Leaving aside characters with alphanumeric names (like Star Wars' R2-D2 and C-3PO), characters who also have serials number imparted to them by their governments but are not generally addressed as such (as in Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Giver), and characters whose first names happen to mean a number in a different language (as with many of the characters in Stardust and Mobile Suit Gundam), there are several characters who are either designated with or often called by a number:

Number One (Star Trek "The Cage"/"The Menagerie"): More than two decades before Captain Picard started referring to William Riker as "Number One," Majel Barrett filmed the original Star Trek pilot, where her character was known only as Number One. Like Riker, Number One was the Enterprise's first officer, but the novel Vulcan's Glory suggests Number One was her actual name, given to her because she possessed the top intellect of her planet's generation.

Number 5 (Short Circuit): Although roboticists Newton Crosby and Ben Jabituya were out to create artificial intelligence, they probably didn't expect any of their prototypes to suddenly gain sentience, and so assigned them numbers in lieu of names. But after prototype Number 5 becomes self-aware (and escapes the clutched of the US military), he decides that, as a living being, he should have a name, and calls himself Johnny Five.

Fifth (Stargate SG-1): One of the few characters with an ordinal number for a name, Fifth gets his name in a fairly straightforward manner: he's the fifth human-form Replicator to be created on the planet Halla.

V (V for Vendetta): Most people who live through encounters with the mysterious anarchist V think they're addressing him by a letter, and his propensity for using V-based alliterations when introducing himself seems to confirm this. But it's much more likely that V derives his name from the source of his vendetta; when he was subjected to medical experimentation at the Larkhill Resettlement Camp, he was the man in room five — marked with the Roman numeral "V."

Number Six (The Prisoner): Residents of the mysterious Village are known by a number rather than their actual names — including at least 16 individuals known only as "Number Two" — probably to protect the secrets they all inevitably carry. Number Six, the titular prisoner, protests in the opening that he's a free man, not a number, but it's implied that Number Six may be known by yet another number: Number One.

The Cylons (Battlestar Galactica): The creators of Battlestar Galactica have said that cylon Number Six is a tribute to The Prisoner, and it follows that each humanoid cylon model would have its own number, with the notable exception of the Final Five. Most cylon models are known collectively by a human name as well (the Sharons, the Leobens, the D'Annas), but individual Sixes tend to have individual human names, like Natalie, Caprica, Shelly, and Gina, perhaps because of they are so often used as infiltration agents.

Seven of Nine (Voyager): Names designate individuality, a concept the Borg have no use for, but sometimes it is convenient for the Collective to identify individual Borg drones. So when the formerly human Annika Hansen was assimilated into the Collective, she was given the designation Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero-One. Even once she was unhooked from the hive mind, she preferred the shortened "Seven of Nine" to her human name, the latter of which she does not take up again until her Borg implants are completely destroyed.

Eight (The Specials): It's fairly obvious how Eight earned its superhero name. A hive mind, Eight consists of eight individual bodies who can physically act independent of one another, but share a single consciousness.

Thirteen (House): As long as we're labeling House as science fiction, we may as well mention Dr. Remy Hadley, better known as Thirteen. In one of his trademark moves to dehumanize his fellowship applicants, Dr. House assigned each applicant a number (and occasionally a humiliating nickname). Thirteen really took to the numerical naming system, refusing to divulge her actual name to her fellow applicants, and continuing to answer to Thirteen long after she'd earned a place on House's team.

Henchmen 21 and 24 (The Venture Bros): With the exception of the ill-fated Speedy, each of the Monarch's henchman is known only to their boss as a number. Henchmen 21 and 24 (the former is known to his mom as Gary) are genre-savvy enough to be content with their numerical positions in the Fluttering Horde. When they learn their new teammate is Henchman 1, they rightly assess that he's marked for death.

84 (P.S. 238): In a school filled with superheroes, Julie Finster has a pretty routine set of superpowers: flight, invulnerability, speed. In fact, her power set is so ordinary that instead of getting a cool superhero name, she's just called "84," since she's the 84th person to possess that particular grouping of powers. Needless to say, it's a tad demoralizing.

Agent 99 (Get Smart): James Bond may have been called 007 from time to time, but Agent 99 takes use of her code number to the next level, never answering to any other moniker (okay, in one episode, her fiance calls her Susan Hilton, but that isn't actually her name). In fact, she married Maxwell Smart and bears him twins without him ever learning her real name, proving once and for all that she's the better spy.

