...Or "How the Cast and Crew Have Fun on the Set of The Big Bang Theory."

They decided to surprise Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady and Steve Molaro during a live taping of the show. And boy, did they ever.

Bazinga!

This would be one taping you'd brag about attending to your great-great-great grandchildren. You might even reference it on your tombstone.

EDIT: A longer version with a lot more going on.

EDIT II: The whole thing from a single camera source.

Get ready for more Star Wars, and possibly further incarnations of your favorite George Lucas properties: The Walt Disney Company is buying LucasFilm for $4.05 billion, with plans to release Star Wars: Episode 7 in 2015.

Edit Episode I: Full press release reveals that this includes LucasArts, Industrial Light and Magic and Skywalker Sound.

Edit Episode II: Fox retains rights to all existing Star Wars films, so that would be a "no" to the Original Trilogy getting a proper re-release on DVD/Blu-ray.

( Full article behind the cut for linkphobic )

He announced it on Facebook.

In a Facebook thread stared by Ethan Van Sciver, he stated, "I would like to Rob Liefeld to draw Badrock Obama. But he won’t."

A mashup of Barack Obama and Rob Liefeld’s Badrock from Youngblood presumably. Liefeld replied, "Ethan, I am retired from comics but you have my blessing, it would look great if you drew it."

Somewhere, Captain America with the bouncing boobs sheds a single tear.

Edit: Lifeld has since clarified via Twitter, saying, I am NOT retired from comics. Taking some time off and will be back at it soon. Thanks! No I am not permanently retired from comics. I’m too young! Momentarily, yes. Geez, let a guy enjoy some R and R
My mistake is that I don’t give facebook comments the same weight as I do twitter rants. Lesson learned.

Dammit, Rob.

http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2012/10/16/63282-a-hobbit-is-chubby-but-is-he-padded/#more-63282

A thorough argument for the idea that Peter Jackson will not simply stretch out the story of The Hobbit to accommodate three movies, as some fear, but rather will use other material of Tolkien -- including stories that would never have been in any movie otherwise -- to enhance the story, its world, and its relationship to the Lord of the Rings movies.

Also, for those worried about the length of the movies: the first one, according to the linked article, has been confirmed to be 2 hours, 44 minutes long -- 16 minutes shorter than the theatrical cut of The Fellowship of the Ring (the shortest of the Lord of the Rings movies).

*Edited due to weird HTML.*

An interesting blog post by Laura Shamas, examining this year's films The Hunger Games, Snow White and the Huntsman, and Brave, with an intriguing conclusion as to how the three are related.

Warning: there are spoilers for each of the movies.

Also, I'd just like to urge all of you who haven't seen Brave to do so ASAP.  ^_^

Hello fandom_loungers! I am here today to invite you to check out Narnia Fic Exchange!



The Narnia Fic Exchange is an annual anonymous fic exchange, similar to Secret Santas and other fanwork gift exchanges.

Participants submit a request, with prompt ideas such as characters, situations, and themes. The mods match these requests with another participant, who then writes the requested fic. All participants receive a fic based on their request/prompt. The authors are anonymous until all the stories have been posted.

You can join us by signing up HERE!

Read through the rules HERE.
Read through the submission guidelines HERE.
Sign up for beta duty HERE.
Sign up for pinch hitting HERE.

Important dates:

Sign-ups open: 11 June
Sign-ups end: 20 June
Prompts sent out: 25 June
Fics due: 28 July
Posting begins: 5/6 August



If you have any questions, feel free to email the mods at narniaficexchange@gmail.com

From MetaFilter:

"In 1999, 23-year-old singer-songwriter Bree Sharp recorded "David Duchovny," a fangirl ode to the male star of The X-Files. After the demo tape proved popular in Duchovny's trailer, two X-Files assistants created a celebrity-filled music video as a gag for the show Christmas party. A grainy bootleg of the video quickly went pre-Youtube-viral among X-Philes. Twelve years later, a high-definition version of the David Duchovny video sees daylight for the first time."

As someone who has had that grainy bootleg on my hard drive since the days of usenet, I am both ridiculously excited and completely earwormed by this.

The MetaFilter post contains the list of celebs who appear in the video and all kinds of Bree Sharp trivia. And the final paragraph is worth the price of admission:

THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE MONOTONE
David Duchovny currently stars in the Showtime dramedy Californication. At age 51, he continues to be brooding and comely.

Hey JFers! I'm here to pimp an event I'm running on livejournal. It's inspired by Fandom March Madness (with permission), and it is centered around anime/manga fandoms.

Bring your fannish passion, your gifs, and your game. The 2012 Anime/Manga Fandom Showdown is an all out tournament to determine the best and brightest of anime/manga fandom. The competition will start tomorrow with the first prelim round.

I've tried my best to include fandoms of all types- from old to new, so there will hopefully be something for every anime/manga fan, whether casual or hardcore.



The above banner links to the community. All the info is in the userinfo and the introduction post, and there are resources for pimping it on multiple websites if you feel so inclined.

I hope to see you there!

NBC to reboot the Munsters as a visually spectacular one-hour drama.

(I'm not sure what to make of the drama part. But the last time I was cynical about a reboot it turned out to be Star Trek XI and boy did I feel stupid. So maybe I'll just keep my mouth shut.)

No, really. They're making a Doctor Who movie--completely unrelated to the show.

Doctor Who Movie Coming From Harry Potter Director David Yates



DISCUSS.

