People have been dreaming about loving giant women (or becoming giant women, for that matter) forever. But the Internet has fostered a really vibrant, creative community of people who've created artwork and lore. This fetish has a fancy name: macrophilia, according to this 1999 Salon article. There are actually two different types of macrophilia porn: There are women who've been hit with growth rays (or growth viruses) turning them into giants. And then there are men who've been hit with shrink rays or whatnot. The science-fiction origins of this fetish rest with movies like Attack OF The 50 Foot Woman and The Incredible Shrinking Man.

If you want to get the total awesomeness of giantess fetish, you have to go with artwork, which allows creators' imaginations to run wild. There are tons and tons of message boards and groups where people post their favorite art showing massive women and the doll-like men who love them. A lot.

And some of our favorite giantess art comes from Dream Tales, which kindly allowed us to feature a few images from their comics:

But adherents to this fetish also post tons and tons of homemade Photoshop collages, showing scantily dressed or naked women stomping across cities and trampling little men, including the one above, and these masterpieces:

There's even a giantess and shrunken men Flickr pool, where people post their own creations.

On the other hand, if you want actual professionally shot giantess porn, that exists as well. There are tons of pay porn sites that feature staged photos of women in their underwear, smashing model cities and stepping on toy soldiers. There's even HebrewGiantess.com, for those of you who just desperately needed "point of view" shots of a man looking up at a skyscraper-sized Jewish woman. Here are some of our favorite pay-site images:

But like many other niche fetishes, the love of giant women is (wait for it) big in Japan. Just check out this scene from a live-action video, featuring a man who's been shrunk to the size of a doll. The movie also includes scenes where the woman stimulates the helpless little man's tiny penis with a giant Q-tip. And the man climbs inside her vagina. But here's a nice scene where she licks his face and then he climbs onto her breast:

And then there's some amazing manga and hentai art from Japan, showing — among other things, a giant woman having sex with a giant robot.

Fans have also collected these amazing Kookai ads, featuring giant women and tiny men (via the defunct GTSFeet site):

So obviously, giantess porn, to some extent, is a fantasy about female power — women who grow to the size of a mountain are stand-ins for powerful women everywhere. But at the same time, you have to love the playfulness and sheer weirdness of the huge females crushing cities with the sheer force of their voluptuousness.

Before really digging into my question, let me offer a few disclaimers. The "First Thanksgiving", as it is popularly known, is a mix of real history and folklore, and most accounts gloss over the complex nuances of early relations between the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony and the Pokanoket Tribe. And even if the First Thanksgiving does help promote an image of peaceful relations between Europeans and Native Americans, it's hard to ignore that centuries worth of disease, war, and oppression were to follow that idyllic scene in 1621.

But even so, for all these complications, it's surprising how rarely media science fiction has been willing to consider first contact between humans and aliens that is premised on peaceful settlement and coexistence, rather than invasion and occupation, as depicted in the popular conception of the First Thanksgiving.

By my count, five films this year deal with human-alien relations — the pleasantly diverting Monsters & Aliens, the vaguely didactic Battle for Terra, the awesome District 9, the kinda stupid Planet 51, and the, um, Avatar-ilicious Avatar. Oh, and I guess I shouldn't forget television's V.

Beyond suggesting that no one is willing to depict aliens in full live action anymore, these six works all have similar conceptions of how aliens and humans would interact: One is going to invade the other. (District 9 is the only exception, but then we never do learn what the aliens' original goals in coming to Earth were.) Indeed, in most cases, the invasion is militaristic in character, whether it's General Hemmer in Battle for Terra or SecFor in Avatar.

There are some recent works of popular science fiction that fit the pilgrim archetype, but only imperfectly. The inhabitants of the Outer Rim in Firefly don't just act like Pilgrims; they also dress and talk like them. Indeed, Joss Whedon has famously described the "River almost gets burned at the stake as a witch" episode "Safe" as "The Crucible in space."

Malcolm Reynolds talks a lot about moving just a little bit further into space to escape Alliance oppression, something meant to recall the pioneer spirit of the 19th century that just as easily fits the ethos of the Plymouth colonists, who fled first to the Netherlands and then to the New World in search of religious freedom. The Pilgrims might be there, but with the exception of an upside down cow fetus, there weren't any aliens to complete the setup.

It's the same problem with Battlestar Galactica. The 50,000 survivors of the destruction of the Twelve Colonies were fleeing a rather more tangible threat than the religious policies of King Charles I, but the opening titles always made their real objective clear: they were looking for a home. Again, that's a decent fit with the Pilgrims' goals, and the on-ship tensions that led to the creation of the Mayflower Compact recall the factional tension that formed a key part of BSG's dramatic backbone. (And that's not even mentioning all the religious zealotry.)

But again, since the Cylons remained fundamentally tied to their human origins, the humans never really encountered any aliens. Well, unless you want to get into some rather tedious arguments about the humans in the finale. But that part was over with in about thirty seconds.

So what's left? Even an old warhorse like Doctor Who hasn't really explored the notion of peaceful coexistence between humans and aliens. Last year's "The Doctor's Daughter" at least ends on a hopeful note, but a lot of Hath had to be slaughtered to get there. Probably the best example of this sort of idea is 1971's Colony in Space, in which humans fled the polluted, overcrowded Earth in favor of Uxarius, where they eke out a living as farmers and live in an uneasy truce with the planet's "primitive" indigenous inhabitants.

The only problem is that the serial is just as much about an evil mining company, ferocious reptiles, and the Master trying to get his hands on an ancient super-weapon, and as such the human-alien relations angle doesn't get to be developed quite as much as it deserves.

