Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Mid-Week Linkage

Since we noted just below that Chowder debuted with good numbers on Friday, we'll go the next step and link to this review of the opus at Toon Zoon:

Cartoon Network brings us C.H. Greenblatt's Chowder, a charming new series that combines strong visual style with a quirky sense of humor to produce a show with tremendous potential. However, situating the action in a kitchen is where the similarity ends for these two cartoons.

The series is named after its lead character, an apprentice at Mung Daal's Catering Company in Marzipan City. He makes up for any lack of culinary skill with boundless enthusiasm, even if he often ends up making more mess than meal. He is mentored by the kindly head chef Mung Daal, while unintentionally tormenting the stone, gibberish-spouting straight man Shnitzel ...

The Pixar crowd was out last week toasting the Blu-Ray launch of Cars and Ratatouille:

Everyone seemed to be in great spirits walking the carpet. Brian Dennehy (who voiced Djano in Ratatouille) joked that his next move would be to dethrone John Ratzenberger as the go-to guy for Pixar voicework ...

John Ratzenberger stood nearby, promising that he would still have a voice cameo in the dialogue-lite Wall-E, though he has yet to record one. He laughed about the fact that, thanks to Pixar (and his brief appearances in The Empire Strikes Back and two Superman films) he's the number seven actor of all time in terms of total box office gross, just ahead of Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson and Morgan Freeman ...

Cripes. Europe still hasn't gotten the memo ...

Ratatouille" Number 1 For Fifth Week: Without a major challenge, Disney/Pixar's "Ratatouille" dominated the international market for a fifth straight weekend, cooking up $15.6 million from 4,142 screens in 30 markets and lifting its foreign gross to $374.9 million.

And as the Writers Guild goes to the mat with the AMPTP, Paramount and DreamWorks are sued over a slogan in freshly-released Bee Movie:

BeeCeuticals LLC, a closely held skin-care products maker owned by Howard Stern's cousin Richie Gerber filed the trademark-infringement suit today in Miami. Gerber, a personality on Stern's radio talk show, filed a federal trademark application for ``Give Bees A Chance'' a year ago, according to the complaint.

Paramount, a unit of New York-based Viacom Inc., and DreamWorks, based Glendale, California, are accused in the suit of using ``Give Bees A Chance'' in movie advertisements shortly after meeting with a BeeCeuticals marketing representative ...

But my very most favorite recent article is about the battle between high-dev DVD formats. It's title? Pixar vs. The Porn Industry.

Disney has cast its lot for Blu-ray, sponsoring major hoopla over the Blu-ray release of the Ratatouille and Cars DVDs ...

Lasseter makes a convincing argument for the Blu-ray player. “Cars on Blu-ray high definition is unbelievable, because it’s the closest you can see Cars to the way we saw it at Pixar,” he tells FilmStew. "It’s so beautiful - the resolution, the look is fantastic.

I was on the verge of running right over to Circuit City and buying a Blu-ray player when an extremely tech savvy colleague stopped me. “Blu-ray is going to lose the battle,” he insists, “because the porn industry has just come out on the side of HD-DVD.”

So have we got this? HD-DVDs win. Blu-ray DVDs lose. Because the porno industry (oh...and also DreamWorks Animation...) backs the HD-DVD format.

Soldier on.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Let's face it, a lot of what the internet is now wouldn't exist without the porn industry.

Anonymous said...

And thanks to the internet, the issue of what format the porn industry is supporting is completely irrelevant now. When vhs and betamax where battling for supremacy, the was no such thing as internet.

Rufus.

Anonymous said...

Speak for yourself, Rufus. I need my hi-def porn!

Why do you think they're really selling all those 50 inch screens?

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