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Secrets Of Special Effects

A spaceship lands. Humans become avatars. A man in a cape can fly. Special effects have made movies magical for decades. Big-dollar or ultralow-budget, the goal is the same: to frighten, fool or thrill the audience.

For a huge movie like Avatar, various special effects companies spent years on the project. One of them, Legacy Effects, had about 120 people working on the look of the inhabitants of the alien moon, Pandora.

But special effects happen on a smaller scale as well. In a cramped trailer in Van Nuys, Calif., two guys mix up fake blood for a slasher scene in C.L.A.S.S. (that stands for Criminal Law and Student Slayings). It's so low budget — $1 million — the filmmakers are shooting in producer Sheldon Robins' aunt's house for the film's final scene.

Robins put much of the little money he had toward special effects makeup. "The most important part was making sure my kills didn't look cheesy," he says.

Jerry Constantine will commit the makeup murders. Constantine did special effects makeup work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Watchmen and Van Helsing. Usually, for bloody scenes, Constantine attaches plastic tubing to the actor's back, and with a syringe, fires fake blood through the tubing during the live scene. But not on this budget.

"They don't have time for the two-hour makeup for me to pull the actor, glue the appliance on, and then spurt the blood," Constantine explains. "So we fake it out."

Viewers will see the actor after the throat's been slit. (Sorry, but it's all make-believe, remember.) First, Constantine takes a superthin, neck-sized piece of latex foam and cuts a horizontal slit in the middle. Constantine's assistant is Mike Measimer — they've been working on films together for 11 years. Constantine holds the piece up to the actress' neck and proclaims that it will work perfectly, so they glue it on. The two men work in tandem, like surgeons in reverse (wearing black surgical gloves.)

Constantine powders the line where the foam meets skin. With a sponge dipped in makeup, he dabs various pinks onto the fake flesh, then sprays on some pale brown freckles. It looks just like the woman's natural neck, but with a big empty slit in the middle. And now, the slashing begins. Before it gets too gory, we're going to cut away (as it were) to some of the special effects folks who worked on Avatar.

The Big Leagues

Legacy Effects, the special effects company for Avatar, is the offspring of the Stan Winston Studio. Winston worked with Avatar director James Cameron on his Terminator films, creating the menacing bots from the future. (Winston also did Aliens and the groundbreaking dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.) Winston's studio started working with Cameron on Avatar in 2006, but Winston died of cancer in 2008.

John Rosengrant, Winston's protege of 25 years, and a few others at the studio started Legacy Effects, a name in honor of their friend and mentor. They carried on the work in Avatar, creating the specialty props such as the enormous Armored Mobile Platform (AMP) suit, which looks like a tank on legs. The AMP is on display in Legacy Effects' warehouse, where all their movie, TV and commercial props and makeup effects are made. The AMP stands 13.5 feet high, and it's made of 200 distinct pieces — hand-detailed to suggest a metal texture.

"It's like Apache helicopter meets power loader from Alien," says Rosengrant, who worked on all three Terminator movies. Standing nearby the AMP suit in the warehouse is a rogues' gallery of specialty props: the Avatar Scorpion cockpit; the T-600 robot and two-gun turret tank from Termination Salvation; and the Iron Monger from Iron Man.

Rosengrant and his team also created the prosthetic legs actor Sam Worthington wore in Avatar. They found a Sam-sized young man — whose paralysis didn't stop him from playing basketball — and made a cast of his legs.

"We finished them off in silicon and punched individual hairs into them. [The prosthetic legs] would get strapped onto Sam, and his legs would go down into holes in the wheelchair," explains Rosengrant. "I think it was important to make sure that this was convincing, because it really sells the idea of Jake in his freedom as an avatar versus how he was trapped on Earth."

Rosengrant's team also conceived the look of Pandora's Na'avi people — with their enormous eyes. The team selected snow leopard eyes as inspiration and played with the color, turning them more golden and less green.

"You always draw from nature," says Rosengrant, "because you're trying to make the unbelievable believable."

Now, Back To Slashing

Making the unbelievable believable is a tall order on a small budget, but special effects makeup artists Jerry Constantine and Mike Measimer are still working on wreaking murderous mayhem on an actress' neck in C.L.A.S.S. So far, they've made the prosthetic to look completely natural with the actress' skin.

Constantine adds cotton to the horizontal slit area. He's creating what he delicately calls the "meat." The cotton will give dimension to the wound area after red coloring is applied to look like blood. Then, with a tiny spatula, Constantine spreads what looks like raspberry jelly on top. And ick — it suddenly looks like thickened blood.

"This where it starts to look like what it is," says Constantine. And it does. It looks so real, you want to turn away.

With all the advanced special effects on movies these days, it's hard to believe that Constantine and Measimer are still doing it the old-fashioned way. But even at a big studio like Legacy Effects, "slashing" is alive and well. Alan Scott, one of the co-owners of Legacy and a Stan Winston protege, stands by the old methods.