And even in Star Trek, where the complexities of human-alien interaction is at the franchise's core, that pesky Prime Directive keeps humans from just up and settling any already inhabited rock, vastly limiting the space pilgrim potential.

Perhaps part of the reason science fiction has eschewed this approach is that the Pilgrims don't feel terribly relevant today. The age of exploration and colonization is now in our past (and, if we're lucky, maybe our future), and in a world where pretty much all territory is already known and claimed, invasion and forceful conquest seems a far more plausible way for boundary lines to be redrawn between humans and aliens.

Well, maybe it's just the tryptophan talking, but I think science fiction is seriously missing a beat here. Recent works ranging from Battlestar Galactica to District 9 have intelligently explored how hoary old science fiction cliches might work when approached realistically, but all have pretty much assumed it would be impossible for all parties to approach such situations in good faith. After all, even when attempting to forge a truce with the humans, the Cylons always (allegedly) have a plan.

But since I'm pretty sure we're still supposed to be in a bold, optimistic new age, I'd like to see what happens when you take a bunch of human separatists, throw them in a rickety old spaceship, and have them try to coexist with those already living on the planet they choose to settle. I'm not saying it would end well - if history is any indication, it won't - but it would be interesting to see, just once, humans and aliens both start out with the best of intentions.

On October 28th, NBC is airing a Monsters vs. Aliens Halloween special, Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space. Our heroes will return to Modesto when a new alien presence is detected just before Halloween. It being Halloween, they naturally find that the city's pumpkins have transformed into mutant aliens and are wreaking havoc on the town.

The video below contains five clips from the special, in which we witness the pumpkins' alien origins, learn what Susan dresses as for Halloween, and watch the Missing Link try to impress his fellow trick-or-treaters.

[Collider]

Deadgirl
What to do when you find a corpse chained to a table, and then discover that said corpse isn't actually dead? If nothing else, this dark comedy horror will make you realize that any answers you'd come up with to that question would be better than what happens here.

Doctor Who: The Next Doctor
Davids Tennant and Morrissey team up to take on Dervla Kirwan's villainous Miss Hartigan as the BBC mysteriously release last year's Christmas special after the already-out Planet Of The Dead special. Well, it is all time-travel, I guess...?

Primeval Vol. 2
The unintended end of the series can be found in this 3 disc box set that, despite the confusing title, actually contains the third season of the now-canceled show.

Sanctuary: The Complete First Season
See? This is how you name your DVD releases, clear and simple. Although, if they'd wanted to be completely descriptive, they would've called it The Complete First Season With Commentaries On All The Episodes, The Original Webisodes And Some Other Special Features. But that may have taken up too much room on the packaging.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Clone Commandos
A second selection of episodes from the first season of the Cartoon Network show that reminds people that, while war may be hell, Star Wars is just a pretty bad heck. Or perhaps a goshdarnit, at most.

X-Men Vol. 3: The Marvel Collection
X-Men Vol. 4: The Marvel Collection
Two more collections of episodes from the 1990s cartoon to remind people that, before there were X-Men movies that didn't match up to the Batman ones, there were X-Men cartoons that didn't match up to the Batman ones. But then again, I liked Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, so what do I know?

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Talking of X-Men movies, here's this summer's installment, allowing you to study the acting talents of Will-I-Am at your leisure. Also, with the ability to skip chapters, you can pretend that Gambit doesn't exist, which will immediately make the movie better.

Sept 22
Battle for Terra
It was the CGI movie you kept seeing trailers for, but don't actually remember seeing in theaters - and now it's out on DVD for you to ignore at home, too.

Clive Barker's Book Of Blood
Yes, yes; it was Books of Blood when the books were originally written, but times are hard for everyone, and movie didn't have the largest of budgets, so some cutbacks were inevitable (It's actually premiering on Syfy this week, for those who want a preview).

The Haunted World of El Superbeasto
If the idea of an animated movie based on a comic book about a superheroic masked wrestler created by Rob Zombie doesn't interest you, maybe the cast list - which includes Paul Giamatti, Rosario Dawson and Brian Posehn - will. Otherwise, we can't help you.

Scooby Doo: The Mystery Begins
Because, sometimes, you need a live action reboot of the Scooby Doo franchise by the man who directed the Flintstones live action movies. Of course, when we say "need," we may be using that word incorrectly. Nonetheless, this direct-to-DVD epic shows the first meeting of Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scoob, and without the disturbing presence of either Sarah Michelle Gellar or Freddie Prinze Jr. So... potential win after all?

Star Trek: Original Motion Picture Collection Box Set
Star Trek: The Next Generation Motion Picture Collection Box Set
Paramount finds a new way to recycle the Star Trek movies with these new era-specific box sets. We look forward to the inevitable Star Trek: The Good Ones, You Know What We Mean box set within a year (Also: Am I the only one who was surprised to find out that there were four TNG movies, even though I've actually seen them all? I think I subconsciously try to pretend that Insurrection and Nemesis don't actually exist).

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: The Complete Second Season
Your chance to relive the only Terminator that mattered this year, despite that whole cancellation thing, with six discs full of episodes, commentaries and special features. Buy it in the hope that someone at Fox will change their mind when they see the sales figures.

Sept 29
Batman Collection: 4 Film Favorites Box Set
Those "film favorites" would be the Michael Keaton/Val Kilmer/George Clooney movies, by the way. It seems fair, because to add in either of the Chris Nolan-era movies - or even the 1966 Adam West one - would make any of these four seem somewhat lacking in comparison (Okay, maybe not Batman Returns).

