Guardians of the Galaxy Mix Tape tape sells over 2300 copies

Quoting Wondering Sound's numbers, Rolling Stone tipped off the man that tipped me off: George Lai, aka Mr. Pithy Shorts about the runaway success of a cassette tape release. 

Its success is due to a cassette by the same name dominating the sometimes-funny, sometimes-touching, often florid Guardians of the Galaxy.

The tape cassette, the thing that brought me up, despite its awkward DCC phase, is a bit of tech that's itching for a Headfonia Back to the Future Friday. 

Thanks George.

And now for something salient from Rolling Stone.

Compared to the 1,000 copies sold of Skrillex's Recess, which got a cassette release limited to 3,000 copies for Record Store Day last year, and 1,000 copies of Green Day's Demolicious, the edition of which is undisclosed, the Guardians release seems like a runaway success.

But it might have sold even more copies than reported. Wondering Sound spoke to Tricia Hedgpeth from National Audio Company, which made the Guardians tape, who told him that 11,500 copies were made last year – the company's biggest 2014 order – and "almost 5,000 are in production now with additional reorders expected." Although it seems difficult to account for cassettes through nontraditional means (online, for instance), a Nielsen rep told Wondering Sound that the company was confident with the number reported.

Read more

Super Bowl XLIX Battle Droid

I had no idea that one of these tournaments was on until Daring Fireball mentioned that The Verge leaked their own Super Bowl advert. While leaking a multi-million dollar advert spot may sound stupid, Super Bowl XLIX's (sic?) apparent graphic latria of the battle droid, a.k.a. the stupidest enemy in the Star Wars universe, is unforgivable. 

Check it out:

  • You got an old guy cheering it on
  • You got another old guy taking orders from it
  • You got two guys checking each other out over its shoulders, letting it play cupid, holding onto scale models of its head

And then there's the support cast: 

  • A guy on the left in the back casting a longing gaze at the droid
  • Another guy is doing a pitiful impression of Boba Fett, on his way to save it

It's 2015. Star was is hitting cinema screens at the end of the year (or, depending on how far from America you are, in 2016). Each one of us that did the Star Wars every-weekend-for-a-year-then-switch-to-Empire-for-a-year-and-finally-a-year-of-Jedi has had her hopes smashed by the green screen of death that was the prequels. 

And now this idiotic game dredges up an idiotic enemy that now is part of a growing idiocy of Star Wars canon. 

I hope the droid kills them all. Then self destructs.

Note: the battle droid image was lifted from this Star Wars page. The Battle Droid Super Bowl image was lifted from this MacRumors page.

 

Read more

Tor: Journeys, Desolations, and Battles: Jackson’s Trifold Hobbit in Review

Jeff Lasala's Tor.com defence of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy has its good points. Namely, that yes, Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, expanded the series's popularity among mass culture. 

Says Lasala:

“The point is that untold numbers of people have enjoyed all three Hobbit films, sometimes because of—and sometimes despite—their Jackson-expanded elements. Now that The Battle of the Five Armies has marched into theaters and the trilogy has concluded, I’d like to weigh in on the bigger picture.”

Lasala also conceded that some of the book's more delicate parts would be difficult to render on the big screen:

“Of course, it’s hard for any film to portray a character’s internal thoughts, which is all that moment is, but I think most of us would agree that Martin Freeman would have done an excellent job visually depicting Bilbo’s trepidation. Peter Jackson opted not to try this, and we can and must live with that. The book is not demeaned, but the movie is the lesser for it.”

But the point is that Peter Jackson didn't make a movie based on Tokien's The Hobbit. He made a film series which incorporated bits from the book, but which relied too heavily on extra-canonical, plot-sapping elements including:

- a stupid love story
- rabbit Santa
- Sauron
- Alfrid
- melodrama
- overbearing darkness
- a long, boring speech between the dragon-dog and Bilbo
- the Laketown plot
- the Laketown fight
- a dragon that, instead of killing, flaps his tail like a dog and flabbers too much

The most egregious is that a small, fun book was split into three lumbering, disjointed films. There is simply no good light to shed on this series, long essay or no.