Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular roundup of all the wonderfully weird and wallet-draining toys we’ve seen floating around the internet. This week: Fantastic Beasts comes to Hot Toys, Monopoly’s got something to say about kids these days, and the fluffiest answer to Super Smash Bros. possible.
Way back in 1989, Peter Jackson released his second film, Meet the Feebles, a hardcore, gross-out puppet comedy which we decided to revisit this week because of a similar film being released in theaters, The Happytime Murders. And while that film is bad in all the wrong ways, Meet the Feebles is bad in all the right…
The Happytime Murders is a poorly paced, visually bland R-rated comedy that has a lot of ideas, none of which ever come together. It’s built around a great idea—a dirty detective comedy for adults starring both puppets and humans—but outside of a few big laughs, it disappoints on almost every level.
We here at io9 take our puppet appreciation very, very seriously, and with Brian Henson’s The Happytime Murders out in theaters this weekend, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to talk about our favorite people made of felt.
ALF’s back, and this time not in pog form—if Warner Bros. has its way, the Alien Life Form could be making his way back to our televisions with a new reboot.
While I did put my hand inside a puppet on the set of the upcoming R-rated puppet comedy The Happytime Murders, the film’s director made one thing very clear: “It’s not graphically sexual,” Brian Henson said. “The puppets cum silly string, but you don’t see their penises.”
Late last week, the company behind Sesame Street filed a lawsuit against the company behind The Happytime Murders to stop the movie from using the tag line “No sesame, all street.” The fear was it could damage the Sesame Street brand by connecting it to the hard R-rated puppet film. Today, a judge ruled in favor of…
Prostitution, drug use, murder, and more, all from the DNA of Sesame Street and The Muppets. Ladies and gentleman, hold on to your childhoods, this is The Happytime Murders.
It’s a yearly tradition, at least in my household, to take in the classic Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special from 1964. Surprisingly, some of the old stop-motion puppet figures haven’t crumbled to dust yet! And you can buy them! If you’re Elon Musk, anyway.
There’s not a ton we can do now but watch in horror as the FCC’s Republican leadership guts net neutrality. You should, of course, join the ongoing online protest. And if your representatives in Congress don’t support strong net neutrality protections, write them and explain how you won’t forget their stance next time…
After making a movie, actors and directors typically go on to do other things—like make more movies, sell beauty products, or become the Governor of California, and then go back to making more movies. But what happens to the props, figures, and puppets that help make a movie come to life?
The child prodigy of puppeteering, Barnaby Dixon, is back with another update to his bug-like hand puppet. This time Dixon’s swapped out the head with a small LCD display showing a live feed of his face, adding another level of realism to the puppet which, quite frankly, totally freaks me out.
Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular weekly roundup of all the toys you’ll want to blow your paycheck on, instead of buying groceries, paying rent, or other more responsible purchases. This week we’ve got an Imperial entry in Sphero’s line of interactive droids, a cartoon version of Boba Fett, and a bunch of New…
Is Barnaby Dixon the reincarnation of Jim Henson? It’s hard to believe that there isn’t at least a little bit of Henson inside the young puppeteer as he demonstrates his latest creation, a glowing bug puppet that’s so articulated it even has moving fingers that can grasp tiny objects.
Already one of the more popular characters from the original Guardians of the Galaxy movie, the sequel introduces a baby version of Groot so cute he might as well have been engineered in a lab as the perfect toy-selling tool. So why not build your own, like Caleb Kraft did, who now has a tiny animated baby Groot…
Our favorite puppeteer Barnaby Dixon is back with a kickass puppet raptor that packs so many moves that it totally feels like it has its own mind. The tail wags back and forth independently, the mouth opens and closes with ferocity, and the body and arms move as naturally as anything you’ve seen in Jurassic Park.
Remember that live-action Futurama fan film someone was making? In addition to binging Bender, Fry, Leela, Zoidberg, and the professor into our world, the Fan-o-rama filmmakers are working on realizing other characters too, including the all-knowing, benevolent, hypnotoad—ALL HAIL THE HYPNOTOAD (replica).
Advertisement
