Add this to my long list of movies I can’t wait to see this year.

I love the Muppets and have for all remembered time. Jason Segal has always been an X factor for me on this project, since I can take him or leave him. “I Love You Man” was pretty boring and by the numbers and I haven’t really seen him in anything else. But anything that brings The Muppets back to the big screen (except a Pirate movie) is good news in my book. Although it was panned, I quite loved “Muppets From Space” and if this is a return to form at that level or higher, I’ll be pleased as punch.

This marketing campaign is interesting. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that the setup isn’t going to be in the final film at all.

It doesn’t matter, though.

It’s the Muppets and I want them on my theatre screen.

The opening ceremonies, streamed live this morning, began with the booming voice of Tom Kane and an opening title crawl that places the ride quite definitively between Episode 3 and 4. Star Tours was created by Captain Antillies, where he assigns Artoo and Threepio to help operate the travel company, fueling Imperial speculation that it’s a rebel operation.

Then, sadly, they cut to a pair of cheesy TV personalities that were incredibly obnoxious.

Then a carnival barker arrived on the Sorceror’s Hat stage and introduced Artoo and Threepio. Who in turn introduced Anthony Daniels, which in turn led to the arrival of Darth Vader to crash the party. Two hooded Jedi Knights cut their way through a dozen stormtroopers who turn out to be George Lucas and Disney CEO Bob Iger.

Vader put a shield over Star Tours and Artoo Detoo needed shoot an Ion cannon at it.

Aside from that, it was a pretty standard welcome to the new ride. Iger spoke of how much they loved Star Wars at Disney, Lucas talked about how the ride exceeded all of his expectations. One interesting thing to note was that their intention was to change the video on the ride every couple of years, but circumstances prevented that from happening.

The event was a little cheesy, but that’s what I’d expect from Walt Disney World in Florida. And as cheesy as it was, it was easier more well written than the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

If they post the video of the presentation, I’ll post it here for you to see. Until then, the ride in Florida is officially open and it’ll be opening in Anaheim on June 3rd. There’s a significant chance I won’t make it on Star Tours until July, but I’ll be riding it at both parks (I went to the closing at both parks, I’ll be happy to be revisiting them both. Well, I’ll be happy to revisit Disneyland.)

UPDATE: It seems as though they’re running the opening presentation here on a loop.

I had a chance this week to see the fourth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and I have to say I was initially excited. I pretty much hated the first three films in the franchise (the first was the best, but that’s not saying much), but when the trailers for this newest film came out I was actually looking forward to it. They had gotten rid of my two biggest problems from the first part of the series (Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly) and added two of my favorite actors (Penelope Cruz and Ian McShane.)

Though they traded up with the supporting cast, I’m sorry to report that they didn’t really fix any of the other problems with the franchise.

The script might be one of the worst I’ve ever borne witness to and the entire film was plodding and boring. I checked my watch repeatedly through the film. And it wasn’t just me. My kids came with me and they loved the Pirates franchise. Halfway through the film my 8 year old daughter handed me her 3D glasses and said, “Dad, can you just tell me when it’s a funny or exciting part?”

Maybe some of the parts would have been funny or exciting if they’d been built by competent screenwriters not trying to just rip off Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in the most ham-fisted way possible. Though it’s one of my least favorite Indiana Jones pictures, at least Last Crusade made a logical sense and had set ups that were paid off and characters that made sense (except for Marcus Brody in the last half, but that’s a different article.) Nothing about this latest pirates movie made sense. Exposition was dropped into the dialogue with all the grace of a 400 pound pig dressed as a hooker.

To start, Jack Sparrow has allegedly been adventuring for the Fountain of Youth for a while but, for reasons beyond me, he knows nothing about it. (I was told it was because he was bullshitting everyone about searching for it, but if that’s true, why did he have the map?) In order to get him out of one of the most plodding and boring action sequences in the movie (the first one) his dad (Keith Richards, reprising his role) shoots a British soldier in the back and takes his boy for a drink… Every line he has is dripping with poorly written exposition and then he vanishes. Seriously. Literally. Into thin air. Nary a word is spoken about him for the rest of the film. What the hell?

