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'A Star Is Born' Isn't A Musical, Says The Golden Globes
The nominations for the Drunk Oscars (aka the Golden Globes) were announced this morning, and not surprisingly, the latest remake of A Star Is Born is up for five of those shiny metal balls. But oddly, even though the Globes has a set of categories specifically dedicated to musicals and comedies, A Star Is Born is not in them, instead competing in the drama categories. So if it wasn't a musical, why has the soundtrack been playing on everyone's devices 24/7 since October, driving most of us to the brink of madness?
Interscope RecordsNot bad for a movie directed by the guy who played "Sack" in Wedding Crashers.
Did none of those songs mean anything to the Globes? "Shallow"? "Always Remember Us This Way"? The one where Bradley Cooper mumbles incoherently? The other one where Bradley Cooper mumbles incoherently? Actually, it turns out that Warner Bros. purposefully submitted A Star Is Born as a drama. Which in some respects is totally fair. After all, unless you left halfway through to sneak into Venom, it is indeed a pretty damn dramatic movie.
But on the other hand, part of the reason audiences have responded to the film is its modern take on the Hollywood musical. It's part of a long cinematic lineage. Both the 1954 and 1976 versions of A Star Is Born were musicals. as well They also both won Golden Globes in the "Musical or Comedy" category. The '54 version won for its two leads, and the '76 version won five awards, including Best Picture. Both had similar bummer endings to the Lady Gaga version.
This is likely because the studio believes A Star Is Born has the potential to win in the drama categories and thus become an Oscar frontrunner. But that's kind of the problem. Lately, the musical and comedy categories have become a dumping ground for movies which studios think don't have much of a chance otherwise. That's where the decidedly not hilarious The Martian wound up, as did Get Out.
Here we have the opposite problem. While A Star Is Born's success should be elevating the musical genre, instead it's pivoting away from that classification. The musical/somedy categories were created in 1951 "so that no genre would be slighted," but instead it's turned into a sub-competition for any movie outside the narrow definition of what a "Best Picture" should be. And by labeling it "Musical or Comedy," they inadvertently slight those genres, which is the exact opposite of what the Globes set out to do. Why not just combine the two categories and have ten nominees? Or scrap the awards altogether and just air 90 minutes of Tommy Lee Jones scowling? That would be fine too.
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Source: http://www.cracked.com/article_26083_E28098a-star-bornE28099-isnE28099t-musical-says-golden-globes.html
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20 Facts That Will Make You Understand America (Or Not)
So I guess I want a follow-up poll asking the important question, which is how mad people get if somebody sits in the wrong seat.
And 8% are in "high-impact" chronic pain, meaning the pain is bad enough that they can't live a normal life. One out of 12 people you pass on the street are in absolute agony.
That's something to keep in mind the next time you run into a rude driver, or a raging customer, or an antagonistic person on the internet. Pain messes with your mind, drains your energy, ruins your concentration. The old and the poor are also more likely to be in pain, so that's just another proverbial cockroach in their chili.
Society is, at the end of the day, just a big pile of other people's coping mechanisms. I guess we should try to remember that.
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Source: https://www.cracked.com/blog/20-facts-that-will-make-you-understand-america-or-not/
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Girl Bakes Dead Grandpa Into Cookies, Feeds Him To Class
Everyone has a different way of grieving over the loss of a loved one. But it's not often that what a person needs to get through the difficult passing of a family member is just a tall glass of milk.
For one teen living in Davis, California, losing her grandpa was a bittersweet experience. Bitter because it's hard to cope with death, sweet because she took his cremated remains and baked them into sugar cookies. In early October (definitely too early for Halloween), two students were handing out cookies at their school, Da Vinci Charter Academy (which probably and now regrettably has a motto about being creative). A fellow student later told the local paper how when he took a bite out of his unnervingly sandy cookie, one of the girls, who had just lost her grandfather, whispered to him that she had added a "secret ingredient." The student was immediately worried that he'd been dosed with some kind of drug, only to then be told that he'd have to worry about digesting a whole different kind of angel dust.
