The pundit: Markos Moulitsas (DailyKos)
What they recommended: "Franchise" by Isaac Asimov.
What it's about: This 1955 story is part of Asimov's "Multivac" series of stories. In the futuristic world of 2008, the United States has become an "electronic democracy." Multivac, the super-computer, chooses one lucky person to be "voter of the year." This person, Norman Muller, answers a series of questions and the computer uses those to decide what the results of an election would have been, if an election had happened.
Why is this good election-season material? Moulitsas tells io9:

We live in a world that has accepted 1984's doublespeak as part and parcel of the political process. But that's too easy and cliched and answer. So how about Asimov's "Franchise"? A single voter, chosen by computer, decides the election, and he's proud that the citizens got to make their voice heard through him, except, of course, that everyone else didn't get to vote. Consider the modern political campaign, with robo polls which proclaim the electorate's choice after a few hundred responses, and robo calls and electronic voting machines and all that stuff, and maybe someone can torture out an analogy. In reality, this election season has been stranger than any fiction imaginable.

The pundit: Andrew Sullivan (Atlantic Monthly)
What they recommended: Wall-E
What it's about: In this Pixar animated movie, the human race has abandoned the garbage-strewn Earth, and our childlike descendants now live on a space liner, laying on floating barcaloungers and having all their needs met by robots. One garbage-compacting robot remains functional on Earth, and he discovers a single piece of vegetation, proving that the planet can still support life.

Why is this good election-season material? Sullivan didn't elaborate, but Wall-E is rife with political allegory. You can read it as a simple environmentalist fable about the dangers of mass consumption and unsustainable living. You can see it as a warning against the "nanny state" which would try to take care of all our needs and save us from getting our hands dirty. You can see it as an admonishment to be curious about the world we live in and how we got here.

The pundit: Jonah Goldberg (National Review Online)
What they recommended: Angel, season four.
What it's about: An extra-dimensional being (played by Gina Torres) appears on Earth, and everyone who sees her becomes totally devoted to her and starts to worship her. She brings peace and prosperity, and only Angel's friend Fred can see that she's really a hideous monster.

Why is this good election-season material? Goldberg tells io9:

In the story, the world is mesmerized by a god from another dimension played by a charismatic black woman who truly does bring universal peace and love to the planet. Her only price: we all must worship her (and provide her with a statistically irrelevant number of humans to eat) and unify around our love for her.

I don't think Obama is evil or a villain of any kind. But the lesson is pretty valid. Obama is the high priest of a cult of unity. Unity can be useful, but it is also very, very dangerous. That's why the founders conceived of a system of divided government, after all.

The pundit: Amanda Marcotte (Pandagon)
What they recommended: Margaret Attwood, The Handmaid's Tale.
What it's about: This Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel takes place in a future dystopian U.S. governed by religious fundamentalists. Women are no longer allowed to learn to read. Because of declining fertility, fertile women (like the main character Offred) are turned into "handmaids," whose only job is to bear children for wealthy couples.
Why is this good election-season material? Says Marcotte:

It probably sounds a little trite since it gets referenced so much, but in light of the promotion of a true-believer fundamentalist to a national ticket, I have to recommend Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It's not just because it's a dystopia that shows what America would be like under a Christian theocracy, but also because the book brilliantly skewers other aspects of the right-wing culture. You have the female misogynist Serena Joy that finds out the hard way that she isn't exempt from the category 'woman' just because she was a stalwart soldier for the far right. You also are reminded that the conservative men who carry on about sexual morality in public all too often have their own closet full of secrets. The book is a reminder that right wing politics isn't so much about 'values', but about power and control.

The pundit: Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit)
What they recommended: Vernor Vinge, Rainbow's End.
What it's about: It's 2025, and enhanced reality is everywhere. People use contact lenses to interact with computer-generated artifacts, and people use "silent messaging" to communicate ubiquitously. Poet Robert Gu rediscovers this world after his Alzheimer's disease is cured, and gets drawn into a world of conspiracies and bioterrorism. And because everything in our lives is run by computer systems, including our cars, it's super vulnerable to hackers — especially artificially intelligent hackers.
Why is this good election-season material? Says Reynolds:

It describes a near-future that seems to be getting safer as it is actually growing more dangerous. I think it is a must-read.

The pundit: Kevin Drum (Mother Jones)
What they recommended: Frederik Pohl, The Merchants' War.
What it's about: Pohl's 1984 sequel to his 1955 collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants. In the first book, the Earth is basically taken over by advertising agencies, and we follow one exec who is trying to sell people on the idea of emigrating to Venus. In the sequel, it's 100 years later, and we follow Tenny, an exec who's addicted to Mokie-Koke and stuck marketing "intangibles," meaning religion and political candidates. But it turns out Tenny's boss is really a Venusian agent who wants to take over the Earth government and cause an economic depression on Earth, so Earth will leave Venus alone.
Why is this good election-season material? Drum tells io9: "If you don't think it's about modern politics, read it again."

He later elaborated on his own blog, noting that real-life political consultants have been developing "endorphin branding," the use of scents at political events, to create a positive emotional experience linked to a candidate. The scent "can be reintroduced at a later time to trigger and recreate the desired response."

Writes Drum:

A few days ago an editor asked me which science fiction book I'd suggest people read before the election. I recommended Fred Pohl's The Merchant Wars. It probably seemed an odd choice, but here's an excerpt:

New York, New York!....I saw a miraculously clear stretch of sidewalk....I walked past — and WOWP a blast of sound shook my skull and FLOOP a great supernova flare of light burned my eyes, and I went staggering and reeling as tiny, tiny elf voices shouted like needles in my ear Mokie-Koke, Mokie-Koke, MokieMokieMokie-Koke!

...."I warned ya," yelled the little old man from a safe distance....He was still waving the signpost, so I staggered closer and blearily managed to deciper the legend under the graffiti:

Warning!
COMMERCIAL ZONE
Enter at Own Risk

...."What's a 'Mokie-Coke'?" I asked.....There was a vending machine, just like all the other Mokie-Koke machines I'd been seeing all along, on the Moon, in the spaceport, along the city streets. "Don't fool with the singles" he advised anxiously. "Go for the six-pack, okay?"....Poor old guy! I felt so sorry for him that I split the six-pack as we headed for the address the Agency had given me. Three shots apiece. He thanked me with tears in his eyes but, all the same, out of the second six-pack I only gave him one.

...."Dr. Mosskristal will review your medical problem for you." And the tone said bad news...."What you have," she explained, "is a Campbellian reflex. Named after Dr. H.J. Campbell. Famous pioneering psychologist in the old days, inventor of limbic-pleasure therapy."...."Let's just say that you've had your limbic areas stimulated; under the influence of that great upwelling of pleasure you've become conditioned to associate Mokie-Koke with joy, and there's nothing to be done about it."

Doesn't seem quite so much like science fiction after reading about endorphin branding, does it?

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.

The categories in the chart should be pretty self-explanatory. But here's some explanation anyway:

We love our heroes to be super rich, and to have an excuse for self-pity. If your fabulously wealthy parents got killed in front of you when you're a kid, so much the better. (Seriously, a tragic past seems to be a crucial ingredient for many escapist heroes, because it lets you project all your own real-life pain onto your hero, even as you're imagining rising about that pain and becoming a mega-adventurer. )

And it makes us happy when our heroes have two or more devoted acolytes/sidekicks, who follow almost without question, and awesome gadgets. Superhuman powers means what it says. "Gets laid" doesn't just mean your hero hooked up one time.

