I love Pixar. It’s really just this unabashed, unbiased adoration that’s deep enough for me to be slightly embarrassed about it as a 27-year old male. Seriously, if Pixar gave me a call and invited me over to be a concept artist, or a janitor, I’d drop everything and go. And when no one was looking, I’d hunt down all of the secret rooms in their building and play frisbee with their office monkey and draw myself into the background of a scene.

I missed Wall-E in the theaters because I’m a lonely hermit who’s too embittered against love sub-plots to avoid them even when they involve robots, but catching the movie on DVD was possibly even better - because I didn’t have to get into a toxic-emission-pumping car to drive home afterwards, or walk through a cloud of shame for having driven to the theater in the first place. While I’m not here to discuss the movie itself, it was a moving experience. You know you’re watching great animation when you find yourself ‘what a great movie!’ instead of ‘what a great cartoon!’ My natural predilection for robots aside, I completely dug the movie.

The DVD comes in a few formats, including Blu-Ray (a format which I’m not completely sold on just yet), a single-disc Standard Edition, and a 3-disc Special Edition. The copy that I happened to get was the 3-disc edition, which seems to be the best deal of all the varying editions. It comes packaged in eco-friendly cardboard packaging, with ‘drawers’ of a sort that slide out from either side of the DVD case - and given the theme of the film, eco-friendly packaging was the only thing that Disney and Pixar could do without being completely hypocritical.

There is one gigantic, explosive irony in the general distribution of the DVD, however. Without playing too much of a spoiler, there’s a certain sub-theme of the film that deals with the future-peoples’ collective lives being simultaneously dulled and overwhelmed by little portable screens that forever hover in front of their faces, obscuring the beauty and excitement of real life. The irony enters the picture with the inclusion of the extraneous third disc included in this set : a Disney File Digital Copy of the disc, specifically made to copy onto your iPod or mini video device. A little, portable screen that you can carry around to immerse yourself in instead of the real world.

Instead of saving plastic and practicing what the film preaches about breaking away from the screen, Digital Rights Management rears its ugly, wasteful head and demands that plastic be used for a third disc, instead of figuring out a less wasteful method, or just, like, dealing with it. Movie thieves are going to get around your DRM on the main DVDs anyhow, and I understand that it seriously sucks, but you have to appreciate the biting irony of the whole situation.

Aside from that, the DVDs are stuffed full of a crazy number of worthwhile extras.

Five of these extras are deleted scenes - two are half-rendered bits that change story pacing a little, and three aren’t scenes so much as animated storyboard sketches. There are also two complete short films included - one happening within the Wall-E universe as the main story is also happening, and one theatrical short called ‘Presto’. Pixar’s tradition of including a bonus short film before all of their features is one that I always forget about before the movie starts, and always love - but much to my disappointment, Pixar seems to have dropped the ‘blooper reel’ that they used to include with their film credits.

Of course, there’s director commentary, as well as some stuff about sound design and ‘Wall-E’s Tour of the Universe’. Disc 2’s main feature is a long documentary called ‘The Pixar Story’ by Leslie Iwerks (granddaughter of Ub Iwerks, the real designer behind Mickey Mouse), which is essentially a history of Disney through the late 1970s and branches off into Pixar upon its formation. It includes a lot of early home video footage inside the Disney studios, shot by friends and excited animators, so it’s a beautiful and rare look inside the world’s most important animation studio. For anyone who takes animation seriously, this is a must see (in addition to the documentary included on DC Super Heroes : The Filmation Adventures DVD). Also notable are 5 short how-to and informational videos from the future, and the disc is rounded out with Making-Of features, info about various robots & a minigame. It’s really stuffed full of every possible extra, and the documentary makes it truly invaluable.

The DVD arrives on shelves on November 18th. It’s a hopeful message for the future of a planet in flux, it’s visually breathtaking, and it’s very charming without ever becoming sappy. I’m in love with robots all over again.

My love affair with Futurama is undisguised. Not only is it a show that remains both hilarious, visually imaginative and emotionally resonant (when it wants to be), but it’s a show that’s developed a stronger character dynamic than almost any other animated series. You can’t ever, ever go wrong with mad professors, time travel paradoxes, robots that seem specifically designed to destroy Asimov’s three Laws of Robotics, and hypnotic toads. I try to incorporate at least two of these elements into my everyday life.

