Chris Hardwick's Blog, page 1796

An Army of Dabbing Robots Set a New Guinness World Record

Sorry, dancing robot army, your world record has been beaten by… a dabbing robot army.



You might remember that record-setting robot dance party in the summer of 2017, where about 1000 dancing bots got their robo-groove on. Guinness World Records is at it again, this time verifying a new record of 1,372 robots dancing simultaneously and in perfect unison.

The event was set up by TIM S.p.A,. an Italian cell phone service company, Guinness World Records said on its web site. Over 1,300 Alpha 1S robots were meticulously placed and programmed to dance and yes, dab, in sync.

The aluminum and plastic robots measure just over one foot tall, which you would think would make them seem quite adorable, but their glowing, slightly menacing eyes are a bit unnerving. (If those blue eyes suddenly flipped to red, I’d get very nervous, myself.)

The dab-bots were created by UBTECH Robotics, the Chinese company that also set up the very first record-breaking dance party, reported Guinness World Records. When science fiction writers first imagined terrible robot armies, they probably never predicted there would actually be scientists working together to build one in 2018—to dance.

Do you think our future robot overlords will hold the dabbing against us? Tell us in the comments.

All Images: Guinness World Records

 

This GOLDEN GIRLS/TMNT Mashup Is the Perfect April Fool’s Remedy

April Fool’s Day is upon us, the day in which we try to figure out what cool movie or TV stories are real, and which ones are made to get us excited, only to pull the rug out from under us. The official Twitter account for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made a not so subtle attempt at an April Fool’s joke, but even if no-one believed the headline, they still created something to brighten our day.

EXCLUSIVE REVEAL Never-before-seen TMNT theme song. pic.twitter.com/Wg0z61aXUi

— TMNT (@TMNT) April 1, 2018

Aside from the fact that they used footage from the 2003 series and not the new series, we’re pretty sure Nickelodeon isn’t allowed to use the Golden Girls theme for one of their shows (well, maybe if the cartoon were on Nick at Nite or TV Land, but that’s a whole other discussion). The main question that we need to answer now is, which Golden Girl is each Turtle? Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first. Michaelangelo is Rose. No question. As for the rest, you can make decent arguments for any pairing. We’re going to go with: Donatello and Sophia, Leonardo and Dorothy, and Raphael and Blanche. For Splinter and April, we’d have to delve into Empty Nest territory. The wormholes this would create would be too deep even for us.

As you try to wade your way through what’s real and what’s not today, at least you know you have this mashup to make surviving it a little easier.

What do you think are the best Golden Girl/Turtle pairings? Let me know on Twitter @donnielederer or sound off in the comments below.

Images: Murakami-Wolf-Swenson/Touchstone Television

These stories are also golden, girl:

Funko makes the Golden Girls into Dorbz.
Golden Girls get a Clue (board game).
Golden Girls as puppets!

See How THE LAST JEDI Got the Thala-Siren’s Breasts Just Right (Exclusive)

One of the most poignant, most powerful moments in The Last Jedi came when famous Jedi and hero of the galaxy far, far away Luke Skywalker walked up to a massive sea monster, and milked its huge teat so he could drink raw green milk like it was a McDonald’s Shamrock Shake. It was a truly touching scene. However it only had the emotional impact it did because the giant alien cow-thingy known as a thala-siren looked so real, especially its sizable breasts that Mark Hamill got intimate with. That doesn’t happen by accident, though; it takes countless hours of craftsmanship from some of the world’s most talented–and truly hands-on–FX artists. And in this “exclusive” behind-the-scenes video, that inexplicably wasn’t included in the film’s home release, you can see how they got that nipple to look and feel oh-so-perfect.

Nerdist Presents “Creating the Thala-Siren,” an inside look from Lucasfilm’s Senior Creature FX artist Sam Donahue at all of the testing (and tasting) that he did in molding, crafting, and developing the most famous bosom in Star Wars history. Because director Rian Johnson only wanted the best, and that included making sure the mammary of his massive mammal merited Mark Hamill’s admiration.

Beautiful. When you’re caught up in an amazing cinematic moment you don’t think about all of the work that goes into making an alien teat look authentic, but somebody decided on whether it should be soft, hard, scabbed over, or long and thin. No wonder Mark Hamill told our Amy Ratcliffe the thala-siren’s breasts were “realistic.”

No, he really did. We wouldn’t joke around about something as serious as Luke Skywalker milking a space monster for its milk. Would we?

What do you think? Were the thala-siren’s breasts perfect? Did the nipple protrude just enough? Did the milk look authentic? We’re eager to drink up your thoughts on this very sincere topic in the comments below.

Featured image: Lucasfilm

 

Why Earth Isn’t Covered in Poop (or The Virtue of Dung Beetles)

To be or not to be? That is the question. Also, there’s a second question: Why isn’t the world covered in literal crap? The video below answers one of those conundrums: try to guess which one!