Then Jack Sparrow fights Penelope Cruz who is dressed as his doppleganger. There’s a really long, stupid explanation for it, that they take time out of a major action sequence (their fight) to explain it.

Blah, blah, blah. A whole bunch more stuff happens that’s boring and then they’re all adventuring for the Fountain of Youth. Blackbeard (I’m evil because I’m evil) is trying to live longer. Geoffrey Rush’s character is after him for some off-screen wrong done him. And the Spanish are also after the Fountain. They actually start the movie, appear twice, briefly in the middle, and then once at the end. It made no sense.

I’m seriously getting angry writing about the amateur nature of the writing. Films this expensive should spend MORE money on a good script, but these guys went lowest common denominator and hired the guys who wrote the first three Pirates movies. As though they hadn’t ALREADY sucked it up enough. I hope they don’t get anymore work… The screenplay was just awful. None of the character turns made sense. It’s like they got to the end of the movie and said, “Oh yeah, the characters need to change,” so they had the Mermaid save the people who tortured her (which didn’t make sense) and Penelope Cruz want to kill Jack Sparrow for not letting her sacrifice her life.

Ugh.

Since I don’t want my blood pressure to get too high, I’ll move on to the visuals. I’ll say this: DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE IN 3D. The 3D is garbage and mutes the colors. I spent half the movie with my glasses off and it looked prettier and more vibrant, if not slightly more blurry. 3D for this film is a waste of your money.

Actually, 2D is a waste of your money on this film, too.

The only thing worth anything in this movie was the music, which was a pretty good rehash of the only thing worth anything from the last three movies. Let me save you a whole bunch of time and money: Go buy the soundtrack to the film and play it for the whole family. For $12 you and the whole family can enjoy, in perpetuity, the only thing worth enjoying about this film.

And since people are going to shit themselves to pay for this piece of crap, we’re almost certain to get another one of these films. Here’s a nickel’s worth of free advice to Disney: NEXT TIME HIRE A COMPETENT WRITER AND NO ONE WILL LEAVE YOUR FILM HATING IT….

There’s a new trailer for Star Tours 2.0. It was released today.

I have tickets to get to Disney World and Disneyland both in July to report on the ride in person for you, but it’s not soon enough.

And really, they let you go through the battle of Coruscant from Revenge of the Sith? Sign me up. Right. Now.

The Disney Parks Blog is giving away 1200 tickets (each with a plus one) to be one of the first to ride the new Star Tours at Disneyland, Anaheim. The best part of this event is that it takes place May 20th to coincide with Florida’s opening of the ride.

I’ve entered. I’m getting everyone I know to enter. And if you win, you should bring me.

But this is the last day to enter, so get over there and do it!

Here’s there announcement.

Now through Monday, May 9, at 11:59 p.m. (PDT), you can enter for a chance to attend the “Star Tours Early Departure” at Disneyland park. We will randomly select 1,200 entries, and those selected will be able to bring one guest to experience Star Tours at Disneyland park on May 20. (Please see official rules for eligibility requirements. We will notify you via email if you are selected.)

Enter now. I’d wish you luck, but as Obi-Wan Kenobi so famously said, “…in my experience, there’s no such thing as luck.”

The Force will be with you.  Always.

A while back we brought you a scoop about there being gears in motion about the Imagineers at Disney percolating ideas about Marvel Comics based attractions at the Disney theme parks. Response in the geek community was incredibly well-receptive, though we did get a vocal minority of Disney purists enraged by the idea.

I think we have reason to believe that the original story is much more likely now with news coming from IGN that Kevin Feige, President of Marvel Studios, is thinking about the same kinds of things also.

In the upcoming issue of D23: The Official Disney Fan Club, Feige speculates about the future of Marvel characters in the park.

