Synopsis:

After super-villain Megamind (Ferrell) kills his good-guy nemesis, Metro Man (Brad Pitt), he becomes bored, since there is no one left to fight. He creates a new foe, Titan (Jonah Hill), who, instead of using his powers for good, sets out to destroy the world, positioning Megamind to save the day for the first time in his life.

Megamind will be out November 5th, 2010.

First off, we find out that Megamind wasn't always evil. At least his childhood concept design doesn't look that way. We see a picture of our anti-hero with short legs, a cherub face and a big blue noggin. Megamind director Tom McGrath explains that the little blue boy came from an advanced civilization in a distant galaxy. He was sent away by pod as his planet was being destroyed, but instead of winding up in the arms of a lovable farming couple in Smallville, he landed in a prison. Thus he grew up with a criminal mind.

Megamind is voiced by Will Ferrell — so you guessed it, he tends to go on long tangents and constantly mispronounce his home city Metro City as Metrocity over and over again. Thankfully when paired up with the rest of this amazing voice cast, he doesn't overpower the production. If anything, his flair works well with his character's various cape ensembles — one cape is for business, another cape is dubbed the Black Mamba, and so forth.

Meanwhile Metro City prospers thanks to the help of Brad Pitt's Metro Man, who's something of an Elvis, crossed with Patrick Warburton, with a giant savior complex, and fringe. In fact, Metro Man is so good at playing the hero, Metro City starts getting rather complacent, and some people have even stopped wearing seat belts. Because what's the point when you have an ever-vigilant hero in town?

Of course, none of this is meant to last, and in the first moments of our screening we see Megamind with his half-fish, half-gorilla sidekick Minion, voiced by David Cross, pull up in their invisible car with local reporter Roxanne Ritchi as their hostage. Roxy is played by Tina Fey, and we really hope this is something Fey continues to do because the back-and-forth banter between Roxy and Megamind didn't miss a beat. In fact, while she may be Metro Man's gal, she's got a much better chemistry with Megamind — perhaps a love story is in the works?

Moving on, Megamind takes Roxy hostage and tries to impress her into screaming with a barrage of guns, alligators and lasers. The unflappable Roxy one-liners each weapon off, and clearly she's used to being kidnapped. Finally, Megamind gives up and moves on with his diabolical plan.

Cut back to Metro City, Metro Man is entertaining the crowd outside of his new Metro Man Museum, until Megamind interrupts on the large screens in the middle of the crowd. Megaman informs everyone of his evil plan while Roxy reassures from behind him that she isn't the least bit scared at all, and that she's at the old abandoned observatory — there always seems to be one of those. Metro Man takes to the skies and crashes into the building. But what? It's a trap! Megamind wasn't there at all!

Megamind rushes to release his death-ray, which is still booting up. Meanwhile Metro Man gasps for strength and reveals that he cannot escape, because the copper lining in the observatory is his only weakness. Safely in a fake observatory, Megamind can't freaking believe that copper is Metro Man's weakness, and blows the entire place, and Metro Man away. The whole thing is actually pretty horrific, and hilarious.

This is where the footage ends. What we see next are a few stills of Megamind concept art including the villain sitting at what looks like the Oval Office. According to McGrath, Megamind does indeed take his place as ruler of the world. But with out the challenge of Metro Man, he's bored. So what does he do? Take Roxy's camera guy and turn him into a buffed up red headed superhero named Titan, voiced by Jonah Hill. But, sadly, the power corrupts the once camera man and turns him evil, so Megamind is forced to make a decision: is he the hero or the villain in this story?

We're excited — like most recent Dreamworks productions, it's stuffed with witty and timely jokes, oddball characters and fantastic voice talent. Let's just hope the CG body of Megamind can keep up with Ferrel's mouth.