Blade Collection: 4 Film Favorites Box Set
I know what you're thinking: "There were only three Blade movies, how can they have a 4 DVD box set?" The answer lies in including the pilot for the short-lived TV show in there, which seems like a slight cheat to me, but that's why I'm not a Warners Home Entertainment executive.

Hardware
Finally making it to DVD, Richard Stanley's 2000AD-inspired robot horror movie from 1990 finds a new, uncut and uncensored form to ensure that old-school fans will want to pick it up as well. If nothing else, how often do you see Iggy Pop and Lemmy in the same movie?

Monsters Vs. Aliens
Dreamworks Animation's love letter to old school B-movies proved to be much better than expected when it was released in theaters earlier this year, and the DVD - with special features on the making of the movie, deleted scenes and, bizarrely, a Dreamworks Animation Video Jukebox - aims on taking even more advantage of the impressionable hearts, minds and wallets of kids of all ages.

The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection Box Set
25 discs of animated paranormal activity, as the entire five year run of the 1980s (and early '90s) cartoon (including Slimer spin-off) gets collected in this insanely comprehensive box set that also has twelve hours of special features. You may never have to leave the house again. Or, at least, not for a few weeks.

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies
The latest DC animated movie adapts Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness' fun, over the top tale of President Lex Luthor trying to turn the world against our favorite superheroes, only to (a) go insane in the process and (b) lead to the creation of a giant Superman/Batman composite robot. If they've not changed too much, this could be the guilty pleasure of the fall.

Ultraman: The Complete Series
...Or, perhaps, it could be this: A 4 disc box set collecting all 39 episodes of the mid-60s Japanese TV show that brought the madness and production values of Godzilla movies to television on a weekly basis. Robot superheroes versus monsters courtesy of Eiji Tsuburaya? Works for me.

Like the movie preview, we've split this preview into months (and, inside those months, into weekly releases), but with releases still unconfirmed and unannounced, we've pushed November and December together. Don't worry; it'll make sense when you click on the links below.

September
October
November/December

The movie made an estimated $16.7 million in theaters yesterday, despite being a kids' movie opening on a school day; according to Variety, we won't know how much of that comes from 3-D showings until tomorrow, but the Hollywood Reporter suggests that it might be a lot:

[T]he PG-rated pic is playing in 3-D on just over 2,000 of those [4104] U.S. and Canadian screens. So it was pretty impressive that early estimates had the 3-D venues accounting for just over half of the Friday grosses on "Monsters."

Estimates as to how much the movie is going to make over the course of the whole weekend range from $50million ( to $60million, but Nikki Finke is suggesting that we should expect it to fall somewhere around $57million (Slashfilm is guessing $56million), which would make it not only easily the biggest 3-D opening ever (beating previous top movie Spy Kids 3-D by more than $20million), but also the third most successful March opening for any movie, replacing Watchmen after less than a month in the #3 spot. Maybe Warners should concentate on the PG merchandising sweet spot from now on after all...

The premise is X-Files for kiddies: A secret underground facility houses all the monsters accidentally or not-so-accidentally created over the past 50 years in America. There they live in giant cages, completely bored, until one day a new "rare, female monster" named Susan is introduced. Voiced by Reese Witherspoon, Susan is a proto-housewife from farm town Modesto who is turned into a giant when she's hit with an asteroid on her wedding day.

When the sweet, reluctant monster Susan is introduced to the blobby Bob (Seth Rogen), mad cockroach scientist Dr. Cockroach Ph.D. (Hugh Laurie), and dorky fish-frog-man The Missing Link, all she wants is to return to her life as the wife of a self-absorbed, small-town news anchor. But slowly the monsters teach her monster pride, and she teaches them about friendship. Luckily, an evil alien named Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson) rescues the movie from becoming Snow White and the Three Dwarfy Monsters, in which Susan tames the (to her) tiny monsters and gives their sexless boy lives meaning with her sweetness.

Gallaxhar is in search of the rare mineral that turned Susan into Ginormica, and decides to drain her of its essence and then destroy Earth just for fun. But first, he sends his giant space robot, which tears up San Francisco in a brilliant series of utterly fun scenes. The 3D action is swooshy, colorful, and exciting. Susan and the monsters defeat the space robot, which not only brings Susan's self-esteem up a peg but allows us to check out Stephen Colbert's moves as the movie's version of the US president.

It's hard not to giggle, regardless of your age, when President Colbert tries to communicate with the giant space robot through music - specifically the funky Axel F. theme song from Beverly Hills Cop. This is just one of dozens of clever little references strewn throughout the movie that will tickle adults and fly straight over kids' heads without any harm done. There's a brief moment with a Journey song that will make you howl, and of course all the monsters have their parallels in the great monsters of filmland canon: Ginormica is the 50 Foot Woman, Bob is the Blob, Dr. Cockroach is The Fly, and The Missing Link is the Creature from the Black Lagoon. And their giant bug pet, Insectasaurus, is Mothra. (Yay Mothra!)

The central drama of the film, other than fighting Gallaxhar and his clone army, is Susan's struggle to accept her new role as supergiant monster. Like the main character in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, she discovers that her husband is a cad. He rejects her the instant that her defeat of the giant robot makes her more famous than he is - it turns out all his promises that they're "a team" only apply when he's the star and she's in his shadow. So she has to embrace her strong, monstery side and accept that she's awesome precisely because she's weird.