“The notion of walking into a theme park and going into Asgard or the X-Mansion—Disney does this better than anyone. That is why I’ve gone to Disney parks multiple times every year for my whole life. It’s that next step in fully immersive storytelling, whether it’s a dark ride, a stunt show, or a thrill ride. The options are endless when it comes to how Imagineers can turn our characters, our adventures, and our films into amazing experiences.”

I’m on the record as being on board with this idea. I can find myself going to Disney Parks a lot more often if they have Marvel attractions. Maybe not if they’re in Florida, but if they’re at Anaheim, that would be awesome. Particularly if they take over as much of The California Adventure as possible.

What say you, faithful readers? Good idea? Bad idea? Best idea ever?

I recently participated in a Virtual Roundtable discussion with Glen Keane, Executive Producer and Supervising Animator for Disney’s Tangled.  However, my knowledge of Keane goes back to The Little Mermaid, when I first discovered my love of animation and the process of making a movie from drawings.  He was often interviewed in the “Making of . . .” documentaries for movies that heralded the second Golden Age of Disney animation (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King . . .)

Though he began his career in a non-CG world, he has demonstrated his strong ability to adapt by bringing his traditional animation techniques to a film that showcases the incredible technology available to animators of today.  He and the CG animators worked together to create a beautiful film.

Here are just some of the incredibly informative answers that he provided to questions during the discussion:

Q – Which one from your many, many past projects was most defining for your career, and why?
A – Glen Keane / : I would have to say The Little Mermaid because I discovered I love characters who have this burning desire inside that they believe the impossible is possible. Since then I have followed that path, now with Tangled. This character of Rapunzel has brought me to a new crossroads. How far can hand drawn affect, or be integrated into, computer animation? I now try to see animation not as CG or hand drawn but simply as filmmaking.

Q – Your background is huge. How hard is it for you to step into that digital world now and in which parts can you count on you massive experiences from the past?
A – Glen Keane / : At first I was very tentative about how I could influence CG with my pencil. I have to say that I don’t know how to animate on the computer but I have never been afraid of the computer. John Lasseter and I did the very first computer animation test back in the 80’s, so I have always seen computer animation wherever it crosses the path of hand drawn, forcing me to draw better and to think more sculpturally. Drawing on the Syntec over top of computer images was very natural and fluid. I could even animate very quickly live in front of the room full of animators and demonstrate how I felt the action could play. Drawing is an incredibly affective tool to communicate ideas. It really is true that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Q – If the loss of her hair symbolized the loss of her power to heal, then how did her tears heal Flynn? Is it an inherent power within her that works even without singing or her hair?
A – Glen Keane / : The healing tear was an important element in the original fairytale. It always symbolized for me that the true nature of Rapunzel’s gift came from her heart, not her hair. This dramatic ending allows us to revisit a similar moment from Dumbo. When he loses his magic feather and can still fly, he can fly because that’s who he was, a flying elephant. Rapunzel finds that the healing power never left her and is actually released by love. Does she keep healing every time she sheds a tear? I believe that was the last of that power.

Q – This might be a tough question for you to answer, given not just Disney’s push but all the studios’ collective push for 3D, but if there were no outside pressures or preferences, would your preference have been to make a 2D or 3D film? Can you explain?
A – Glen Keane / : On John Lasseter’s first day at Disney Animation as president, he came down to my office and gave me the choice to animate Rapunzel in 2D or CG. I told John if he had asked me three years ago I would have said 2D for sure but for the last three years I had been building a team around me with the idea that there was a better synthesis of the best of 2D and the best of CG possible. We had a new vision of what animation could be and I really wanted to pursue that goal. So I told John, let’s do it in CG.

Q – Which do you prefer, the 2D traditionally hand drawn animation or 3D computer generated animation?
A – Glen Keane: I love to live in the skin of the characters I animate. I find the pencil the most intimate connection to my heart in terms of communicating what is inside. There are artists today who don’t draw with the traditional pencil. Instead they express themselves with a much more expensive pencil, a computer. One of our top animators on Tangled used to be a plumber and discovered that animation was his true calling. So I have to say I have enormous respect for the pencil and the computer. Personally I prefer to draw with the pencil, but I chose to stand in the middle of the computer world and use everything in my power to make the computer more artist-friendly. Tangled is a result of those efforts.

