They used to be called The Napalms. They were on their way to becoming the biggest punk band in England until Johnny Napalm signed a contract with the devil for hookers and blow, promptly going AWOL. Following in the footsteps of generations looking for a fresh start, Johnny’s bandmates came to the US and rechristened [...]
You remember Popeye, right? OF COURSE you remember Popeye! But if you’re like me you don’t remember anything other than the spinach, Bluto, Wimpy and Olive Oyl. I don’t even remember any plot elements other than Bluto’s constant machinations to steal Olive away, and that he’d make a great Bear icon in the gay community. Well, [...]
When you got home from school growing up, was your mom sitting at her computer blogging? Some of today’s kids are being raised by a whole new generation of web savvy parents. Momversation offers their viewers the chance to join the web’s most outspoken mom-bloggers in a smart and entertaining video conversation. From the controversial Heather Armstrong of Dooce to the extremely frank Giyen Kim of Bacon is My Enemy, the show offers a discussion of today’s parenting topics. Tubefilter talked to Asha Dornfest of the popular website Parent Hacks to find out more about mommy blogging, Momversation, and what her kids think about the web celeb in their house.
Every great adventure has a few select moments that its participants remember a little clearer than the rest. The transformational moments that shifted the journey along a slightly different path. For Jeff Macpherson, creator of the widely popular and long-running web series Tiki Bar TV, one such moment was an email that landed in his inbox one morning in the first week of October, 2005. It came from Apple. What followed was a somewhat cryptic phone call that essentially boiled down to this: “We can’t tell you why, but you might want to make sure you have plenty of bandwidth for your web site next week.”
That following Wednesday Apple CEO Steve Jobs would introduce the video iPods in one of his famed keynote speeches, boasting about the introduction of video podcasts to iTunes. Luckily MacPherson was savvy enough grab an unlimited bandwidth plan from his hosting company, prepping for the windfall that followed Tiki Bar’s ‘Johnny Johnny’ (Kevin Gamble) character’s beaming mug blown up on the tech world’s stage right behind the magnanimous Jobs. That day the cult web show went from just under 10,000 subscribers to over 60,000. For the next four months it would sit atop the iTunes top 100 podcasts charts garnering the show over 200,000 new subscribers to the bi-monthly series.
Today, almost four years after the first somewhat awkward episode was broadcast out through the RSS waves, the series has grown from a creative hobby into a thriving and sustainable business. Having moved the set from Macpherson’s modest Vancouver apartment to a stunning new location based in Los Angeles, Tiki Bar TV heads into its fifth season. The show’s nicknamed stars—Doctor Tiki (Macpherson), Lala (Lara Doucette) and Johnny Johnny (Gamble) —have become internet celebrities. Led by producer Tosca Musk, who joined the operation in summer of 2006, and Macpherson himself who stars as the lab coat donning ‘Dr. Tiki’ in this series, Tiki Bar TV continues to stay on forefront of web video technology. As one of the first narrative format video podcasts, the series is now continuing to stay on the cutting edge of the web series world by recently signing a deal with Dolby Laboratories to be the first web series to be encoded in Dolby 5.1 surround sound.
Bitterlawyer.com’s smart web series Living the Dream isn’t about a bitter lawyer, or at least not yet. Set in a top New York City law firm, the series revolves around Nick Conley, a new hire from an average law school trying to fit in amongst the Ivy League legal elite.
Nick, played by John T. Woods, never seems to triumph, a la The Life and Times of Tim. He constantly bumbles chances to kiss butt and kiss girls, but does deliver us a few decent laughs. He’s a little too put together and good looking to be believable as the typical oddball that can’t seem to fit in or get anything right, yet that has never stopped Hollywood before, and John is a quality actor that makes the most of the material.
The production value is excellent and the vast majority of acting is on par with the best of television and the web. I wouldn’t expect much less from writer-director, Rick Eid who earned his stripes as a Co-Executive producer and writer for Law & Order.
Noir-meets-Super-Smash-Brothers web series There Will Be Brawl has joined the ranks of Zero Punctuation and de-rez with the Escapist Magazine, a web publication devoted to video games culture and commentary. Although the deal was announced on the There Will Be Brawl homepage on December 11th, 2008, last Friday marked the re-release of the show on the Escapist’s website.
We first covered There Will Be Brawl on after the first episode, titled “Twilight Ruin,” was released in late September. Since then, the show’s co-creators Matthew Mercer and Zach Grafton disclosed that, while they had made promising progress on the next episode, they needed more funding to continue production. However, when they announced Escapist’s intervention they made it clear that production would continue on a monthly release schedule, meaning that Episode 2 should be due out a month from now at the Escapist.
For those of you out there who didn’t catch it the first time, There Will Be Brawl takes its inspiration from Nintendo’s hit fighting game Super Smash Brothers: Brawl (which is itself a mish-mash of characters from several of Nintendo’s game franchises: Super Mario Brothers, Kirby’s Dream Land, Pokémon, The Legend of Zelda, etc.) and classic film noir. The result is an adults-only, more sinister look at the Mario Brothers (with Matt Key as Luigi, Paul Duraso as Mario, Kyle Hebert as Wario, and Katherine Steel as Princess Peach), where power-up mushrooms are peddled in dark alleys, Toad Pimps slap their Toad Hoes, and the once-peaceful Mushroom Kingdom exists only as an unsteady stalemate between ganglords Bowser, Dedede, Ganondorf, and Mewtwo.
New York’s forgotten borough. The fifth of the five. Staten Island. The receptacle of NYC’s garbage (paper, plastic and sometimes human). A place where the makeup is thick and the tans are greasy. A land of quasi-suburbia not at all dissimilar to Long Island, both full of denizens proud to rock the banner of Bridge [...]
For some moms just dealing with the kids is enough, but for Paige Heninger and Gretchen Vogelzang being a mother isn’t just a full-time job, it’s also a business. With some encouragement and prodding from some entrepreneurial husbands, the long-time friends launched Mommycast, and the sponsorship deals followed (Dixie and Pampers are among the biggies that have backed the show.)
|
|
|
|