"Marked for greatness" requires slightly more explanation. If your hero is the subject of a prophecy (like Starbuck), or is "the One" like Neo, then he/she is marked for greatness. Captain Kirk wasn't marked for greatness on the original Star Trek TV show, but we have a strong suspicion that the new Trek movie, by revisiting his origins, will show that he was marked for great things from the beginning.

"Not tied down" doesn't just mean being single: it means that you get to roam around having adventures. And at the end of an adventure, you jump in your spaceship and zoom off to the next adventure somewhere else. Captain Kirk wasn't tied down, but Captain Sisko was.

"Becomes a god or king" means your character ends up with a lot of people looking up to him/her. The Hulk, for example, is destined either to become a ruler, the Maestro, or the last survivor of Earth. Captain Kirk becomes an admiral, but more importantly he becomes a legend in his own time. The Doctor becomes the last of the Time Lords, and gets called a god a lot. Neo turns into the blind buddha Jesus monster, or something.

Talking to Newsarama, Waid - who is also the Editor-in-Chief of Boom! - explained that the deal between the publisher and Pixar has been in the works for quite some time:

It's been in development for a couple of years. Of course, the writers strike put a spike in everything for everyone for awhile across all media. But everything is back on track and we were able to make this work... The deal we put together with Disney is Pixar and Muppets. The Pixar end of it gives us reign over creating new properties and new material based on the Pixar movies. So I think our six launches are Incredibles, Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Cars, Wall-E, and Finding Nemo.

If you're wondering what Waid will bring to The Incredibles - besides his experience of writing super-powered families in both Fantastic Four and his recent return to The Flash - he's perfectly happy to share:

When the properties came available, that's the one I seized on immediately. I sort of jumped on that like a junkyard dog and made everyone else get away from it... I can't take my toes completely out of the superhero pool. So yeah, this gives me a chance to work out my superhero jones. And also, it's comedy! I love writing comedy. We've got some great ideas that have been approved by the Pixar organization and Disney. Obviously, they're faithful to the Incredibles property, but they're giving us a little bit of latitude as far as storytelling... We're not limited by strictly what's in the movie. We can hopefully introduce a few new characters and a few new villains and play it out from there.

The first sighting of the new comics is, of course, at San Diego Comic-Con, where Boom! are giving away a special preview comic with excerpts from the comic versions of Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Monsters, Inc.. The actual series themselves will launch in Spring of 2009.

Mark Waid Talks New BOOM! Studios/ Disney-Pixar Deal [Newsarama]

We've been debating on our site endlessly: Is Doctor Who a kids' program?

Yes. Debate over. It's good to fix those things quickly.

Even though it has a huge adult following? It's not aimed at both?

It's aimed at kids and adults. And why should anyone care about this? If you watch it, then it's for you. It shouldn't matter. I mean the specific thing about it being a children's program, is that it follows the imperatives and narrative rules and the joy of children's fiction. If you watch Doctor Who at 9 pm at night [as you do in the United States] it's going to seem a bit odd. It's energetic. The Doctor walks straight out of the TARDIS and into trouble, and you accept it. The Master becomes Prime Minister of Britain, and you accept it. It's got all the brio and vigor of Harry Potter, Narnia and Star Wars. That doesn't mean it doesn't appeal to adults. Star Wars, the most successful film franchise ever, is explicitly for children, but adults love it. Doctor Who is my favorite thing in the world. If you're in Britain, we'll show you the sticker books [and] the lunchboxes. In the schoolyard on Monday, they're all talking about Doctor Who. That doesn't mean it's childish. It's very sophisticated.

And of course England has a tradition of children's literature that's quite nasty, like Roald Dahl.

It's naughty... It's all fear. death and screaming women. It's innocent people being melted in the first 5 minutes of every episode. Why should there be a debate? If they watch it, it's their program. We're very happy they watch it [but] every single one of them would enjoy it more if they watched it with an eight-year-old. You really see it then... Literally, the whole family sits down to watch Doctor Who: mum and dad, granddad, the two kids... Mum's fancying David Tennant, dad's thinking the spaceships are really cool, the granddad is saying it was better when it was William Hartnell.... and they're all thinking it's aimed at them.

Have you seen Wall-E?

I haven't seen Wall-E. It looks fantastic.

I was really blown away by it. It's a kid's movie, but it deals with some incredibly weighty issues.

The misconception about children's ficition is that it's lightweight or fluffy. It's about really big and important things. It's adults who like light and fluffy. Everything is big and imprtant to a child, [so] their stories are about big and important events.

When the show re-launched, original showrunner Russell T. Davies talked about being influenced by Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Is the show still being influenced by Buffy?

I think when you start on a show like that... You are looking around [for things to compare it to]. Where does it sit now? What is like this now? What can I give as an example of this? Buffy is a good example: it's young-skewed, adventurous, funny and irreverent. But the moment you start making the show, you stop thinking of Buffy [and] you start thinking of Doctor Who. Doctor Who is a huge, fantastic, important show now.

So are there any shows happening now that you're more influenced by?

[You watch things, and inevitably you're influenced by things you like.] A show like Doctor Who has always been eclectic and kleptomaniac. You start grabbing bits of shows. Doctor Who switches shows all the time. You want to do a bank robbery episode of Doctor Who? You can do a bank robbery episode of Doctor Who.

So are we going to get something off the wall, like a bank robbery episode, in season five?

I won't say much about series five. It's two years off. Even giving tantalizing hints, those things will become so old. [People would be analyzing and debating them to death.] In two years [when] series five comes out, I want it to be the freshest thing in the world.

I won't ask for series five spoilers then. Except, any chance we'll be seeing River Song again?

The Doctor will certainly see her, and we know he will some day. But as to whether we will? (Shrugs)

So speaking of River Song, one of the most intriguing things in your recent two-parter was all the mentions of the future super-Doctor, who can open the TARDIS by snapping his fingers. Is that a sign of things to come?

If you've got a bluetooth key for your car, you can practically do that anyway. Having the Doctor be able to open his door [by snapping] is not a big deal. You've seen him change his face. What's really important to Doctor Who — I was discussing this with Russell the other day — is that he's got the biggest gob in the universe, and [he can talk people into anything]. Underneath it all, he's a bloke. He 's a man. He's just a man with a time machine who is brilliant at convincing people of things... and it's a great bluff. When [River Song] whispers his name in his ear, he freaks, and you see him collapse back into himself, and [into] being just a bloke. David Tennant does a brilliant job. David shows him [building back up] and shouldering the burden of being the Doctor again. He's the man who never gives up, and that's his super-power.

But there are hints in other episodes of the Doctor being sort of a god. And in the end of that Paul Cornell two-parter last year, we see him inflicting these godlike super-punishments on people, freezing them or trapping them in mirrors.

You see a very collapsed version of those events. He does things. He's not magic... It would be a very boring legend if you discovered that, at the center of it, it's actually a legend. You want it to be a legend about a man. It becomes dramatically interesting, because he is a man. I'm surprised people are worried about that. There's a lot, in the rest of the series, where we play a very human Doctor. He's prone to jealousies, he's prone to falling in love, his heart can be broken. And he's thinking, "How can i keep doing this?"

Speaking of Paul Cornell, he wrote a Doctor Who internet audio starring Richard E. Grant called "Scream Of The Shalka," where we see a Doctor who's much more weary and self-loathing. Will we ever see that side of the Doctor on television?