Pixnio Just like grandma used to make dinner for.
As it turned out, the teen and her friend thought it would be a fitting sendoff for peepaw to add him to the cookies and share them with their friends. All said, at least nine teens ate gritty grandpappy cookies, some having been tricked into it, others volunteering for this once-past-a-lifetime experience. Though it wasn't actually that hard to get your hands on the cremains of this late, not-so-great-tasting man. Previously, the teen had offered one student a handful of the ashes in exchange for switching seats in class. And honestly, from that point on, they really should've expected that any future dealings with her would come with a side of dead grandpa.
After the school found out about the macabre macaroon incident, the police were brought in to open a case against the dead body baker. But because none of the kids got sick, Lt. Paul Doroshov decided to drop it, stating that even if anyone insisted on prosecuting the girl, they wouldn't know what crime to charge her with. Um, what about forced cannibalism? Or does it no longer count as human remains once you burn them that much? If so, does that mean burnt toast no longer qualifies as bread either? Forget the dead grandpa cookies, this girls may have stumbled upon both a fascinating philosophical quandary and a very easy to follow no-carb diet.
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Source: http://www.cracked.com/article_25987_girl-bakes-dead-grandpa-into-cookies-feeds-him-to-class.html
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Check It Out, Nerds: There's a 'Ghostbusters' Dinosaur
Like the unabashed giant dorks they are, scientists have a penchant for naming amazing new discoveries after random scraps of pop culture. There are deep sea creatures referencing Game Of Thrones characters, a new species of spider named after the Hogwarts Sorting Hat, and even a bacteria named dubbed "Midichloria mitochondrii" in a nod to the midi-chlorians of Star Wars that we all try not to think about, so thanks a lot, science.
Well, luckily for fans of paleontology and paranormal investigation, a recently discovered species of dinosaur going on display for the first time has been branded "Zuul crurivastator." The "Zuul" part is, of course, a reference to the demonic Gatekeeper from Ghostbusters. First discovered in 2016, the fossil does kind of look like Zuul.
YouTube/ROM
Columbia PicturesThe grotesque Terror Dog Zuul, not the Sigourney Weaver in Negligee Zuul.
Zuul is the star of the exhibit "Zuul: Life of an Armoured Dinosaur" at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Apparently Zuul was a "6-metre-long, 2.5-ton, plant-eating ankylosaur." Unlike the rubber monster puppet, this Zuul was covered in armor, with a "menacing" tail that could club the crap out of its enemies. And the museum isn't above playing up the Ghostbusters angle, either. After unpacking whatever dusty crate they use to contain Dan Aykroyd, the museum had him endorse the new dino in a video on Twitter.
Twitter/@ROMTorontoAykroyd claims to be honored by the moniker, though you have to imagine a part of him wishes they'd gone with "Crystalskullvodkasaurus."
In any case, if you're in Toronto, why not swing by the museum to learn about an exciting newfound part of our natural history? Or alternatively, ignore all of the boring educational parts and just pretend that scientists excavated the remains of an evil interdimensional being.
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Source: http://www.cracked.com/article_26141_check-it-out-nerds-theres-ghostbusters-dinosaur.html
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Netflix Alters Ending To 'The Notebook' Defying Death Itself
The Notebook is the classic tale of rich girl, Allie (played by Rachel McAdams), who falls for poor and hopelessly unattractive young ruffian, Noah (played by Ryan Gosling). It's most remembered for its tearjerker of an ending, in which (SPOILERS) it's revealed that the two seniors whose tale frames the story are in fact the future Noah and Allie. Noah's been reading to Allie from his notebook, either out of romantic sentiment or because he was too cheap to spring for a Tom Clancy paperback. We also learn that Allie has dementia, meaning that the story's all new to her. (Or who knows? Maybe Noah's making it all up to prank a senile stranger.)
In the closing moments of the film, Noah curls up with Allie, and the two die together hand-in-hand. Pass the goddamn Kleenex. Then it cuts to a flock of birds for some reason. We can only assume they contain the reincarnated souls of the couple, thus paving the way for an animated romp centered on their hilarious avian adventures.
