October 31, 2008 | 5:43 pm

This Week in Shat: Gay marriage smackdown

Posted by Adam Wills

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First The Shat slammed J.J. Abrams for not including him in the next “Star Trek” film, and now he’s released a video through his Shatner Project claiming he wasn’t invited to George Takei’s wedding (“Star Trek” castmates Nichelle Nicols was maid of honor and Walter Koenig was best man, and even Leonard Nimoy attended the ceremony.) In the video, the Captain says he “feels badly” for Takei because the “poor man” suffers from a “psychosis,” and mocks his co-star coming out so late in life.

Shatner says he doesn’t know Takei very well, but then pulls from various sources in an effort to prove his co-star has some kind of jealous actor’s vendetta against him for hogging the spotlight so many years ago. Why is The Shat getting so worked up if he barely knew the man? It’s not like he’s 12-year-old girl who didn’t get invited to a friend’s bat mitzvah. But he comes across that way—so jealous, so jilted…

“You’d think he’d have this epiphany and say, ‘God, I hope that…’—because he and I don’t have many years left in this world ‘—…I wish him well. I’m so happy that I wish him well.’ But instead, what he does is make this big deal about not inviting me to his wedding.

“If I was such a terrible force in his life, even 40 some odd years later – because I haven’t seen him – that I affect his marriage, where he has to isolate it and say…. What kind of sickness is going on the man?

“There must be something else inside George that’s festering and makes him so unhappy that he takes it out on me, in effect a total stranger.

“Why would he go out of his way to denigrate me? It’s sad that the man can’t find enough peace in his life, to either say … be positive and say, I forgive him for whatever those hurts were, or shut up about it. It’s sad. I feel nothing but pity for him.”

Calling it all “silliness,” Takei said this week that Shatner did get an invitation, but that he never responded.

Takei extended another invitation to The Shat this week: support the “No on 8” campaign.

No word yet on whether Shatner has sent in his RSVP.

When the LA Times Dish Rag caught up with Nimoy and The Shat at an L.A. Philharmonic event and asked about Prop 8 earlier this month, here’s how it went down…

Nimoy: “Absolutely NO on Prop 8 because I believe that gay people have every right to get married and share their lives. George and Brad have been together for many years. They have every right to be together in any way they choose. Prop 8 is completely unjust.”

Shatner: “That’s not about music. That has a dissident sound to it.”

October 4, 2008 | 11:37 pm

E for SmAll

Posted by Adam Wills

What a far cry the 2008 E for All is compared to last year, which was already a shadow of the original E3 trade show. (E for All was spun off from E3 to give the public a chance to play with upcoming games, and now game development news comes out of E3 Media and Business Summit, along with the Leipzig Games Convention and the Tokyo Game Show.)

E for All 2008, which was organized by IDG, pulled in EA, Ubisoft and Microsoft to the Los Angeles Convention Center. But noticeably absent at the Oct. 3-5 event were Nintendo, Sony, THQ, Activision Blizzard (which has BlizzCon next weekend), to name a few.

Although a large crowd waited to get into the L.A. Convention Center on Friday morning, the numbers over the weekend didn’t exactly overwhelm the convention floor. E for All organizers said last year’s event drew 18,000 attendees. And while exact numbers for this year have not yet been made available (GeekHeeb was given the runaround when they were requested), few should expect a high score.

The U.S. finals of the World Cyber Games were a draw and it was cool to watch Steve Wiebe (one of the featured subjects in the 2007 documentary “The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”) attempt to break the world record on the classic “Donkey Kong” arcade game at the Allgames.com booth. But Samsung products, Intel computers, DeVry, Gamer Grub, energy drinks and Fatal1ty products are not why people paid $35 (or $60 for two days, or $75 for all three) to get in. They wanted to check out upcoming games.

Target’s “Guitar Hero World Tour” display dominated the expo, but the retailer gave short shrift to “Star Wars” fans by setting up one perfunctory XBox to play “The Force Unleashed.” Other games that drew eyes—and sore thumbs—included “Gears of War 2” (great display in a dark area with ammo boxes, camouflage and moody red lighting), “Lego Batman” and “Mercenaries 2: World In Flames.” But most of the major games featured at the expo have already been released, leaving little for people to actually preview.

IndieCade to the rescue!

The Santa Monica-based group—founded by Stephanie Barish, former producer/director of multimedia publications and creative director of Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation— organizes international events to showcase independent games and their developers.

Some of the games featured at the IndieCade booth this year included:

• An advanced preview of Jakub Dvorsky‘s “Machinarium”

• “Jo Jo’s Fashion Show”

• “The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom”

• “Rooms: The Main Building” by John Bardinelli

• PMOG (The Passively Multiplayer Online Game)

And…

• “Super Energy Apocalypse” (learn about sustainable energy use while fighting zombies)

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October 3, 2008 | 7:00 pm

This Week in Shat

Posted by Adam Wills

This week, The Shat:

• is slated to voice Santa in a messed-up animated teleflick that combines quantum mechanics and X-mas cheer. Should be out this December. (MTV)

• is gaining weight because he keeps eating at his favorite Italian restaurant. (Cinemablend) Some fanish friends fessed up they’ve seen him at Café Firenze in Moorpark, which happens to be owned by Top Chef season 5 contestant Fabio, who also works as The Shat’s private chef. Might have to Trek on by…

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October 1, 2008 | 10:36 am

Superman fans save Siegel-Shuster house

Posted by Adam Wills

The city of Cleveland declared the childhood home of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel to be a landmark in 1986, but the place is falling apart 22 years later. An online auction that ended Tuesday has raised more than $100,000, double the amount needed to fix up the Man of Steel’s birthplace.

Siegel and artist Joe Shuster created the character together more than 70 years ago in the Glenville neighborhood house, which is now owned by Jefferson Gray, who wasn’t aware of its significance when he bought it.

“This was easily the most humbling spectacular project I’ve ever been part of, and showed just how much people care about this character and why today Superman still matters,” said novelist Brad Meltzer, who organized the auction.

Meltzer said $101,744 was raised in the month-long sale of art, memorabilia and other donated goods, more than double the $50,000 goal. The extra money will allow organizers to fix up not just the outside but also the inside of the Cleveland house where an elderly couple now live.

Meltzer, who discovered the deteriorating house while researching a novel, said at first he wasn’t sure people would care about restoring the red-and-blue house where the superhero who wears the red-and-blue suit was dreamed up in 1932.

But the response has been overwhelming.

“The house where Google was created is saved. The farm where Hewlett-Packard was founded is preserved. We protected the house where Dr. Seuss lived, where Elvis lived,” noted Meltzer. “So the idea that Superman’s house was just rotting away struck everyone as inherently wrong.”

Meltzer, who offered the naming rights to a character in his next novel as part of the auction, takes no credit for saving the home, saying loyal fans of the comic book hero came to Superman’s rescue.

“We’re all Clark Kent. We all know what it is like to be boring and ordinary and we all want to be able to rip open our shirt and do something beyond ourselves. That’s what happened here. Ordinary people made a difference.” (Reuters)

 

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