Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 165 of 581)

THE 2018 HESS RV WITH ATV AND MOTORBIKE

As has become tradition, our first day of The PopCult Gift Guide includes this year’s HESS Toy Truck. We tell you about this one on the first day because it’s a limited edition, and if we held off, they might sell out before you can get your hands on one. Once sold in HESS Oil gas stations, these keepsakes are now only sold online, since HESS sold their retail outlets to Marathon Oil a few years ago.

This year HESS released a bonus truck, an 85th anniversary edition of their very first tanker truck, and it sold out in less than two days, so you don’t want to wait around on this one.

This year lucky kids and collectors can get The 2018 Hess RV with ATV and Motorbike. a powersport trio ready for any adventure. The set features a sleek and modern recreational transport loaded with lights, and a spirited wheelie-popping pair of teammates eager for on and off-road action!

The RV is strikingly vibrant with 60 LED lights, a gleaming chrome front, white body, contrasting black fenders, and dark tinted cab windows. Clear windows showcase the two internally illuminated compartments housing the ATV and Motorbike, which are accessed by button-release drop-down ramp doors.

The ATV has oversized, terrain-tough tires that partner with a powerful pull-back motor to race flat or flash its impressive wheelie-action. A roll cage encloses the driver while the 10 switch-activated lights and chrome details shine bright. Getting in on the race challenge and wheelie-popping power is the sport-tourer style Motorbike, with a push-friction motor, and working head and tail lights.

One change this year, which may be considered a blessing to some parents, the HESS RV with ATV and Motorbike does NOT have any sound features. Some folks might miss them, others will be very happy to see them go.

In total, this 3-in-1 combo includes an eye-popping 73 lights, the most ever on a holiday Hess Toy Truck! The 2018 Hess RV with ATV and Motorbike is sold exclusively he at The Hess Toy Truck website, for $33.99 plus tax, which includes 8 Energizer® batteries and free standard shipping.

Rick and Morty Games

Cryptozoic Entertainment, released two great games based on the cult TV show, Rick and Morty this year, and we’re going to recommend both of them for rabid fans of the Adult Swim mind-bending series.

Rick and Morty: The Ricks Must Be Crazy Multiverse Game. In this engine-building tabletop game, 2-4 players take on the roles of Rick, Morty, Zeep, and Kyle as they introduce Power Supplies to different worlds, and then try to use the resulting Power to activate Contraptions before their opponents. Based on the Rick and Morty episode “The Ricks Must Be Crazy,” gameplay takes place in four “’Verses” with unique attributes: the Rickverse, Microverse, Miniverse, and Teenyverse.

During the Action Phase, players spend Actions to move to different ’Verses where they can build Power Supplies and Contraptions. Then, during the Power-Up Phase, Power generates from the bottom ’Verse up, and players utilize it to play One-Shot cards, use Character Abilities, and power-up their Contraptions. The winner is the player who scores the needed Victory Points by building Power Supplies and activating Contraptions.

Rick and Morty: The Ricks Must Be Crazy Multiverse Game can be found almost anywhere games are sold for a suggested retail price of $20.

Rick and Morty: The Pickle Rick Game is an intense 1-2 player game, based on the hugely popular “Pickle Rick” episode of Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty. One player plays as Pickle Rick as he tries to escape a heavily armed compound, while the other player takes on the roles of both the Russians and Jaguar as they try to stop him.

The Pickle Rick player uses weapons cards to dole out damage and Air Vents to get out of jams as he or she tries to get to the Rooftop. The game includes both Pickle Rick and Jaguar miniatures that are moved across a dynamic board made up of tiles that are constantly being added, rotated, and flipped. Adding to the off-the-wall fun is the game’s packaging: It looks like a pickle! The Pickle Rick Game is in stores now, and will run you between $30 and $35.

Pinpricks: A Book of Tiny and Terrible Oddities.

Our first pick in the 2018 PopCult Gift Guide is a graphic novel by Jason Pell, Pinpricks: A Book of Tiny and Terrible Oddities, which I told you about back in its Kickstarter incubation stage earlier this year. The book is now available, and I highly recommend it as a gift for fans of the macabre and the unusual.

Pinpricks: A Book of Tiny and Terrible Oddities is not really a novel, per se. It’s one-hundred and one illustrated short stories of misfits, monsters, and the terminally awkward. You will meet unusual characters who get caught up in extraordinary situations, which get resolved very quickly in ways you won’t expect.

You will meet monsters and madmen and mimes and very unusual children among the many short, short stories. Pell’s cleverness shines through as he crafts atmospheric scenarios with a minimum of words and pictures.

