Great Big Story: This is the story of how a tiny, magical creature was transformed into a cultural phenomenon by inventor, marketing genius and complicated eccentric Harold von Braunhut. Full of fun facts (both charming and disturbing), Just Add Water is a colorful short film about a half-century of marketing directly to children, the force of nostalgia in pop culture, and an unlikely meeting of flim-flam and hard science. A film by Penny Lane.
Rhystic Studies, a YouTube channel that explores the art, history, and culture of Magic: The Gathering, takes a detailed look at the design of Magic’s card frames.
The Collection is a short documentary about two friends, DJ Ginsberg and Marilyn Wagner, and their discovery of an astonishing and unique collection of movie memorabilia, comprised of over 40,000 printer blocks and 20,000 printer plates used to create the original newspaper advertisements for virtually every movie released in the United States from the silent period through 1984, when newspapers stopped using the letterpress format.
The collection, which spans nearly the entire history of the film industry from the silent era to 1984, was recently appraised at ~$10 million and is available for acquisition. (via Kottke)
What appeals to me about this story is less the collection itself, and more the opportunity to enjoy a project like this! To unpack all of these plates, clean them, print them, catalog them… Fun! One day I hope I make a similar discovery.
The Smash Brothers is a 9-part documentary series about seven of the greatest “smashers” of all time. Through years-long rivalries spanning coasts and countries, discover the passion for a game which started as a casual experience only to become a heart-pounding competitive lifestyle.
sudoscript: Last weekend, a fascinating act in the history of humanity played out on Reddit.
The rules were simple. Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes between placing each one.
Over the following 72 hours, what emerged was nothing short of miraculous. A collaborative artwork that shocked even its inventors.
“On April Fool’s Day, when the rest of the internet devolves into a cesspool of unfunny press releases and fake product launches, Reddit becomes the most interesting place online by unleashing a social experiment on its enormous community.” — Andy Baio / Waxy
Nintendo: It’s The Legend of Zelda’s 30th anniversary this year, and so we thought you might appreciate a look at some illustrations created during the development of the first The Legend of Zelda game, originally released on the Nintendo Entertainment System!
These design docs include a video of the hand drawn overworld map and show how some of the original dungeon sketches translated into the game.
(via Gamasutra)
Some of the hand-drawn maps Takashi Tezuka and Shigeru Miyamoto used when designing the original Legend of Zelda. A fascinating glimpse at Nintendo’s game design process from days gone by.
Wired: [In] Ticonderoga, New York, in a former supermarket. There, at 112 Montcalm St., a valiant would-be commander named James Cawley has constructed a precise replica of the original starship set used for Star Trek: The Original Series.
Cawley began construction in 1996, crafting set pieces in his grandfather’s barn-turned-workshop. Over the past 20 years, he has spent an “astronomical” (he said it, not us) sum painstakingly rebuilding the Enterprise. Some items, like Scotty’s wrenches and a Klingon costume, are originals from the show. Others, like Captain Kirk’s chair, Cawley built from scratch.
The Star Trek Tour is permanently housed in Historic downtown Ticonderoga, New York. The sets are full recreations based upon original blueprints. ⋮ The recreated sets achieve a high-degree of accuracy based on original blueprints, hundreds of hours of serious research and thousands of photos – both period images and images culled from extensive review and capture from latest Blu-ray images.
See also: Other posts on this blog tagged ‘Star Trek’, including many on the restoration of the original USS Enterprise model at the Smithsonian.
Visitors can sit in Captain Kirk’s chair and punch buttons just like William Shatner did 60 years ago, or perhaps gaze into Spock’s scanner and search for signs of life. Everyone has to make that decision at some point. — Wired