I’ve told the story here before : Futurama gets canceled because of grievous mishandling by FOX, and many years later, fan fervor causes it to be resurrected in the form of four direct-to-DVD animated movies (which eventually make their way to Comedy Central). This week marks the release of the third DVD movie, and like the others, it includes the full original voice cast and almost all of the original creative team that made the show so great the first time ‘round. The fate of the show is still uncertain after the release of the fourth DVD, but us Futurama nerds are really, really hopeful. There are way too many creative possibilities, aliens to meet, and scientific theories to eviscerate to stop making the show now.

The most recent DVD, Bender’s Game (a reference to Orson Scott Card’s classic science fiction story, Ender’s Game), continues to live up to the standard that Futurama has defined for clever space adventure animation. One of the prerequisites for bringing the show back was that each DVD movie would have to be easily divisible into four full-length TV episodes which weren’t too reliant upon the events of the other episodes, and somehow, I found it impossible to see where the seams might be. That right there is the definition of smart writing.

Without going into too much plot summary, the first 44 minutes are spent in the Futurama world as we know it, as the world faces a fuel crisis not unlike our own, while in a subplot, Bender tries desperately to discover his imagination. Around the 44 minute mark, the two plots merge and some science-magic happens (which almost definitely has some actual science counterpart, as most Futurama events do) and the whole Planet Express crew is transported into a Dungeons and Dragons / Lord of the Rings parodyverse of Bender’s subconscious design. Whether or not this is a thin premise doesn’t concern me, because I’m watching new Futurama stuff, and shut up. The whole thing ties up nicely, with a startling character-revelation retcon as only Futurama can write.

The DVD is stuffed with extra features, my favorite being the Genetics Lab, which is a simple little DVD game in which you select two Futurama Characters (out of six) and merge their DNA, resulting in a displayed image of just what the concoction would look like. I can’t articulate why, but it amused me to no end. A bizarre Fry / Bender combination named ‘Friender’ shouldn’t have tickled me in so many places. Seriously. I’m calling the authorities.

The movie commentary, as always, is great stuff - Billy West and John DiMaggio just bein’ themselves is endlessly listenable. There’s a short documentar-ette about Futurama’s past D&D references (including a very notable episode in which D&D creator Gary Gygax provided a voice as himself), some sarcastic ‘how to draw’ lessons, only one deleted scene, and a scant two minutes of watching the voice actors do their thing behind the mic. All of you DVD extra creators, hear this : more voice acting footage.

Of course, this is an essential part of any Futurama collection, and very directly complements the existing episodes, and it made me laugh. The DVD was packaged, and created, with carbon neutral standards, so while you’re enjoying your ‘toons, you can also rest easy knowing that they didn’t shorten the planet’s lifespan. You know, as long as your TV isn’t somehow powered by a V6 engine and orca blood.

I admit that I’m a huge fan of 1980s era cookbooks. You know, the ones with the full-color photographs of prepared dishes before the art of edibility was invented. The ‘throw a slice of lemon on a something vaguely resembling a football and call it dinner’ era. I’m also a fan of exceptionally awkward public access television shows, exceptionally bad but enthusiastic musical numbers, and the general squirming uncomfortableness of the human theatre. If any of these things appeal to you, we’ll be pretty good friends. If you wanna stick all of these things into a blender and drink that thick, salty mess all down at once, we can watch Tom Goes to the Mayor together, and maybe even cuddle.

This week saw the long-awaited, and possibly much-dreaded, release of all 30 episodes of TGTTM (as we people in the know call it) on a saucy 3-DVD set. One of the many exciting shows exclusive to the Adult Swim programming block on Cartoon Network (which is responsible for both me meeting my last girlfriend and keeping me alive post-breakup), TGTTM is the brainchild of Tim and Eric, an uncategorizable duo of comedians / performance artists / students of humanity, resting on the very edge between poor taste, ridiculous subtlety, complete hilarity and total nihilism.

In the 30 different 11-minute animated shorts, we’ll often see good-hearted but oblivious Tom Peters, resident of the perfectly middle-American zombie-consumer-culture Jefferton, attempt to enact his wildly entrepreneurial ideas with the approval of the Mayor. The Mayor, a Dadaist figure of chaos, subjugates these plans with uncomfortable and tragic results - like a Tom and Jerry for the culturally-hyperobservant. My friend Brian said to throw the word ‘postmodern’ in here also, and he’s an English major, so he knows what that means.