New Line Cinema
New Line Cinema
But UK Netflix's version of the movie omits this scene. Instead of showing the couple lovingly shedding their mortal coils together, it just cuts to the birds and ends. The weirdest part is that no one's exactly sure what the hell happened here. Netflix claims they didn't edit the film, and that this was just the copy sent to them.
Twitter/@NetflixUK
So if they really didn't edit the movie, where did this phantom ending come from? No one knows! Even the fancy DVD edition, which is crammed full of deleted scenes (and ... stickers, for some reason) doesn't contain this version. So somewhere out there is a rogue editor, intercepting mail to tinker with depressing love stories. Hey, maybe next you could try altering Titanic so that Rose shimmies over to make some room for Jack on that door?
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Source: http://www.cracked.com/article_26232_netflix-alters-ending-to-the-notebook-defying-death-itself.html
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Behold, The Most Important 1980s Action Movie Study Ever
Just like every classic '80s action hero, Dolph Lundgren's resume is littered with ups and downs. For every Rocky IV, there's a Kindergarten Cop 2. For every Expendables, there's a Fat Slags. And for every Universal Soldier, there's a Sharknado 5: Global Swarming. It kinda makes us wish that there was a way of figuring out what makes a perfect Lundgren movie. We could pass it along to the man himself and ensure that his star never fades.
Luckily for us, then, that someone did exactly that. The answer: It's all in the front kicks, baby.
According to Reddit user LundgrensFrontKick, movies in which Dolph delivers a front kick tend to "have higher critical scores and make more money than films that are devoid of front kicks." How did they figure this out? By living the dream and watching Lundgren movies all day, noting down the ones wherein he delivers a front kick, or at least a variation of it, and then comparing the average box office grosses and review scores (taken from Rotten Tomatoes) of those movies against those of the ones in which Dolph delivers no front kicks.
The result? If you're writing an action movie for Lundgren and want to make bank, including a front kick boosts your review score by 10 percent and your domestic box office gross by nearly double, on average.
u/LundgrensFrontKick
Of course, there are a couple of limitations to this method. LundgrensFrontKick didn't include Rocky IV and Universal Soldier: Regeneration in their data set -- the former because it seemed unfair to count the movie, seeing as front kicks aren't allowed in boxing ("Drago may embrace steroids, but I don't think he would dishonor himself by throwing a deadly front kick at Rocky during their boxing match"), while the latter doesn't have a score on RT and so couldn't be counted. LundgrensFrontKick also noted that they're using a wide definition of a front kick which martial arts purists probably wouldn't agree with.
Even so, it's hard to critique their work, considering that it's, um, a study into whether Dolph Lundgren has magic movie-kingmaking feet. It's all for fun, ultimately ... but on the off chance there's something to this, then good news, Dolph! It's not too late to save Pups Alone: A Christmas Peril. Bad news, though: You're going to have to kick a Labrador in the face.
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Source: http://www.cracked.com/article_25998_behold-most-important-1980s-action-movie-study-ever.html
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The 1938 'War Of The Worlds' Alien Hysteria Was Fake News
On October 30, 1938, U.S. citizens were glued to their radios as they received dire news: Their country was being invaded. Not by Nazi zeppelins or Japan's secret Godzilla unit, but by Martians coming to destroy the world. However, this announcement didn't come from a journalist, but from Orson Welles, who was pulling a prank on millions by making them think the plot of a popular sci-fi book was actually happening. Or at least, that's what the newspapers wanted us to believe.