Agent 355 (Y the Last Man): In the historical spy network known as the Culper Ring, there was a female agent code named 355, whose identity has never been definitively determined. Similarly, in the fictional Culper Ring of Y the Last Man, Agent 355 is a highly competent spy whose name is never revealed (at least not to the reader). Her odd relationship with her name parallels that of Alter Tse'elon, the Israel commando whose real first name is not spoken (until the end) for fear of attracting the Angel of Death.

Experiment 626 (Lilo and Stitch): The alien mad scientist Dr. Jumba Jookiba created 626 strange and dangerous lifeforms. The wanton destruction caused by the final experiment, 626, condemns them both to life in exile, but the experiment escapes to Earth, where a young Hawaiian girl names him "Stitch." Of course, once Stitch's destructive nature has been reigned in, there are still 625 other experiments to contend with.

1812 (Farscape): In terms of numbered names, the DRD robot 1812 gets his from a fairly unusual source. Instead of 1812 being a serial number or a numbered designation, it's a reference to the 1812 Overture, which Crichton teaches the little service bot to play.

Subject 781227 (Kyle XY): Zzyzx, the company funding Adam Baylin's research, saw the child-shaped being Adam Baylin developed in his lab as a biological computer rather than a person, reflected in him getting a serial number in lieu of a name. It's only after 16 years, an escape, and a bout of amnesia that Subject 781227 finally gets a name: Kyle Trager.

While the collected population of the internet seems to be wetting itself in excitement about the trailer for Zach Snyder's version of Watchmen, one man is more than cynical about the whole exercise. In fact, he thinks that any comic book adaptation is suspect, and he should know, having survived the experience three times already. The man in question? Watchmen writer, Alan Moore.

Talking to Entertainment Weekly about next year's movie version of his celebrated comic, Moore said

I would rather not know [anything about the movie. Snyder] may very well be [a nice guy], but the thing is that he's also the person who made 300. I've not seen any recent comic book films, but I didn't particularly like the book 300. I had a lot of problems with it, and everything I heard or saw about the film tended to increase [those problems] rather than reduce them: [that] it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid. I know that that's not what people going in to see a film like 300 are thinking about but...I wasn't impressed with that.... I talked to [director] Terry Gilliam in the '80s, and he asked me how I would make Watchmen into a film. I said, ''Well actually, Terry, if anybody asked me, I would have said, 'I wouldn't.''' And I think that Terry [who aborted his attempted adaptation of the book] eventually came to agree with me. There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can't.

As to whether Moore had been contacted about being involved in the production of the movie:

I don't want anyone who works for DC comic books to contact me ever again, or I'll change my number... I only started to get upset when I found out they were trying to rob me of a couple thousand pounds. It was over the Watchmen merchandising back in the '80s, and they kind of eventually said, Oh, yeah, I suppose you do deserve this money. But by that time the damage was done.

This isn't the first time that Moore has divorced himself entirely from a movie made from his work; he did the same for the movie versions of fellow DC-published projects V For Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and even his indie book From Hell. Of course, having seen the movies, perhaps he was right in doing so. With experience like his, no wonder he's down on cross-medium adaptations in general:

I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless.

I wonder what he thinks of The Dark Knight?

Alan Moore Still Knows the Score! [Entertainment Weekly]

It's happened to all of us. We read a novel that blows us away, and a few years later its title appears on posters underneath the face of Harrison Ford or Natalie Portman. But at some inevitable point in that darkened theater, the movie takes a turn we didn't expect. Our eyebrows go up, our lips turn down, and the disappointment begins. Maybe the wrong director or writer can curse an otherwise excellent project — or maybe some things were just never meant to be filmed. Here are 10 books that we think should never have been committed to celluloid.

DUNE by Frank Herbert

There's no doubt about it: Herbert's Dune is a bona fide classic. It won the first ever Nebula award and the 1966 Hugo award, and most consider it to be the best-selling sci-fi novel in history. Set in a future where a feudal empire controls the planets of the unvierse, the novel tells the story of young nobleman Paul Atreides and his family's rule of the desert planet Arrakis. Arrakis is the only source of "melange," an addictive spice that lengthens lives and makes interstellar travel possible. Herbert's book explores the power struggles that arise around the spice, and the complexity of human society that exists even in the far future.

