Shell's amazing Ferrari ad

Shell's new commercial for the 60th anniversary of their partnership with Ferrari is, without a doubt, one of the sexiest car commercials ever made. Directed by the very talented Antoine Bardou-Jacquet (the man behind the brilliant Honda 'Cog' ad) of Partizan, the ad shows off a number of classic Ferrari F1 cars tearing through the streets of Rome, Sydney, New York and Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro and Monaco. An awesome sight in and of itself, but what makes the ad truly extraordinary is its soundtrack. No music, just the powerful roars of the cars' engines. A joy for the eyes AND the ears.

(thanks to Autoblog for the production information)

Technorati Tags: cars, Shell, Ferrari, advertisement

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The Animaniacs Bible

Animaniacs (and its spin-off, Pinky & The Brain) was one of my favourite cartoons of the 90's, so I was quite excited when I found this Animaniacs Bible, which details the ideas behind the show and its characters. Surprisingly enough for such a seemingly anarchic show, its plot structures are laid quite quite rigidly, as you can see in the "Show Format" and "The Formula for Warner Bros Cartoons" pages. Now that I come to think of it, most of the show's episodes did roughly follow the structure as laid out in this document! I guess that says a lot about the formulaic nature of modern TV writing, even in cartoons, and why even the best Animaniacs cartoon, while a good deal better than the Warner Brothers cartoons that preceded it as well as those that have come since (except for the 90's Batman and Superman animated series, and possibly Justice League), just can't hold a candle to their classic Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons.

Technorati Tags: animaniacs, cartoons, history

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Dexter & Monty: the first robot comedy duo

Anybots's announcement video for their new robots, Dexter, the world's first (well, not really) dynamically balancing walking humanoid robot, and Monty, a wheeled robot with one fully articulated arm, is a very cool demonstration of their technology, but it's also really funny. To be specific, the bit where Monty pokes Dexter repeatedly to try and get him to fall over is *comedy gold*. Cracks me up every time I see it.

Technorati Tags: robots, bipedal robots, anybots

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The Return

First post of 2007! It's been a long time in the coming, but here it
is. This is going to be an exciting year in many ways and it's high
time I started keeping a record of it (as soon as I clear my backlog
of posts). I also need to start reading all the RSS feeds I subscribe to again- I haven't checked my Rojo since December, which means I'm in danger of losing my sense of the web Zeitgeist!

What's been keeping me so busy all this while? Work, work and more work, with my remaining free time being devoted to consuming as much media (movies, TV, anime, comics and of course games) as possible. Yeah, I need to start writing about all of those. As you may (or may not) have noticed, I've stealth-posted the entire archive of my now-defunct entertainment blog Robot|Eel here. In addition, I've also stopped updating my gaming-centric blog, Zest Games- not because I intend to stop writing about games and gaming culture (if anything I have more to say now), but because I'd rather focus on this blog exclusively. So from now on, I'm going to post about pop culture and games right here. Hopefully I can add some breadth to this blog without sacrificing depth (insofar as it is possible for a blog to have depth).

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