While the pro-monster message a good one for kids - who doesn't feel like a booger-faced superinsect when they're 8? - the message about Susan feels embarrassingly dated. Girls in America today aren't choosing between selfhood and marriage. That's the struggle of their grandmothers' generation. Susan's anguish seems weird and misplaced, especially in a pop culture universe where Power Puff Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have existed for over a decade.

Instead of feminism, or even just "girl power," Monsters vs. Aliens gives us a "rare female monster" whose power is used to shame the other monsters ("I can't believe you were beaten by a girl monster!" one of them says to The Missing Link). Still, it's nice to see Susan as the hero, leading the battle against Gallaxhar, even if everybody keeps reminding her that what makes her a monster is that she's a strong woman.

The true joy in this movie is the way it overturns conventions of kids' movies about being "different." There is no happy ending where the monsters are accepted by everybody, though Susans' family eventually does accept her new size. Mostly the monsters are hung out to dry by all the humans we meet, who are generally bozos who can't tell the difference between the red button to end the world and the red button to order a latte. There's a gleeful, mean apocalyptic streak in this flick, helped along by the great voice acting from the likes of Wilson, Laurie, and especially Rogen. At times, their antics capture the smart mania of the early Muppets.

If you're looking for goofy fun you can share with carbon lifeforms under the age of 10 this weekend, definitely shoot yourself over to a theater to check out Monsters vs. Aliens.

In Monsters Versus Aliens, a woman named Susan gets hit by a meteor and becomes a bleach-blonde giant on her wedding day, so she's shipped off to a secret government facility where a host of classic monsters are kept. At the same time, a giant robot arrives from outer space to conquer the planet on behalf of the evil Gallaxhar. Conventional weapons are no use, so the government decides to send Susan and the other monsters to fight the alien menace.

Spooky improv at a distance:

The recording process for Monsters Versus Aliens sounded totally demented, the way Vernon described it. On the one hand, stars like Hugh Laurie, Will Arnett, Seth Rogen, Kiefer Sutherland, Stephen Colbert and Rainn Wilson were encouraged to make up their own dialogue and go crazy with the script. On the other hand, none of the actors were ever in the same room together - except for one scene between Reese Witherspoon (Ginormica) and Paul Rudd (Derek, her fiance).

"That's one reason we enlisted these great comedic actors: We needed the dialogue to sound completely natural, because this was an ensemble cast," explains Vernon. But at the same time, "they're never really together, in the sense of recording their dialogue together."

Instead, the actors were bouncing their dialogue off a "reader," named Stephen Kearin, and when they would ad lib, "he would come back at them" with an ad lib of his own.

So if Seth Rogen (B.O.B.) came up with a great line that wasn't in the script, the directors would go to Will Arnett and Hugh Laurie and tell them what Seth had said. And then Arnett and Laurie would make up their own responses. And then the tape would go to Reese Witherspoon. And often, it would end up coming back to Rogen a few more times, so he could respond to what the other actors had ad-libbed. And sometimes, Rogen would end up changing his original line of dialogue that had sparked all of this round-robin reinvention.

"It was very iterative," explains Vernon. The same scene would get re-recorded over and over, "more than several times."

The benefit of 3-D:

Since James Cameron told Time Magazine that proper 3-D movies use more neurons in your brain and create a "real" experience, I asked Vernon if the MvA audience might possibly think they were watching a documentary. He didn't seem to think so. But he did think that having the movie in 3-D made the sight gags pop more. And it allowed you to become more invested in the characters and "more on the edge of your seat when they're in danger."

Are classic science fiction films the new fairy tales?

Vernon directed Shrek 2, which plays with the classic Disney formula of making old fairy tales into animated source material. But now he's making a film that uses classic science fiction characters like the Blob, the 50-foot woman and the creature from the Black Lagoon in place of fairy-tale characters.

Vernon says he thinks these characters are "atomic-age fairy tales: each one of them has a certain idea behind it, and a certain moral, and a certain story theme." Many of the 1950s movies are about what happens if the bomb drops, and "what would be the fallout." So in a typical 1950s movie, "this was a fish that absorbed atomic radiation, and grew to be 1000 feet tall. And now it's flopping around New York eating everything." So whereas a fairy tale might have a moral about jealousy or talking to strangers, these 1950s movies have a moral about being careful with atomic weapons.

And Vernon definitely hopes MvA will appeal to adults who remember seeing these old monster movies on television. "It's like these characters kind of transcend time" and keep getting reinvented for new generations. Frankenstein has already been around since the 1800s and on film since the 1930s, but each generation makes its own Frankenstein story. "They're always going to have new generations becuase of the way they're updated. There was even a new Blob movie put out. We wanted the adults to remember those movies and know the movies and kind of nod to them. It's nostalgic and pulls at the heartstrings a little bit."

At the same time, Vernon would rather reinvent these old characters and ideas than do a straight-up remake. "You have to give everything a new spin," he says. "The original is always going to have more punch."

Yay for empowerment!

So what's the moral of Monsters Versus Aliens? Vernon says there are "parallel messages" going on at once. "I think the main message is for Susan (aka Ginormica), [and that is] 'Don't let anyone tell you what you can and can't do, and who you are. Be proud of who you are, and don't let anyone stop you doing what you want to do.'" And once Susan learns this lesson, she passes it on to the other monsters. She also learns not to let her weatherman fiance Derek treat her like dirt any more.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine:

Yet another update on the Deadpool controversy. Ryan Reynolds confirms that the weird figure in the trailer with his mouth sewn shut and the freakish tattoos is him, and that it's Deadpool. "When I'm in the scarred makeup, too... you'll see closer shots, obviously, in the film." You can see in the video, the reporter even asks a follow up question to make absolutely sure "the dude with the mouth sewn shut" is Reynolds, and he says yes. [MTV]

Monsters Versus Aliens:

A couple of pretty hilarious TV spots have been airing the past few days, including some new footage of the monsters meeting Ginormica's family and stuff. This movie may be the only time I ever find Seth Rogen cute.

