Today is John Carpenter’s 64th birthday. To celebrate, here’s a remake of his 1982 hit film “The Thing” done entirely in claymation in the style of Pingu.

As of this post being published the film has been seen by 885,887 people, which may be more people than watched the 2011 remake…

Check out more videos like this at leehardcastle.com, which also has these storyboards of Pingu’s The Thing.

Also check out John Carpenter’s The Thing in Stop Motion with GI Joes from a few years ago.

Tonight Fox premiered the first two episodes of the new Napoleon Dynamite TV series. Is this a new hit for Fox’s Animation Domination block or will it go the way of Allen Gregory?

I’m a huge fan of the Napoleon Dynamite movie, so I was both worried and excited at the prospect of a show. Despite the excitement of an animated version of a favourite movie of mine, there’s always the concern that this would turn out to be a piece of garbage that’s an insult to the film, like other animated series based on great movies such as Spaceballs and Strange Brew.

It’s still a bit early to make any final judgements, but I found the show to be pretty funny. Though not as consistently funny as the film, each episode included some pretty solid jokes which made me laugh, which really is all you can ask for from a comedy. The show was reminiscent of the movie, and although some dialogue seemed unnaturally repetitive from what we’ve heard, the general tone seemed pretty consistent, while adding a certain level of cartoon silliness as we can only expect from such a show.

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