The clip above on the topic of worldwide crap production was posted by TED-Ed, the YouTube channel that’s previously given us critical enlightenment into issues such as why your cat is so dang weird. This time around we get a crash course on poop, and honestly it’s the most interesting poop 101 course since we learned why dogs eat their own warm gifts to the world.

And we’ll bet you didn’t even know the answer to why in the world the world isn’t covered in crap: Yes, it’s due to dung beetles. Dung beetles like this one:

Dung Beetle Rolling Two Balls of Dung. Image: Wikimedia / Sripathiharsha

Apparently these little guys, which are present on six out of the seven continents (no Antarctica for these little poop fiends), are just about everywhere there’s poop out in the wild. And they really like dung. Like, really like it.

Perhaps the best part of the video, aside from learning about all the really great ways dung beetles involve dung into their sex and social lives, is the fact that they literally eat dung from birth until death. These beetles are 100% dung fed and look at what life has animated simple dung into! Magical. Also, the longer tubes of dung these little guys roll around with are called “dung sausages.” But that’s just a bonus.

What do you think about the masses of dung beetles who keep a tidal wave of poop constantly at bay? Do you want to start a band called “Dung Sausages”? Let us know in the comments!

Featured image: TED-Ed

GIF: Giphy 

Science is wonderful:

The reason your cat keeps knocking stuff over.
How eating Tide Pods will kill you.
Can you really break a wine glass with your voice?

Jeff Goldblum Reads for Seymour Skinner in THE SIMPSONS’ “Steamed Hams”

Is there anything Jeff Goldblum won’t do for our very personal amusement? The guy rates tattoos of himself, answers the most bizarre Google questions, and literally plays with himself on national TV. And now, in the beginning of what is sure to be another delightful press tour for the new Jurassic World sequel, he for some reason offers his take on that semi-beloved, ever-put-upon denizen of The Simpsons‘ Springfield, Principal Skinner.

The best part is that he doesn’t even recognize the script, and has no idea what it is until he’s told afterward. So he’s going in completely cold, with no preconceptions about how Skinner should be portrayed, or even what his pre-existing relationship with Superintendent Chalmers is. In full ‘blum, Skinner comes off less as a bumbling, awkward fibber, but a charming con man able to cover his less-than-competent tracks with ease.

Much credit to the team at Gamespot for coming up with this idea, and persuading Universal and The Jeff (do people call him that? We should start) to go along with it. We look forward to seeing if they managed to get Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard to voice Bart and Lisa Simpson. Life, after all, finds a way.

Also, in a hypothetical live-action Simpsons, Goldblum would be an interesting choice for Professor Frink. Just saying. He makes you laugh and he makes you think.

What did you think of this particular reading of “Steamed Hams”? Is there another offbeat script that could drastically use the addition of Goldblum? Give us your chaos theories in comments.

Image: YouTube/Gamespot Universe

More fun with The Simpsons:

This isn’t the first time “Steamed Hams” got a makeover.
Krispy Kreme has a Simpsons doughnut now.
How to make perfect Ned Flanders hot cocoa.

Worst of the Best – STAR TREK: VOYAGER’s “Threshold”

I was a late bloomer to Star Trek fandom. A major factor was that the show ran in syndication constantly when I was growing up, so I often grew bored of the repeated episodes before I could ever really get hooked. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become a fan of Star Trek, and in particular Voyager. Captain Janeway is a pleasure to watch, and I adore the concept at the core of the series–the exploration of a Federation ship on the other side of space from the Federation itself. Though Voyager has its many highlights, it also gave us what I believe to be one of the worst episodes of not just Voyager, but also all of Star Trek.

“Threshold” is a hot mess, coming relatively early in the show’s seven seasons, unleashed on unsuspecting fans in the middle of Season Two. From the outset, “Threshold” appears to be out to upset Trek fans by rewriting vital canon that the show had never before questioned, as Tom Paris uses an experimental shuttlecraft to attempt to cross the transwarp threshold and hit warp 10. That may sound like your average science-fiction mumbo jumbo, but as Trek-heads will know that’s actually tantamount to treason. In Star Trek, the idea is that throughout the entirety of Starfleet’s perfection of Zefram Cochrane’s warp drive technology, no one has ever hit warp 10 (in the revised warp scale used during Star Trek: The Next Generation and later). The science behind that is the hypothetical idea that if you did hit it, you would be traveling so fast that you would exist in all parts of the universe at the same time.

Cochrane and warp speed are huge tenants of Star Trek lore, and the fact that Paris essentially breaks/disproves them in the first act of “Threshold” would be bad enough if the episode didn’t quickly descend into one of the strangest, most horrifying 46 minutes of television in broadcast history. One of Voyager’s strengths is interesting, experimental storylines, but with “Threshold” they jump the shark–in fact they jump the shark and then jump every other creature in the ocean. After Paris essentially strongarms Janeway into letting him attempt to hit warp 10, he breaks the warp barrier, his shuttle disappears, and then he’s later found on the shuttle, deathly ill but still alive.