The Los Angeles Times caught up this weekend with Phillip Paley, who played the caveboy Cha-Ka in all 43 episodes of the 1974-76 series. Paley earned the role thanks to a childhood spent learning gymnastics and karate; he studied under Chuck Norris and was a black belt by age nine. Today, he's 45 and working at a law firm in Santa Monica, and he tells the Times that, while he no longer has his Cha-Ka costume, he still has the dictionary of the Paku language created for the show that Cha-Ka and his people spoke. Years before Klingon appeared as a full-fledged language of its own in the 1980s in the Star Trek films and on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Land of the Lost hired a UCLA linguist to invent a complete language for Paley and his fellow Pakuni.

Series co-creator Marty Krofft, speaking to British magazine SFX in 1997, said the initial impulse to create an artificial language for the show came from the network, which, hoping to appease the FCC, wanted to ensure that the kids' show had a positive educational component. Sid and Marty Krofft hired linguist Victoria Fromkin to create the language.

In the same issue of SFX, Fromkin said that she developed the language to be revealed over time in the series, so that kids watching could learn new words every week the same way Will and Holly did in their attempts to understand Cha-Ka, by picking up the Paku vocabulary and grammar in context as Cha-Ka used them. (Unfortunately, Fromkin said, the episodes would frequently air out of sequence in reruns, spoiling her lesson plan.) "Since I did a lot of work on West African languages, particularly Akan, the major language of Ghana, Paku appears to be in the Kwa family of Bantu languages," she said. "Or at least if some linguist 2000 years from now would find excerpts of it, through reconstruction methods they would probably conclude that."

Not only was Paku the first artificial language created for a kid's show (according to Stephen Corley and Tim Cain's Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages), but it was also the first instance of a television show hiring a professional linguist to develop such a language. Fromkin went on to invent the far less extensive vampire language spoken in the 1998 film Blade.

Fromkin created a 200-word vocabulary for the Pakuni. A good chunk of which survives in this Pakuni-English dictionary reconstructed by LOTL fan Nels Olsen. So if you're watching the reruns again on SyFy, you can consult the list and learn not to confuse an aganka (iguana) with an agamba (dinosaur).

Lost made just $7.2 million in its first day, leading many to predict an opening weekend somewhere around $20 million (Placing it third, behind The Hangover and Up, holding up well in its second weekend). But, as Nikki Finke points out, that's not good enough for Universal, the studio behind the movie:

Universal told me its expensive Land Of The Lost needed to debut with at least $30M for the studio not to sweat. It's now officially one of the first turkeys of the summer. (Because aren't dinosaurs related to birds?)

Despite winning Annalee over, the movie was generally badly received by critics, with only a 27% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

'Hangover' has a good night at boxoffice [Hollywood Reporter]

In many ways, the movie is a recreation of the original TV series with this serious characters taken out and replaced by goofballs who make a lot of pop culture references. Ferrell and company satirize the original show, but most of all they satirize themselves.

I was a big fan of the Krofft Super Show series where Land of the Lost debuted in the 1970s. It was a fun kids' series about an alternative universe full of dinosaurs and lizard aliens, and somebody was always being chomped or threatened with being chomped. Although the show was whimsical, it was sort of like the recent Journey To The Center of the Earth - goofy but snarkless. I couldn't imagine how Will Ferrell's adolescent humor would translate into this universe.

But it did, effortlessly. Instead of a nice dad and his two kids trapped in a dinosaur-packed landscape, we have a self important scientist (who is basically the anchorman, but with time travel on his mind), the hot Oxford graduate student (Holly, played a rather woodenly by Anna Friel) who believes in him, and a sideshow operator (Will, played by Danny Mcbride) whose goal in life is to build a mega casino. Through an accident that involves show tunes and a broken down roadside attraction, the three of them wind up on an alternate Earth where the past, present and future are intertwined. And that's when things get really awesome.