The Thing:

Scribe Ronald D. Moore repeated that his script is a prequel, and added it's a "companion piece" to John Carpenter's original movie. It links up with the Carpenter film, and doesn't try to reinvent it. A director (Matthijs Van Heijningen) is assigned, and now he's waiting to see if Universal Pictures greenlights it. [Sci Fi Wire]

Doctor Who:

The Tenth Doctor will face creatures from Mars right before he regenerates, according to a report from the Mirror. (But it's not clear if these are Ice Warriors, or some new creatures. Or possibly the guys from "Ambassadors Of Death," who were not technically from Mars, but hung out there.) Also, two villains in the final episodes will be played by Neighbors star Peter O'Brien and "glamorous actress" Gemma Chan. [Mirror]

Battlestar Galactica:

Ron Moore tells Sci Fi Wire it was important for him to deliver a finale that tied up most of the loose ends and left a few people dead. (From which I infer, not everybody dies?) [Sci Fi Wire]

Also, the first hour and a half of the finale is so intense, you'll be breathless. And Mary McDonnell, in particular, will have you in tears more than once. A ton of questions will be answered, including some you'd think they wouldn't have time to address. [TV Guide]

Lost:

That mystery upcoming death? Apparently, it's not Sawyer. Also, don't expect to see Nikki again on the show this spring. [E! Online]

What's going on with Young Ben in the upcoming episodes of Lost? Actor Sterling Beaumon explains:

You're going to find out how Ben became the mean, cruel Ben that he is today. And you're going to find out about the roots of the island and how the island became the island. ... In two of the episodes, I'm really not doing a lot, but you just see me a lot, and you'll see what I mean by that.

And he says he's not really doing an impression of Michael Emerson, for a reason that will become apparent. [Sci Fi Wire]

There are six pages from the season finale script that detail some huge twist, which only the actors involved get to have... and Elizabeth Mitchell says she's not one of those people. And Juliet has a lot of insecurity over Kate coming back, and how Sawyer will react. [TV Guide]

Dollhouse:

This week's episode will make you gasp at least once, and possibly rewind to see if someone said what you thought he/she said. And the episode features one of the best hand-to-hand fight scenes ever, a "cool reveal" about the Dollhouse's business model, and lots of shirtless Tahmoh Penikett. [TV Guide]

Also, this Friday's episode is Sierra-centric, and focuses on a documentary about the "urban legend" of the Dollhouse. There's some "sexy time" going on "behind the scenes" in the house, and some of it involves Sierra. And as we've mentioned, Echo and Paul also come face to face. [E! Online]]

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles:

The official description of the season's penultimate episode, "Adam Raised A Cain," fills me with giddy excitement:

When John attempts to rescue Skynet's latest target he finds himself closing in on Weaver, but at what cost? Game plans change, causing Sarah and Ellison to reunite. Meanwhile, Weaver learns Ellison's secrets.

[Sarah Connor Society]

Fringe:

When we find out what Peter's "condition" is, we'll understand why Walter has been so desperately attached to him, and so concerned about him. [TV Guide]

Life On Mars:

Producer Josh Appelbaum hints that the American version of this time-stranded cop drama will have a very different ending than the U.K. version. But he also seems to be saying both Sams are in a coma, so it's hard to tell. [Slice Of Scifi]

Smallville:

Meteor freaks start dying out in Metropolis, but Doomsday may not be to blame. [E! Online]

Heroes:

Angela and Peter Petrelli are on the run together, now that the Hunter is in charge. They hide out in a church on Monday, and then after that they go "someplace special." And Angela has a big role in the rest of the season's episodes. [E! Online]

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

It looks like Gallaxhar takes Ginormica prisoner at some point and rants to her about his plans for universal domination? I think that scene with the pink bars and stuff shows up in the trailer as well. And Ginormica takes her fellow monsters, including Dr. Cockroach PhD (Hugh Laurie) and B.O.B. (Seth Rogen), to meet her parents. Awww. Plus Ginormica seems to become pretty friendly with General W.R. Monger (Kiefer Sutherland).

Monsters Vs. Aliens is in theaters March 27, in 3-D.

Monsters Versus Aliens is out March 27th.

Wolverine:

Dominic Monaghan gives a teeny bit of background on what his character, Beak, is doing in this movie:

My character's story begins the angry motivational moves for Wolverine. I'm a guy who was friends with Logan in his earlier Army days, and something goes down in an Army sortie, and because of that, Logan gets brought back into a combat scenario.

[E! Online]

Terminator Salvation:

The Academy Awards showed a super-brief montage of clips from this movie during its closing credits.