"The technologies that have been used in special makeup effects that worked for nearly 100 years still work," Scott says.

He says digital blood is not as messy, but you don't have actors reacting to something visually horrible, either.

"If you just have a tennis ball that you're playing to, it's hard to understand that there's a 30-foot creature trying to eat you," Scott says.

Scott and Rosengrant were inspired by all the old, great classic horror films — Frankenstein, The Mummy — and actors like Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney. In fact, Scott says, he'd love to do a full-on zombie movie.

"That's part of our roots," he says. "We love horror. My wife doesn't understand it, but that's my whole Netflix library

James Cameron: Pushing The Limits Of Imagination

James Cameron worked with a Cirque du Soleil choreographer to make his Na'vi characters appear graceful on screen.

James Cameron was working as a truck driver in 1977 when he quit his job and, in his words, "started making little films."

Those "little films" got the attention of someone working for Roger Corman, the producer and director known as the "King of the Bs" — as in B-movies. Corman, who has over 100 low-budget films to his credit, including Little Shop of Horrors, Attack of the Giant Leeches and Last Woman on Earth, taught Cameron the basics of creating special effects with almost no money — lessons that Cameron then applied to his blockbusters Titanic and Avatar.

"What you learn in those early films is that your will is the only thing that makes the difference in getting the job done," Cameron tells Terry Gross. "It teaches you to improvise and to never lose hope — because you're making a movie, and the movie can be what you want it to be ... it's not in control of you, you're in control of it," he says.

"Even though visual effects are not what we use now — there's no film, or glass painting," Cameron says, "the basics of storytelling don't change."

Avatar, Cameron's latest box office hit, was conceived in the mid-'90s, years before the high-tech special effects and cameras Cameron used to create his virtual world existed.

"Avatar comes from a childhood sense of wonder about nature and reading sci-fi and imagining other worlds," says Cameron. "I grew up in a little town in Canada and spent all of my time in the woods, hunting snakes and frogs and doing drawings of protozoa."

The film, the first in history to gross more than $2 billion worldwide, takes place on the fictional moon Pandora. The people of Pandora — a fictional tribe called the Na'vi — inhabit a lush, pristine rain forest untouched by industrialization. When humans discover that the Na'vi live above a very valuable, very rare natural resource — they travel to the moon to mine the mineral, and the film's main character, a paraplegic marine named Jake Sully, manipulates a genetically engineered human/Na'vi hybrid as a way of learning more about the indigenous culture.

The film combines different genres — the Western, the sci-fi film, the war flick — all of which, Cameron says, were consciously chosen.

"The Iraq stuff and the Vietnam stuff is there by design — and references to the colonial period are there by design," says Cameron. "At a very generalized level, it's saying our attitude about indigenous people and our entitlement about what is rightfully theirs is the same sense of entitlement that lets us bulldoze a forest and not blink an eye. It's just human nature that if we can take it, we will. And sometimes we do it in a very naked and imperialistic way, and other times we do it in a very sophisticated way with lots of rationalization — but it's basically the same thing. A sense of entitlement. And we can't just go on in this unsustainable way, just taking what we want and not giving back."

Cameron says that Avatar is also a comment on "the huge gap or shortfall between what you can imagine and what you can actually do."

"We go from this state as children where we don't know what we can't do. You fly in your dreams as a child, but you tend not to fly in your dreams as an adult," he says. "In the Avatar state, [Jake] is getting to return to that childlike dream state of doing amazing things ... In a funny way, it's actually kind of a comment on the way we find expression for our imagination."

Avatar is #1 All Time

It was only a matter of time - 47 days, to be precise.

According to the box office tally site Boxofficemojo.com, "Avatar" is now the highest-grossing movie of all time domestically. The James Cameron film's business now stands at $601.1 million, ahead of the $600.8 million Cameron's "Titanic" did back in 1997-98.

Moreover, "Titanic" took 252 days to top out; "Avatar," which has been the biggest movie in the country since its mid-December release, is still No. 1 and shows little sign of flagging (and those nine Oscar nominations won't hurt).

 The film is already the global box office leader, having topped "Titanic's" $1.8 billion-plus last week.

Yes, there's been a lot of teeth-grinding over what this means. Yes, tickets for "Avatar" cost more than "Titanic," or "Star Wars," or "Gone With the Wind." Yes, the film is still down the list if you adjust for inflation. But credit where credit is due: "Avatar" was a monumental gamble - its budget is the kind of thing that can cripple studios - and it's paid off, both critically and commercially. James Cameron has got the golden touch.