The episode quickly spirals into the grotesque, with Parris transforming into a fleshy, rotting monster due to some badly explained evolutionary theory. There’s none of the intrigue or science that makes so much of Star Trek so splendid and engaging to watch. Instead, “Threshold” becomes a gruesome body horror, as we watch the charmless Tom Paris rot away in the sick bay, becoming more and more arrogant as he reaches something close to omnipotence. Where so much of Voyager relies on intimate character studies–and too many holodeck episodes–the team behind “Threshold” apparently eschewed all of that to go for a more hard sci-fi feel, which sadly doesn’t hit any of the marks it’s aiming for. There’s no great theoretical explanation behind Paris’ transformation, only a very mediocre plan to save him, and most criminally no ramifications for what happens next.

Even the most casual Trek fan has probably heard of “Threshold” referred to as “the salamander episode,” which is a title it duly earned with the third act of the story. After rotting all over the Doctor’s nice sickbay, a now insane Paris decides that he’s going kidnap Janeway. He does this with surprising ease, flinging her into the shuttlecraft and breaking the transwarp barrier before the Voyager team can even think of catching up. This is where “Threshold” really loses its way, as the crew eventually locates some familiar lifesigns on a nearby planet. When they reach them, Chakotay finds two large reptilian creatures and a number of their “children,” which he LEAVES on the planet after rescuing lizard Janeway and Paris.

There’s a lot wrong with this terrifying ending, the main one being that none of this is ever mentioned again after this episode. Not to mention the fact that they created an entirely new species and left it on a planet, clearly breaking the Federation’s Prime Directive, nor that Paris broke the transwarp barrier or that he kidnapped Janeway, forcing her to evolve into a salamander via warp speed and subsequently impregnating her. In fact, just to reassure us of the horrors of “Threshold,” the episode ends with Janeway suggesting to Paris that maybe she was the one who encouraged him to mate with her. Then she recommends him for a commendation for his terrible, awful, very bad actions.

Do you have a great example of one truly awful episode of an otherwise incredible show? Really love Voyager? Really hate “Threshold”? Let us know below!

Images: CBS, Paramount

More Worst of the Best!

“Superman’s Pal” from Superman: The Animated Series.
“Fear Her” from Doctor Who.
“Where the Wild Things Are” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

A Donut Shop Wedding Is the Sweetest Way to Get Married

There’s liking donuts, loving donuts, and wanting to marry a donut. File me squarely into that last camp, because donuts equal a lifetime of happiness. And if marriage is on your agenda you already know that planning a wedding is a huge project. Which favors to choose, what to serve, and most important—location, location, location. Getting everything right for your special day can be a headache, and that’s why choosing a donut theme is sure to solve all your wedding woes.

The famous fried dough haven Voodoo Doughnut at Universal CityWalk in Hollywood is offering up a unique wedding for your holy-donut union. What could be more uniquely Hollywood then having a wedding inside a donut shop? Their unique wedding package includes a legal wedding for up to 13 guests—for those paying attention, that’s a baker’s dozen right there.

Along with a donut heart centerpiece and coffee, you’ll also get a Voodoo Doll bride and groom custom donut to celebrate the day. As far as eats, the whole party gets to feast on one dozen of Voodoo’s famous one-of-a-kind donuts like the Bacon Maple Bar, Old Dirty Bastard, or the Voodoo Doll, a donut filled with raspberry jelly and served with a pretzel stake for torture.

For those getting married on a whim, the shop only needs a week’s notice. The more notice the better, of course, but when the heart wants donuts, time is meaningless. Don’t worry if you’re already married, Voodoo also offers up vow renewal ceremonies so you can celebrate your many years of sugary wedded bliss.

Check out Voodoodonut.com for more information.

Would you have a sugary ceremony? Let us know in the comments and if you go through with this, donut forget to tag @nerdist and @justjenn to show us your wedding pics!

Images: Voodoo Doughnut
More ways to say “I dough,” er, “I do”:

Owls aren’t very good ring-bearers.
A supercut of cinematic weddings.
The ultimate Disney wedding.

Ryan Reynolds Delivers a DEADPOOL Easter Treat, Where’s Waldo-Style

Deadpool‘s ties to the rest of the X-Men film universe have always been tenuous at best: everyone pretends X-Men Origins: Wolverine never happened, in part because of the way it mangled Ryan Reynolds‘ first chance to play Deadpool on the big screen, and the rest of  the X-Men movies have their own continuity problems which can’t be easily resolved. But what if the X-Men and Deadpool films were truly linked together? To celebrate Easter, Reynolds released a Where’s Waldo? style pinup which is packed with references and characters from almost every X movie to date.