Monsters Vs. Aliens:

The closing credits during the Oscars also included a shiny eight seconds of clips from this upcoming movie:

Dragonball Evolution:

The movie did a press conference in Korea, and a few snippets of new footage showed on Korean TV. [DB The Movie]

Battlestar Galactica:

Here are some pics from episode 4x17, "Someone To Watch Over Me." [SpoilerTV]

Fringe:

Keep looking in the backgrounds of the upcoming episodes, because another "observer" may be turning up soon — and co-creator Roberto Orci says it may be a female observer this time. [E! Online]

Also, Jasika Nicole says she'll finally get more screen time in an upcoming episode, as we learn why Astrid was chosen to do such a crucial job and have access to so much crucial information. [E! Online]

Dollhouse:

Here are some pics from the show's fourth episode, "Gray Hour." [Multipleverses]

During that episode, Echo gets "remotely deactivated" by telephone, and it's bad news. And the mysterious former doll Alpha is responsible. [E! Online]

Lost:

Getting back to the island is not what the Oceanic Six expected, says actor Jorge Garcia, and the O6 get split up and scattered through time. The time-jumping storyline will continue, but with a pause in one decade (the 1970s, I guess.) And there are more hints that Sawyer and Juliet will be hooking up long-term, at least for now. Also, Sawyer is becoming more of a leader and gaining some substance, says Josh Holloway. Sawyer's leadership role will put him in opposition to some of the Oceanic Six's goals, and cause him to butt heads with Jack. [TV Guide via SpoilersLost]

Here are some sneak peeks from tomorrow night's episode.

Heroes:

Joshua Rush appeared as Young Sylar in a photograph shown during the first episode of the "Fugitives" story arc (see pic, right), and the young actor blogged that he'll be back in next Monday's episode, playing Young Sylar, probably in a flashback of some sort. [SpoilerTV]

We'll see more of Rebel coming up, and it's looking increasingly likely that he/she is really young Micah. And Noah and Sandra may actually get divorced. Sylar remembers more of his childhood before he was given up for adoption, and we'll learn that one of his "signature" psycho killer acts runs in the family. (Like, dad used to slice people's foreheads too?) [E! Online]

Supernatural:

Here's a new trailer for episode 4x15, "Death Takes A Holiday." Anna the "disgraced angel" is back, and so's Tessa, the reaper who tried to claim Dean back in the season two opener. [Thanks Amy!]

And Dean and Bobby start an intervention for Sam, over his addiction to demon blood, and keep him prisoner. (Bondage!) Also, the show is casting a cutie-pie 11 year old who's suddenly possessed and turns into an ice queen, which means Lilith is probably coming back. [E! Online]

True Blood:

The show put out another casting call, this time for episode 2x05, "Never Let Me Go." They're looking for someone to play Gabe, a fierce drill instructor at a boot camp for vampire hunters; Stan, Godric's metrosexual lieutenant in Texas, who dresses in fancy Westernwear and is a volatile troublemaker; and Isabel, an elegant Hispanic vampire and Godric's other lieutenant. [SpoilerTV]

Also, we'll catch up with Eric in 10th Century Scandinavia, when he was first turned into a vampire. [E! Online]

Reaper:

Here's what happens in episode 2x02, "Dirty Sexy Mongol":

Sam's (Bret Harrison) been given a new assignment from the Devil (Ray Wise) but all he can focus on is finding out how Alan (guest star Sean Patrick Thomas) got of his deal with the Devil. However, after Sam and Alan are attacked by two demons sent by the Devil, Alan refuses to talk to him anymore and disappears. One of the demons takes a surprising interest in Ben (Rick Gonzalez).

[Reapersite]

Also, TV Guide says Sam, Sock and Ben come back from their male-bonding road trip to find they've lost their jobs, and Sam's in hot water with Andi over all his evasions. Andi gets a promotion at the Work Bench, and there are some new characters that add complications (such as love triangles) to existing storylines. [Reapersite]

It's pretty amazing to see all the work that went into crafting this insane rollicking adventure — from the guy wearing 3-D glasses to animate a scene, to the "camera" tracking as it goes down a staircase into the president's briefing room. Even more than all of the adulatory featurettes and cool soundbites, this look into all of the movie's insane prep work is making us excited for a crazy 3-D ride.

After seeing a large chunk of the movie's first third, I'm still pretty excited. The voice performances, by talents like Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland, are just as fun as you'd expect. The movie is jam-packed with silly in-jokes and ridiculous sight-gags, at least half of which are genuinely super funny. I'd say it's not quite as great or memorable as The Incredibles, but several heads better than 99 percent of other animated films.

Here's my rundown of the scenes we got to see:

First scene:

A 350-foot tall alien robot has landed in Modesto, CA, as a reporter explains. The president (Stephen Colbert) tries to confront the giant robot, which has a single swiveling blue eye. The president leaves his guards behind and ascends a giant staircase that leads up to the alien's eye. At the top he plays a big synthesizer. (First he plays the musical message from Close Encounters, then "Axel F" from Beverly Hills Cop. All the soldiers and government spooks dance, stiffy.)

The Prez seems to be getting through! The alien puts out a little protruding item, like a communcations device. Colbert tries to shake hands with it — but it smashes his synthesizer. The robot sprouts massive legs and starts to walk.

The president barely manages to get away, and tells an army captain, "Do something violent." The army complies, but to no avail, and everyone has to withdraw. On his way out, the president pulls out a big gun and shouts, "Eat lead!" (No good. As the president says, "Turns out it eats lead.") Then the president lets himself be carried off, insisting that he's a brave president.

The missiles launched against the alien robot include one that says "E.T. Go Home" in giant letters.

Then we see a guy running to get into the secret bunker where the president is meeting with all his top advisors, and he has to get his eyes, hands, feet, and butt scanned to get in.

The president has two giant red buttons: one of which launches every nuclear weapon in the country, the other of which makes a latte. (Who designed that ridiculous system? he demands. And then it turns out it was him. In which case, of course it makes sense.) The president keeps almost pressing the wrong giant button, either by accident or because he's panicking. ("Damn good cup of joe," the president says.)

