hidden from her view, to determine which would be the best date. Sometimes the process was switched, with a male questioning three females. But in all cases, the questions were designed by the show’s writers to elicit sexy answers.
Celebrities and future celebrities who appeared as contestants included Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Martin and a pre-“Charlie’s Angels” Farrah Fawcett, introduced as “an accomplished artist and sculptress” with a dream to open her own gallery.
After the show became a hit on both daytime and nighttime TV, the Barris machine accelerated. New products included “The Newlywed Game,” “The Parent Game,” “The Family Game” and even “The Game Game.”
The Zero Escape games saw an inauspicious start in 2009 with Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors—otherwise known as 999—a mystery slash sci-fi visual novel for the original DS. Coming after a wave of successful adventure game-meets-visual novel hybrids on DS, ranging from Phoenix Wright to Hotel Dusk, 999 became a cult hit, spawning a series that culminated in 2016’s Zero Time Dilemma. By now, you’ve probably heard Zero Escape fans talking about how cool the series is, and publisher Spike Chunsoft is working to ensure that word of mouth has someplace to go with Zero Escape: The Nonary Games, a compilation of the first two titles in the series.
The Sword Art Online the Movie: Ordinal Scale anime has sold 1,439,149 million tickets to earn 2,026,861,020 yen (about US$18.2) at the Japanese box office as of Monday. The film ranked #10 at the Japanese box office in its fifth weekend.
The film opened in Japan on February 18, and sold about 308,376 tickets for 425,762,760 yen (about US$3.76 milion) in its opening weekend. The film was the first anime film to rank #1 in both weekend attendance and weekend box office receipt totals since Makoto Shinkai’s your name. The film also set the opening-weekend record among films distributed by Aniplex.
The film also surpassed US$1.35 million in ticket sales in its opening weekend in North American theaters. Aniplex of America and Eleven Arts opened the film in the United States on March 9 after a Hollywood premiere on March 1. The film also screened in Canada during the March 17-19 weekend. The film will return to U.S. theaters with an English dub starting on April 22.
The film also opened in Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, and Mexico over the past five weeks, and it ranked in the top 10 at the box office in all four countries. It earned 150 million yen (US$1.3 million) and ranked #3 in its first weekend in Taiwan. It earned 80 million yen (US$700,000) in South Korea and 50 million yen (US$400,000) in Singapore. The film is opening in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, and Italy, and dubbed versions are playing in Germany, Mexico, France, and Italy. As of Tuesday, the film has sold 700,000 tickets for the equivalent of more than 600 million yen (about US$5.32 million) in foreign box office ticket sales outside Japan.
This character in the original version of the film that met a much more sinister demise at the hands of Darth Vader. Continue reading
Lucasfilm has released a must-watch featurette for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story that focuses on bringing back our favorite villain, Darth Vader. The video includes interviews with director Gareth Edwards and more as they talk about bringing the character back to the big screen after all these years.
This new featurette also shows off some cool behind-the-scenes footage from the set of the film showing these momentous moments being shot.
If you’re a Darth Vader fan, you’ll definitely want to watch this!
It’s long been known that the original ending for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was completely scraped for the ending that we ended up seeing in the film. In the alternate ending the plan was for Jyn and Cassian to live to fight another day.
In an interview with EW, co-writer Gary Whitta talked about coming up with the ending, saying: Continue reading
Welcome to Walt Disney World! All together, WDW comprises 43 square miles! That’s two times the size of Manhattan, or roughly the size of Boston. Within the confines of this vast are four theme parks: (Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom), two water parks: (Blizzard Beach, and Typhoon Lagoon), 34 hotels (see later), two nighttime-entertainment areas (Downtown Disney, and The Boardwalk), five golf courses, campground, over 100 restaurants, four interconnected lakes, a sports complex, three convention venues, a nature preserve, and a transportation system consisting of four-lane highways, elevated monorails, and a network of canals. PHEW!
They have 60,000 employees – well they had 60,000 employees … also known as “cast members.” That makes them the largest single-site employer in the United States!
If this were a real book, I’d go into more, but instead, I’ll go right ahead and start talking about the best times to go – so, here we go! Continue reading
“Very, very reliable sources” have informed the White House that Hasbro, the current owners of the classic board game “Clue,” will announce a new, revised version of the game. According to White House Press Secretary Melissa McCarthy, the new edition will be “tremendous.” Sales will be, “Yuge. Bigly yuge.” There are some tweaks to the game mechanics, which we will go into detail after the jump. Continue reading
The world of comic books has lost another legend, as artist Bernie Wrightson, known primarily for his work on horror comics and being the co-creator of DC Comics‘ iconic horror hero Swamp Thing, has passed. The legendary artists lost his long battle with brain cancer on March 18, 2017, at the age of 69. His wife Liz Wrightson posted the news on Bernie’s official Facebook page. Aside from Swamp Thing, Bernie Wrightson was also well known for his work for Heavy Metal magazine, as well as his years-ahead-of-its-time illustrations of the Frankenstein monster.Wrightson was born in Dundalk, Maryland in 1948, and was raised on a steady diet of EC horror comics. In 1966, Wrightson began working for The Baltimore Sun newspaper as an illustrator at the age of 18, and it was in the following year, after meeting artist Frank Frazetta at a comic-book convention in New York City, that he decided to create and illustrate his own stories. In 1968, he showed pages of his artwork to DC Comics editor Dick Giordano, and he was then given his first freelance assignment.
In 1968 he drew his first professional comic book story, “The Man Who Murdered Himself,” which appeared in House of Mystery No. 179 (March–April 1969). He then became the “go-to” illustrator for horror and mystery anthology comics for DC, which were very popular back in the early ’70s. He did contribute some work to Marvel books at this time as well, such as Chamber of Darkness and Tower of Shadows. Essentially, he was THE horror guy in comics at the time. It was in 1971 that Wrightson co-created Swamp Thing with writer Len Wein, a character that would go on to become a pillar of DC Comics publishing, and become the subject of one of the very first DC Comics films outside of Superman: The Movie.
In January 1974, he left DC to work at Warren Publishing, and in 1975 he would begin what many consider to be his greatest achievement, when he spent seven years drawing approximately 50 detailed pen-and-ink illustrations to accompany an edition of Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein. Wrightson’s take on the monster was unique and terrifying, and looked totally different that anything we’d seen before in movies or television. In the late ’80s, he returned to DC, where he drew the now-classic Batman mini-series The Cult.
In 1983 Bernie Wrightson began a long and fruitful collaboration with the modern master of horror Stephen King, when he illustrated the comic book adaptation of the King written horror film Creepshow. This ended up leading to many other collaborations with King, including illustrations for the novel Cycle of the Werewolf, which became the movie Silver Bullet, and the restored edition of King’s apocalyptic opus, The Stand. He also lent his talents to Wolves of the Calla, the fifth installment of King’s Dark Tower series.
In more recent years, Wrightson did production design for the Reavers in the 2005 Joss Whedon film Serenity, and illustrated many comics for publishers like Bongo, Image Comics, Dark Horse Comics, and Kitchen Sink Press. He ended up retiring from comics in January of 2017 following complications from brain surgery. In addition to his wife Liz, he is survived by two sons, John and Jeffrey, and one stepson, Thomas Adamson. You can read his full obituary on his official website by clicking here.
Is there a particular favorite comic from Bernie Wrightson that speaks to you the most? Let us know down below in the comments.