Below is a list of the Top 20 Grossing Domestic Films Of All Time

1	Avatar	Fox	$601,142,000	2009
2	Titanic	Par.	$600,788,188	1997
3	The Dark Knight	WB	$533,345,358	2008
4	Star Wars	Fox	$460,998,007	1977^
5	Shrek 2	DW	$441,226,247	2004
6	E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial	Uni.	$435,110,554	1982^
7	Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace	Fox	$431,088,301	1999
8	Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest	BV	$423,315,812	2006
9	Spider-Man	Sony	$403,706,375	2002
10	Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen	P/DW	$402,111,870	2009
11	Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith	Fox	$380,270,577	2005
12	The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King	NL	$377,027,325	2003
13	Spider-Man 2	Sony	$373,585,825	2004
14	The Passion of the Christ	NM	$370,782,930	2004^
15	Jurassic Park	Uni.	$357,067,947	1993
16	The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers	NL	$341,786,758	2002^
17	Finding Nemo	BV	$339,714,978	2003
18	Spider-Man 3	Sony	$336,530,303	2007
19	Forrest Gump	Par.	$329,694,499	1994
20	The Lion King	BV	$328,541,776	1994^

Can Avatar Beat Titanic?

James Cameron is king of the box office again, but will his latest eclipse his Titanic success?

 

It's been in theaters for five weekends and director James Cameron's Avatar is still going like gangbusters. Its billion-dollar (and counting) worldwide gross makes it a shoo-in as the all-time second-highest-grossing film, but can it topple the current No. 1, Cameron's Titanic? Forecasting is a tricky business, and, as with that last Cameron film, analysts are wary of guessing at Avatar's future. It won't eclipse Titanic in raw ticket numbers, but there's a good chance that if Avatar can sustain its holiday-season momentum, it could be well on its way to the biggest-ever worldwide gross (unadjusted for inflation). Here are six factors that could help push the otherworldly epic into the top spot:

1. The hard part is done. It took The Dark Knight seven months to gross $1 billion worldwide. It took Titanic nearly three months. Avatar has pocketed the same amount in a cool 17 days. The market pressure to release a film on DVD means movies aren't in theaters for seven to eight months anymore, as Titanic was. In Avatar's case, it doesn't need that much time: the heavy lifting is done, and after a scorching three-week kickoff, there's just (just!) over $800 million to go to beat Titanic's record.

2. It's competing against itself. January is historically the dumping ground for the year's weakest films, and this year looks to be no different: where December had strong commercial fare like Alvin and the Chipmunks: the Squeakquel and Sherlock Holmes, January will average only three wide releases per weekend and boasts only one ballyhooed release (The Book of Eli, starring Denzel Washington). Titanic capitalized on the same January doldrums by roaring past the 1997 holidays to earn most of its cash in 1998. Then again, if you're operating on as much momentum as Avatar is, "competition can be overrated," says Brandon Gray, president and publisher of BoxOfficeMojo.com. The film has established itself as a must-see, and "at this point, people who are going to see Avatar are going to see Avatar and would even if the slate was strong," Gray argues. The biggest threat to Avatar's lead could be when it has to cede 3-D screens to the next 3-D blockbuster, March's Alice in Wonderland.

3. Marketing the "novelty factor" has succeeded. The water-cooler wisdom you've probably heard about Avatar hits at the core of its marketing success: If you want to see this movie, you must see it in a theater. Fox positioned the film as a cinematic event, enticing audiences typically turned off by fantasy or science-fiction films by emphasizing the spectacle and majesty of it all. Call it Netflix proofing: "It's really hard to sell the idea that you can have the same experience at home," says David Mumpower, an analyst at BoxOfficeProphets.com. "Avatar faced expectations as unreasonable as there are, and it met them. That made it a near-impossible triumph that people suddenly wanted to see."

4. The Oscars bring the heat. The buzz around a film historically heats up through the Academy Award countdown, and Avatar is a near lock to be nominated. Last year, three of the five best-picture nominees saw their domestic per-theater gross increase the weekend after they were nominated, and Slumdog Millionaire saw its domestic per-theater take jump on the weekend after it won the Oscar. For Avatar, nods from the Academy could lure in skeptical holdouts and repeat viewers.

5. There's a whole world out there. Two-thirds of Titanic's haul was earned overseas, and Avatar is tracking similarly (compare that with, say, The Dark Knight, which saw a near-even split between North American tallies and what it earned around the rest of the globe). Avatar opened in 106 markets globally and was No. 1 in all of them. Markets such as Russia, where Titanic saw modest receipts in 1997 and 1998, are white-hot today, analysts say, with more screens and moviegoers than ever before. Avatar stands poised to reap the benefits, and it has already dotted the globe with box-office records.

6. Premium ticket prices. Movies in 3-D took in $1.3 billion in 2009, according to Variety, a threefold increase over 2008 and more than 10 percent of the total 2009 box-office gross. The increased ticket price—an average of $2 to $3 per ticket in most markets—will undoubtedly help pad Avatar's coffers.

None of the above explanations, however, will diminish Avatar's accomplishment as a (potential) top grosser. "What makes Avatar remarkable is that it has no basis in previously established material," Gray says. The movie might be derivative of many movies in its story and themes, but it had no direct antecedent like the other top-grossing films: Titanic (historical events), the Star Wars movies (an established film franchise), or The Lord of the Rings (literature). It was a tougher sell, which makes its achievement more impressive.