Just when all seems lost, General W.R. Monger (Sutherland) shows up and suggests a solution. (The bit you've seen in the trailer where he says "We need a hail mary pass, we need raw power, we need... monsters.")

He runs through a round-up of all the monsters and their origins. (The killer blob B.O.B. (Seth Rogen) is the result of an experiment in a fast-food factory involving ranch dressing and candy. Insectosaurus was irradiated and became giant, attempting to destroy Japan.) When each monster is shown, one woman in the room screams in a theatrical B-movie fashion.

Finally, she's dragged out of the room, but we still hear a scream when Ginormica's origin is revealed — it's the president.) One nerdy guy asks if we really want to have a monster problem added to our alien problem, and General Monger gives him a horrendous wedgie. The president gives the go ahead for the monster plan.

Second scene:

Susan Murphy (Witherspoon), the gigantic woman known as Ginormica, is asleep in her cell, when an alarm begins to sound. She thinks it's her honeymoon and asks her new husband to press the snooze button — then she wakes up and realizes she's actually giant, and her wedding never finished. (She suddenly turned giant on her wedding day after being hit with a meteor, as you probably saw in the film's trailer.)

Then the cell suddenly turns into an elevator and starts shooting down. She finds herself in a huge hangar in Area 52, where mysterious voices speculate on whether she's just a giant pair of legs or something more. A pile of gloop drops onto a table, and a shape scuttles out and hides behind it. The insect-man genius Dr. Cockroach, PhD (Hugh Laurie) pops out and introduces himself, and Susan tries to squish him in a very Bugs Bunny-esque sequence. "My brain will be in the Smithsonian some day, let's not ruin it, shall we?" he implores. Gradually, she meets the other monsters: the gelatinous B.O.B., the half-fish Missing Link (Will Arnett), the gigantic Insectosaurus, whose roar only makes sense to the Missing Link.

B.O.B. thinks Susan is a boy, and says "Look at his boobies! B.O.B. has no brain and says it's overrated. Then he forgets how to breathe, and Dr. Cockroach has to explain it to him.

They all get their food — nasty fish for the Missing Link, garbage for Dr. Cockroach and a giant ham bone which dissolves inside B.O.B.'s see-through flesh.

Susan tells the monsters her name, but they want to know her monster name. She says, "Susan." And they're all like, no, what do people scream when they see you coming, "Oh my god, it's —" And she's still like, "Susan." "Oooh, Sooosan," says B.O.B. And then he decides it is a scary name after all. "I just scared myself."

General W.R. Monger turns up in a flying jetpack harness, and tells all the other monsters to go back to their cells. Insectosaurus gets led around via a giant lamp that he stares at. Susan is thrilled to meet another real human — until she worries that the general is really one of those half-machine, half-human things. "A cyborg," the general says helpfully. "Aaaaa you're a cyborg!" she screams.

Third scene:

The monsters go to confront the giant robot probe in San Francisco. Ginormica gets chased down the street, and runs across the rooftops. She falls down one slanted rooftop, and hangs by her fingernails — and then she only falls! But she only falls a few feet because, duh, she's giant. And B.O.B. gets stuck to the underside of the robot's foot, and grabs a hot dog cart off the street for a snack.

Meanwhile, Dr. Cockroach, PhD has fitted a cable car with rockets, and is zooming down the street with the Missing Link. He tells the Link he'll pull up alongside the robot, and the Missing Link can get up inside it and access the control center. But just as they reach the robot, B.O.B. comes flying into the cable car, knocking the other two over. They go whizzing down the street until they land in the water.

Susan, meanwhile, has turned a couple of cars into improvised roller skates, and she's running away. She reaches a group of people trying to escape the city in their cars, so she has to dodge and weave around them while going a zillion miles per hour. And then the robot shows up when she reaches the Golden Gate Bridge, and starts smashing everything. She's trying to fight the robot and help the people get to safety. The other monsters (except Insectosaurus) show up and tell her she's doing great. "I'm doing everything!" she shouts.

Dr. Cockroach, PhD, runs up inside the machine's crushing mechanism, because nothing can crush a cockroach. He manages to reach a control mechanism. He puts two wires together — and only succeeds in generating a beam that hypnotizes Insectosaurus, who's shown up to fight it. The Missing Link is knocked out, so Susan tries to get B.O.B. to help. "Oh, sorry, I was just looking at that bird," B.O.B. says. She tells him to get the people out of there, so B.O.B. tries to pick up the cars and throw them off the bridge. "No!" she says. "Move the dividers!" B.O.B. starts eating the dividers on the bridge, so people can drive into the opposite lane and drive away.

Overpowered by the robot, Susan almost gives up, but then she gives herself a pep talk and rallies. She manages to knock the robot over so that part of the bridge comes down and slices it in half.

Most of Katzenberg's presentation had to do with the development of the InTru 3-D system. Proper 3-D film (as opposed to the clunky 1950s version) is the third great advance in film-making, after sound and color. From now on, every Dreamworks animation movie will be conceived, from the earliest storyboards, in 3-D.

I asked Katzenberg about the comic book Rex Havoc And The Ass-Kickers Of The Fantastic, which was rumored to be where some of the ideas in Monsters Versus Aliens came from. Said Katzenberg:

Rex Havoc is something that we did option, some many years ago. And that does have a monster hunter, I think, at its core. But the filmmakers, Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon... actually ended up creaing [MVA] from scratch. And so I think the similarities between those are fairly distant.

During the Q&A after Katzenberg's presentation, people asked why CG animation in these sorts of movies is not more photorealistic. Katzenberg replied that at $150 million a movie, CG animated films are much more expensive than just pointing a digital camera at actors. So in animation, it's better to go for "heightened realism."