This compact book of eerie vignettes is the perfect gift for the person who enjoys the offbeat elements of life. You can order it from Amazon, where it is currently just under $16.

Check out the video preview made for Kickstarter for a sample of what you’ll find in Pinpricks: A Book of Tiny and Terrible Oddities…

The big day is here! It’s Halloween. Because of the vagaries of the calendar and the fickleness of the public, most of the celebrating is over. The drunken parties were last weekend, and much of this area did trick or treating last night. That leaves us with today, the actual holiday, to simply get into the real spirit of spooky fun with a few Halloween treats. First, there’s our programming on The AIR, which you can listen to at the website, or on this embedded player…

Among the cool things you can hear today are a musical salute to Edgar Allen Poe, audio adaptations of work by H.P Lovecraft, plus Dracula, A Clockwork Orange and The Twilight Zone, and you can hear Halloween episodes of our music programs. This stuff will all disappear from the server and go into storage until next year on November 1, so catch it while you can.

An even bigger Halloween treat comes to us from our good friends Tim and Lisa Weedn, and Studio Joe. It’s a brand-new Toys Will Be Toys Halloween Spooktacular.  The image with this post is a preview of the show. It’s twenty-one plus minutes of surreal stop-motion-animated wild humor, brought to life using GI Joe and other 1/6 scale action figures. This time around the gang heads to Joe’s Bar & Grill to participate in a Halloween costume contest. Musical guests Radio Cult perform ‘Saturday Midnight Double Feature’ written by Ricky Zhero. This is a cool collision of fun people that we’ve met at JoeLanta/ToyLanta, and I thank Tim and Lisa for letting me share it with you.

Tomorrow we put Halloween behind us, and begin The 2018 PopCult Gift Guide, which will run every day in November. Be here, and bring money. Until then, Happy Halloween from PopCult!

This Saturday at The Alban Arts Center there will be an all-ages Improv show featuring Improv, Magic and Raffles, and it’s all a fund raiser for a young woman who’s awaiting a double-lung transplant.

That remarkable young woman is Beth Slack (seen right), and you can read about her struggle in great detail in this profile by Bill Lynch, which ran in last Sunday’s Gazette-Mail. Beth is the daughter of Tony Slack, who, in his days in The No Pants Players, appeared on the very first episode of the Radio Free Charleston video show, back in 2006. Tony and his family have been friends ever since, and Mel and I plan to be at this event to show our support.

“A Beth Of Fresh Air” is the name for a series of fundraisers, and Saturday’s show is just one of them. Tony’s new Improv Troupe, The Mighty Shmucks, will be joined by The fearless Fools, from Parkersburg, and Magician Joey Steep. There will also be a raffle with an ever-growing list of prizes. Check the Facebook event page for the latest details. There will be more benefit shows in the future, and we’ll try to keep you up to date on them here in PopCult.

Admission to the show is only ten bucks, and it all goes to a very worthy cause. That’s 7 PM Saturday night at The Alban Arts Center, 65 Old Main Plaza, Saint Albans.

We wrap up our month of spooky art with a slightly impressionistic portrait of Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula. It’s his iconic role, and it’s a Halloween classic, one of the greatest horror films in history. For this painting I pulled out some digital brushes that I don’t use as often as I used to, and worked in a mostly monochromatic fashion. I did use photographic reference, but didn’t just feed it through a filter. I think it’s recognizable, but I’m not sure I captured the piercing quality of his eyes.

Click the image to see a larger version, so you can be the judge.

In the meantime, today over on The AIR, we present another 24-hour marathon of special Halloween programming. From 7 AM Monday until 7 AM Tuesday you can tune in to hear Halloween episodes of Radio Free Charleston, Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, Radio Coolsville, The Bats**t Crazy Show, Curtain Call and RFC International, all mixed in with classic Radio Drama and more spooky goodness. We’ll be playing most of the same shows we brought you last week, but since it’s a 24-hour marathon we mixed up the running order so you won’t hear the same progamming at the same part of the day, so much of it will seem new to you. We’ll also run a marathon for Halloween on Wednesday.

Tune in at The AIR Website, or on this neat little embedded player…

This week we revisit our last big all-star Radio Free Charleston Halloween Spectacular, with our guests Mark Wolfe, Kitty Killton, Penny Maple, and Mic Bradford all gathered around a Quija board. Mark guest-directed the host segments, which feature camera work by Mark and Melissa Bradford.

Our musical guests were Radio Cult, The Jasons, Possum Kingdom Ramblers and HarraH. You can read the full production notes HERE.

We did one more Halloween special after this, but it was a quickie solo job, with me reprising my role as Count Rudolf. That was also a fun show, but I miss getting a bunch of friends together to crank out some fine guerilla filmmaking.  Maybe next year we’ll do something cool again for Halloween. You can find the last Halloween Radio Free Charleston to date HERE.