Chaka, the cute primate of the TV series, has been turned into a horny adolescent. The sleestaks are still bulgy-eyed lizard people, but they're kind of scary too. And Dr. Rick Marshall, played by Ferrell with deadpan pizzazz, is the perfect satirical white explorer without a clue. He immediately tries to establish himself as Chaka's master (though Chaka hardly takes him seriously), and is constantly making incorrect proclamations about everything around them. There's a great moment when he thinks the sleestak are guarding when they're actually about to "hit that ass." And even on alternate earth, he can't escape a humiliation he suffered on YouTube.

Part of the fun in this flick is watching Ferrell turn science fiction stereotypes of the intrepid explorer upside down. The other part of that fun is watching him dance to show tunes, pour dinosaur urine all over himself so that his scent will "blend in," and make an ill-advised deal with an alien wearing a tunic. As Will points out wisely, tunics are always bad news.

The plot, such as it is, is pretty simple. The gang falls into an alternate dimension, with the help of Rick's tachyon-enhanced time travel device, and now they need to get the device back if they want to go home. In addition the tunic - wearing alien has told them that an evil alien will use the device to invade earth with his terrible army of lizard aliens. So it's a race against time, and also, strangely, a test of banjo improvisation. Hey, it's Will Ferrell - what do you want?

Somehow along the way we manage to have drug induced male bonding. And boob grabbing. Plus a wide array of poop jokes, which culminate in the biggest poop joke of all. But that's a major spoiler and I won't give it away.

A few scenes go on a bit too long (the drug scene springs to mind), and you may be irritated by the fact that many of the jokes are at the expense of women. But despite this most of the bits are genuinely funny, and I predict you'll be repeating lines from the movie for days afterward. In fact, if you're looking for good science fiction fun this weekend I would recommend Land of the Lost over Terminator 4 any day of the week.

So...funny or not? Land Of The Lost will be in theaters this Friday.

I mean you can't ask for much more from an award show that is basically one big peddler for commercials and self promotion. Well done Samberg — now, go hit on Megan Fox some more.

Can you name them all? Don't forget From Dusk Til Dawn.

The new trailer gives a bit more of the movie's story, including the bizarre tachyon device that Will Ferrell builds to get himself to the garbage dump of the space-time continuum. You can watch it in absurdly high definition over at MovieFone.

The clips if from MTV's Spoilers show, and it shows adorable Anna Friel from Pushing Daisies meshing very well with Will Ferrell's over-the-top delivery. Land Of The Lost is in theaters June 5.

Land Of The Lost is released June 5th.

[YouTube]

In an interview with MTV, Paul Rudd hinted that in order for there to be another Anchorman they would need to take it to the next level.

“Last I heard they were starting to write it, and they were thinking about setting it in the eighties,” Rudd said. “[But] I know when we were shooting it [director] Adam [McKay] said if they ever did something it would have to be really weird, like we were on the moon or something. I think it has to go even further if it was to work.”

I hope this means that if they reprise singing a cappella "Afternoon Delight," Brick Tamland is actually riding a rocket crooning, "sky rockets in flight." [MTV]

Writes Cody:

Upon arriving at the Universal lot, I'm directed to an airplane-hangar-size soundstage tricked out to look like a Sleestak temple. It actually takes my breath away; I've never been on a set of such massive scale. The first thing I notice is how the production design, extravagant though it may be, manages to retain the camp charm of the original show. Rocks look like fantasy rocks, in the best possible way. Storybook moss creeps across rugged stone paths. A suspended iron cage intended for poor Holly (played by Anna Friel) evokes those great Chuck Heston-style adventure movies of yesteryear. Best of all, there's a menacing lava pit surrounded by a bay of talking Sleestak-head oracles. ''When they're turned on, their eyes glow. It gets totally Vegas in here,'' director Brad Silberling says, pleased.

How you feel about that probably depends on whether you want your Sleestak temple to get "totally Vegas," I'm guessing.

And yes, the new version of Lost, starring Will Ferrell, will be more of a broad comedy than the original. Ferrell tells ReelzChannel:

I think it's a great blend of paying homage to the show mixed with what I think could be a different genre, this kind of adventure comedy where we really use the adventure to set up the comedy and we're able to comment on these situations that you would love to see characters comment on.

