Futurama Release Party Brings Out Paparazzi

Thursday night, Fox threw a redcarpet hootenanny at the Arc Light in L.A. for its first direct-to-DVD feature release of Futurama. “Bender’s Big Score,” which comes out November 27, marks the sporadically amusing franchise’s return to grandeur. The occasion was celebrated, of course, by making voice-over artists pose for paparazzi shots and trotting out a…

Alien Visitors Always Look Like Potato Fetuses

Why are aliens always such a cliche? This one is a mockup of the Roswell Alien from the Museum of Science’s new exhibit, “The Science of Aliens,” which opens Sunday. Click through for more images, including figures from Aliens and Alien Autopsy.Images by David Adame for AP.

Robot Theme Parks Don’t Need No Stinking Humans

South Korea is spending more than $1.6 billion (!) to build not one but two robot theme parks set to open in the year 2013. They’ll only be 250 miles apart from each other, so if you’re in Korea you won’t have far to go to visit one of these robotopias. That’s some serious cash…

Stop Oppressing Men in Virtual Worlds With Unrealistic Body Expectations

Is the virtual universe ready for Men’s Lib? In World of Warcraft they are. Fans are getting irked about how the male characters in WOW are so muscle-bound and macho-bulky that they are practically unable to move. While female characters are lithe and flexible, the men hobble around in so much armor that it’s as…

Everything You Need To Know About Razor

Battlestar Galactica’s upcoming TV movie Razor assumes that you already know a lot of the backstory from previous seasons of the show. If you haven’t been keeping up with Battlestar Galactica regularly, then you’ll need to know a few important things going into Razor before it airs on November 24th. Here’s a shorthand version to…

Science Fiction Farts of Death

Fart danger is everywhere recent science fiction. First there was Greg Bear’s novel Vitals, in which an evil Soviet conspiracy leads to targeted biological mind-control attacks. How do you know somebody has been taken over by mind-controlling bacteria? They start farting. Doctor Who took this idea a step further. In “Boom Town,” which aired during…

Which Current Technology Will Destroy The World?

Chances are the seeds of the end of the world are already in our midst. But which technology that we embrace to our bosoms will end everything? Help us decide, before it’s too late! Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web…

Kiss My Singularity, Says Author Rudy Rucker

Computers will become self-aware and smarter than humans. And Baby Boomers will live forever. That’s the basis of the Singularity, which predicts that technology will accelerate so rapidly that we’ll be like gods in twenty years. Rudy Rucker’s new novel deals with a world where the Singularity has already happened, called Postsingular. He used to…

Theater Geeks to Study Warp Cores and Prime Directive

Never ones to shy away from scifi references, L.A. architects have now moved on from Battlestar Galactica to Star Trek. Just as we’d learned to love Tom Mayne’s Caltrans intergalactic dreadnought, HMC Architects/Coop Himmelblau serve up an homage to Starfleet Academy with their design for the somewhat ominously named “Central Los Angeles High School #9.”…

Star Wars Clones May Hit Theaters Before Invading Your Home

Next August could see another Star Wars movie in theaters. Only it would be an animated film, to launch the gritty new Clone Wars animated TV series that George Lucas is working on. During a conference call with investors, an executive from the Hasbro toy company said the Clone Wars film would be in theaters…

Never Forget the Glory of the Wankhers

Here, in full color, is exhibit A for why it’s hard to sell science fiction novels. What exactly is a graphic designer supposed to do with a book that literally has the word “wank” in the title? Maybe put a Dracula-headed guy in a purple robe and have him hold a teeny lizard guy in…

Superbugs to Make Power from Poo

Quick intro to the hydrogen-economy paradox: The stuff could save our oil-addled asses, but curses! We have to burn oil to make the stuff. Enter researchers from Penn State, who have announced that they can use specially bred bacteria to make the most plentiful element in the universe from… Well, let’s allow FOXNews to serve…

Moon Camera Has Earth Under Surveillance

A special HDTV camera on Japan’s lunar probe, SELENE, captured the first ever hi-def image of the Earth sinking over the Moon’s horizon, released Nov. 13. You can just see the brown shape of Australia on the top left. And click through for a gallery of cool images of last Friday’s spacewalk at the International…

Special effects are killing movies. The cost of making the 50-year-old Ray Winstone look “17 again” in Beowulf is just one example of the SFX excesses that drove up the cost of movie-making by 16 percent between 2004 and 2006. Meanwhile, DVD sales are plummeting. Image by James Higgins/Splash News [Times of London]

Please Don’t Give Us Another Knight Rider

Hollywood is deep into pre-production on a new Knight Rider series, due to the success of theTransformers movie. This 1980s show about sentient supercar K.I.T.T. who was equipped with artificial intelligence and fought “those outside the law” alongside his driver Michael Knight enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the 1980s, but there has been…

Bye-bye, Bionic Woman?

The Bionic Woman is the latest victim of the Hollywood writer’s strike—and not a minute too soon. This week’s dating-and-dictators episode landed the ailing series almost at the bottom of the Nielsen ratings, a fall cushioned only by a worse performance by The CW’s Gossip Girl. Will Bionic Woman return post strike? Hard to tell,…

Black Friday at JR.com Offers $3.99 DVDs

The Black Friday madness continues! JR.com has gotten into the swing of things a bit early, offering $3.99 DVDs. Sure you might be a hi-def guy, but four DVDs would go a long way toward stuffing a stocking. Granted, a lot of the movies are crap, but here are a few we either own already…

Creationism Is Science Fiction

Dinosaurs were in the Garden of Eden and only died out a few thousand years ago. That’s the message of the $27 million Creation Museum, which opened in May in Kentucky. Science fiction author John Scalzi toured the museum the other day and discovered that dinosaurs were still around as late as the mid-third millenium…

You Cannot Escape Shaky Camera Syndrome

During a real alien attack, most of us would have no clue what the hell was going on. And judging from both trailers, J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield will bend over backwards to simulate that state of confusion. The first trailer, especially, has a hand-held camera swooping and jostling as if the camera holder is running for…

Save The Dolphins, Save The Cheerleader

Heroes continues to one-up Lost as often as possible; as the cast of ABC’s castaway drama get continually arrested for DUIs, actors from NBC’s superhero soap are now in danger of finding themselves arrested for saving the world. At least, that’s the story that the show’s indestructable cheerleader, Hayden Panettiere, is putting about. Talking to…