THE CAT WITH HANDS

Start your Wednesday off with a nightmare, watching this most peculiar short about a most peculiar cat.

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Murray says he'll play a ghost in GHOSTBUSTERS 3

In what we can only hope is a joke, Bill Murray now says he'll only return in Ghostbusters 3 if he gets killed early on and turned into a ghost. Watching Peter Venkman die sure doesn't sound like a hilarious way to start the movie to me.

It's weird, the fans have made it pretty clear that they want the film to star Murray, Dan Aykroyd and the rest of the original gang, but all you hear from Murray and company is how they're too old now and it's time for a new generation to take over the franchise.

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HI-FI PIZZA OF THE APOCALYPSE: The STRETCH ARMSTRONG movie

Inspired by this apocalyptic moment from an old Daniel Clowes Eightball comic, Hi-Fi Pizza of the Apocalypse is a Monsters and Rockets feature where we chronicle the Hollywood rehashes, recyclings and recombinings that serve as ominous portents of the End Times.

Today's ominous foreshadowing of Armageddon: the upcoming Stretch Armstrong movie, starring that wolf boy from that one Twilight movie. At this point, I don't think there are many toys left to base movies on. What's next, Weebles: The Motion Picture?


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DAYMARE TOWN

Daymare Town is an online point-and-click game with a nicely quirky look and tone. It feels less like a Myst clone than a short adventure you take within the pages of an artist's sketchbook, with the 3D graphics of most point-and-clicks replaced by scratchy little cartoon scenes. But just because the game has such a charmingly simple look, don't assume that the puzzles are easy to beat!

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LOST, circa 1967

Some mischievous fans have cut together a Lost opening titles sequence in the style of TV titles from the 1960s. Very well done. (But why is Desmond the "hero"? Isn't that kind of Jack's gig?)

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JURASSIC PARK IV almost starred a gun-toting squad of commando dinos

It sounds like a gag out of Family Guy, but apparently a few years back Steven Spielberg was actually planning a Jurassic Park sequel that would have featured genetically engineered, intelligent dinosaurs who become a squad of gun-toting commandos. The idea got as far as the script stage, and in 2004 Ain't It Cool News had this to say:

"There’s the eight-year-old-boy side of me that thinks that a DIRTY DOZEN-style mercenary team of hyper-smart dinosaurs in body armor killing drug dealers and rescuing kidnapped children will be impossible to resist. And then there’s the side of me that says... WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!

[The main character] is put in charge of training these five dinosaurs, X1 through X5, and the first thing he does is name them. 'Any soldier worth his pay has a name to answer to, not a number,' he says. So we are introduced to Achilles, Hector, Perseus, Orestes, and Spartacus, each of them a specially created deinonychus, which is sort of like a miniature T-rex. They have super-sensitive smell and hearing, incredible strength and speed and pack-hunting instincts, and they have modified forelegs, lengthened and topped with more dextrous fingers, as well as dog DNA for increased obedience and human DNA so they can solve problems well. All of this is topped off with a drug-regulating implant that can dose them with adrenaline or serotonin as the situation demands."

Fortunately sanity prevailed, and the dino commando project was shelved. Director Joe Johnston has been (rather loosely) attached to Jurassic Park IV for a while, and recently he told hitfix.com that the sequel will have a different plotline.

There is an idea now for number four that is different from the first three, and that is more or less the beginning of a new trilogy, in that it sends the whole franchise off in a new direction. It's not about the dinosaur park anymore. It's about all-new characters. So Steven's busy right now with the stuff he's doing and I've got to do "Captain America," but hopefully afterwards, we'll find time to develop it. And really... it's something different that we haven't seen before in the "Jurassic Park" world.

(The clip above is from the widely-mocked game Jurassic Park: Trespasser.)

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YELLOW SUBMARINE redo cast

I'm not sure how I missed the news that the Robert Zemeckis Yellow Submarine remake has already been cast, with British comedian Peter Serafinowicz as Paul McCartney and The Princess Bride star Cary Elwes as George Harrison. They would both be too old for the parts if this was live-action, but this is motion capture so their ages won't matter. Through the miracle of modern technology, they'll be transformed into hideous, shambling cartoon Beatle zombies with glassy, unfocused eyes.

I keep trying to wish this horrible project into the cornfield, but it doggedly persists in not ceasing to exist.


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Mighty Boosh MIGHTY DECIDER iPhone app

My girlfriend is one of those iPhone zombies. She's constantly fiddling with that infernal device and prattling on about all the wondrous things it can do. In my experience, the iPhone basically does three things:

1) It takes ten minutes to load up a website unless you are sitting directly on top of a wifi hotspot. Like, you have one under your chair.

2) It has a crappy onscreen keyboard that you can't use unless you have tiny fingers like a raccoon. Believe me, you don't know what frustration is until you've accidentally hit the same three freaking keys together, for like the fifth time in a row. (That's right, short people, laugh at the big fellow as he struggles with your tiny plastic toy phone. But never forget that you only continue to live at the whim of the tall folk. Anger us sufficiently, and we will eat you.)

3) It smudges if you so much as look at it across a crowded room.

At least, in the iPhone's defense, it really excels at being slow, too small and smudgy.

So, I'm no iFan, but even I might be persuaded to pony up the dough for one just so I could download the new Mighty Boosh app. The Mighty Decider features new animation (based on Noel Fielding's designs), new dialogue voiced by the Boosh boys and weird little games to help you decide stuff. A cartoon Vince and Howard explain in the clip above.


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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner sings the WWE "superstar" entrance themes

Nearing 80, William Shatner is more ubiquitous than ever. You can hardly turn on the TV without catching him in a commercial or something. But he still turns up places you'd never expect, like this showstopping performance during a recent wrestling show.

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WOW, A TALKING FISH!

Actually, the titular talking fish is one of the less remarkable flights of fancy in R. Saakyants' brilliant and exhaustingly strange 1983 Russian cartoon based on an Armenian fable. You're gonna have to watch this thing at least twice.

Next time a talking fish asks you to spare its life, I bet you'll listen!

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