Is 'Avatar 2' in the works?

Now that Avatar is on course to become the second-highest-grossing film in history, James Cameron has his absolute pick of projects. What's next?

A month ago, it appeared to be a remake of the 1966 schlock classic Fantastic Voyage.

Cameron told reporters at the British premier of Avatar that he plans to do the film using the same 3-D technology that made Avatar such a visual feast. For those who loved Avatar's visuals but groaned through its tinny dialogue and tone-deaf, noble-savage plotline, things probably won't get much better this time around. The Fantastic Voyage script is being done by Shane Salerno, the man behind Fitzgeraldian classics of wordsmithing such as Alien vs. Predator and Armageddon.

It now appears that Cameron will take a shepherd's role on Fantastic Voyage – helping craft

the story and oversee production – but that he won't direct it himself.

When Cameron talked up Fantastic Voyage, many still thought Avatar would struggle to break even, given its colossal ($300 million? $400 million?) budget. Seventeen days into its run, the movie long ago recouped its production costs.

That would seem to make a sequel pretty inevitable.

Cameron told MTV.com that he has two follows to Avatar in mind.

"I have a trilogy-scaled arc of story right now, but I haven't put any serious work into writing a script," he said two weeks ago. Both would follow Avatar's lead characters, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and pick up where Avatar left off, on the planet Pandora in the year 2154.

Avatar took more than a decade to make. Cameron has said that since the technology he created to shoot the movie is now in place and well practised, sequels will not take nearly as long. That's the good news. The bad news: He's still writing the script himself.

There are two other prime possibilities.

Cameron has tapped the Japanese manga Battle Angel Alita – a sort of La Femme Nikita meets Blade Runner – about a bounty-hunting cyborg. At one point, Cameron intended Battle Angel to be his next feature. When he hit a wall on the story, he turned instead to a script he'd written in the mid-'90s – Avatar.

Cameron now has a Battle Angel script and "a lot" of production design, though he characterized the preparations as "not too far down the line."

Also, there's another reboot of a sci-fi classic: Forbidden Planet. This one has been written by J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the best space opera you've never watched, Babylon 5.

Cameron has called the original Forbidden Planet, starring Robby the Robot, "my favourite science-fiction film of all time." (Cue whimper from George Lucas).

He has also said in Avatar junkets that he's "actively involved" in Straczynski's remake, but "I haven't made any decisions about it yet."

Which sounds like Hollywood-ese for, "How much will you give me?"

Can #James Cameron Be King Again?

In April 2008, in a windowless Los Angeles warehouse where Howard Hughes built his airplanes some 70 years earlier, James Cameron, in a hockey jersey and jeans, was doing something élite directors do not do — holding a camera. "Why can't I see anything?" he yelled from an apparently empty warehouse floor to a small crew huddled over computer monitors in a corner. "Oh, oh, oh, I'm in the monster's head!" Cameron backed up, and a peek through his camera lens revealed blackness giving way to a thick and vivid rain forest where a tall, blue, alien version of Sigourney Weaver was battling the monster whose head had just blocked the director's view. On the warehouse floor there was no rain forest, no monster, no Weaver — just a bunch of guys and their computers. But Cameron's camera was allowing him to shoot inside a virtual universe of his own creation. He swooped in over the monster's shoulder and entered the world of Avatar. 

Equal parts artist and gearhead, Cameron, 55, has brought to film the time-travel saga of The Terminator, the watery depths of The Abyss and the sinking deck of Titanic. But more than any of his previous movies, Avatar is wholly Cameron's world. The 2½-hr. sci-fi epic follows an ex-Marine named Jake Sully as he struggles for survival on an alien moon called Pandora, home to a tall, blue, humanoid species called the Na'vi and to a mysterious resource called unobtainium, which draws humans in a future century to colonize the planet. Jake (Sam Worthington) must inhabit the body of a human-alien hybrid, or avatar, to breathe the noxious air on Pandora. There he falls in love with a Na'vi woman and finds himself at the center of a human-Na'vi battle. The story had been knocking around in Cameron's brain since the 1970s, when, while driving a truck for Southern California's Brea Olinda Unified School District, he began to paint some fanciful scenes that would linger in his mind: flying jellyfish, wood sprites (which he called "dandelion things"), blazingly colorful bioluminescent forests, fan lizards and big-eyed cats. 

Years in the making, and with a production budget from $200 million to $300 million plus marketing costs, Avatar arrives in theaters on Dec. 18 to colossal expectations. The movie industry hopes its immersive special effects spark a big-screen renaissance. Fans crave the next Star Wars. It's a heavy burden, even for a man who seems to enjoy doing only things that are hard. Cameron first laid out his vision for the technology he would use in the film in a digital manifesto in the early 1990s; he then labored to perfect it over the course of a decade and a half, creating cameras that let him peer into virtual worlds and pushing for the industry's adoption of a digital 3-D format. The result is as if the director has broken through the screen and pulled the viewer by the hand into a new, exotic world.