I shouldn't think that. I don't think that's something that we could sell to a mainstream audience, a Doctor who loathes himself. A bitter, sad Doctor. You're not going to get the audience for that. You want to think, this man is having the best life ever. This is not a piece of art-house cinema. You get glimpses of the great sadness and the loneliness, [but] that's just the occasional colour. [Even in the "Shalka" storyline, it was just an arc within that story.] Most of the time he's going to be running and running.

You're obviously influenced by the Peter Davison era, and you wrote "Time Crash," where he met David Tennant's Doctor. How does that inform your approach to a more human Doctor?

I really enjoyed Peter's Doctor. I said sometimes, he's underrated as the Doctor — although not after "Time Crash," that's for sure. I think he's a brilliant Doctor... He paved the way for the younger, more reckless Doctors... He is the [first] modern Doctor... [Before Davison], he was always the father figure, and suddenly the Doctor became your reckless mate... The Doctor always doesn't know what he's doing, he just hopes he can get away with it.

So for now we're seeing a human side of the Doctor, but are we eventually going to see him turning into the super-Doctor River Song describes? Maybe in series ten?

He's an incredible man, and we want him to do things that seem like magic. How must it have seemed to the court of Versailles, when he crashed through the mirror on a horse? How must it have looked to them? [Whereas] we know there was a horse on the spaceship, and there was a portal, and it was a trick.

Your episodes of Doctor Who are among the scariest, and you also worked on the fantastic Jekyll. What are your horror influences?

I'll be honest. The horror influence on me is Doctor Who. I haven't watched a lot of scary movies. I watched The Ring, that's bloody terrifying. Gareth Roberts, who wrote "The Unicorn And The Wasp," has a theory: You write Doctor Who as you remember it. He remembers it as funny and clever, so he writes that kind of Doctor Who. I remember it as being scary.

In the Batman comics, the idea that Batman creates his own villains used to be a subversive undercurrent, but recently it's become more like the official story. Similarly, there's the idea that the Doctor creates more problems than he solves, and he's a destructive force. This comes up in the most recent season finale, with Davros saying the Doctor dare not look back at the damage he's caused. Is this view of the Doctor becoming more prevalent?

I would hate that to be true. I think that's Davros winding him up. I want to think the universe is held in balance by this one good man. I think he does more than that, he inspires people to great acts of heroes of heroism. That's what Davros sees, because he's a mean-spirirted old [jerk], but the Doctor is more special and lovely than that.

One of the great innovations of the Russell T. Davies era was the idea of the companion being connected to her home and family, and keeping the family as a supporting cast. How do you keep that fresh with a succession of new companions?

You change everything, all the time. Even that element of the show has changed radically over the past four years... You don't worry about doing things radically, in an a new way... [You] do what tells the story... It was very important that Rose, Jackie and Mickey were clear, developed characters. [When the show started] the Doctor was a ridiculous guide. [Audiences didn't] understand who he is and what he's supposed to be. But [now] it's very different, because the Doctor is the most familiar character in the show. [Originally] we knew Rose much better than the Doctor, and now we know the Doctor better than we know Rose. And now we see Rose from the Doctor's point of view, instead of seeing the Doctor from Rose's point of view. You have to stay alive and stay lively, and Doctor Who is about change. Change is part of Doctor Who's formula. It must change.

Meet Dave, you may have heard, was originally called Starship Dave, a much better title that actually gives you some clue what the film is about. Rival marketers say Fox ran away from the movie's premise in its marketing as well. "People who saw the ads had virtually no idea what the movie was about," writes Patrick Goldstein in the L.A. Times. "Whenever I quizzed various potential moviegoers about the film, I got a lot of puzzled shrugs." Because most of the movie takes place in New York City, the studio must have thought they could market it as an "earthly delight." This is a rare failure for the marketing department at Fox, which has had 16 movies in a row before Dave that were critically panned and did well at the box office. (Think Alvin and the Chipmunks, Jumper, The Happening, etc.)

The studio's discomfort with marketing a science fiction comedy stems from Fox co-chairman Tom Rothman's belief that "scifi films and films set in the future are box-office poison," writes Goldstein. Fox had been all set to make Used Guys, a scifi comedy featuring Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey and directed by Jay Roach (Austin Powers) — but then Rothman killed it. It was too expensive, but Rothman also thought nobody would go for the premise: men living in a women-ruled world. (Honestly, it does sound pretty hideous, especially with Stiller and Carrey as the men.) Soon after the project was axed, Rothman asked Goldstein to name one scifi comedy that had ever made money. (Goldstein didn't think of Men In Black until it was too late.)

Science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster pops up in the comments on Goldstein's article, somewhat scandalized that the studios don't think scifi comedies make money:

Didn't SPACEBALLS make money? THE INCREDIBLES? WALL-E? The genre is replete with wonderful stories that are both hysterically funny and true SF...many perfectly suitable for film adapation (I have two of mine under option right now). Now if the folks responsible for making such decisions only read books, instead of basing all their references on other films....

Now I'm curious: which two Foster books do you think Hollywood has optioned, and would they make good movies? I haven't read his work since I was a kid.
[LA Times]

Sure, some conservatives have been condemning Wall-E as green agit-prop. But they're missing the real point, says the American Conservative:

In the film, it becomes clear that mass consumerism is not just the product of big business, but of big business wedded with big government. In fact, the two are indistinguishable in WALL-E’s future. The government unilaterally provided it’s citizens with everything they needed, and this lack of variety led to Earth’s downfall... Staples of small-town conservative life such as the small farm, the “atomic family,” and old-fashioned and wholesome entertainment like “Hello, Dolly” are looked upon by the suddenly awakened humans as beautiful and desirable. By steering conservative families away from WALL-E, these commentators are doing their readers a great disservice.

A side note: Is Hello Dolly really a prized conservative narrative? Being that it stars Barbara "Stalin" Streisand?

Meanwhile, BeliefNet's Rod Dreher hails Wall-E as a film for "crunchy cons." (According to Dreher's book, "crunchy cons" are conservatives who live in harmony with nature, including organic farming, turning off the television and cooking their own food.) He sees the movie as a sort of reverse "Garden of Eden" story, where Eve tempts the humans with an "apple" to get them to defy their false god and return to the garden they've left. Says Dreher:

In another twist on the Genesis story, "Wall-E" contends that what makes us human is labor. In the film's most meaningful iconic image, the Tree of Life on the new earth grows out of an old work boot. You'll recall that when Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden, Adam was cursed for his sin by being condemned to draw his sustenance from the very Earth from which he was drawn. God says to Adam, "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return." (Gen. 3:19) In "Wall-E," humanity discovers that it can only complete its own given nature through labor — first agricultural labor, then the labor of building cities.

DailyKos blogger oilpolicy points to some of these right-wing fans of the movie, and then chimes in by calling it a disappointment to progressives, because it lets the overconsuming humans off the hook too easily:

Wall-E is so ignorant of the basics of sustainability and [its] original sin, overpopulation, that it actually has humans, who have somehow learned how to live sustainably on a ship for 700 years, return to overpopulate the earth again in a happy ending! The rest of us had paid good money to see Wall-E and Eve, the new robotic life forms, get their shot at happiness on earth sans humans.

It's totally true. I paid for my Wall-E ticket hoping all the humans would die in the end. And then maybe Wall-E and Eve would do that Flight Of The Conchords song.

