Lady Gaga fans and Olympic Games enthusiasts alike already know the style of the 1980′s has sleazed its way back to the top. This week Nike and eBay make clever use of the trend by auctioning authentic Back to the Future II Nike Mag shoes, to benefit the the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.
While I don’t have the credits on hand to walk away with such a prize, I have a feeling we’re witnessing only the first trickles of a floodgate breached. So everyone keep an eye on the markets and maybe you too can take home a piece of your own 1980′s re-culturalized movie memorabilia.
For example, those on a tight budget might be able to claim hold to Puma’s new Haphazard E.T. Ghost costume.
And for the moguls and high-rollers, maybe exchange your change chunk for the upcoming 2012 Chrysler 200: ATAT model.
Many a blogger has gone to Japan for conspicuously selfish reasons and returned home to annoyingly spend a few years contributing semi-valid “In Japan they…” gossip to all conversations. Concordantly, let my one-sided observations of the Rising Sun Land commence.
Observation #1: Mascot Envy
While American company icons petered out after Spot and the Noid, Japanese businesses have kept their mascot coffers full for the last 20 years.
Behold Doala, the Chuunichi Dragon Koala, naturally, the cutest possible animal with the Dragon’s “D” added to the beginning…
And Chidejika, the terrestrial deer responsible for Japan’s digital television switch, because the elderly relate more to a partially mechanized ruminant than a public service announcement.
Until the States’ agencies re-realize the genius of mascot characters, let’s all pour one out for Grimace, Mayor McCheese, and good old Mac Tonight. *Tear*
Photo: Tecmo, Inc.Our team got to do some screen-takeover creative for the impending release of the long-awaited Duke Nukem 3D, and from the nostalgic ‘games we miss’ conversation that inevitably ensued, Craig and Jamie remembered the side-scroller Abuse for its remarkable playability, depth, creative level design. For these exact same qualities, I remembered the somewhat later release Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball.
Photo: Tecmo, Inc.DOAX was not a game. It was a pervy dream where eight similarly proportioned young ladies get tricked into lying around a tropical island for two weeks, buying each other suntan lotion and coordinated bikinis by day, then gambling away their savings at the hotel roulette table by night. It was also by far the most applicable implementation of the original Xbox’s pressure sensitive controller.
Aside from tree-envy, we must remember DOAX taught us an important lesson in our technological coming-of-age. Through fluidity of animation and superb textural graphics, we learned that even the privacy of fictitious characters can be invaded.
Photo: Paramount PicturesEver since Ford put a Cylon face on all its vehicles we knew we’d reached a cultural Sci-Fi saturation point. The 90′s already a decade behind us, we’ve gotten used to bubbly low-riders laced with gadgetry like the Civic and Fiesta being commonly available. The new Warmachine-inspired Chrysler logo too now lends weight to an arcane brand, drawing on twenty years of action-adventure design teams. So I thought I’d take a peek back and see what other Sci-Fi-inspired gems made the transition from media to market.
Action cop John Spartan witnessed first-hand the stopping power of Securefoam in 1993′s Demolition Man. This technology has since been adapted as window curtain airbags, standard in the Prius. Not quite as advanced, but the premise is basically the same.
Photo: Hollywood PicturesIn fact, we really have to hand it to Stallone for setting the pace of automotive futurization, because if anything Toyota’s FJ Cruiser is a mid-market Judge Dredd city cab.
Photo: Twentieth Century FoxWill Smith’s personal transit in 2004′s I, Robot could spin rapidly in circles while barreling down a highway. The ball-wheeled Audi RSQ concept, sans balls, is practically available today as the Audi A5. Released in a rash of robot thrillers, I, Robot was the tale of a robot named Sunny who learned to wink and could also print dot-matrix images from his finger.
Without getting into Minority Report, with its revamped highways, The Fifth Element, where McDonalds hotties await your sky-car, or the original pimped ride, the Back to the Future DeLorian, auto-engineering has definitely made some great strides towards putting drivers in the seat of our Sci-Fi dreams. Until the flux capacitor is realized, however, we may hang in limbo, staring at our backing-up cameras and playing, “artist, the Strokes,” wondering if in our lifetime we’ll truly, boldly go.
Thanks due in large part to the Internet Movie Car Database for its extensive library of amazing, useless information. You’ve done it again, internet.
If you saw Jane McGonigal’s talk on gamer potential or on The Colbert Report last week, or the Superbowl Kia Optima 60-second spot, or caught last night’s Glee, you know what is come. “Epic” is the new zombies.
For the last few years Valve’s Left 4 Dead series, alongside Will Smith and Jessie Eisenburg’s successively less creatively-titled releases had helped saturate us with Zombie fever. We all knew there was a glut when the Zombies begin to sell me Starburst and Ford Fiestas. (I think that Fit owner was in my yoga class.)
Now the Zombie must hand over the torch, by removing his actual hand, to our next cultural champion, the double rainbow.
Photo: Blizzard EntertainmentI recently stumbled upon the magnificence of watching pro football with the purchase of our very own HD tv. Not the scoring or the running around so much, but the torrent of high-grade, PS3-quality screen graphics and icons flooding my entire field of vision. Usually there are so many stats and showboating transformers on the screen I can get through a whole quarter before I figure out who’s actually playing. Though I’m not 100% on all the names yet, I think last night was a battle between the Pittsburg Blood Angels and the Stormpike Guard.
But we all know the only reason to sit through the rest of a football game (and any non-Prince halftime show) is for the Superbowl commercials. This year I’ve come up with an ingenious and overtly nerdy commercial rating system, which maps directly onto the HSB color model so each commercial can be captured by a single hexadecimal value.
Three ratable aspects of the commercial map to the scale like this.
First, chose an emotional response in the form of a hue, as each rainbow hue is receptively unique but none less valuable.
Then, from a scale of absolute darkness to absolute intensity, apply the hotness of the characters in the commercial to a brightness value, since unattractive people can black out an ad from our memory.
Finally, scale back the saturation purity of your rating by how effective the ad’s overall messaging is, since an ad that sells nothing is gray from an utter lack of entropy.
Put it all together and give it a try. Here Eminem and Chrysler coin the new slogan “Imported from Detroit”
While I don’t have the credits on hand to walk away with such a prize, I have a feeling we’re witnessing only the first trickles of a floodgate breached. So everyone keep an eye on the markets and maybe you too can take home a piece of your own 1980′s re-culturalized movie memorabilia.
If you saw 
