Month: November 2014 (Page 4 of 4)

It’s time to plug a Kickstarter project again, and this time it’s West Virginia’s own Jason Pell raising money for a full-color hardcover collection of all of his Zombie Highway stories to date. The Zombie Highway HC Ghoullection includes two mini-sieres, the Black in Blue special plus an unpublished story and plenty of other surprises. It will weigh in at over 200 pages if he meets his goal in the next three weeks. Check out the pitch video…

For a little background on this Zombie Road Trip comic book, we quote from the Kickstarter page:

“When a young writer named Jason Pell was given an opportunity to work with the two amazing talents of Roberto Viacava  (Adventures of Superman starting this April) and Eduardo Bazan, he swore he’d do ’em proud. Pulling inspiration from his closest friends, Jason created one of the most original horror road-trip stories put to panels. It was this fun and scary take of the zombie genre that Ed Dukeshire and Digital Webbinghelped distribute all around the world.”

Many of these books are hard to come buy, and the story is a must-have for fans of movies like Shaun of the Dead, Army of Darkness or Zombieland.  With it’s mix of horror and humor, Zombie Highway is a work that is still timely today. The rewards are generous and reasonable. You can get a copy of the hardcover book as cheap as twenty-five bucks. Higher levels bring you signed editions, T-shirts, hardcover copies of Pell’s other works and even original art, if you drop a ton of money into Jason’s lap. More details are at this widgety link…

There’s nothing quite like the fact that there are such things as antique video games to make a person feel old.

But that’s the feeling I got today when I tried out the new Colecovision Flashback plug-n-play video console from AtGames. They’ve previously had success with Atari and Sega Genesis plug-n-play conoles, and they released an Intellivision set simultaneously with this Colecovision unit.

The tiny Colecovision Flashback

What this is, basically, is a tiny replica of the original console, with 60 (or 61 if you buy it in the right place) built-in games. Most of the games are original games that were available on the Colecovision Game System back in the early 1980s.

A dozen of them are new creations, designed and programmed in the retro eight-bit style by programmer Kevin Horton back in 2006.

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This week we bring you the band, Ouralias. Rising from the ashes of In The Company of Wolves and Cry Havoc, the band has reached new heights of creativity as they gelled into an organic new band with elements of jam music, progressive rock and alternative rock in the mix. You will hear them perform their original songs “Can’t Fight Love” and “Wave,” recorded live at The Bowling Alley-Dunbar.

We just captured these guys at The 13th Lane Tap Room  at the Bowling Alley a couple of weeks ago. The Bowling Alley-Dunbar is quickly becoming one of the coolest venues in the area, with a hot Thursday open mic and live music most weekends. It’s a place with a great laid-back vibe and a welcoming atmosphere.

We kick off this week with a Pop Art semi-abstract digital work that owes more than a little debt to Jack Kirby, the man who brought Captain America, The Fantastic Four, The Silver Surfer, The Hulk and countless other comic book characters to life, visually. This started out as just a geometrical abstract, but when I added a variation of the “Kirby Krackle,” it almost sprouted a narrative. Click to enlarge.

Elfman on stage with Oingo Boingo, circa 1986

This week’s Sunday Evening Video presents one of your PopCulteer’s favorite bands, Oingo Boingo, performing live at The Ritz in an MTV special from 1985. Boingo, of course, were the “quirky” band that rode their success in the New Wave era to some pretty decent commercial success. Then the group’s leader, singer/composer Danny Elfman, became one of the most prolific and successful composers of film scores in modern history. The last Oingo Boingo show happened Halloween night, nineteen years ago.

In an interview this week at the Oinon’s AV Club, Elfman said that the songs he wrote for “Nightmare Before Christmas” were analogous to his desire to leave his band, “It was really simple. Jack, in Halloweenland, was me in Oingo Boingo. So I just wrote completely from that perspective. I understood completely where Jack was coming from. I wanted to leave Oingo Boingo, but I couldn’t, so Oingo Boingo was my version of Halloweenland. I was the king of my own little world—as anyone is when they’re the singer-songwriter in a band. I was trapped and couldn’t leave.”

Watch the band live and hear some of the most powerful songs that hardly anyone took seriously back in the 1980s.

From January, 2008 comes a show with music from Holden Caulfield and The Synergy Collective. This show also includes Turkish Star Wars and animation by Frank Panucci.

Holden Caulfield was captured live at the La Belle Theater in South Charleston in August, 2007.  For The Synergy Collective, we took our cameras to Ric Cochran’s Lighthouse Cafe at the Baptist Temple Fellowship Hall in November, 2007. While remastering this show, I was reminded that, in the early days of Radio Free Charleston, I was not as adept at salvaging camera audio as I am now. I h0pe that the performances come through despite the shaky sound.

Frank Panucci contributed another installement of his animated “Existential Journey” series, while we also dug up scenes from the “so bad it’s good” Turkish sci-fi movie that used the special effects from Star Wars without permission. You can read the original production notes HERE.