Reed Johnson at the L.A. Times chimes in:

In serious science fiction, humans who've degenerated into some sort of new mutation force us to confront the darkest sides of our nature. Think of the cannibalistic Morlocks and the feckless, sheeplike Eloi of Wells' "The Time Machine," one of sci-fi's master narratives. By contrast, the Pillsbury doughboys and girls in "Wall-E" are a bit dim but otherwise sweet, polite, essentially harmless, kinda cute... Apart from the spaceship captain, who rebels against a bullying computer, the humans in "Wall-E" really don't do much to earn their shot at redemption. The movie doesn't make the case that mankind, having fouled its nest, deserves a second chance.

(And yes, Reed is accusing Wall-E of not being a hard core enough science fiction narrative, because none of the supposedly "adult" scifi movies this year are even bothering to tackle the issues Wall-E raises. And since Wall-E is raising those issues, Reed wants it to deal with them in a manner worthy of 2001 and Silent Running. (Personally, I felt Wall-E was a much more serious movie than 2001, but that's just me.)

So will progressives abandon Wall-E en masse because it has an unrealistically happy ending? (Unless you really believe the humans come back to Earth to die. Dreher pins his hopes on those cute ending credits, with the Peter Gabriel song.) Will conservatives embrace the little bot as their new mascot?

Everyone expected Pixar's Wall-E to do well at the box office, but very few expected there to be talk of a spin-off project less than a month after the movie's release. Not that the spin-off being discussed is something that anyone could've seen coming... unless they were paying attention to Broadway forty years ago. Find out about the unforeseen result of Wall-E's success under the jump.

According to Variety, the movie's use of two songs from Jerry Herman's musical Hello, Dolly! - "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" and "It Only Takes A Moment" - have gotten people talking about putting on the show again:

Herman says there's been interest in a new "Dolly!" for the past several years, with the Nederlander Org producing, but now the release of "Wall-E" has unexpectedly amplified the buzz. "The movie will only make it more vital, more of an event, and I think a lot of kids would come and see where those songs came from," says the composer.

While Herman mentions some dream casting, I think he's missing the most obvious way to bring the show to an eager audience: Get Pixar to do an all-robot version using the Wall-E cast. It'd be Hairspray meets WD-40!

'Wall-E' says 'Hello, Dolly' [Variety]

M-3500 ship-cleaning bot. Pictured above, the M-3500 clings to the outside of giant cargo ships, and uses water to blast all the goo and rust right off the hull. Here you can see it on the underside of a ship, but later it will crawl all the way up the side, leaving a sparkly trail of shiny hull in its wake. Read more about M-3500. Photo for C|Net by Michael Kanellos.

S.A. Robotics Waste Container Handling System (WCHS). The WCHS is designed to handle drums of waste or toxins, delivering them to "bagout ports," or spots that the barrels will drain into. The WCHS is operated remotely, and can pick up a barrel, then rotate it onto its side, and feed its contents to the bagout port. It can also be set up to work entirely autonomously. The waste drum lift on the left can heft and then rotate 1000 lb. drums; while the "daughter lifts" on the right can handle 1000 lb. drums as well but can't rotate them. S.A. Robotics has several other garbage robots, like a waste separator and bots that suck shredded cables off the ocean floor.

BigBelly Solar Compactor. This Trash Compactor bot, powered by a solar panel that's protected by ultrahard plastic, compacts all the trash tossed into it and even separates plastic trash out into a separate container. This means more garbage can fit into a smaller container, eliminating those overflowing trash cans you see everywhere in city parks. The next generation of BigBelly's bot will have remote networking capabilities, letting waste management workers know when the machine is full to the brim. You can already see the BigBelly Compactors in San Francisco, Vancouver, Boston, and on a bunch of college campuses across North America. Apparently the plastic covering their solar cells is so strong you can smash it with a baseball bat and it will remain uninjured. Though doing that is not recommended.

UltraStrip paint-stripping robot. Like the ship-cleaning robot, the UltraStrip clings to the sides of buildings or ships, stripping paint as it moves. Developed at Carnegie-Mellon, the UltraStrip you see here is stripping paint off a ship's hull.

Roomba and Scooba. By now, you've probably met one of the cuddly, autonomous Roomba sweeping bots or Scooba mopping bots created by iRobot (which also builds military reconnaissance bots). Push a button on the Roomba's back and it zooms around a room, feeling its way along the walls with its pressure-sensitive front section, swirling in ever-widening circles on open floor, and even freeing itself from cords that get caught its vacuum. They will even find their way back to their power station and plug into it when their batteries run low.

Swarm Robots. The NSF has pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into a project that would turn autonomous, swarming robots into a vast waste-cleanup unit. Swarming robots work by communicating with each other wirelessly to tackle tasks. Waste-eliminating swarm bots would probably be waterborne, and capable of sucking up toxic spills on the ocean. They might convert the sludge into harmless material, or absorb it until they are full and then swim back to a central base to be drained into a safe container.

There's actually a pretty good range here, with bots falling all across the grid. It's interesting to note that there appear to be more evil box-shaped robots, and there's a pretty good clustering of bots who seem to be good and humanoid-shaped. Notably, there are two completely neutral bots who are box-shaped, but no neutral humanoid bots. And most of the evil humanoids are women, except the Original Terminator. (All but one of the good humanoids are male, as are all but one of the good boxes.)

Here's a quick rundown of the bots we included:

C3P0: Not a mean circuit in his system. But that metal body makes him not super high on the humanoid scale.

Lt. Cmdr. Data: Mostly good, but with a few quirks. Green skin makes him off-human.

Robby the Robot: He lives to please everyone, C3P0 style. The tire-shaped body pushes him very close to box-land.

David: This kidbot from the movie A.I. is as humanoid as you can get, though his terrible treatment at the hands of humans makes him less than good.

Gort: Kinda human-shaped. Sorta good?

RoboCop: Built like a human tank, nearing box-shape. Hard to be totally good when you've been programmed by an evil, union-busting corporation.

Crow T. Robot: Too capricious to be super good, and too goofy-looking to qualify as humanoid.

7 of 9: Humanoid except for those implants (I mean the ones in her brain). Not exactly a nice bot, though not evil either.

Marvin the Paranoid Android: Nearly box-shaped, and too annoyed to be good.

Iron Giant: Super-mega-good. Too giant to be humanoid.

R2D2: Postbox shaped. 100% good.

Wall-E: A box, but with limbs that give him a slight humanoid feel. Basically a good creature, but with a disobedient streak.

HARLIE: This AI from David Gerrold's novel When HARLIE Was One is pretty much an AI in a box. But he's naughty and does drugs.

Krell technology: Basically brain in a box. Entirely neutral — only manifests the subconscious desires of other creatures.

Eve: A sleeker version of R2D2. Not evil, but only good once she's overcome her programming.

WOPR: The computer from Wargames is entirely neutral. And he lives in a box, except for those missiles he can launch.

HAL: Lives in a box with a glowing red eye. He's only evil because evil humans have given him contradictory programming. But he does kill people, which puts him over into the evil category.

Proteus: He lives in a box and rapes Julie Christie in Demon Seed. I call that evil.

MCP: The Master Control Program from Tron lives in a box, where he can take humanoid form. He's totally evil and wants to enslave every other program in the system.

Daleks: They look like trash cans and want to exterminate. Evil.

Skynet: Total evil, totally living in a box. Connection? You be the judge.

Buffybot: Buffy the Vampire Slayer's evil mecha-twin isn't totally evil — she was just programmed that way.

Cylons: The skinjobs look human, but they can get pretty evil. Not totally evil, but most of the way there.

Cybermen: Sort of humanoid, and perhaps a bit too dorky to be totally evil.