[EW and ReelzChannel]

One glance at this mini-episode from Land of the Lost will tell you everything you need to know about why Will Ferrell is in the remake.

By far my favorite Krofft show, even cooler than Doctor Shrinker and Wonderbug, was ElectraWoman and DynaGirl. They worked for a magazine by day, and donned cute outfits and fought crime by night. Hey, at least I grew up to work for a magazine-like thing, even if I don't always wear yellow tights. I cannot believe how utterly funktastic their theme song is. Do you think ElectraWoman and DynaGirl were superlovers?

What I find really interesting about these cut-down MySpace episodes is that they actually work in their new, shrunken, share-this-video-online format. Some 70s culture does seem to survive the upgrade to the web, even if it has to become even more short-attention-span to do it. Really, I don't mind losing the boring parts of these episodes. Now I've got the very best stuff, and I'm actually going to visit MySpace to check out future mini-episodes as they become available.

Sid and Marty Krofft on MySpace [via MySpace]

Says Silberling:

There is a sense of humor that I loved from the original show that can only come from an actor trying to negotiate the suit. If it became CG, they'd be too perfect. For the Sleestak to remain in people's memories, it tells you that it was about who was in the suit."

According to USA Today, the new movie features three adults (Will Ferrell, Anna Friel and Danny McBride) thrust into a land of "dinosaurs, monkey-men called Pakuni and the murderous Sleestak." The three adventurers hope that a giant crystal will zap them back to their own "dimension." [USA Today]

Batman: The Dark Knight

Harvey Dent is only Two-Face for "a couple of minutes" towards the very end of The Dark Knight, the sequel to Batman Begins. The transformation into Two-Face at the movie's end sets up a confrontation in the third movie, making the Nolan Bat-films seem even more like a trilogy. (And Knight a bit more Empire Strikes Back-ish.) Mind you, this whole spoiler is based on what some reps told a guy at a costume show, where there was no Two-Face costume on display. [Superhero Hype]

Y: The Last Man (the movie)

As we'd previously reported, the Y: The Last Man movie only covers the first 12 issues of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's comic, unlike Vaughan's own movie script which tried to cover the entire saga. D.J. Caruso's Y movie would be the first of a planned trilogy, says Caruso. Also, Caruso will use a real monkey for Ampersand, and Shia LaBoeuf is definitely the front-runner to play Yorick. [Ain't It Cool]

Land Of The Lost:

Here's a first look at Will Ferrell as a park ranger who explores a hidden land and meets dinosaurs, Sleestaks and other weird creatures, in the new Land of the Lost movie. He's kind of a slob, since apparently this scene ends with him tossing his cigarette butt and cheetos bag in the lake. [JFX Online]

The reason Ferrell's scientist character is working as a park ranger (at the LaBrea Tar Pits) is because he assaulted disabled physics great Steven Hawking during an interview on Anderson Cooper 360. A young scientist, played by Anna Friel, approaches Ferrell at the Tar Pits and asks him to guide her (and his kids, for some reason) to the Land of the Lost. Are you excited yet? At least Anna Friel is fun to watch. [Slashfilm]

Doctor Who:

Here are some new Doctor Who season four teasers that have been airing on British TV. They're really only spoilery if you didn't know the Daleks were coming back:

Smallville

The person who dies in the April 17 Smallville has never been presumed dead by the audience... which means he/she may have been presumed dead by the characters on the show, as long as we knew better. [Ask Ausiello]

Also, that April 17 episode, "Descent," is when Lex Luthor jumps off the good/evil fence once and for all, and goes totally evil. He falls into his "own personal hell," says executive producer Brian Peterson. "There is a major turn that happens in his life that drives him into pure darkness. ... It's Lex's real descent into the villain he becomes." [Sci Fi Wire]