New York Daily NewsThis the closest a headline has ever gotten to actual yelling. Continue Reading Below Advertisement According to news sources, Welles' performance of War Of The Worlds had "upwards of a million people, convinced, if only briefly, that the United States was being laid waste by alien invaders." Quite the prank, except that Welles was as shocked as everyone else. His show, The Mercury Theatre On The Air, had been around for months, adapting famous literary works as radio plays every week without anyone ever thinking they were real. When they premiered the show with Dracula, it didn't cause people to loot their local garlic-and-stakes emporiums, so what was so special about War Of The Worlds? If anyone was to blame for tricking people into panicking, it was the newspapers. During the '30s, print media was in decline (can't imagine what that's like), with people preferring to get their news from their newfangled talkin' machines. So when they heard of Welles acting out a newsreader announcing the end of the world, they saw a chance to smear the radio as spreading fake news, proving that people should only trust print journalists -- which we now know is even dumber than believing aliens are invading. Continue Reading Below Advertisement However, the embarrassing truth for Welles was that not enough Americans even listened to his show for it to cause pandemonium. As the alleged mass panic was kicking off, a radio ratings service was telephoning households to ask what they were listening to. Only 2 percent answered that they were listening to "the Orson Welles Program," and none said they couldn't talk because they were helping Pa load his shotgun to stop the aliens from probing Ma. The only thing the "scandal" wound up doing was make the 23-year-old Welles famous throughout the country as the world's most convincing storyteller, which must've really helped his burgeoning film career. So what we're trying to say is this: Thanks for Citizen Kane, fake news. Support your favorite Cracked writers with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you. For more, check out George Washington Got Hit By Lightning In The Womb and Paintball Looked Far More Insane In The 1900s. Also, we'd love to know more about you and your interesting lives, dear readers. If you spend your days doing cool stuff, drop us a line at iDoCoolStuff at Cracked dot com, and maybe we can share your story with the entire internet. Follow us on Facebook before the aliens take over your brain!
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Guess who'll be the Emcee for the next @dirtysouthburlesque show 馃槣 #burlesque #charity #idocoolstuff #youshouldfollowus #getonmylevel (at Le Chat Noir)
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Looks cool. ..#ididthat #workstuff #lablife #idocoolstuff
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The Writer Of 'Green Book' Is Making A New (Terrible) Movie
Sunday's big Oscar winner, Green Book, has its fair share of controversy, from accusations of perpetuating a tired white savior narrative to the real-life Don Shirley's family calling bullshit on the movie for its condescending inaccuracies. Oh, and the director had to apologize for routinely flashing his junk in the past. And one of the producers sent pissy letters to critics. And co-writer Nick Vallelonga helped spread Trump's racist conspiracy theory that New Jersey Muslims were celebrating in the streets on 9/11. (Though to be fair, had Nick taken a whimsical road trip with a Muslim, his prejudice would have presumably disappeared and solved racism forever.)
Still, the movie prevailed, and now the Academy-Award-winning Vallelonga has his next project lined up. And it sounds ... not great. According to Deadline, Vallelonga wrote and will direct the "musical romantic comedy" That's Amore! -- named after the famous Dean Martin tune. Timely! Oh, and if you think that there isn't a character named "Amore," then you have some unearned faith in the Hollywood machine.
That's Amore! is about a depressed "40-year-old bachelor" working in a pizzeria who falls for Patti Amore, a "shy and introverted loner with an overprotective father and a dark secret in her past." (Hopefully that secret isn't some kind of wildly racist old Tweet.) It sounds like Garden State meets La La Land meets the world's saddest Domino's.
Vallelonga's directorial track record should further put you off. His IMDb page is basically a museum of schlock, featuring titles such as Choker, about a "serial killer (who) is let loose to hunt down and kill alien beings," and Stiletto, about a female assassin who is seemingly allergic to shirts.
First Look International
So in retrospect, maybe we should all just be happy that Green Book didn't find Dr. Shirley battling a horde of bikini-clad zombies or something.
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Source: http://www.cracked.com/article_26229_the-writer-green-book-making-new-terrible-movie.html
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5 Oddities Of Everyday Language That Leave Experts Baffled
And here's the thing: Just like the boss's son, if dummy pronouns went away tomorrow, it wouldn't affect productivity at all. That's what makes dummy pronouns so, well, dumb. They're completely unnecessary. Plenty of other language have figured this out and dropped them entirely. Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Turkish speakers all learned eons ago that saying "raining" is just as effective as saying "it's raining," or that you can just say "lot of people outside the cafe" without anything being lost. In fact, if you verbally say "lot of people outside the cafe" in English, it also sounds fine.