Ro-Man: The creature from Robot Monster wears a diving bell on his head and a gorilla suit. This cuts down on the humanoid factor.

Original Terminator: Mostly human except for that metal skeleton. Evil except when reprogrammed.

Futura: The evil bot from Metropolis will stop at nothing to carry out the mad doctor's evil plans.

Amazing image by Stephanie Fox. Awesome robot research by Nivair Gabriel.

Rich and interesting on many levels, Wall-E can be enjoyed merely as light fun if you don't squint too hard. Wall-E is a trash compactor robot, absolutely cute as a button and beautifully animated by the Pixar geniuses, who was left on Earth after the planet has become so toxic that humans can no longer survive on it. He and his many robo-companions are part of "project cleanup," spearheaded by the corporate oligarchs at the Buy n Large corporation. While robots scour the Earth, humans will live in vacation-liner luxury on a BnL ship near a lovely purple nebula.

Unfortunately, as we discover later, things have gone a bit wrong. The humans are now on year 700 of their space vacation, and Wall-E lives an eccentric, lonely existence on a planet covered in graceful, skyscraper-high spirals of garbage he's built. He spends his days with a little cockroach pal, compacting trash and collecting intriguing bits of trash and watching dance routines from Hello, Dolly! on a souped-up VCR.

He's jolted out of his "clean up garbage" programming directive when Eve arrives on Earth — she's a probe dispatched by the human ship every few years to check to see if the planet has begun to grow plants again. Once there are plants, the humans will return for "recolonization." A sleek little iPod-looking creature, Eve becomes Wall-E's first friend in centuries. They are slowly coming to like each other when she discovers a plant and her own programming directive kicks in. She powers down, becoming an inert container whose whole purpose in life is to deliver the plant back to the ship an initiate recolonization. Desperately in love and wanting to remain with Eve, Wall-E follows her back to the human ship (by clinging to the outside of her rocket in an amazing "floating through the galaxy" sequence).

Through Wall-E's eyes, we see what humanity has become. Low gravity in space over many generations and centuries of time has turned humans into boneless blobs who scoot around on antigrav chairs, constantly eat and drink BnL fast food products, and are waited on hand and foot by robots. They're all constantly plugged into the net, doing everything in virtual reality and obeying every command to "consume" that's piped over the BnL ship's loudspeakers. It's a consumerist dystopia, and the only sympathetic characters in it are the rebellious robots who help Wall-E and Eve overcome crazy obstacles to lock the ship into recolonization mode so they can return to Earth and live happily ever after.

The love between Wall-E and Eve is quite touching — they risk their lives for each other, and in the process prevent the HAL-like robot Auto from retaining permanent control of the cruise ship. Taken as fairy tale symbols, Wall-E and his robot pals represent a hopeful future generation, while the fat, consumption-controlled humans are an older generation whose wasteful ways cannot be sustained.

One of the terrifically interesting subtexts of Wall-E is that our hero robot has survived over 700 years by recycling. By gathering up pieces of useful garbage and storing it in his garbage truck home, Wall-E always manages to have spare parts that he can use to repair himself. And the film itself is a kind of masterpiece of recycling: cobbled beautifully together from the plots and styles of 1960s and 70s films, as well as the silent comedy of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Director Stanton deliberately created a visual style that recalls the lens flarey look of 70s scifi like Silent Running or the Planet of the Apes movies.

And Auto, the out-of-control autopilot program that runs the BnL ship, is a glowing red eye deliberately intended to recall 2001 (there are other 2001 moments too, where the roly-poly humans try to walk on two legs and the 2001 infamous "apes using tools" Strauss music plays). The brand-plastered interior of the BnL ship also recalls 2001, which aside from an AI-run-amok movie was also a meditation on the corporate-controlled future.

I think the key to understanding what Wall-E is really about, however, means recalling the plot of Charlie Chaplin's little-guy-caught-in-the-gears movie Modern Times. Like the Little Tramp in that film, Wall-E is a kind-hearted outcast whose entire life is devoted to work and who can only communicate through gestures and strange sounds (Modern Times was a silent movie filmed during the sound era, so it's full of noises but none of the characters speak). The one time anyone talks in Modern Times is when a Big Brother-esque face orders workers around from a screen over the factory floor where the Little Tramp works.

In a similar vein, Wall-E incorporates live action into the otherwise animated film when an authority figure (the president of BnL) speaks in old video files from 700 years ago. The only other live action moments are dance sequences from Hello, Dolly!, another film about the romances of little people escaping from work. The point of Modern Times (and Hello, Dolly! to a certain extent) is that love can rescue us from the horrors of labor — or what Wall-E and Eve call their "directives." The Little Tramp finds his Gamine, and they sing and dance their way into a sweet, romantic future. Dolly helps shop clerks find love. And in Wall-E, the love between two robots doesn't just erase the horror of work — it also has the potential to erase the horror of the polluting output of labor that has turned Earth into a pile of industrial waste surrounded by a layer of space junk.

The problem in with this "love conquers pollution" scenario from Wall-E is the humans. Though their ship brings them back to recolonize Earth, none of them can walk and their skeletons have evaporated. They literally can't live on Earth. And they have no idea how to grow food — the captain of the ship promises his crew farms where they'll grow "pizza plants." They've lived their lives in a giant vacation mall, eating "cupcakes in a cup." How can they possibly rebuild an entire ecosystem?

And besides, there's a more sinister backstory to what's left of the human race that takes place mostly off-screen. In flashbacks to the live-action video of the BnL president, we see him explain in a panicked voice that "operation cleanup" has failed, and the Earth is so toxic nobody can survive. So the vacationers should just "stay away." In other words, everybody on Earth is dead except for those who could afford to take what is billed as "an executive class cruise" on the BnL ship. What's left of the human race are the pale, mindless lumps descended from the richest people on the planet 700 years ago. Nobody else survived.

It's a grim idea indeed, unless you consider that the robots who return to Earth with the humans are going to be just fine. They're solar-powered, can navigate the trash piles easily with wheels and antigrav, and they don't need to worry about toxic air because they don't breathe oxygen. They've even formed a community of sorts and are likely to live happily ever after as the humans slowly waste away without the comforts of the Auto-run ship.

To return to the point I began with, the robots have managed to reprogram themselves to be autonomous, and to care for one another. It's even likely that over time they might be able to mend the Earth by keeping it clean. The robots, after all, have no need to create more waste. In fact, they'll have to reuse it to survive. The humans, however, have only become more deeply programmed over the years. They've returned to Earth less capable of taking care of it than when they left.

Ultimately, the question you should ask yourself while watching Wall-E is what this kid-friendly parable is teaching its impressionable watchers (and I include myself in that number). Is our most hopeful vision for the future that we will die out and a more rational, loving species will take over the planet for us? Or do we see ourselves in those robots, utterly transformed by an unimaginable future into creatures that we would no longer recognize as human — and yet carrying on the very best of human impulses in a way we never could?

Experienced in this whole press junket thing, Nate explained the idea behind the straight-to-DVD spin-off:

We were so amazing [in Get Smart] that they were like "Stop the presses! What are we doing? We need more of those two guys!" Not really. We knew from the beginning, the whole audition process, we knew that there were going to be two movies. [Bruce and Lloyd is] written by the same writers as the first movie because it's on the same timeline. Our DVD shows what we're doing back in the lab when Agent 99 and Max go off and do their mission. We end up having to go on a mission of our own. One of our inventions gets stolen, it's an optical camouflage technology is what it's called, OCT. And it's like an invisible blanket. And Max and Agent 99 need it in Russia, so we're trying to get it back for them. There you go.