Big shoes to fill for a film producer. Yet in 1984 David Lynch wrote and directed a movie version of Dune, rescuing it from development hell and plunging it into bad-adaptation hell. Reviews panned the movie — Roger Ebert deemed it "the worst movie of the year," and others expressed similar disgust. Despite the movie's 40-million-dollar budget, its effects were notably cheap, and the screenplay did not hold up to the challenge of translating a four-hundred-page book to screen. You'd think you couldn't go wrong with Patrick Stewart, Sting, and Jürgen Prochnow, but evidently you very much can.

FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury

Who could forget Fahrenheit 451, "the temperature at which book-paper catches fire, and burns …"? Bradbury's classic 1953 novel takes place in a dystopian future where television has entirely replaced the printed word, and firemen burn books instead of saving lives. The author himself has stated that the point of the story was to showcase how owning a TV set can destroy all interest in literature — so making a movie version seems pretty damn ballsy to say the least.

With that in mind, the 1966 film, helmed by French icon François Truffaut, seems doomed from the start. It certainly didn't help that there were many notable omissions, like the disappearance of the novel's nuclear war (which is, let's face it, a pretty big cut). Julie Christie plays the main character's wife and his illicit lover, which adds an extra level of pointless weirdness. The bottom line is, there are plenty of books for which you can tell your friends to "just watch the movie." But in the case of Fahrenheit 451, that probably makes you kind of fascist. Just sayin'.

V FOR VENDETTA by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

The book is probably one of the best graphic novels ever produced. Detailing the adventures of a masked anarchist and his sweet blond protégée, Moore's writing also delves far deeply beyond his two main characters into complex themes of fascism, anarchy, identity, and the meaning of life itself. Nobody is without a story to tell: Even his villains are creepily sympathetic. By the end of the comic, every reader will have at least one Lloyd image burned in their brain, and be wondering — with no small amount of fear — exactly how much control their government does have.

Enter the movie. For the Wachowski brothers, the boys who gave us the two-thirds-sucky Matrix trilogy, setting this story to film was easy. They just had to cut out all of the character depth, change Moore's nuanced portrayal of British fascism to the cookie-cutter Hollywood standby of Suited White Men, and (of course) turn the subtle, understated relationship of the main characters into romantic pining. But hey, at least they got the costume right.

A WRINKLE IN TIME by Madeleine L'Engle

Though it's often marketed as a young-adult fantasy novel, make no mistake: This book is without a doubt a sci-fi classic for all generations, an incredible tale that deftly blends science, speculation, and humanity. L'Engle's 1962 story invented the concept of a "tesseract" — the fifth dimension, a phenomenon that folds the fabric of space and time. It introduced a mother who cooks dinner on a Bunsen burner, a father whose research leaves him imprisoned on another planet, and a brother and sister whose loving relationship turns out to be the most important thing in the universe.

Mostly we make an effort to ignore it, but it's true: Many of the great sci-fi writers were (and are) better at dreaming up nifty science ideas than they were at weaving together a compelling story. L'Engle, however, belongs in no such group. Her work was never meant to be a crappy Disney movie, and yet in 2003, a crappy Disney made-for-TV adaptation appeared that one critic described as "lightweight, saccharine, rather slow going most of the way, and somewhat simplistic" as well as "sometimes clunky, and... often uninspiring". Let us speak no more about it.

THE MINORITY REPORT by Philip K. Dick

Dick's 1956 short story introduced the chilling concept of "precrime," a police system whose officers arrest would-be murderers, rapists, and thieves before they get a chance to do their dirty deeds. His futuristic New York City is a world where three future-seeing mutants control who goes to prison and who doesn't, and free will is a gray area — a luxury that not everyone possesses. One veteran cop, after seeing a prediction that he will kill someone he doesn't even know, is having none of it.

So what did Steven Spielberg's 2002 movie add, besides a gross eye transplant? Well, for one, it brought in Tom Cruise — balding, out-of-shape 50-year-olds are never attractive narrators as far as Hollywood's concerned, no matter what they might be able to share with us in real life. The setting's different, too, and names have been changed, but at least it presents the idea with a lot more nifty special effects and a lot less storytelling, right? And that, my friends, is frighteningly endemic of the print-to-film adaptation.

I, ROBOT by Isaac Asimov

This is a revolutionary sci-fi classic, a collection of nine short stories exploring the limitations and dangers of human-created artificial intelligence. Asimov's 1950 publication of I, Robot established the Three Laws of Robotics, supposedly unbreakable rules which govern the actions of these metal beings, and his short stories read like the best sci-fi mind puzzles you will ever find.