Lost

There actually will be a Jack-centric Lost episode this spring, despite reports to the contrary. [Ask Ausiello again]

Secret Invasion

More spoilers for Secret Invasion, Marvel Comics' upcoming "everyone is a shape-changing Skrull invader" storyline: Supposedly Jarvis, the Avengers' man-servant, is a Skrull, who uploads an alien virus that makes all of Tony Stark's technology crash, including Iron Man's armor. A Skrull briefly impersonates Invisible Girl, just long enough to send the Fantastic Four into the Negative Zone. A Skrull Hank Pym shoots Reed Richards, and a Skrull Captain Marvel blows open Thunderbolts Mountain. Also, a Skrull busts all the supervillains out of their supervillain prison, the Raft. Meanwhile, one of the X-Men, Nightcrawler, is a Skrull, and the X-men are the only ones on the West Coast standing in the massive Skrull Armada.

Secret Invasion #1 begins with a Skrull ship crash-landing in the Savage Land, Marvel's version of the Land of the Lost. Both the New Avengers and the Mighty Avengers rush to the crash site. The ship opens up, and the classic 1970s versions of the Marvel characters come out, including webbed-armpits Spider-Man, nose-armor Iron Man, tiara-wearing Power Man, the furry Beast, Sue Storm, Mockingbird, Wonder-Man, Captain America, evil Emma Frost and old-school Wolverine. "The modern, darker, dirty versions of all the characters stare at their more innocent version of themselves in shock." But it turns out the 1970s versions aren't the real characters returned, but a Skrull trick meant to sow doubt. Or something. Only Mockingbird turns out to be real. [Schwapp!!!]

• Because nobody demanded it, we're going to get to see James Kirk and his brother George as kids in the new Star Trek movie. Maybe we'll get some crucial insights into Jim's formative experiences and the childhood traumas that influenced him to be... waitaminute, this is Captain Kirk we're talking about. Anyway, the 11-year-old Jimmy Bennett will play kid Kirk, and 15-year-old Spencer Daniels will play George.

  Also, apparently the brothers have a scene together without their parents. And we get to see Kirk's mom pregnant at some point (possibly with James?). This is more proof that the Trek movie will visit lots of different time periods. [TrekMovie]

• Meanwhile, J.J. Abrams is already planning on two more Trek movies. [SyFyPortal]
• Will Ferrell's Land Of The Lost movie includes actual time-travel instead of just a hole in the ground, according to a new synopsis: "Eccentric (and remarkably unlucky) paleontologist Dr. Rick Marshall validates his discredited theory of time travel by heading back into an alternate universe inhabited by dinosaurs, monkey people and reptilian Sleestaks." [Production Charts]
• Someone will die on Lost in the second half of this new mini-season. [TV Guide]
• Here's the new official description for the Feb. 14 episode of Smallville: "Lois follows Lex to Detroit and discovers he has found Kara, who has amnesia. Finley (guest star Corey Sevier), a busboy who is obsessed with Kara, fears Lex will take her away, so he shoots Lex and holds Kara and Lois captive. After Lex's comatose body is found, Chloe offers to heal him, but Clark refuses to let her." [SpoilerFix]
• We'll see more of Andy and his chess-playing computer in an upcoming Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, it seems. [SpoilerTV]
• And here are a few new pics from the fourth episode of Torchwood season two. Apparently it's about an alien who's being used as a source of "cheap meat" (no, I'm not making this up) and Gwen's fiance Rhys gets involved as part of the Torchwood team. [SFUniverse]

Instead of a family getting trapped in the dinosaur wasteland, it'll be a "disgraced paleontologist" (Ferrell), his assistant, and his macho sidekick (Danny McBride). In other words, it'll be more of the homoerotic two-guys comedy that Ferrell has excelled at lately. Brad Silberling (Casper) will direct. And the film will still have monkey people, dinosaurs and Sleestaks, but it'll be a spoof of the TV series rather than a remake. McBride says "massive sets" have been constructed for the film. [IGN]