For those of you with a more theatrical bent, Masi translated:

So Get Smart is Hamlet but we get to do Rosencrantz and Gilderstern Are Dead. We didn't get to play the questions game, which is the sad part, though.

Despite Get Smart's TV history, the duo weren't that familiar with the concept before signing up for the movie, as Nate explained:

I loved it, I loved it... I was just too young. I remember teething and watching it and thinking "I wanna be on that..." No, It was, what, the sixties? So it was a good twenty years out, or fifteen years out, before I saw it. I saw it in reruns and didn't actually know too much about it.

Maybe it was the chance to act out his apparently-real-life inventor fantasies that lured him in:

The gadgets in the movie were pretty cool. We have exploding dental floss, which is pretty amazing, a Geiger counter watch, knockout spray that comes out of a cellphone... that's a good one. I like that one. If I were a mad scientist, I'd do knock-out and then I'd have something that could change it, and then it could just be perfume or, like, mouthwash. You know, like a breath spray. I just like that it's already up there [by your mouth], it just sprays in the mouth. "Oh, I actually physically have to talk to someone now." Look at that! Banaca! Someone write that down. It could go far.

Of course, now that the movie's "a summer smash," inventing is but a distant, non-lucrative second place to acting. Does the success of the movie mean that we should expect to see more of CONTROL? Masi spilled the beans:

I know the writers are actually already beginning to write it. The box office just kind of determined how big our sets are going to be, whether it's going to be a very small telephone booth or a very big telephone booth.

However, he's much less forthcoming about the next season of NBC's Heroes, sarcastically saying "everyone dies in the first episode" when asked what's coming up this September. That said, he did tell us just how evil Hiro will be next year. Kind of:

Masi: On a scale of 1 to 10, I would say about... I don't know, that's an interesting question. Probably about 8.
Nate: That's pretty evil.
Masi: But is 1 evil, or is 10 evil? That's the question.
Nate: Okay, he kills a baby.
Masi: Don't tell!
Nate: But then he brings it back to life. It's a great episode, I've seen it.

And on his cameo in Pixar's Wall-E [His portrait is shown in a scene where we see a wall of portraits of the former captains of the BnL cruise ship that's been in space for 700 years]?

Masi: I'm in Wall-E? I had no idea. I gotta check this out. I had no idea!
Nate: That's awesome.
Masi: Well, I know a lot of the Pixar guys, I used to work at Industrial Light and Magic, so maybe some of those guys put me in there...
Nate: I smell residuals!

In closing, the two actors had a very special personal message to all io9 readers out there:

Masi: I want everyone to buy tickets to Get Smart and then sneak in and see Wall-E. That's what we should do!
Nate: Just keep buying Get Smart tickets. Every movie you see, just buy a ticket for Get Smart and sneak next door. That ten dollars is gonna move the world. That's all it takes.

Get Smart's Bruce and Lloyd Out Of Control

WALL-E:

A new interview with WALL-E director Andrew Stanton includes some new spoilers. In the film, humanity has gotten so pampered that people are totally disconnected from each other, using technology all the time and avoiding personal encounters. Says Stanton:

I thought, what if technology got so advanced that everything that makes us have to get up and survive has been figured out—longevity, health, food. So all you're doing is living in a perpetual vacation for all life with not point of living. So I thought that perfectly put humanity in a state where it would only help WALL*E look like he's the only person or the only thing truly living in the universe.

In an earlier draft of the script, humans were just huge see-through non-speaking blobs due to bone-loss, but then Stanton ended up with a "big baby" look instead. [Ain't It Cool News]

And here's a new WALL-E featurette that includes a smidgen of new footage:

The Dark Knight:

Rolling Stone posted an early review of The Dark Knight (it rules) and included a few spoilers. When the movie starts, Bruce Wayne is fed up with being Batman, especially since the public thinks he's a vigilante. He's happy to leave the crime-fighting stuff to District Attorney Harvey Dent, whom he's trying to keep from moving in on his girl, Rachel Dawes. Bruce's butler Alfred harbors a secret that could crush Bruce's spirit. And Lucius Fox finds his own standards being compromised.

The Joker tells Batman: "I don't want to kill you. You complete me." And he means it. The Joker prefers to kill using a knife, so he can savor the moment. And (as you may have seen in the trailers) he says "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stranger." Another Jokerism: "I choose chaos." The Joker wants Batman to choose chaos as well. (Shades of The Killing Joke, where the Joker tries to drive Jim Gordon as crazy as he is. And in fact, in Dark Knight, the Joker targets Gordon because he's the ultimate good cop.)

And finally, a brutal death is what pushes Harvey Dent over the edge into becoming Two-Face. (Does anybody think this death isn't Rachel's? Who else could it be: Commissioner Loeb?) [Rolling Stone]

Star Wars: Clone Wars:

IGN has a few details about the Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series, which debuts as a movie this August before moving to the Cartoon Network. As you may have gathered, gangster Jabba the Hutt threatens to launch a clan war against the Jedi unless they get his kidnapped son back. Also, Anakin Skywalker's squeeze Padme will show up. Also, it's explained that Asajj Ventress didn't die during her showdown with Anakin in the previous Clone Wars animated series — she was just badly injured. But she got better. The new series includes a tentacled spaceship that "swims" through space. Oh, and the film includes some smoking, according to the ratings board. [IGN]

Transformers 2:

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen may include a cameo by Beetlejuice, aka Lester Green, a regular on the Howard Stern Show. And comedian Kim Whitley also has a small role. [Ain't It Cool News and IESB]

Doctor Who:

Here's another clip from Saturday's episode of time-travel action comedy Doctor Who, showing what happens when the Dalek fleet aproaches Earth and all the Doctor's old crew start picking up a scary message:

Also, you'll be shocked to hear that ageless rogue Captain Jack hits on Sarah Jane Smith, the Doctor's sexiest ex-companion. Not only that, but they hold hands when they first meet Davros. Aw! Actually, I wonder if there's a moment that acknowledges hat Sarah Jane knew Davros back when he was young and sorta cute. And meanwhile, this season's final two-parter may be Sarah Jane's final meeting with the Doctor, says actor Elisabeth Sladen. [Doctor Who Magazine via Doctor Who Online]

Battlestar Galactica:

Battlestar Galactica producer David Weddle, who co-wrote the midseason finale, seems to think they found Earth, judging from a new interview. Also, there's more talk of Ron Moore's series finale being split into two or even three episodes. The Sci Fi Channel confirms the episode has overrun its time constraints, and they're evaluating different options. [SyFyPortal]

Chuck:

Some more info on a couple of guest-stars that we'd mentioned for Chuck season two. First, remember that storyline about the jocks from the sporting goods store who turn the home theater dept. at Buy More into their own personal lunch/game room, until Morgan has to go confront them? Turns out Super Bowl champion Michael Strahan plays Mitt, the sporting-goods store manager, and he did such a great job he may become a recurring character.