Bringing Pandora to Life
Despite Cameron's success with Titanic — the highest-grossing movie of all time and winner of a record-tying 11 Oscars — Avatar was not an easy sell to his home studio, 20th Century Fox. Since 1997, Cameron had been largely absent from the Hollywood scene, riding in submersibles, shooting documentaries and building new filmmaking toys. In 2005, Fox funded a $10 million, 5-min. prototype for the movie, but when Cameron delivered a 153-page draft of the script months later, the studio balked. Here was an ambitious project with a lot of risky elements, including unproven technology, blue protagonists with tails and a script that wasn't based on a comic book, novel or video game — making it unique for a big-budget film in its time. In September 2006, Fox formally passed on Avatar. Only after another studio (Disney) seemed poised to take it on — and after Cameron made concessions in both his script and his compensation — did Fox green-light the film. Now he just had to make it.

The director's last movie had involved creating the largest and most meticulously detailed set ever made: a scale replica of the Titanic. By contrast, Avatar's performance-capture soundstage, which is called the volume, looked like a Saturday Night Live skit about postmodern theater. Instead of sets, gray-painted polygons and the occasional tree were moved around to create topography. For the computer-generated (CG) scenes, which make up about 60% of the finished film, the cast wore clingy Lycra bodysuits covered in markers that were recognized by the 102 cameras on the warehouse ceiling. They donned skullcaps rigged with tiny cameras that imaged their faces. Thanks to software created for the film, the actors appeared on Cameron's monitor in real time as their alien counterparts.

With more than 2,500 special-effects shots, the bulk of the man-hours on Avatar were spent not on a stage but in a dark viewing room in Los Angeles, in teleconferences with collaborating artists from Peter Jackson's Weta Digital studio in Wellington, New Zealand. The real world was being used to inform the fictional one: an energy map of the Pandoran forest was modeled on rat neurons; hours were spent getting alien sap to drip precisely right. 

And as much as he could, Cameron tried to place the cast emotionally inside the environment of Pandora. He took the actors to Hawaiian rain forests and shot reference footage for them to use as sense memory. To help them feel an explosion, he boomed a noise over amplifiers, threw foam particles at them and whacked them with a padded jousting pole. To approximate Pandora's moss-covered terrain, he laid plastic sheets on the floor, forcing the cast to walk gingerly. When Zoe Saldana, who plays Jake's Na'vi love interest Neytiri, was "riding" a flying creature, she clung to a giant gray hobbyhorse rocked on a gimbal by grips. For scenes that combined live action with CG, Cameron used a new tool called a Simulcam, which allowed him to see actors playing in exotic CG surroundings in real time. Cameron's goal was to shoot as if he were filming a documentary on another planet. It was the kind of filmmaking environment that required both imagination and patience. A crew member wrote a set catchphrase on a whiteboard: "It's Avatar, dude, nothing works the first time."

Avatar Onscreen
Audiences got their first look at Avatar footage in July at San Diego's Comic-Con. When the trailer went online on Aug. 21, demand was instantaneous, quickly making it the most downloaded trailer at Apple.com The Avatar footage triggered a record 4 million streams in its first day. But the reaction wasn't all glowing. Some commenters likened the Na'vi to George Lucas' reviled CG character Jar Jar Binks, others to the '80s TV cartoon Thundercats. Those who saw the footage in theaters (it screened in select IMAX locations) were considerably more impressed, but the initial hype and interest that had surrounded the project were giving way to a backlash. This was a place Cameron had been before, on Titanic — only instead of bloggers and online commenters, back then it was the mainstream media who snickered at his ambition.

One script element Fox had initially objected to was Cameron's failure to explain unobtainium, the precious resource that sends humans to Pandora to strip-mine the planet ruinously. Unobtainium is a joke term engineers have used for decades to describe any needed material that is rare, costly or difficult to obtain. For Cameron, the specificity of unobtainium is not important, and despite Fox's objections, he never explains in the movie what makes unobtainium worth the trouble of interstellar travel. But the answer to that mystery is that the substance's room-temperature superconducting properties make it the key to cheap power generation back on Earth, where all the oil has run out. Unobtainium is crucial to running ships like the ISV Venture Star, which delivers humans to Pandora. The irony is that the more unobtainium humans mine on Pandora, the more they will be able to travel there. It's a devastating feedback loop.

Like all of Cameron's movies, Avatar can be watched as pure escapist entertainment or as a dire warning about humanity's current path. But here, for the first time, Cameron's future vision has not been limited by the strictures of a real-world movie set. The result is his most fantastical film, one that hews to the rules of science in its creatures and environments but not to the limitations of the physical world of props and the human body. Of course, it still needs to draw human bodies to the theater. Its trickiest special effect is yet unseen: meeting the expectations that await it.

