Who puts the future in your hands? Robotix! Robotix!

As a child of about 5 or 6 and later, my mother would often take my sister and I to the local The Video Store. That is capitalized because, as I recall, that was the actual name of the business. Local businesses renting vhs tapes of movies and television was the norm back then, long before national chains like Blockbuster Video moved in and undercut them and even longer before Netflix would establish itself undercutting the national chains and let us not mention YouTube or Hulu just yet. Going to The Video Store was quite the treat. My mother would allow us to rent one or two videos of our choice. It would not be out of the norm for me to rent a couple episodes of The Transformers or Challenge of the Go-Bots. That was my proverbial jam in those days and, truthfully, still is. There was one movie in that children’s section that I really adored and rented many many times that was neither Transformers, Go-Bots, nor any other wildly popular franchise at the time (and there were a lot of them). This 90 minute movie was called Robotix. And that is why today is R for Robotix.

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It’s not a great thing to be Batman’s protege. You get shot at, blown up, killed, and — like Menudo, the Boy Scouts, or the Disney Channel — you get kicked out once you get too old. Robin is little more than a brightly colored sprite for criminals to shoot at instead of Batman, much like how a magician would use a sexy assistant to distract the audience. Except this sexy assistant is (usually) a nubile young boy, and stands a much better chance of actually getting sawed in half.

Robin has been part of the Batman mythos for 70 years. Even in real time, that means Batman must have gone through a slew of supple young teens by now. But in comic time? Hoo boy.

So just how many goddamn Robins are there anyway? (And why isn’t Batman clever enough to think of another alias for his underage sidekicks?)
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Since the alphabet is the building block of our language, the Powet Alphabet is the building block of what makes us geeks.

Zombies – they’re a staple of film and games alike. Pioneered by the likes of George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” and its sequels, and followed by the slightly less-serious “Return of the Living Dead” movies and scores of others in the horror genre, zombies have been a tool of the entertainment industry for decades. Games began using them as early as the late 80’s, with Castlevania starting the trend of pixelizing the undead, and the idea taking off with subsequent games such as DOOM and the less-than-terrifying “Zombies Ate my Neighbors”. The idea of the dead coming back to life in order to devour the living has been used to great effect in all types of media, and tend to do rather well because of a good chunk of the populace having a morbid fascination with not only the undead, but more importantly – killing the undead. Capcom decided that, by the mid-1990’s with video games starting to become mainstreamed in the media, that it would try its hand at capitalizing on the concept.

Enter Resident Evil (Biohazard) in 1996 for the Playstation. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Since the alphabet is the building block of our language, the Powet Alphabet is the building block of what makes us geeks.

Anyone who grew up in the ’90s should remember ReBoot on ABC. As a budding computer geek, I was fascinated by this show — not only because of its endless barrage of computer in-jokes and references, but because it was the first 3D-animated cartoon ever. This barely compares to what a teenager can do these days with off-the-shelf software, but in 1994 it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

Most people don’t even know that the show survived its cancellation to have an amazing third season, and somewhat middling TV movies. What? You’re one of them? Then read more after the jump! (Or watch the video above!)

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