There's no reason English has arbitrarily decided to keep hanging on to dummy pronouns. They serve absolutely no purpose, we'd get by equally fine without them, and they keep spending company funds on cocaine.
This sounds nuts, but one of the least-understood elements of any language is how we acquire it. The human faculty for language is untouched by any other species, yet, as in the case of the intervocalic alveolar flapping in the introduction up there, humans are absolute dogshit at explicitly knowing the rules of their own language. So how do we teach our kids how to speak? Do we even teach kids to speak, or is this a Maybelline situation, where they're just born with it? Short answer: We don't know. Long answer: We have some theories.
Noam Chomsky argues that language is innate and comes pre-loaded into the brain, so when your kid arrives, you can just switch 'em on and they'll have the framework to learn whatever it is you're speaking. On the other end of the spectrum is the idea that we are born blank slates, and that every single thing we know about language is imparted to us by our parents and teachers -- otherwise known as linguistic empiricism. But there are some major flaws with both of those.
If humans were born with absolutely no preexisting framework for language, there's no way we would learn language as quickly as we do. The going rate for human fluency is that by three years, all healthy children are saying sentences that are grammatically correct 90 percent of time. There's no way we get these just by what our parents have taught us. Have you met most parents? Absolute shitshows. On the other hand, the idea that babies are born pre-loaded with software like an iPhone seems equally weird, although there are more supporting arguments to that than you'd think.
For example, all children, regardless of the language they're speaking, learn it in similar stages. Meaning that at one year, a child has a vocabulary of about 50 words, regardless of whether those words are Chinese, Greek, Tagalog, or English. At a year and a half, those same kids can differentiate between nouns and verbs. A rate of acquisition that quick can't simply be explained by good parenting, and this universal process is even more granular than that.
When it comes to pairs of opposites (long versus short, deep versus shallow, big versus little), studies show that children universally learn what's called the "positive member" before they learn the "negative member." Therefore, children know the concept of "long" before "short," "deep" before "shallow," and "big" before "little." For something that specific to be applicable in all languages across the globe, you know there has to be some degree of underlying framework at play. But obviously, that framework isn't complete, because if taken to the extreme, that would mean a Chinese baby adopted by Spanish-speaking parents would end up speaking Mandarin, since it's what they gestated with.
So yeah, if you want a new subject to bitterly argue with strangers about, study languages.
English too hard? Want to learn a new language? Try picking up one with Rosetta Stone.
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Source: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-oddities-everyday-language-that-leave-experts-baffled/
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The Big Clues In The New Avengers Trailer (Are The Haircuts)
A new, presumably final trailer for the highly anticipated bladder endurance test Avengers: Endgame hit the internet today. It doesn't give us a whole lot to go on. There are a lot of flashbacks to previous Marvel movies, but with the color drained save for red -- either a stylistic choice, or a coded reference to Marvel's communist sympathies.
But if you really want some clues about how Endgame will play out, you have to pay attention to the haircuts and outfits. First off there's Black Widow. At the end of the trailer, when Captain Marvel shows up, Natasha is sporting the same blonde bob she wore in Infinity War.
Marvel
Later she has a longer, darker blonde hairstyle while firing off rounds at a target that is disappointingly not Thanos-shaped.
Marvel
In other scenes her hair is longer still, and back to its familiar red coloring.
Marvel
All of which implies that the movie will span years, confirming the time jump Gwyneth Paltrow accidentally blabbed about. Even Hawkeye's look changes, eventually showing up with a new hairdo seemingly styled by Super-Midlife-Crisis Cuts.
Marvel
Then there are the outfits. In the trailer's closing moments, the Avengers assemble wearing new costumes, implying they're either heading off for a final confrontation with Thanos or doing some team-building at a suburban laser tag joint.
Marvel
Some have pointed out that these suits aren't aesthetically dissimilar from the one Hank Pym donned to enter the Quantum Realm ...