So, I figure since people are allowed to promote their communities and things here, I can do this.

My nephew will be on tomorrow's episode of FRINGE!

He is the goth boy in the car.
See?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-BUEk2_Ov4

0.07 seconds into the commercial right side of the screen.

Watch it! Tell your friends. Then watch it again!

I'm also thinking that there needs to be a community for this sort of promotion but I'm too lazy to actually set one up. Thoughts?

The movie now has a poster and a new trailer.

I would strongly advise against reading the comments, because well, fanboys.

Edit: HOLD IT! Subtitled trailer now online.

Who fans should enjoy these two videos, both from the wrap party of The End of Time back in '09, and only recently released to the public. (For those unaware, this episode marked the end of a number of cast and crewmembers' run on the show, including showrunner Russell T. Davies, executive producer Julie Gardner, and previous Doctor David Tennant.)

First up, a little danceathon featuring many members of the cast and crew, to the tune of "I'm Gonna Be (500 miles)" by the Proclaimers.

(Struggling with embed, so here's a link.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s4Czla6tXc&feature=player_embedded

Second, a fabulous and cheeky ditty sung by John Barrowman, Catherine Tate and David Tennant regarding Russell and Julie's decision to bring back Doctor Who.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giaMRyn47Xg&feature=related

My day = made.

The first footage from the live-action Ace Attorney movie directed by Takashi Miike showed up on a variety show in Japan recently.

The full trailer is set to debut next week.

Whedon completes secret "Much Ado About Nothing" film


Not much to say except :D!

ETA: NEWSFLASH!
Just learned from Whedon's main page... Alexis Denisof aka Wesley Wyndham-Pryce and Amy Acker aka Fred Burkle are Benedict and Beatrice. Discuss.

Hello fandom_loungers! I am here today to invite you to check out The Chronicles of Narnia Big Bang Challenge!

We're a small fandom, and this is our first Big Bang, so we're looking for more writers and artists (especially artists) to participate. Right now we're taking prompts for story ideas, so feel free to post any prompts you'd like!

Sign-ups for writers, artists, and betas open on Sunday, so watch the community for those posts. More information and the schedule found here.

We'd love to have lots of participants for our first round, so please check it out and join us!

So, somehow I landed a small gig at my old comic art school - they want me to teach a "how to draw manga" course. (It's a very small, community-run school, so I guess they had no problem overlooking my mediocre artistic prowess in favor of the fact that I'm the only one on staff that actually knows anything about manga.) The only problem is that, while my style is graphically very similar to manga, and I follow the Japanese pop culture market a lot, I don't actually *read* a lot of manga myself (in case anyone cares, I'm not hot about the way the production process impacts the storytelling and I find that a lot of stories suffer in terms of pacing and closure because of that. /thoughtsaboutyaoi.).

Ok, so here's the beef: one of my two classes is entirely composed of 11-12 year olds, and I don't know many good manga that fall into that demographic (the stuff I usually read - Urasawa, the Utena opus, and a few seinen - is definitely not suitable). I'm planning to invite the kids to bring their favorite books to class so we can discuss them together, but I'd like to bring myself up to speed and have something to propose to them. So fandom_lounge, throw at me your ideas about cool manga aimed at preteens: the more unusual, creative, and non-formulaic the better! I have some artists like Tezuka and Yoshihiro Togashi on my mind, but I wonder if the kids would find them dated. I'm also very interested about western artists that incorporate elements of the manga style, always falling in the same demographic (Alessandro Barbucci's stuff and graphic novels like Chew and I Kill Giants being among my favorites, but still not something I'd rec to a young'un).

Sorry about the wall of text, and thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Actor Zachary Quinto (Heroes, Star Trek reboot) has come out of the closet.

For one thing, he’s willing to unambiguously talk about his sexual orientation. His eight-month role in Angels (in America) was both “the most challenging thing I’ve ever done as an actor and the most rewarding” he says. Having to inhabit that terrible lost world, if only in his mind, took a toll. “And at the same time, as a gay man, it made me feel like there’s still so much work to be done, and there’s still so many things that need to be looked at and addressed.”

...Last year, the Times, in profiling him for Angels, noted that “the blogosphere is rife with speculation about his sexuality” but that “he prefers not to feed the rumor mill with either substantiation or dismissal.” That has changed. A little while later in our conversation, speaking of the cultural bipolarity that can see gay marriage legalized in New York in the same year that yet another gay teenager, Jamey Rodemeyer, was bullied and killed himself, Quinto says, “And again, as a gay man I look at that and say there’s a hopelessness that surrounds it, but as a human being I look at it and say ‘Why? Where’s this disparity coming from, and why can’t we as a culture and society dig deeper to examine that?’ We’re terrified of facing ourselves.”

Congratulations, Mr. Quinto.

Edit: criticalcricket wonders how his astral fiancee will take the news. Heee.

Edit the second: A blog post from Zachary Quinto himself, explaining things in his own words.

Edit III: Zachary Quinto reacts to the outpouring of support he's recieved via Twitter. Quinto's coming out inspired ABC's World News Now anchor Dan Kloeffler to come out on the air last night.

I figured I'd ask since I know there's a few wankas who're local to the area. My costume lineup is going to be Eartha Kitt!Catwoman, Storm, and Rose Bride!Anthy from Utena (it's been a while for that one!), though I'm still waffling about what days I'm wearing which thing.

Anyone? Bueller?