Q – Which character has been your favorite to animate?
A – Glen Keane: Every character has touched on some real part of my life. I suppose Ariel really was that character that opened up my heart, that connection in me to animate characters who believe that the impossible is possible. I am a guy who sees life as a glass half full and I relate to a character’s optimism.

Q – Can you talk about the difficulties in drawing Rapunzel’s hair and how you overcome these?
A – Glen Keane: Rapunzel’s hair was 70 ft. long. 140,000 individual hairs animating and controlling thousands of hairs was at times like herding a thousand cats. The hair would often explode into a chaotic mess of strong willed pixels bouncing against one another and heading off in their own direction. The real miracle in this movie was Kelly Ward a software engineer who had a PhD in computer generated hair. She wrote software for 6 years on how to control this gigantic beast. We really thought of the hair as another character. I did many drawings to describe the esthetic look of the hair, the rhythm, twist, volume, etc. that needed to be incorporated into the animating of the hair. Drawing once again became the best tool for communicating ideas. A picture is worth a thousand words. But I discovered that creativity is not limited to pencils. Kelly proved that the domain of numbers and equations can be just as creative.

Disney has been incredibly prolific in their Blu-ray offerings in the last couple of months and each of them are worth your money, but each for drastically different reasons. The one reason unifying all of them is that they’re all entertaining films and more often than not, they’re good.

Bambi: Though Walt Disney was a renowned fighter of “Communism”, his films had some pretty radical messages by today’s standards and Bambi is no exception. (Fantasia, you’ll remember, had a pretty definitive statement of the truth of human evolution.) Bambi is a thoroughly stunning indictment of man’s encroachment into nature. Everything is idyllic and the animals are peaceful, happy, and adorable, until man enters the forest. He kills these cheery creatures indiscriminately and burns down the forest. It’s a pretty standard message of environmentalism and illustrates a fairly pointed opinion against hunting. And I loved every minute of it. I remember seeing Bambi as a kid, but I don’t remember any details of it, so seeing it on Blu-ray again was an eye opening experience. It was a very, very well animated film and in HD it was utterly breathtaking. Everything about it was so painterly and lovely, even the burning down of the forest. It wasn’t as much of a narrative as I expected it to be, much more of an animated vignette of nature with beautiful music and special effects, Bambi’s story is merely way of bringing the viewer through the seasons and to illustrate the destructive nature of man.

This is a classic film and there’s a reason for it and I would definitely consider

picking this up for your collection.

Tron and Tron: Legacy: Watching these films again was a joy, but I have to say, the original Tron film outmatches the sequel in just about every way. From story and heart to character and script, Tron was just head and shoulders a better film. The story certainly made more sense and there was this ambitious energy to it that made it perfect. The new film made little sense, though it was incredibly fun to look at. I’ve added both to my collection, but if you have to pick just one of these two to pick up, I’d go with the original. Aside from the fact that it’s hands down a better movie, it looks absolutely gorgeous on Blu-ray.

The Incredibles: Easily my favorite of the Pixar films, The Incredibles is out on Blu-ray tomorrow and is a bright and shining example of beautiful storytelling, brilliant filmmaking, and stunning animation. Wrap all of those things into a truly great, classic movie onto a Blu-ray and you’ve got one of the easiest excuses for dropping $25 in the galaxy. Everything about watching this film again on Blu-ray is a joy, particularly the characterizations and the music, both standout upon repeat viewings. That, and the style of the film, the cool 50s retro look in the beginning and the overstylized characters, it’s easy to fall in love with the visuals. But director Brad Bird takes the tried and true formula of a superhero family (much like The Fantastic Four) and knocks it up a notch on screen in a way that may never be replicated again. I could only ask for a Fantastic Four film half this good and I’d be completely satisfied.