Marvel
Meaning that, as fans have speculated, the psychedelic microscopic dimension seen in the Ant-Man films may be the key to stopping Thanos and necromancing all of their buddies back into their lucrative franchises where they belong, dammit.
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Source: https://www.cracked.com/article_26252_the-biggest-clues-in-new-avengers-trailer-are-haircuts.html
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Please Don't Make A Live-Action 'Nightmare Before Christmas'
The Nightmare Before Christmas has become something of a modern classic, embraced by Disney fans who presumably wanted more severed heads and anthropomorphic burlap sacks full of vermin in their animated fare. Now, rumor is that Disney's looking to mine the world of Halloween Town once more -- either in a sequel, or as another goddamn live-action remake.
On the one bony skeleton hand, this makes total sense. Since it was released in 1993, the story of Jack Skellington royally screwing up Christmas has only become more popular, spawning theme park rides, video games, and of course, lingerie. But would anyone want a sequel? One where Jack tries his hand at Thanksgiving or St. Patrick's Day? (We can fuck up St. Patrick's Day on our own, thank you very much.)
Even more concerning is the threat of a live-action version. To give you an idea of how unsettling that might be, here's actor Matthew Patrick Davis performing in full costume as Jack. And yeah, real-life Jack Skellington kind of looks like if the Slender Man got a job as a used car salesman.
YouTube
Even Disneyland's official Jack Skellington and Sally are no less upsetting.
YouTube
So maybe some things are better left to the realm of stop-motion animation -- hence why we never got a gritty big-budget reboot of the California Raisins. Though there is cause to be skeptical that we're getting another movie at all. The news comes from Moviehole (apparently not a satirical spinoff of The Onion) which got its scoop from an anonymous source. Supposedly the same source reliably leaked some intel about an upcoming Backdraft sequel. But you'd think Disney would be more careful with their upcoming plans than whoever is in charge of the "Forgotten '90s Ron Howard Movies" division of Hollywood.
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Source: http://www.cracked.com/article_26203_please-dont-make-live-action-nightmare-before-christmas.html
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Picking The Audience For 'The Price is Right' Is A Weird Job
Continue Reading Below Advertisement "After the show, people would be crying and felt like they were owed it ... they felt we were denying their 20- or 30-year dream. I saw some people who said they spent their entire life savings to get out to California to win money -- they felt it was like a lottery ticket." That's the other part. Remember, everyone in that line knows that once they're in the door, they could be a contestant. And when there's money on the line, well, things get weird. "e had people repeatedly try to get in. Former contestants who didn't win, and then there were also people who tried dozens of times that we said no to because they were unpredictable." And they were proved right: " would come back wearing wigs, with a lot of makeup, fake mustaches. We didn't keep their name or ID on file or anything, so they'd continually try. After a while, we got to know some of them well enough that we could see through their disguises. One woman who tried for years (but would refuse to not shout at the top of her lungs every time) always had new wigs, but had the same damn tattoos that we always called out ... she never made an attempt to cover them or put them under makeup." Continue Reading Below Advertisement
1They Have To Be Obsessive About Even The Appearance Of Cheating
Every reality and game show is fake to a degree. On the same channel where you watched The Price Is Right, you could then see Jerry Springer staging fights, or "judge" shows that clearly aren't depicting actual courtrooms (how those work could be a whole separate article, and maybe will be). But if a game show tried to pull that shit -- like if they wanted to make sure the most likable contestants won the cash -- they could expect a squad of federal agents to kick down the door. That's because in the 1950s, there was a huge quiz show called the The $64,000 Question, which turned out to be rigged (one contestant got all the answers in advance). Today, every single game show is monitored by the FCC. There are lawyers, standards, and practices -- the whole shebang behind each show. And if things aren't perfectly on the level, all hell breaks loose. Continue Reading Below Advertisement "One time a female contestant said '859' for a bid," Ned says, "and Barker heard her as saying '809,' so '809' went up instead. The next guy went '810' and won the round with the highest correct bid. I was up in the control booth at the time and everyone was freaking the hell out. Lawyers were shouting into phones, people over the radio we saying, 'He said the wrong number! What the hell are we going to do!' By happenstance the woman won the next round, eventually won the entire showcase, and walked out with a ton of money, so she didn't complain. After that, everyone got together