From May, 2012, we have a special episode of Radio Free Charleston devoted to the work of James Vernon Brown, AKA The Liquid Canvas. our 158th episode was called “The Liquid Canvas,” and was devoted to the work of Charleston filmmaker, musician, and artist James Vernon Brown. I first met James back in 2007, when we recorded the band Doctor Senator. James was playing bass and had also made several cool short films and music videos featuring the band.

James ended up leaving Doctor Senator and, at a jam session at The Blue Parrot one night, I heard him play guitar for the first time and was blown away with his David Gilmore meets Jimi Hendrix six-string pyrotechnics. I remember going up to him after hearing him play and asking “why the hell were you wasting your time playing bass?”

On RFC 57, our first “Show Without Words,” James gave me the beautiful instrumental track, “Elemental Devices,” on which he played all instruments himself. I wound up editing it to some of RFC Big Shot Frank Panucci’s computer animation, and the end result is one of the most acclaimed clips in the history of the show. I’d been in touch with James ever since about contributing more to the show and we decided that he had so much quality material that he deserved an episode of the show all his his own. I even had James direct and shoot the host segments for this episode, which is named after his production company, The Liquid Canvas.

Our first clip in this week’s show is a brief trailer for James’ short film, “Blind Date,” starring James, Sierra Ferrell, and Thomas Sigmon. Next up, we have a bittersweet video which has actually been on Radio Free Charleston before in a different form. When we shot the band Quick and Dirty, featuring James on guitar and Randy Walden on bass and vocals, after running the clip in episode 44, I gave the raw footage to James, who added more footage and animation and embellished it with his own edit. After the demise of Quick and Dirty, James began studying the work of ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna. He was so inspired that he took one of McKenna’s speeches, set it to music, and created the short film, “What Are Psychedelics?”

One of the things I enjoy most about James’ work is that he is a filmmaker of opportunity. Much like we do with the Radio Free Charleston style of guerrilla filmmaking, James usually has his camera handy and is not afraid to capture the moment with his unique vision. One such instance of this is the video for Hybrid Soul’s take on the Marvin Gaye classic “What’s Goin’ On?” As seen at left, James was tending bar at Sam’s Uptown Cafe and stepped away just quick enough to grab the footage for this stylish video. Another film of opportunity is the very short film, “Winter Blues.” Inspired by the first snowfall of 2011, James created this short mood piece while returning from a gig at The Empty Glass with Sierra Ferrell. Another collaboration with Sierra Ferrell is James’ music video for her song, “Little Company.” Conceived while listening to Sierra rehearse the song while sitting on a couch outside a recording studio, James shot the footage and dropped in Sierra harmonizing with herself on additional vocal tracks to create a wonderful piece.

Wrapping up the show this week, we have a video commissioned by the legendary Washboard Dave Thomas of Boulevard Tavern and Gonzoburger fame. Dave asked James if he could come to the Tavern to record Kentucky band, The Bloodroots Barter. The video that played us out this week is their cover of the Townes Van Zant song, “White Line Freighter,” featuring Washboard Dave sitting in with the band.

This was the only episode of Radio Free Charleston that was entirely devoted to the work of a single filmmaker, and I stand by my admiration of James’ work. He has migrated out to California, and I hope he has some new music for the RFC radio show soon. And with this special episode, The RFC Flashback goes on a month-long hiatus. By this time next week The 2018 PopCult Gift Guide will be in full swing, and every Saturday will be BIG TICKET DAY, where all the gift suggestions are really expensive, so with three or four Gift Guide posts a day, we’re giving some of our regular features a rest. The RFC Flashback will return on December 1, probably with a jump back to epsides that we’d skipped over previously.

The PopCulteer
October 26, 2018

It’s become a fun annual tradition in just four years, The Mountain State Pop Expo, dedicated to exploring all aspects of pop culture in a safe, fun, family-friendly environment, with vendors, cosplayers, panels and demonstrations, raffles and more, and it happens the weekend of November 3 and 4, little more than a week away.

Created as a benefit, all proceeds from this event go directly to the Children’s Home Society of West Virginia. Fans of comics, toys, movies, TV, videogames and all manner of genre culture will find vendors, guests, events, contests and a massive pop culture raffle. All vendor table costs, admission, and raffle ticket sales will go directly to Children’s Home Society of West Virginia to benefit the area’s neediest kids this holiday season.