This is one of those movies that you’d be foolish not to upgrade onto Blu-ray. I’ve said it over and over and over again that Pixar makes some of the best looking Blu-rays in the business and The Incredibles is no exception.

Disney has also been kind enough to give us a taste of some of the bonus features:

Tangled: Last on our list today is the newest animated release of the batch and I find that it’s really proving Disney’s return to form for the medium that brought them originally to greatness. You can read Scarlett’s more full review of the Blu-ray here, but I have to say that I enjoyed this movie quite a bit myself. My only complaint about this film is that it was in 3D animation instead of classic 2D animation. I don’t understand the fascination with 3D. I can understand Pixar clinging to it, but it’s frustrating that I can’t get my 2D hand drawn feature animation fix anywhere else. Having said that, Tangled is the epitome of a good story well told with a lot of tremendous elements to it that I really did enjoy more than most mid-list Disney movies. In particular, Ron Perlman’s appearance as The Stabbingtons.

If you have kids, this is definitely a movie that you’ll enjoy watching them if you missed it in the theatres. And you’ll probably find yourself watching it more than a few times.

That’s it for the recent Disney releases of note, and I have to say it’s a really solid batch. You’d not do much better than adding all of these to your collections. The picture quality on all of them is astounding, the movies are all range from watchable to fantastic.

I did have one issue with the Bambi disc, though. It was more than likely my Blu-ray player, but it took forever to load every time I tried playing it. And I’d have to eject it and put it back in over and over again. I have an older player, but the firmware is update. The loading time is probably my only complaint about Blu-ray as a whole.

If you had to pick one of these four, which one would you buy?

Earlier this week, the Disney Park Blog gave a tease about potential destinations that Star Tours 2.0 would be travelling. They offered three teases and only one of them turned out to be false. (It was Endor we will not be travelling to, which is…sad… Because that’s where I’ve always wanted Star Tours to take me.)

But today (which I’m pretty sure is real, despite the date) they released a list of most of the destinations they’ll be visiting. There’s also a new spaceport they’ve created just for this attraction that they haven’t named publicly.

From their post:

Additional destinations include a visit to the beautiful planet of Naboo, a rare tour of the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk, and a trip to the icy planet Hoth (seen above in a still image from Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back).

Of course, no Star Tours adventure would be complete without an unexpected visit to the Death Star, this time above the planet Geonosis.

This is a pretty solid list of planets and a host of variety is possible and I love the idea that Geonosis is where we’ll encounter the Death Star, since it was Geonosian engineers that designed it. I love the possibilities that entails.

But I still want to go to Endor.

The Disney Parks blog released a partial list of destinations that Star Tours will be flying to. Sure, they released it in Aurabesh, but it’s still a list. I imagine with 50 some odd different configurations of the ride, I’m guessing they’ll add more destinations than this limited list, but if they don’t, I’ll still be happy. When I went on Star Tours the first time I was dying to see Endor and it looks like it might finally happen.

Here’s the flight list:

And never fear, I’ve decoded the Aurabesh for you. It’s a bit repetitive, but here it goes:

Tatooine – Status – Gate Changed
Coruscant – Status – On Time
Tatooine – Status – On Time
Endor – Status – Delayed
Coruscant – Status – On Time
Tatooine – Status – On Time
Alderaan – Status – See Agent
Tatooine – Status – On Time
Alderaan – Status – See Agent
Endor – Status – Delayed

I’m assuming that we’re going to head to Tatooine a lot. And might we be witnessing the destruction of Alderaan?

In any case, the ride opens in May and June in Florida and Anaheim respectively.

I’ll bring you more updates as I get them.

UPDATE: Some are saying that this is more of a list of destinations the in-universe tour company flies, not necessarily the destinations you’ll be seeing on the ride, but they’ve teased these destinations in the past and with 50 iterations of the ride, I can’t imagine them not including these spots.