and decided not to air the episode, as it would make the show look like there was some sort of cheating or favoritism involved, so they scrapped it so the FCC would not hammer down." Some of you may have seen an infamous clip from a 2008 episode in which a contestant guessed the final Showcase Showdown exactly to the dollar (the first time in the 38 years the show had been on the air). It's "infamous" because Drew Carey barely reacts to this incredible feat: Continue Reading Below Advertisement The reason for Carey's nonchalance is that he assumed the guy had cheated somehow, possibly with the help of an audience plant, and that the episode would simply never air. (In reality, the victory was the result of the show using the same items over and over and the contestant spending hours memorizing prices in advance.) "It's crazy how much they fear being called out for cheating," says Ned, but there's a reason for it. "Everyone on The $64,000 Question was pretty much blackballed ..." Still, when you think about what's going on elsewhere in reality TV and daytime shows, this steadfast dedication to integrity is kind of inspiring. Don't forget to have your pets spayed or neutered. Evan V. Symon is an interviewer, journalist, and interview finder guy at Cracked. Have an awesome job/experience for a Personal Experience? Hit us up here today! Support your favorite Cracked writers with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you. For more, check out 6 Inside Facts About Jeopardy From A 74-Episode Winner and I Was A Reality TV Judge: 5 Secrets I Shouldn't Tell You. Also, we'd love to know more about you and your interesting lives, dear readers. If you spend your days doing cool stuff, drop us a line at iDoCoolStuff at Cracked dot com, and maybe we can share your story with the entire internet. You've won the chance to follow us on Facebook! Come on down! Read the full article
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The iPod Is Waaay Older Than You Think
The world collectively lost its mind in 2001 when Steve Jobs introduced the iPod, a shiny square that promised to fit 20,000 songs in our pockets. Forget hoverboards, this was the sign that we were finally living in the future! Except that it wasn't new at all, and the first iPod is almost as old as your dad's eight-track player.
Kane KramerTry making a cool silhouette commercial with that nerdy-looking thing. In 1979, two young Brits named Kane Kramer and James Campbell invented the first-ever portable audio player with a digital library. It was called the IXI, and it looked like a cross between a calculator and a Happy Meal toy. Kramer had thought of every modern convenience for the IXI that he could without knowing a thing like the internet would ever exist. To use the IXI-pod, users would go to stores and download new music through a jukebox-like computer. He even had a system he thought would make sure people couldn't pirate their music, which might've been the most unrealistic thing about it. The problem was that in the '70s, a portable computer chip could hold maybe half of a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo, so the device was too ahead of its time. However, Kramer was optimistic that this would soon change and his device would one day be able to hold dozens of songs. Unfortunately, he was a bit too optimistic, and his patent had expired by the time Apple finally launched the iPod. Support your favorite Cracked writers with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you. For more, check out Meet The Family Who Disappeared Into Siberia For Decades and North Korea Once Made A Monster Movie And It Was Super Crazy. Also, we'd love to know more about you and your interesting lives, dear readers. If you spend your days doing cool stuff, drop us a line at iDoCoolStuff at Cracked dot com, and maybe we can share your story with the entire internet. Follow us on Facebook. If you like jokes and stuff.
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9 Common Pieces Of Life Advice That Are Bad And Stupid
When you encounter a shithead, you're usually encountering somebody who is bristling with defense mechanisms, and they built up those defenses to -- you guessed it -- fend off shitheads. That, ultimately, is the true danger of encountering shitheadery -- not the immediate distress of having people curse at you, but the long-term change in your own personality that occurs in response. You know, kind of like how the real damage of 9/11 came from the reaction and not the attacks themselves. Continue Reading Below Advertisement What you instead must do is: Get a clear sense of what you should and shouldn't be ashamed of. People will try to shame you over your weight, income, sex partners, hobbies ... anything they sense you're insecure about, whether it's actually in your control or not. But shame exists for a reason. It's how society gives you feedback on your habits. So staying sane means learning how to answer this fairly simple question: "Is the critic here actually interested in seeing me get better, or are they just tearing me down so they look bigger in comparison?" Now, despite having become perfect at this, I still haven't encountered a single piece of legitimate criticism since 1996. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep an eye out.
