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While surfing around, I stumbled across a link on the site Internet Duct Tape that took me to an article on Lifehacks.org titled 10 Virtually Instant Ways to Improve Your Life. Believe you me, a link like that is hard to ignore. Here are the ten ways; they’re explained in more detail in the article:

1. Stop jumping to conclusions.
2. Don’t dramatize.
3. Don’t invent rules.
4. Avoid stereotyping or labeling people or situations.
5. Quit being a perfectionist.
6. Don’t over-generalize.
7. Don’t take things so personally.
8. Don’t assume your emotions are trustworthy.
9. Don’t let life get you down. Keep practicing being optimistic.
10. Don’t hang on to the past. This is my most important suggestion of all: let go and move on.

Interesting list, and easier said than done.

I’m a little bit busy today, but you won’t leave this blog empty-handed. For your viewing pleasure, I present an entire episode of a terrible television show from the 1970s — Legends of the Superheroes.

I’ll leave it to Movie Poop Shoot to give you a description of the show:

What is LEGENDS OF THE SUPERHEROES? Well, I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and I’m still not sure. Airing on NBC in January 1979, LEGENDS was apparently one of Hanna-Barbera’s few ventures into live-action. If I had to guess, it seems to me like the success of the “SUPERFRIENDS” Saturday-morning animated series prompted the production of this abomination, a live-action comedy/action kids’ show that thankfully only managed to eke out two episodes, most likely because when the people bankrolling this trainwreck saw the finished project, they not only slashed funding, they probably slashed their wrists as well.

Here’s a segment from one of the episodes in which Ed McMahon introduces the never-heard-of-before (nor again) hero, Ghetto Man, who does a painfully bad stand-up/roast routine that mashes up “in the hood” jokes with superhero humour:

If you need more seventies cheese, I’ve posted the entire first episode below in six parts:

Legends of the Superheroes, Part 1

Legends of the Superheroes, Part 2

Legends of the Superheroes, Part 3

Legends of the Superheroes, Part 4

Legends of the Superheroes, Part 5

Legends of the Superheroes, Part 6

Here’s my current desktop background image: a map of an alternate Earth, where land and water have been switched:

Click the image to see it at full size.
Illustration courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

I rather dig the “Philippine Kingdom”, located on the far right of the map, not far from the equator.

Click to see the picture at full size.
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

I’d like to wish my American readers (especially my friends and relatives in the U.S.) a safe and happy Fourth of July!

Back in May, I pointed to some Belarusian posters for American movies. They were clumsy hand-painted approximations of the American versions. As a refresher, here’s a Belarusian poster for Scooby-Doo:

The retroCRUSH shows a set of Polish posters for American movies, all of which take a completely different approach. Instead of slavishly copying the American promo material, the artists behind these posters ignored it entirely and created high-concept versions that aren’t just better artistically, they also make the movies seem better than they actually are.

Take Superman III (please). In case you don’t remember — and if you don’t, there’s a recap at a site called The Agony Booth — it’s the one with Richard Pryor. It would’ve been the worst of the bunch, but it was saved from this fate by the even more painful Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.

Here are the American and Polish posters for the movie:

 
Left: Original poster for Superman III. Right: Polish poster for the same movie.

There’s a simple rule when creating posters for Hollywood movies: be as literal as possible. For example, Short Circuit 2 features the sentient pacifist military robot known as “Number 5” in fish-out-of-water antics in the big city with his human friends, and the American poster lets you know this before you’ve even a single frame of the movie. The creators of the Polish poster weren’t afraid to go a little more abstract:

 
Left: Original poster for Short Circuit 2. Right: Polish poster for the same movie.

The American poster for Alien is quite good and far more abstract that most of the American movie posters of the time, but the Polish one does a better job of capturing the movie’s sticky-icky H.R. Giger feel:

 
Left: Original poster for Alien. Right: Polish poster for the same movie.

In spite of the fact that the plot of Weekend at Bernie’s is pretty much an excuse to come up with about 90 minutes’ worth of corpse desecration gags (the waterskiing scene is my favourite, especially when Bernie starts hitting the channel marker bouys), it’s a light-hearted comedy. You wouldn’t be able to tell that from the Polish poster:

 
Left: Original poster for Weekend at Bernie’s. Right: Polish poster for the same movie.

And finally, we get into deep abstract territory with Trading Places, which the Polish artists go hog wild and make it seem to be an art film that is both a searing indictment of the American capitalist system and three lectures’ worth of stuff for a semiotics course:

 
Left: Original poster for Trading Places. Right: Polish poster for the same movie.

If you’d like to see more Polish posters for American movies, check out this page, which features a decent collection.

While flipping through the TV channels, checking the weather before going to Andy and Sue’s wedding rehearsal (I was a groomsman and the Ginger Ninja). I saw this:

The show — an episode of good ol’ Jerry Springer titled I’m Happy I Cut Off My Legs — featured a man who really wanted to be woman, and so he sliced off his legs with a circular saw.

I kept thinking “Wrong appendages, dude.”