Amazon reviewer B. Farmer says it best in his one-star review of the show : “If you enjoy junior-high school play-level acting, aggressively bad and self-conscious mugging for the camera, and the deliberate, drawn-out, and belabored mispronunciation of words without context, then this is the show for you.”

TGTTM is a kind of experimental live-action-animation, wherein the main characters appear to be badly Xeroxed photographs of themselves, all caught in that awkward moment right before a sneeze or the fleeting ugliness of human expressiveness before it settles on a singular emotion. This is mixed with live action spots (usually for commercials or anything that happens through a secondary lens), and a mix of today’s best cult actors and comedians, such as Jeff Goldblum, Brian Posehn, Michael Ian Black, Sarah Silverman, Bob Odenkirk, David Cross, Paul Reubens and Patton Oswalt, to name but a few. With their approval, it can’t be anything BUT good, but it’s an acquired taste. You need to enjoy being intentionally uncomfortable.

The DVD set (with each DVD printed with a genuinely disgusting plate of barely-edibles) has some great extras, including a rare and genuine behind the scenes segment, a mock behind-the-scenes segment, various outtakes, deleted scenes, and the two original TGTTM shorts that predated the show itself. It’s disarming to see a seriously-approached examination of the show, as Tim and Eric seem to never drop their oblivious, artiste personas, as evidenced by their iTunes podcasts and various Adult Swim promos.

After these thirty episodes, Tim and Eric went on tour doing… whatever it is that they do, and came back with a new series called ‘Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job’, which can be watched for free on the Adult Swim website, along with a metric ton of other Adult Swim shows. For free, No money. So now you have no excuse. Also, check out Tim and Eric’s website for more of their stuff.

It’s a good DVD for fans of mature cartoons, or animation, or the completely bizarre. You’re probably going to hate me for this, but don’t waste your hate. It’s only dwarfed by my self hatred. Save yours for the ladies on The View. And by ‘ladies’, I mean ‘Lovecraftian horrors’.

Lenticular items, or ‘you know, those plastic things that look like one thing when you look at them one way and another when you turn them, what are they called?’, can usually be found, well, wedged in with other more noticeable things. They’re sidekicks, mere extras making cameo appearances in the shadow of more glorious, scene-stealing items. Small slips of cardboard and plastic in the bottom of a bag of delicious potato chips, or as a useless accessory next to a neato action figure, or an extra-showy slipcover to a new DVD.

Creating the illusion of motion where none is actually present is one of my favorite kinds of optical illusions - that which changes within your perception but makes no physical change whatsoever, tearing small rifts in everything you think you know about reality and time and where you left your car keys. These little perceptual glitches open up understandings about how the brain and eyes work, and they fascinate me. If you’re still not sure what I’m talking about, take a look at the cover to the Transamerica DVD, in which Felicity Huffman transforms from a man to a woman with a slight turn of the case, or the cover to the Napoleon Dynamite DVD that has him dancing all over the place with a slight shift of perspective. Please keep in mind that these things do not respond well to photography, as they’re designed to be perceived by the human eye alone and not a camera lens, otherwise I’d be showing you all kinds of clear examples from my awkward collection.

Essentially, what these lenticular items do is create a short animation using a series of frames that are broken up into narrow strips and interlaced together, creating a single image. A clear, ridged grating is laid over this image, and as it is viewed, light is refracted back to the eye at different angles because of the ridging of the plastic grate. Certain parts of the image are revealed and others obscured. Shifting the angle reveals (and obscures) another perspective and other areas of the image. This can reveal an instantaneous change between two images, or the animation can hold up to a full second of ‘video’ animation. A second’s worth of information might not seem like much, but keep in mind that all of this glorious information is stored in a non-electrical, static object. Instead of storing the video information of the entire World Series on one, you could definitely store video of the winning touchdown. Or whatever it is those guys do. I prefer Dungeons and Dragons and crying alone in my room.

And thusly, like I am a sucker for so many things (Batman, cephalopods, Slim Jims, Legos, girls with glasses, and so on), I am a sucker for lenticular images. They’re gimmicky and entrancing enough to be suitably hypnotic for use as promotional devices and are often just given away, all willy-nilly, to promote new films or action figure lines or toothbrushes. A Spider-Man that turns his head and spins a web, or a C-3PO that inexplicably transforms into an Ewok.