2004's movie adaptation was undeniably well done, and it ended up being one of the best of the year — due in no small part to Jeff Vintar's tight script and the total awesomeness of Will Smith and Chi McBride. Asimov certainly meant to get us thinking, so one could imagine he'd be pleased that his work inspired a smart sci-fi thriller like this. As it happens, however, the main plot of the movie is actually lifted from a 1939 short story by Eando Binder that bears the same name; Asimov's publisher gave his collection the same title, against Asimov's wishes. The Three Laws of Robotics were only added to the script after the film's producers secured the rights to Asimov's anthology. This project, then, has been plagued from the beginning by intellectual property snafus: It's a confused collaboration of several minds, and it seems that not all the minds involved were properly credited. And since it's caused most of the problems, can we let go of that title already?

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE by Philip Gordon Wylie and Edwin Balmer

It's a crusty old staple of hard sci-fi, a 1933 novel that first saw print as a magazine serial. Wylie and Balmer's story begins with a South African astronomer, Sven Bronson, who discovers that a pair of rogue planets are headed for Earth's orbit. Only a small group of scientists believe his claim; they work to build two ships that will carry the beginnings of a new human settlement to one of the rogue planets, which is projected to replace Earth in its orbit. This is the kind of pre-NASA speculation that works best in old-fashioned typewriter font on yellowed paper.

But of course, Hollywood felt the need to put it in Technicolor. The film adaptation did win an Oscar for special effects, but it was 1951, so you decide for yourself if that's impressive. The movie's story doesn't so much explore sci-fi ideas as showcase human hysteria when tidal waves sweep the Earth and survivors are chosen by lottery — and it naturally also allows for the most groan-worthy of romance subplots. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the way the film's hero pushes his handicapped financier off the boarding ramp as the ship leaves, despite the fact that he funded the entire project. "Politically incorrect" doesn't begin to cover it. Apparently there's a remake of the film scheduled for a 2010 release — isn't one mistake supposed to teach you a lesson?

STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert Heinlein

War sucks, and Heinlein proved it with his 1960 Hugo-award-winning novel. Told from the point of view of Johnnie Rico, a young soldier, this futuristic tale explores a world where only veterans can vote or hold public office — and where humankind battles endlessly with giant bugs. Rico's flashbacks to his time at school, and his experiences in the military, serve to illustrate the total destruction that war causes.

In the book, the bugs barely ever appear; Rico views them only through a giant battle suit. For the 1997 film adaptation, though, that was not an option — after all, there ain't a moviegoer born of woman who doesn't want to see giant grasshoppers. Special effects left little screen time for Heinlein's philosophy discussions, but director Paul Verhoeven admitted he never got past the first few chapters of the novel anyway. If he hated the story that much, what do you think was keeping him from writing and directing his own friggin' screenplay?

THE POSTMAN by David Brin

Originally published as two novellas (both of which won Hugo awards), this post-apocalyptic story grapples with the concepts of survivalism, civilization, and hope. In a world destroyed not by disasters but by its own people, one man discovers a worn-out United States Postal Service uniform — and discovers that his fellow humans are so desperate they'll even take hope from that. The complete novel, published as the two novellas combined, was named the best science fiction novel of the year in 1986 in the John W. Campbell awards.

And then Kevin Costner decided to direct and star in a film adaptation. The 1997 story, while still broadcasting a message of hope, centered that message more around the Postman as a war hero — and don't forget his tagalong baby mama. The New York Times blasted the movie for its "bogus sentimentality" and "mawkish jingoism," but Roger Ebert warned that we "shouldn't blame them for trying." Well, I think perhaps we should.

THIS ISLAND EARTH by Raymond F. Jones

The year 1952, I'm sure, saw many new creations in sci-fi, but I'm willing to bet that almost none of them were as silly as the interociter — an alien transmission device, which despite its apparent sophistication is about as big as a truck. Jones gave us the interociter in his novel This Island Earth, which told of an alien race that recruited Earth's greatest thinkers for a group called the "Peace Engineers." Not surprisingly, the "Peace Engineers" were actually helping the aliens wage an intergalactic war. On a planet that had already seen the genius of 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still, this should not have seemed a good candidate for a film adaptation.