5 Superpowers Science Will Give Us in Our Lifetime

 

Every one of us once dreamed of donning some spandex pants and taking our brand of renegade crime fighting to the streets. The only problem was our total lack of super powers, and the fact that when we blasted ourselves with gamma radiation we only got a super-powered tumor that becomes more malignant when angered.

Recent scientific breakthroughs are changing that. Within our lifetimes we just might be able to see mankind do the things it only wrote about in cheap picture books and their multi-billion dollar film adaptations. Some day, you or your children may very well get to be ...

The Character's Power: Technologically advanced battle suit.

After being kidnapped by the Vietnamese (or in the film, some brown people) billionaire inventor Tony Stark MacGyver's himself a technological wonder of a battle suit that simultaneously prevents shards of shrapnel from entering his heart and helps him explode you with literal hand cannons.

How Science Can Give It To You:
Meet HAL 5.

HAL 5 is an acronym for Hybrid Assistive Limb ... 5. HAL is an artificial powered exoskeleton. In other words, a technological wonder of a suit that is capable of allowing the user to carry five times the weight they could normally carry.

"When a person attempts to move, nerve signals are sent from the brain to the muscles via motoneuron, moving the musculoskeletal system as a consequence." We just copy and pasted that from the official HAL website because it sums it up well enough (apparently just saying, "When you move, this thing moves HARDER!" is too simplistic for the type of people who know how to make cybernetic suits).

Unlike Tony Stark's "Mark VI" Iron Man suit, HAL was not invented for tearing-ass through a war zone, leaving behind a trail of men slowly realizing they just got their limbs torn off by a robot. On the contrary, HAL was designed for factory work, disaster relief, assisting disabled people, and, as the website states, "the entertainment field" which we're sure is code for "Superhuman Endurance Sexbot."

The only problem is ...
You'll probably think we're being silly when we point out that "HAL" is also the name of the AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you're having trouble remembering the character let us refresh your memory: HAL 9000 spied some astronauts talking shit about him behind his back, and went on a murderous rampage in response. Probably just coincidence, right? Surely not a sign that the inventors have evil intentions or anything.

Well, do you remember when we linked the official HAL website earlier? Look at the web address. That's www.cyberdyne.jp. Cyberdyne! As in, "the manufacturers of the Terminator" Cyberdyne.

Don't get us wrong, we're not saying this isn't an amazing technology. All we're saying is that you should find your nearest John Conner and sequester him in your local underground robot apocalypse bunker before some dip-shit scientist puts some kind of thinking chip in these things.

The Character's Power: Telekinesis.

Jean Grey, more commonly known as "That redheaded bitch that dies whenever shit gets serious," has telekinetic powers that allow her to do much more than lift simple objects with her mind. She can also use her powers as a kind of Jedi-like force push and as a defensive shield.

How Science Can Give It To You:
The Brain-Gate Neural Interface System (BGNIS).

Foxborough, Massachusetts based company Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, Inc. is working on technologies that let the paralyzed interact with their surroundings using only their thoughts. The "Gate" in the name refers to a computer interface that acts as a gateway for the entire process. The system begins with the implantation of a sensor in the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement.

This sensor detects neural signals that your brain would normally use to tell your body to move. But, rather than having this information transmitted to an arm or leg these signals get relayed to a computer which then decodes the information and converts it into a physical action. So when you think about an action (say, giving a stripper a dollar) that thought would go though the computer which then would activate a device (say, the dollar bill cannon attached to your pelvis).

The BGNIS project has been approved by the FDA and Cyberkinetics hopes this technology will be ready for the mass market within three to five years.

The only problem is ...
This technology clearly isn't going to stay limited to the disabled. The prospect for being able to, with a simple implant, turn on your coffee maker or car with the power of your thoughts, will be too much to resist. How will a society already plagued by obesity and sedentary lifestyles adjust to the invention of the mind controlled pudding cannon?

And how long until a group of rogues find a way to get souped-up implants that let them take over your car from a mile away? Or send your lawnmower on a murderous rampage?

They'll also make it fly somehow

Without the wisdom of a Dr. X to guide them, they will wreak havoc on a world too fat to defend itself.

The Character's Power: Web slinging and wall climbing.

When a young loser named Peter Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider he becomes endowed with the powers of an arachnid. He can crawl on walls and, just to round out the whole "Spider" gimmick, he invented his own web slingers. Furthermore, he has a spider's ... precognitive abilities? We must have missed that day of science class.

How Science Can Give It To You:
Carbon nanotube technology and nanoglue.

Spidey holds the honorable distinction of being the only character on this list that has two real life technologies currently being researched that can one day bring us a step closer to being riddled with bullets after trying to stop a bank robbery.

First up is carbon nanotube technology, which will basically be Velcro for the "What the fuck is Velcro?" societies of the future. Like Velcro, carbon nanotubes can be formed as a series of hooks and loops that interlock, thereby creating a clinging effect. Unlike Velcro, these hooks and loops are microscopic and can latch on to nearly any surface imaginable, even while underwater.