8"What Matters Is What's In Your Heart!"
This is a case in which people misinterpret the intentions of the original author of the phrase (a copywriter at Newark Refrigerator Magnet Solutions, LLC, who oddly enough later turned out to be the infamous serial killer known as the Jersey Cannibal). I'm sure it's supposed to mean that it doesn't matter how poor or ugly somebody is, what matters is their character. Continue Reading Below Advertisement Unfortunately, how people actually live this advice boils down to, "What matters isn't what I do, but how I feel about it." Yes, these are the Thoughts and Prayers people. If they've wronged you, they'll feel guilty as hell. The guilt is, in fact, the fee they make themselves pay to do the shitty thing the next time. But their guilt won't lead them to actually try to make things right. "What do you mean you want me to pay back the money I stole? I told you I was sorry!" These are the people who will make some kind of mental resolution to get a job, or lose weight, or be generally better, then will congratulate themselves on having made that mental resolution and consider their work done. "Those poor kids, left without a home. We'll definitely keep them in our thoughts." This, as I think I've said several thousand times, is the epidemic of the social media age. "This viral tweet says immigrant children are being treated terribly, so I feel depressed today, which represents the totality of my response." Hmmm, it seems like if you are truly touched by this, you should do something more. "You're right. I'll be sure to also tell everyone I see how miserable I am, so that I get credit for being properly miserable in response to the plight of those poor children." Continue Reading Below Advertisement Fuck off. You are the sum total of your actions, and nothing else. This is not, however, to be confused with ...
9"Results Are All That Matter!"
Allow me to present the single most damaging yet almost universally believed piece of advice in the world. This is the bullshit spouted by every "loose cannon" cop on TV who violates all the rules but still gets the bad guy ("I don't like your methods, but damn it, you get things done!"), every talentless pseudo-celebrity who insists that their 15 seconds of fame is proof that they were right to drop out of college, every asshole who got rich off one lucky investment and then acts like they're a goddamned wise life guru. "I'm proof this method works!" No, you're fucking not. There is a method to being successful -- no matter how you define success -- that is effective and boring and requires suffering through numerous brutal setbacks. It involves learning how to do a thing, and then practicing doing the thing until you've made yourself valuable to the world due to being good at the thing, whether the thing is being a surgeon, artist, lover, or friend. Or all of them. Continue Reading Below Advertisement You'll have stretches where you do everything right and still fail, just as you can have a perfect shooting form and still miss a shot in basketball, and you'll get frustrated because some novice will then take the ball and put it through the hoop by bouncing it off of his ass. The physical universe is full of randomness. There are marathon runners who drop dead at 25 from cancer, there are fat smokers who live to be 103. But it's no mystery which way is much more likely to work. You have to always keep that big picture in mind, and, Take pleasure in mastering the process, regardless of the results. Shit, I'm just now realizing that these would all be easier to remember if they rhymed. Hold on, how about: Mastered Process Is Faster Progress. Crap, it took me two hours to come up with that. There's no way I have time to do the rest of these before deadline. Fuck. David's latest novel is out in paperback right now -- look at the review scores! Jason "David Wong" Pargin is the Executive Editor at Cracked. Follow him on Twitter or on Facebook or YouTube or Instagram. Support your favorite Cracked writers with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you. For more, check out The 5 Most Useless Pieces Of Advice Everyone Gives and 5 Stupid Pieces Of Advice That People Need To Stop Sharing. Also, we'd love to know more about you and your interesting lives, dear readers. If you spend your days doing cool stuff, drop us a line at iDoCoolStuff at Cracked dot com, and maybe we can share your story with the entire internet. We strongly advise you to follow us on Facebook. Read the full article
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