Since the movie version of This Island Earth now gets most of its viewings in the form of Mystery Science Theater 3000's lampoon, the folly of bringing it to film is assured. Plastic skulldomes, toilet thrones, and raspberry bushes are not the stuff of eternal movie classics. Before you adapt a book, my advice is to run it through a quick Mike-Joel-Crow-Tom Servo test. You might be surprised how much money you save on camera equipment and actors.

According to Variety, "The story centers on a female journalist who is assigned to investigate a series of bizarre murders and discovers that the victims were all being treated by the head of an org that researches alien abductions." Wow so many questions. What do they mean bizarre? Bizarre like they died in clown suits of will be there wonderful horrible gore? Will there be aliens? And finally why make the main character a journalist? I feel like there are only 5 jobs for women in movies, journalist and secret agent being two of them. It's exciting to let McTeigue get his hands in this, he's pretty crafty with conspiracy theories and cover ups. First he worked with machine cover-ups, then government conspiracies now aliens. He's like Mulder. [Variety]

We've watched the full-length Speed Racer trailer a bunch of times, and we keep being blown away by a lot of the bizarre cityscapes that Speed races through. Where did those come from?

In the genesis of Larry and Andy's idea, they were trying to pay homage to the cartoon that came out of Japan in the 60s. And so the idea in a nutshell was to do a movie that was photographically real, but that was two dimensional that and had a sense of the cartoon style. And of course along with that, you need to design a city that s fresh and different [and] that's not as threatening as the city in The Matrix. [A city that's] fun and blatantly colorful. The original cartoon was full of colors that contradicted each other. They used color very well and they used two-dimensional design very well. We've tried to take it to the next level.

It looks like the designs have a lot of bright purples, reds and pinks in them.

There's lots of greens as well, and oranges, I think you'll find every color in the palette. And at times, it was quite a challenge to get all those things to work together.

Why was that challenging?

I think using a very broad palette with a lot of colors in it is very complicated. Larry and Andy wanted the film to be very colorful. There is a retro feeling to it. It's not exactly psychedelic at all, but it has parts of that. We were doing a lot of the pre-production in California, and we used that ranch style house and a lot of the colors from it, and we amped it up a hundred fold.

It definitely looks amped up. And it looks like it has a very cartoony style in general.

Larry and Andy are renowned for their groundbreaking worlds, and this will be another one. This will have a profound effect on how people go about doing things. There are a lot of very graphic images within the film. In one of the trailers, you'll see the faces kind of swirling across the background while the camera is moving. The camera is rotating around the room or panning around the room, and it's following a character, and intercut with that is another character who comes into the frame and sort of pushes the other character out as they're doing their dialog. It's very unusual. It's come from the world of 2D cartoons.
One of the fantastic things about the Wachowskis is their transitions from one scene to another. In Bound, which I didn't work on, there are some fantastic transitions. In The Matrix, they'll drop through the road [or the floor] from one room to another. I think in trailer #1, Speed and Royalton are having an altercation, and you'll see how one face almost pushes another face out... it's not a traditional way you'd cover a scene. There is a sense of a cartoon or an anime.

So does the movie take place in a future city? It certainly looks weird and futuristic.

There are two cities. Cosmopolis is the main city. George Hull did a lot of the design of the actual cities for me, he's one of the illustrators. We were taking inspirations from a lot of buildings around the world — and even from the [American] dollar bill, with the pyramid and the eye on top. One of the buildings is in fact that [pyramid], or very similar to that. It's a completely fanciful city. It's a huge city that's built on advertising and commerce. [In the movie]the world was a world of "corpocracy" as opposed to democracy.

It sounds a lot like our world, actually.

I suspect there's a kind of reference in that. They're very smart guys. The city came from that. We were trying to make a city that is full of color. There's a building that looks like a big sushi fish. There is a sense of playfulness — You could take a giant caterpillar and do some elongations and some geometry on it, and you could create a building. If you look really closely and freeze one frame, the background is like that.

In the film, when they get to the Grand Prix toward the end, the city surrounds the Crucible, which is the Grand Prix track. The track is literally in the city, and parts of the buildings are great big grandstands that can look down into the Grand Prix track. If you go to Chicago, to Wrigley Field, all around the baseball field, there are grandstand buildings that are five stories high and on top of some of them are homemade grandstands that people sell tickets to and you can sit there and look right down into the baseball.

What's it like designing sets and backgrounds using CGI? Is it harder than the design work for The Matrix?