In the mid-80s, Marvel and Mattel’s Secret Wars line of toys (which is a story unto itself, defining the very word ‘toyetic’) each came with a ‘shield’ which bore that character’s portrait. Turn it slightly and it would reveal his alter ego, or a slightly different image. While I could never grasp the practicality of defending oneself with a giant banner that revealed to your attacker which of your friends and family to kill to REALLY get at you, it seemed to work for Iron Man. Mattel would use this lenticular gimmick a whole bunch, most recently repeating it in their JLU Mission Vision line. BanDai includes small lenticular discs in their Ben Ten line of toys which animate a three-frame transformation between Ben Tennyson and the character that he’s becoming. Of course, this (and smart character designs) was enough to sway me into picking up the line. DEVO used to sell ‘wiggle discs’ as part of their merchandise, printed on their record sleeve catalogues.

Marvel had also put out a small (and relatively unpopular) line of trading cards under the name ‘Marvel Motion’, which were entirely lenticular and featured such things as Beast swinging through the treetops or Danny Ketch morphing into Ghost Rider. So enamored with these I am that I’ve even looked into making some myself, and there are companies out there who will produce your mini-animations for you (and send you free samples). As someone who’d madly in love with animation, lenticular items seem like a perfect way to both collect small animations and create your own without a team of artists and photographers hovering around.

So please, spread the word. These things have a proper name. My mission will be complete if I never hear the phrase ‘really, is that what they’re called? I didn’t know that!’ ever again.

Week after week, Saturday after Saturday, I’d rush into the tv room and turn it on, only to see the closing credits of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon show. In this way, I learned about the recurring, Kafkaesque disappointment that would make up the rest of my life, but I felt especially robbed when all I ever managed to see of the damned cartoon was the creepy little Dungeon Master giggling at the departing party of children after they’d just completed some surely-epic quest that I rightfully deserved to see. I mean, I played the video games and plotted my own pencil-and-paper adventures through imaginary dungeons (all without falling into the clutches of devil worship, thank you), so that cartoon was mine. It was made for me. I should have been the nerdy wizard kid. Sure, I’d fail at almost every spell I’d try to whip up, but at least I’d be doing it in a world of dragons and unicorns instead of my mundane world of…. pogs and mortgage rates.

In wandering through the post-Holiday dystopia at my local motion picture shoppe, I came across the very DVD box set that would counteract all of those years of shattered dreams - the Dungeons and Dragons animated series, in full, and for not much more than thirty bucks. It seems that 75% of the DVDs that I purchase are either animated or involve laser beams, so it would fit quite well into my established themes of never, ever scoring again.

Whereas I usually save these sets for rainy-day viewing or to enjoy in the presence of willing company, I was eager to pop it open and start watching it immediately, hoping for the best. Would the disconnect between my lofty childhood recollections be too embarrassingly different from the harsh actuality of the cartoon? Too many warm youthful memories are destroyed by fact and evidence, and some things should remain untouched. D&D, however, was not one of them. Ink and Paint have assembled a handsome set, which includes a sturdy cardboard box, 5 DVDs (which contain the 27 aired episodes), a hardcover handbook for incorporating the show’s characters and themes into a genuine D&D adventure, and a mass of interesting extra features on the DVDs themselves.

For a short-lived and not oft-remembered cartoon series, its following and fanbase were devoted. The DVD extras include just about everything you’d want from a definitive set, including the unproduced final episode performed as a radio drama and a live action fan-made film, creator commentaries and storyboards, and a behind the scenes documentary. It’s an impressive amount of features for Ink and Paint, who are also responsible for the He-Man box sets, to cram into this set.

While the cartoon isn’t much compared to the exclusively computer animated cartoons of today, the D&D cartoon is representative of the finest cel animation that 1983 had to offer. Without a pilot episode to explain exactly WHY this group of kids was unwillingly transplanted into Dungeons and Dragons World, one had to glean what they could from the frantic opening exposition sequence, where we meet the bootleg-Yoda Dungeon Master, the awesomely designed evil Venger and the rogue 5-headed dragon Tiamat. We’re also informed of everyone’s roles in the party, where they are, their social security numbers, shoe size, blood type and feelings on the Reagan administration - all in about 30 seconds. In their never-ending quest to try and find their way home, they’ll use their newfound powers to defeat beasts and save villages, solve riddles and find talismans, and for a 1980s era cartoon, it’s all actually very coherent. None of that Ralph Bakshi under-the-influence stuff.

For me, it’s all about reclaiming a missing part of growing up, and the Dungeons and Dragons box set doesn’t disappoint. I suggest watching it while eating Count Chocula, and then running outside to ride your bike up and down the road for hours.