This year guests include author Edward Holsclaw, artist Glen Brogan, Final Form Fusion, The No Pants Players plus a loads of cosplayers and even a replica of Lightning McQueen. Charcon and Bonus Round will man a tabletop gaming room, and the raffle will include a not-sold-in-stores lithograph of a map of West Virginia from Fallout 76, donated by the folks at Bethesda Games. Many of the state’s coolest rare toy and videogame dealers will be there with incredible assortments of cool stuff from the not-too-distant past. Cosplayers from all over will appear, including Ghostbusters WV Division and the 501st Legion. There will even be late-night panels and entertainment.

This all happens at the Holiday Inn Charleston West, located in South Charleston, at 400 Second Avenue. Admission is only ten dollars per day, or both days for fifteen bucks. Kids under twelve get in free.

All proceeds from tickets, table rentals, and raffles at this event will benefit the Children’s Home Society of West Virginia. The Children’s Home Society is a statewide nonprofit children and family services agency. They have 13 locations throughout the state, each of which have a variety of programs including emergency child shelters, foster care and adoption, early intervention, and family strengthening programs. CHS serves over 15,500 West Virginia families a year, and this year they are celebrating 122 years of service.

Funds from this event will go specifically to benefit the Children’s Home Society’s holiday help. Children in foster care, emergency shelters, and needy families in the community will have the holiday gifts and necessities such as winter coats that they otherwise might not receive.

So it’s going to be a great time, to benefit a great cause, and with so many cool vendors coming from all over the region, there’s a good chance that you can get some early holiday shopping done and find the perfect gift for that certain someone on your Christmas list. It all takes place Saturday and Sunday at the Holiday Inn & Suites in South Charleston (not too far from Olive Tree, if you want an awesome lunch) from 10 AM to 6 PM with after-hours events on Saturday, and 10 AM to 4 PM Sunday. Make your way out to soak in the wonderfulness of it all.

Your PopCulteer will be in (paid) attendance, and I hope to see lots of folks there.

That’s all we have for this week’s PopCulteer. Tune in to The AIR Saturday and Monday for more Halloween audio treats, and check back this weekend for our regular features, because The RFC Flashback and Sunday Evening Videos will be taking a vacation during the Month of November, to make room for our daily offerings in The 2018 PopCult Gift Guide.

It may seem early, since Halloween is just next Wednesday, but right after that, one week from today, we will begin the 2018 PopCult Gift Guide. We are shaking things up a bit this year, which is sort of the norm, since I don’t think we’ve ever followed the exact same format more than two years in a row, but in 2018, we are once again making some changes.

This year the PopCult Gift Guide will begin on November 1, and the last day for it will be November 30. The master list will be posted on that final day, and then I’ll be done with it for the year. The reason for this is that, many of the items I suggest this year will have to be ordered over the internet, and I wanted to give you plenty of time to get your gift-y goodies before Christmas. Also, I’m going out of town the first week in December, and don’t want to have to tie up any loose ends.

For 2018 I will post three or four gift suggestions every day in November. These will include books, CDs, DVDs, toys, gadgets, gift certificates or gift cards and anything else that I think will make a cool gift. For the month of November, The RFC Flashback and Sunday Evening Videos will go on hiatus.They’ll be back, and just in time for the holiday season to really kick off in earnest, on December 1 and 2.

Every Saturday will be BIG TICKET DAY, where every gift suggestion will cost more than a hundred bucks. The rest of the days I’ll try to suggest gifts that are appropriate for a more modest budget.

The plan is to offer more local gift ideas than I have in the past. I’m aiming for at least one local item per day, but that may not hold true for BIG TICKET DAY.

As an early tip, something that will appear in the Gift Guide next week is Jason Pell’s graphic novel, Pinpricks (that’s the cover to the left). I plugged the Kickstarter for this cool project last March, and Jason stunned everyone by delivering it a month ahead of schedule. Pinpricks. A book of tiny and terrible oddities is not really a novel, per se. It’s one-hundred and one illustrated short stories of misfits, monsters, and the terminally awkward. Spoiler alert here: I enjoyed it enough to make sure that it had a spot in this year’s PopCult Gift Guide. It’s so good that it was the very first pick.

I will post a detailed review with links to how you can order it next week, but for now, you ought to know that Jason will have a booth at The West Virginia Book Festival, this weekend. Jason will be in booth 112, and this is your chance to buy Pinpricks and his earlier graphic novels, like Zombie Highway and Suicide 5, and get them autographed to the graphic novel fan on your gift list.

You should make it out to the West Virginia Book Festival anyway, because there will be all kinds of great gift ideas there among the authors and publishers.

You can read more about the West Virginia Book Festival HERE. The 2018 PopCult Gift Guide will begin Thursday, November 1, with posts going live between Noon and 4 PM, Eastern Time.