Yes and no, in that we were designing a city that had particular style to it and color to it. There was a little more two-dimensional quality to it than there was in The Matrix. In The Matrix our big city was based on Sydney and then it was expanded, buildings were made taller, buildings were made longer. Particularly in the first Matrix when Agent Smith is talking to Morpheus — whey they have Morpheus a prisoner in the government building — the city behind Morpheus in the window is the city of Sydney, and we had just added a bigger building to it. Agent Smith says this was built at the pinnacle of human success.

Whereas the city of Cosmopolis is actually based in a fantasy world. There are a lot of elements based on car parts [in the buildings] but they're very subtly done. It's a lot like how when you look at the Empire State Building, they take a particular design motif and they expand on it. Certain things like that have been done with the buildings and the city of Cosmopolis, they'll take a particular piece of a grill of a car and they'll extrapolate on it so it doesn't look like a car part any more but there's a hint of it.

And you mentioned it's a very corporate-dominated world.

It's also a world where they don't use gasoline. They have motors that take like battery power and convert it using a thing called a transponder and they convert this theoretical energy through a convertinator, into a high powered non-CO2 fuel. They're not burning up gasoline when you see those cars going around.

Did you work on designing the cars as well as the sets?

Yes, the art department does that. We have a team of people who work with me who were doing that. The original Mach 5, the car Speed drives around in, was a cartoon car. We had to make a physical version of the car, it doesn't drive, but you can push it around. Julian [Jenson] reinterpreted that car to bring it into the 21st century. It's a very beautiful looking car. It certainly has a retro quality to it. When you look at it you say, "Oh it's the Mach 5 from the cartoon," but it's developed a long way. They did a beautiful job of doing everything from the bumble bee to the shooting star that flies out of the car that Rex Race drives. That's an absolutely gorgeous car. [The cars in the movie] can do lots of tricks, they have saws and jumping legs.

Everybody who worked on this was out to put in the fun elements that you have a cartoon that you can't really put into a regular movie.

In our world we have architects. In Speed's world, they have carchitects. [If you] want a car, you get someone to customize or design your car for you. It doesn't have to be the most expensive. All the street cars [are customized], so when you drive down the road what you see is just the most beautiful cars and exotic cars that you could possibly imagine. It's like going to the Pebble Beach Concourse up at Monterey. The Concourse de Elegance. They have the most beautiful cars in the world, from all time periods from the futuristic cars the concept cars to the 1910s and earlier probably. Some of the cars there are the concept cars of the 1920s or 1950s. If you're going to have a city called Cosmpopolis, it has to be very cosmopolitan. Every car you see is absolutely uniquely beautiful.

And then there are the race cars?

Race cars in Speed's time are called T-180s, and their wheels are able to rotate 180 degrees, rather than the regular 90 degrees. So the car can travel down the race track sideways. In its simplest form, the wheel is captured form above and then it has a drive shaft.

Captured from above?

You know, in a shopping trolley, the wheel is captured from above, and the wheel can spin right around, and then the car has a flexible drive-shaft which is coming off this very powerful non-polluting engine. It's like ion power. So the T180s, they'll do 300 miles per hour, they're very fast. Some other racers we see, [like the one] that Rex Racer is racing, they're the cars that are pre-T-180, their wheels will only partially spin. We were trying to make a film of a parallel world. It's our world, but it's slightly off axis a little bit.

The documentary is produced by Shadowsnake Films, and can be purchased in a much cleaner looking DVD edition with 5.1 surround sound here. We're not saying it'll help you understand how Moore's brain works, but it's definitely fascinating and well worth watching.

Free Online Alan Moore Documentary [Comic Mix]

Famous names: Alan Moore, David Lloyd

Crunchy goodness: 5

Social message: Moore doesn't hide his commentary on the rise of Thatcher in Britain below the surface. In fact, Moore criticized the American movie adaptation for sticking to the comic's British setting. If the Americans wanted to comment on Bush-era excesses, Moore said in an interview, they should have made a movie set in America and featuring a clear Bush analog.

The shit: Evey, V's only friend, starts out as a frightened girl and travels through hell (partly at V's own hands) until she is able to rise up and take his place. Her suffering and transformation allows the reader to do what V's grand-guignol speechifying can't: understand the desire to rise up and smash the state at any costs.

Deadliest spoiler: V isn't really a person, he's an idea, man.

V for Vendetta Shrine!