The creator of the nanotube, Italian scientist Nicola Pugno, says that when placed on gloves and boots, his wall-crawling breakthrough would be able to keep a fully grown person suspended on a ceiling. He hopes to have a prototype suit out by 2010.

The second Spider-Man tech that will revolutionize the way we as a society approach cosplaying is more of a theory, but it's a very promising one at that. This theory is based around something called nanoglue.

A group of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute scientists working with nanolayers (molecular chains of carbon molecules with elements such as silicon, oxygen or sulfur) accidentally found that heating nanolayers of commercially available glue sandwiched between copper and silica, it created a bond that one researcher called "As strong as a motherfucker."

 
Metal chains and hooks are metaphorical

The leader of the project, Professor Ganapathiraman Ramanath, hypothesizes that this "nanoglue" could be used as a real-life version of Spider-Man's web shooters:

"If we can find a way to create threads and/or intertwined bundles using the molecules in a scalable fashion, while retaining the adhesive properties, then creating web-shooters similar to Spiderman's is a real possibility," he said as he pointed to the face of Spider-Man gracing the crotch flap of his Underoos.

The only problem is ...
We admit, it's awesome that a mountain climber plummeting to his death may one day be able take a minute to enjoy the quickly passing scenery before deploying a stream of stringy glue that will save his life, before crawling effortlessly back up the rocky cliff with his hands.

The problem is that once the method of web-swinging from building to building becomes possible, no one will ever use any other means of transport. So what's wrong with that? Well, what goes unreported in Spider-Man films and comics is the hundreds of long, sticky strings of web he leaves behind wherever he goes.

In the city of the future, where rush hour features a few million Spideys web-slinging their way to the office, pretty soon every building is going to look like it's either wearing a fur coat, or been Bukakked within mere inches of its life.

 

The Character's Power: Fast-healing wounds via tissue regeneration.

According to the comic, the man formally known as James Howlett was born with keen animal senses and lizard-like tissue regeneration abilities. That made him a prime candidate for an experimental surgery that grafted adamantium to his bones. The lesson learned here is that you never give metal claws to something that doesn't die when you shoot it in the head.

How Science Can Give It To You:
The extracellular matrix.

In 2005, Lee Spievack, a man working in a Cincinnati hobby store, sliced off the tip of his finger as he was showing a customer how you can lose a finger when dealing with a model plane's motor. This is either an ironic accident or the single most badass thing any retail associate has ever done to sell a customer.

In another ironic twist to the plot, Spievack just so happened to have a brother in the tissue regeneration business. This brother told his fingertip-less sibling to forgo a simple skin graft and opt for a ride on a model train toward the future of wound healing: a powder made from the extract of a pigs' bladder. This extract is called the Extracellular Matrix.

This protein-based substance can also be found in human fetuses and assists in repairing any damage incurred by even the most hardcore fetus. Supposedly when the extracellular matrix is turned into a powder and applied to a wound the substance breaks down the surrounding tissue and causes it to rebuild in the same way it would in the womb. Which theoretically should let you heal stab wounds in seconds, while the knife wielding thug looks on in terror, stuttering, "T-THAT's IMPOSSIBLE!"

Well, maybe not exactly that quickly. But within four weeks of applying the powder, Spievack's finger tip grew back, nail and all.

The only problem is ...
Some scientists do contend that he could have tossed Pop Rocks on the stub and he still may have grown back the finger tip, as it wasn't like he had lost the whole finger or anything so a natural healing wasn't out of the question. Still, as we type this sentence, military research is being conducted on this pig bladder based limb re-grower. So as unbelievable as the story sounds, at least somebody thinks there's something to it.

We can't argue with helping the wounded grow back tissue and limbs. The problem will come once somebody inevitably says, "You know, since we're growing it back anyway, we might as well grow it back better."

We could be looking at a future of monstrocities, swimmers cutting off their hands to get webbed fingers, basketball players adding a foot to their height by cutting off their legs, and men doing the unthinkable for the chance to be endowed like a porn star. Clearly this would be a terrible thing, somehow.

The Character's Power: Invisibility.

Wikipedia says, "She has the psionic ability to manipulate ambient cosmic energy to mentally bend all wavelengths of light (including infrared and ultraviolet radiation) around her body without causing any visible distortion." See, that's why Wikipedia is untrustworthy. It took 30 words to say something that only takes one.

How Science Can Give It To You:
Retro-Reflectum.

Susumu Tachi, a scientist at Tokyo University, is hard at work on a ground-breaking piece of tech that could very well be one of mankind's greatest achievements ... until it's used by chronic masturbators to peer in on your sexual exploits, that is.

What Tachi has done is create the fabled invisibility cloak through the usage of a camera that records a background image. This Background image is then projected via a device that scientists have dubbed a "Projector" that actually "projects" the background image on to a screen.

Here's where the real science comes in to play: This projection can only be seen on a special material known as retro-reflectum, a material made-up of thousands of tiny beads that were specially designed to capture the projected image. This retro-reflectum allows a projected image to be seen in three dimensions or, rather, to be projected in three dimensions. The image wraps around the cloak wearing subject, thus, creating a sense of blending in with the moving background.