Katzenberg also said he's seen a few minutes of James Cameron's 3-D epic Avatar, and it was amazing. And he admitted that the financial crisis has slowed down the financing of 3-D-enabled movie theaters, meaning there are a lot fewer screens available than everyone had predicted this time last year. So even though Katzenberg insisted every movie would soon be in 3-D, it might take a little longer than he'd hoped.

At first glance, Total Conspiracy is just a hilariously awesome conspiracy site, including pictures of flying dogs, alien coins (from the U.S. Treasury), and alien-influenced mathematicians. It's chock full of weird ranty videos by sitemaster Jeffrey Freedman, and essays on things like flu vaccines as an alien scheme to weaken us. (And I love the whole thing in the video, where he demands to know if the government had anything to do with the death of Robert Heinlein.)

But eagle-eyed reader James pointed me to the science fiction book covers in the latest video, posted above. Not only do they have great parody titles like Weirdo In A Weird Land, Probed: A Love Story, Scales Of Fear, The Boy Who Forgot The Time, Welcome To Our New Mechanical Overlords, My Big Fat GIant Revenge, and I Have No Brain And I Must Yell. But they also feature MVA characters like Bob (the blob), Dr. Cockroach PhD, Ginormica and a couple others.

Could this, too, be a conspiracy? Could Dreamworks be controlling the mind of an innocent UFO conspiracy nut, trying to get him to promote their movie? Only you can decide, by exposing your truth. [Top Secret Conspiracy, thanks James!]

There's been plenty of animated scifi before this summer, of course — Fox and Blue Sky put out the bog-awful Robots a few years ago, and Disney/Pixar did The Incredibles. There's been underground-y weird animated scifi like Heavy Metal since the 70s, and plenty of animated science fiction/comics stuff on TV. And while we've been dragging our feet in the U.S., the Japanese have been putting science fiction anime on the big screen for decades.

But this will be remembered as the summer science fiction animation broke out, mostly thanks to Wall-E and Clone Wars. It's not just that both films will probably end up having been box-office successes. They're also so different from each other, in style and storylines, that you won't be able to think of science fiction animation as being restricted to a kind of space-operatic goofiness or superhero pastiche ever again. Whether you love either of those films, they're both a proof of concept for two different ways of approaching big-screen CG-animated science fiction.

(Despite having the cartoony chubby humans, Wall-E is actually more photorealistic than Clone Wars, thanks to the awesome pseudo-cinematography of Roger Deakins, complete with lens flare and textures. Clone Wars, meanwhile, deliberately sets out to avoid being photorealistic and winds up with a weird puppet style of animation that may grow on me. Or not. )

At first, I thought the science fiction animated boom would be self-limiting, because of a string of wretched films in the pipeline, like Space Chimps, Fly, and (I have a feeling) the forthcoming Planet 51. These films sport a cheesy not-quite-Pixar style and paper-thin plots. Unlike Pixar films, which are aimed at kids but speak to adults on a whole different level, the Chimps/Fly movies are barely cogent enough for a really slow child.

But Pixar comes to the rescue once again, with the animated Newt, about the last two blue-footed newts in the world, who hate each other but must interbreed in order to save their species. I'm also quite optimistic about Monsters Vs. Aliens, which is based on a great comic book and has put out some really cool images and a great trailer so far. It has a 50-foot woman and a mad scientist with the head of a cockroach, plus a sort of Mars Attacks sensibility.

I'm sort of intrigued by Igor, mostly thanks to the incredible cast listing, including Eddie Izzard, John Cleese and John Cusack. It also has a cute premise: the hunch-back who wants to a mad scientist instead of an "Igor." The latest poster looks sort of clunky and awful, but the trailer is cute and funny. A brain in a jar tries to hypnotize Igor, and when that doesn't work, it just hits him with a spatula. Pure win!

We're also in for a big-screen anime explosion, with American studios involved. Studio Imagi is working on animated Astro Boy and Gatchaman movies, among others. There's also a Heavy Metal remake/homage in the pipeline.

I feel as though these sorts of kid-friendly animated movies have been dominated by fantasy and funny animals for as long as the CG variety has been around. (There's no science behind talking toys in Toy Story or talking cars in Cars.) But now the pendulum is swinging toward scifi premises, maybe as more creators who grew up on scifi in the 1950s and 1960s take charge.

I have two happy observations about the rise of CG animated scifi kiddie movies:

1) Science fiction is the new fairy tale, and that's an awesomely good thing. Who could watch Wall-E without starting to think of him as a young commoner who gets swept up into a castle by a princess, only to discover his own nobility? Etc. etc. The Igor trailer even includes the "Once upon a time" caption. I could totally see Clone Wars' Ahsoka turning into a fairy tale heroine (although she's probably destined for a bad end.) It would be great if generations of kids grew up thinking of robots and scientists the way earlier Disney watchers thought about princesses and flying elephants.

2) On the flipside, even as these animated scifi movies become fairy-tale-ish, they're also more serious and thoughtful than most "grown-up" science fiction movies. Of the summer's big blockbuster films, how many were as smart and debate-provoking as Wall-E? Off the top of my head, I'd say Iron Man and Dark Knight, and that's it. Okay, so Clone Wars is not going to be smart or thought-provoking, I'm pretty sure. But movies like Newt, Igor and Monsters Vs. Aliens at least have the potential to throw in some clever concepts and make you think about issues like extinction, the class system, and the rights of monsters. So I'm cautiously excited about the new scifi animated boom — and I think it's going to be around for a while.