I like eggs three ways: scrambled, poached or hidden.

A post shared by Ryan Reynolds (@vancityreynolds) on Mar 30, 2018 at 12:19pm PDT

The pinup appears to take place at Xavier’s mansion, as the school comes under attack from an outside force during an egg hunt (Colossus found one under a Christmas tree). On the far left side, we can actually see Patrick Stewart’s Xavier chasing James McAvoy’s Xavier with a pair of scissors, as if the outcome of the real fight doesn’t matter to them as much as accurate baldness. At the bottom left, it appears that Spiral, a six-armed villainess who has yet to appear in the films, is stuck searching in the bushes.

Towards the middle, we can see Dogpool sitting in front of Hank McCoy, who is doing his best Beauty and the Beast impression with his ladyfriend. Behind them, Angel is naked for some reason while Wolverine and X-23 have a little father-daughter time in the middle of the slaughter.

To the left of Wolverine, we can see Deadpool (with bunny ears) and Cable behind one of the hedges, with Domino nearby as well. Blind Al also has an unlikely team-up with Storm near the top right, while poor hapless Dopinder is trapped in his cab as Magneto uses it as a weapon. There’s a lot more to find in the pic, especially for the hardcore fans.

What do you think about Reynolds’ Easter Egg pic? Let us know in the comment section below!

Image: 20th Century Fox

Have a nerdy Easter weekend, everyone!

Star Wars Easter printables!
A look at American Gods‘ version of Easter.
Let’s watch some marshmallow Peeps explode!

Han Solo Sneakers Will Help You Smuggle Fashion

Po-Zu has brought a new look to Star Wars shoes since they acquired a Lucasfilm license. Before they brought Rey boots onto the scene, not many options existed for casual galactic footwear. And now their eco-friendly, made from sustainable materials offerings have expanded to include every kind of Rey shoe you can imagine, Chewbacca boots, sneakers covered in porgs, and their newest style, Han Solo sneakers. I’m sure they’re designed to help you run away from Imperials at maximum speed.

The style is inspired by Han’s pants in A New Hope. The high top sneakers have the iconic Corellian bloodstripes running down the side; it’s a subtle design that will pair with more outfits than say, porg sneakers. And as someone who has looked up the precise measurements for those bloodstripes for cosplay purposes, Po-Zu clearly paid attention to all the details.

View more pics of the rad smuggler sneakers in the gallery below. The Han Solo sneakers are available for pre-order on Po-Zu’s site now.  They’ll be delivered in May, which means you might have them in time to wear to your first screening of Solo: A Star Wars Story. My fingers crossed that Po-Zu will also unveil some sparkly Lando Calrissian sneakers in the next month.

Will you let your feet go solo, or will you order these sneakers? How many Star Wars sneakers do you have? Fly to the comments and let us know.

Images: Po-Zu

Amy Ratcliffe is an Associate Editor for Nerdist. She likes Star Wars a little. Follow her on Twitter.

More nerdy fashion!

Sneakers covered in porgs–not real ones.
Bloomingdale’s fancy Nintendo collection.
Kiki’s Delivery Service fragrances and accessories.

How CGI Brought Iron Man, Captain America, Peggy Carter, and More to Life

It’s trendy these days to bemoan the overuse of CGI in big budget fantasy filmmaking, and romanticize the past of all-practical effects work in Hollywood films. But the truth of the matter is, without the use of CGI, we simply couldn’t have had things like Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter films, and, yes, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Part of the reason it took so many decades for characters like the Avengers and Spider-Man to even make it to the big screen was that most of these characters weren’t even possible without the use of computer generated imaging.



In the video above from the folks at Looper, they break down all the ways CGI was crucial to making the Marvel Studios films, and it’s not just in the obvious ways either. Much of 1940s Brooklyn cityscape in Captain America: The First Avenger was made possible by CGI for example, which most people didn’t realize at the time, as was Hayley Atwell’s aging into a nonagenarian Peggy Carter in The Winter Soldier (nope, that wasn’t practical make-up, kids; that was all CGI).

Of course, the effects house responsible for most of these amazing CGI shots from the Marvel films is none other than Industrial Light and Magic, the company George Lucas created over 40 years ago to create the effects for Star Wars, because there was no effects house in Hollywood that was good enough to execute his vision. Even though Lucas sold the company to Disney back in 2012, the video above shows that they are still the best of the best, and the best Marvel films wouldn’t be the same without them.

What do you make of Marvel’s visual effects work over the past 10 years? Let us know your thoughts down below in the comments.

Images: Marvel Studios

More from the MCU!

Here’s how secretive things were on the Infinity War set
Hawkeye finally gets his Infinity War poster!
James Gunn confirms a Guardians of the Galaxy Easter egg