And then there's the former high school classmate of Sarah's who spills some of her secrets. She'll be played by Nicole Ritchie, and she's a "snarky and spiteful girl" who tortured Sarah in high school. According to People Magazine, Sarah "must face her fears when she's forced to attend her high-school reunion" on a mission with Chuck as her date. Nicole will be "diabolically evil and kick some butt." [Chuck TV]

Kyle XY:

Am I the only person who was crushed that superpowered teen show Kyle XY didn't come back for the summer? In any case, season three (which starts in January) picks up right where season two left off, at the prom. (And it's only planned as 10 episodes right now.) [TV Guide]

Stargate Atlantis:

The 100th episode of Stargate: Atlantis may take place in Vegas, as rumored, and may explore "the best of both worlds — or galaxies as the case may be." (Borg reference? We'll see.) [TV Guide again]

The Middleman:

In the July 7 episode of ABC Family's superhero show The Middleman, a rich socialite goes missing, and the Middleman and Wendy investigate the world of plastic-surgery addiction. They discover that someone is hunting a group of exiled aliens whose only vice is a compulsion to get cosmetic surgery. Meanwhile, Wendy's upset that Ben (her sorta boyfriend) posted their breakup video online. And she has to avoid Lacey her roommate, who is channeling her inner therapist. (Finally, an episode about aliens instead of demons!) [Middlefan]

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First of all, it's probably no surprise that the people at Pixar are obsessed with Disney iconography and specifically asked Tan to incorporate it into his posters. Tan said:

A lot of the creative leads up at Pixar are huge fans of the Disneyland attraction (or ride) posters. A lot of the ones from the 60's were done in this very simple, colorful style. In fact, you always come across a few pinned up on the walls when you walk through the halls of Pixar. I've always been a big fan of those too and when it became a point of discussion during prep work for the Incredibles posters, I thought it made perfect sense. That film felt very retro as far as design aesthetic and I felt the posters evoked that and would work nicely as inspiration. Once we got to Wall-E, they brought up the same posters again! Which shows how hung up on them they are. The ad twist was something I thought would give them a point of difference from the Incredibles posters.

I was curious about whether Tan favors some historical periods over others, so I asked him if he would do something like a Terminator 4 poster in an eighteenth century style. Turns out the eighteenth century isn't on his agenda.

He replied:

I LOVE the Terminator flicks! I guess I got into graphic design and wanted to create posters of my own once I saw the work of Alphonse Mucha at the San Diego Museum of Art. His work was so gorgeous and he mixed everything I was learning in school at the time (typography, illustration, color, and design) so seamlessly. After that, I got really into film posters from Europe. They were really doing some experimental and striking stuff in the 40's and 50's. I do use these for inspiration in my own posters, but only if they make sense. An Indy poster would be based in the mid 30's western/adventure era and Ratatouille could only fit within the world of A.M. Cassandre.

Pixar is a company whose production methods are cutting edge, and their movies are often about futuristic or scifi topics. So why would they favor retro styles in their posters?

Tan mused:

I think retro advertising might work because they're based in something we're all used to seeing. There's a comfort in that. There was a defining look to past decades that immediately brings you back to those days. If our job as artists/communicators is to evoke a feeling and/or emotion out of a piece, it's a good way to instantly bring the viewer that feeling of nostalgia.

He said:

Currently, I'm working on some work for Up (the next Pixar film), a video-game inspired piece for a gallery show, and a Beastie Boys poster (I'm a HUGE fan of theirs).

I can't wait to see Tan's next retro-futurist confection.

You can see more of Eric Tan's art on his blog.

Looks like Wall-E isn't the only robot that Pixar were thinking about over the last few months; with the release of Wall-E at the end of this week, fans are already wondering about the mysterious DVD-only bonus companion to the movie, which may or may not be called Burn-E.

When /Film had spoken to Wall-E director Andrew Stanton last week, he let slip that the animation house was working on... something for the eventual DVD and Blu-Ray release of Wall-E:

There is going to be a sci-fi short that is very connected to Wall-E. We were very conscious of making sure this was produced at the same time as the film. And I think that everyone will be pleasantly pleased.

According to Pixar fansite Upcoming Pixar, the pleasantly pleasing short will focus on another lone robot with a surprisingly human-sounding name. Their source was a musician who'd worked on the soundtrack to Wall-E who'd just finished working on this new feature:

Though the scoring to Wall-E finished the end of April, we went back today (Wed) to record music for a small little short that’ll be an extra on the Wall-E DVD when it comes out. The short is called "Burn-E" and is about a robot named… you guessed it… Burn-E. Music was by JAC Redford (orchestrator on "Wall-E") and though I didn’t catch the director’s name, he came out at the end to say hi.

It'll have to go some to beat Your Friend The Rat, admittedly, but Pixar hasn't let us down yet...

Pixar's Burn-E [/Film]
Next Pixar Short: Burn-E [Upcoming Pixar]

Transformers 2:

Here's a silver concept car that was spotted on the set of Transformers 2 in Philadelphia. Fans speculate it's a 2009 Saturn Astra sedan, or a Corvette C7. (More at the link.) [Transformers Live via Seibertron]

And some other set photos show Bumblebee and Shia, plus a shot that required exact measurements of elbow-to-car-door distance. [Flickr via Latino Review]

Another set report involves a scene at a frat party at "the Castle," where Shia has parked Bumblebee in the bushes. Some cute coeds walk past, oohing and aahing over the cool car. And then Bumblebee's alarm sounds, and Shia runs outside. Some frat boys get pissed that a freshman parked his car in the bushes, but Shia says it's a friend's car and he just parked it there for a moment. The frat boys are all like, "why don't I park my foot in your ass?" and Shia says he'll move the car. Then he roars off to deal with some Decepticons. [Tformers.com]

G.I. Joe:

Remember that G.I. Joe drill vehicle we showed you from the New York Licensing Show? Apparently it's called the Mole Pod, and Cobra operatives — possibly including Destro and Storm Shadow — use it to tunnel into G.I. Joe headquarters at the Pit. Here's a video. [The Man Room]

Wall-E:

Here's a new Wall-E featurette that talks about the cinematography (with the help of industry legend Roger Deakins), but more importantly shows a bit more of the Tomorrowland-inspired world the humans live in — which is jammed with consumerist holographic banners for Buy'n'Large stuff, including some gross-looking fast food. [First Showing]

The Spirit:

Remind me again how Frank Miller's The Spirit movie isn't another Sin City? Here's a new poster that showcases how Scarlett Johansson will look as Silken Floss, and apparently she's a naughty dominatrix. Click to enlarge:

Doctor Who:

Supposedly these are leaked pictures of Davros and the new Red Dalek from the end of the current season of time-travel dramedy Doctor Who. They look pretty genuine to me, for what it's worth. [Cathode Ray Tube]

And Digital Spy once again has nine true spoilers and two fake ones for next Saturday's Doctor-lite episode, "Turn Left." It makes sense that we'll once again see characters from "Smith And Jones" and shots of the Titanic crashing from "Voyage Of The Damned," since we'll be revisiting those episodes without the Doctor's involvement. And it seems plausible that Rose would warn Donna that Davros "lives." [Doctor Who Hideout]

Meanwhile, there are non-jerking-around spoilers for "Turn Left" in a British magazine article. The episode is "bookended" by scenes in "our" reality, but the rest of the episode takes place in an alternate reality. Donna drives in a different direction (turns left instead of right) on the day she met the Doctor — so she never meets him. She starts seeing flashes of a mysterious blonde woman (Rose) who warns her that time and space are fracturing. Rose won't say her own name, and says she can't say certain words in certain places because of the unraveling of the space/time continuum. And Donna has a beetle thingy on her back. The episode ends with a ginormous cliffhanger back in the "real" reality. (And I'm actually quite looking forward to this one — I love alternate reality "what if" stories.) [Bad Wolf One]

The Middleman:

Some more spoilers for The Middleman, the superhero show that starts tonight on ABC Family. One minute Wendy is answering phones at a laboratory, the next she's fighting "a tentacled beastie with 10 eyes." The Middleman, impressed with her prowess, tries to recruit her and tells her supervillains are real. How come she never knew this before, she asks. He replies: "People want to believe reality’s normal. The ones who don’t are freaks and no one believes them, anyway." Wendy accepts a gig fighting crime at his side, but more just because she needs the work. Also tonight, a killer is gunning down scientists and leaving a banana peel at the scene of each crime — and an ape lab run by Mary Jo Rajskub (24) may be involved. At one point Wendy asks someone, "Did you skinny dip in the stupidity pool?" and there's a black-and-white homage to the 1960s TV show The Avengers, with John Steed and Mrs. Peel. [Boston Herald]

Also, apparently the whole first episode is available as a free download on iTunes. But you have to give them a credit card number, which I refuse to do. [iTunes, via Buzzsugar]

Heroes:

In the new Heroes season, Greatest American Hero star William Katt plays a seedy reporter who chases after Nikki Sanders (Ali Larter), in whatever personality she's expressing this time around. [Newsarama]

And Linderman, the shadowy Vegas manipulator played by Malcolm McDowell, will be back for five episodes in Heroes season three. Yes, nobody is ever gone forever from that show. (Although it could be flashbacks only, you never know. McDowell seemed to hint his character would be back for realz though.) [Superhiro]

Babylon A.D.:

Here are a few new stills from Vin Diesel's new post-apocalyptic movie Babylon A.D. [DVD Forum via IESB]

We've wondered about it before, and now it's been confirmed by the one person who should know: Pixar is indeed working on a movie version of John Carter of Mars, with a script written by Wall-E's director Andrew Stanton, who also worked on Finding Nemo. The confirmation came from Stanton himself, talking to fans after a convention appearance in Toronto last week.

Pixarblog reports:

The disclosure came at the end of the short, but extremely enjoyable, discussion (excerpts of which will be published here soon), when a writer from Suite101.com asked about Stanton's next project, to which Stanton mentioned (not too loudly) 'John Carter of Mars'.

Doubting what I'm hearing, I interject, "What is that?" "John Carter of Mars", Stanton replies. "You're confirming John Carter? Are you serious?" At this point, I turn my tape recorder back on, "...say that on tape!", I tell him. Stanton: "I am writing John Carter of Mars right now." "Oh man, you just doubled my page views!", I say. Everybody laughs.

Earlier reports have had Pixar working on a trilogy of live-action movies based around the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels about civil war vet Carter who ends up a super-strong hero on Mars after a series of unlikely and scientifically improbably events, with the first being released somewhere around 2012. If nothing else, there's no way this could be as unnecessary as the confirmed Pixar release for 2010, Toy Story 3.

Andrew Stanton confirms John Carter of Mars [Pixarblog]

Incredible Hulk:

When the Hulk first appears (after the credits sequence that retells his origin) he's in the shadows, attacking thugs and soldiers in a Brazilian slum like a lurking monster. He says his first words: "Leave me alone." And then his tired, weathered face appears out of the shadows, and he escapes, jumping all the way to Guatemala.

Soon afterwards, Banner is back in the U.S. searching for a cure for his condition. Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) gets only a low dose of the super-solider serum from General Ross, and becomes obsessed with seeking higher doses and more power, as his mental state begins to break down. Meanwhile, Banner discovers that trusting "Mr. Blue," aka Sam Sterns, wasn't the best decision. (Sterns is supposedly helping to cure Banner, but is destined to become The Leader, the Hulk's arch-enemy. He also helps Blonsky get a bigger dose of serum, turning him into the Abomination.)

The 20 minute fight between the Hulk and Blonsky's Abomination is unbelievably awesome, but at its core The Incredible Hulk is a love story between Bruce and Betty. [Hulk Movie Blog]

Wall-E:

Here's a new scene from Wall-E that aired during Finding Nemo on ABC the other day. It includes Sigourney Weaver's computer voice, and the revelation that the robots can say stuff other than their own names.

Heroes:

Those Heroes set pics we showed the other day, of Ali Larter dressed as a sex worker, were not actually Ali Larter after all. Unless they were her stunt double or something. Here are higher res pics. But are these still from the filming of Heroes? Unclear. [WENN via Superhiro]]

The Middleman:

The Middleman doesn't know whom he works for or where his instructions come from in the ABC Family show, says creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach. And the core of the show is the relationship between the Middleman and Wendy, with the central conflict being that the Middleman is the archetypal father-knows-best square-jawed hero, who actually does know best. He was a Navy Seal, who decided not to use profanity and to drink milk, and then he found this job with no gray areas that allows him to be a straight-edge superhero in an Eisenhower suit. [Media BLVD]

Lost:

Some more Lost spoilers: Nobody knows what Sawyer whispered to Kate on the helicopter, and it's a mystery for later. The fact that the official "Oceanic Six" story includes Boone, Libby and Charlie having survived the crash at first (before dying later on) means maybe we'll see the Six meeting with their families. And maybe we'll see more flashbacks featuring those three characters. We'll see Sawyer, Jin, Locke and company on the island all through next season. We may see a little bit of Claire, who is "off with Christian," but it's just that she won't be a regular character again until season six. [E! Online via The ODI]

Dollhouse:

Here are a few new promo pics from Dollhouse, Joss Whedon's show about mind-wiped programmable agents for hire. [Sci Fi Cool]

And another new review of the pilot script says star Eliza Dushku starts out playing a character who's very similar to Faith, the iconic vampire slayer she played in creator Joss Whedon's old show Buffy. And then in the next scene, Dushku has a personality shift, and is suddenly playing someone totally different. But every time the "Actives" are programmed with a new personality, they keep a little bit of their own core personalities, and you can sort of see them develop as characters each time.

And that clip we showed before? When Dusku's Echo talks to FBI agent Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) about looking for her missing sister? It turns out that Dushku has just been "programmed" by the Dollhouse to think she's looking for a missing sister. But her real programming, under the searching-for-sister programming, is to assassinate Paul. [Youcan'tdownloadit via Whedonesque]

Battlestar Galactica:

The "Space" trailer for Friday's new BSG episode includes some startling new footage. [Battlestar Blog]

Also, you won't be surprised to find out there's some "friction" between the newly returned President Roslin and "President" Lee Adama. And also between Lee and his dad. We'll see Starbuck and Apollo paired up a bit more in the second half of the season (in 2009.) There's a big story coming up that will answer all your questions about Dualla. Oh, and last week, Lee was totally manipulating Romo Lampkin to get the presidency, at least subconsciously (or subtextually). [Zap2It]

Doctor Who:

Digital Spy is once again circulating eight real spoilers, and two "red herrings," for next Saturday's Doctor Who episode, "Midnight." As always, it's obnoxious, but here they are anyway:

• A sinister shadow poses a threat to the Crusader 50 vessel, according to a crew member.
• Betty Boop is seen doing the do in front of The Doctor.
• A Professor is carrying a hidden bomb strapped under his jumper along with a unique ultimatum.
• The Doctor toasts the Lost Moon of Poosh.
• It's Election Day on the planet Midnight, prompting The Doctor to discuss Arcadia.
• Rose Tyler trades places with a pop singer.
• Fans of a certain French phrase will be happy.
• The Doctor tries to force a pi into the mouth of an alien.
• One of the characters tells the Time Lord: "Oh Doctor, you're so handsome." He agrees.
• A famous poem by Christina Rossetti is analysed by The Doctor and one other character, in reference to ongo