 
A platoon tests prototype retro-reflectum camoflage

Tachi envisions a future where such a system lets pilots look right through the floor of a plane's cockpit to see the ground (or, you could do the same with the passengers if you wanted to fuck with them) or it could be used on surgical gloves, so surgeons can see through their own hands and get a full view of the operation.

Time magazine even dubbed it one of the "Coolest Inventions" of 2003, saying it would be on the market by 2008, so it's a little late.

The only problem is ...
Or is it? Couldn't somebody be outside your window right now?

Even if nobody is watching you in the shower every night, the military is going wild thinking about chilling ways to apply the stuff. The fine folks at DARPA (the Department of Defense's research and development team that created ARPANET, the precursor to the very same internet you are using right now) wants to create shields for soldiers that can be seen and fired through from one side, invisible and bulletproof from the other.

They have given plenty of scientific reasoning explaining how this would work but halfway through reading it we came to the conclusion that it must have not been in English. The whole thing just sounds like cheating.

6 Famous Characters You Didn't Know Were Shameless Rip Offs

 

They say there are no original ideas out there, and we can believe that. Storytelling themes are universal and we understand when a character or scene gets "borrowed" here and there.

But it's hard not to feel betrayed when you find out that some of the stories around which your entire childhood revolved were, for the most part, copied and pasted in with a cavalier attitude of, "the little bastards will never know the difference!"

We're talking about...

Mutated freaks gathered by their wheelchair bound mentor in order to protect a world that fears and hates them. You think we are talking about the X-Men? No we are not. Well, we will be in a second, and technically we are, but not in this paragraph, except for the parts where we do.

They are a Rip-Off of:

The Doom Patrol, which debuted in comics three months before everybody's favorite, more marketable mutants.

Unlike the X-Men, the Doom Patrollers were once normal people who suffered an accident that disfigured them but also gave them superpowers. Shunned by the world for just being plain ugly, the freaks were gathered by Doctor Caulder, a paraplegic, who thought that maybe the world wouldn't dislike them so much if they used their powers to save the normal people's asses from giant robots once in a while.

If this sounds somewhat familiar to you, it's because the same thing as X-Men with the only difference that the smart guy in the wheelchair was bald in one and X-Men uses mutants as an allegory for minorities instead of people with elephantiasis or whatever the heck Doom Patrol was going for.

Even the tag line is the same! At least make an effort, guys!

Possibly, the most unnecessary thing borrowed by X-Men was the name of the Doom Patrol's enemies: The Brotherhood of Evil. In Doom Patrol the name made sense; because they were a group of evil assholes, which got together to do asshole things. There was never any confusion about what the group was about.

On the other hand Magneto stole the name, added the word mutant at the end of it and then whined endlessly about how humans persecuted and hated him. Maybe people hated you, Magneto, because your group's name was The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and you went around the world trying to wipe out humanity?

How successful would the American Paraplegia Society be if they called themselves the Brotherhood of Child Molesting Guys on Wheelchairs? Magneto's weak PR skills aren't the only reason the original Brotherhood looks awesome by comparison ...

A brain in a case and an armed gorilla? How is Magneto more famous?

"Hold on a minute!" you may be shouting from your cubicle. "Not only is he one of the most famous and recognizable icons in the world, he is also the first superhero ever created! So how can he be a rip off of anything if he was the first, you idiot?"

Well, that's where you are wrong, hypothetical Cracked reader who is talking to us and for some reason insulting us even though you are figment of our imagination; Superman may be the first superhero, but not the first character with those superpowers.

He is a Rip-Off of:

Philip Wylie's wrote a pulp novel called Gladiator in 1930, starring Hugo Danner, a man whose father invents a secret formula that can create superpowers. Instead of selling it and making millions, he just injects it into his son, because, hey, why not? Hugo gains super strength, bullet proof skin and the ability to jump over the tallest building in a single bound. Jumping, not flying--so it's sort of different, right? Well, actually, in Superman's early years he couldn't fly either, just jump really high.

All he was missing was the laser/telescopic eyes and the million retarded powers Superman pulled out of his ass in the 50s. And it was published eight years before Superman appeared.

But superpowers are kind of standard, right? Super strength? Hell, Hercules had that! It doesn't mean it's a rip-off!

But the resemblance doesn't end there. Both Superman and Hugo Danner grew up in a small farming town. Supes in Kansas and Danner in Colorado. Both pretended to be meek and weak to prevent people from finding out about their superpowers. And both had a special place where they went to be alone: Superman had his fortress of solitude in the Arctic, and Donner had his own place in northern Canada. Of course, his didn't have the total emo name, which really only proves that he was less of a huge tool.

And to boot, the first image of Superman the world saw, the cover of Action Comics #1, recreates a scene of the Gladiator novel where Hugo loses his shit, lifts up a car and scares the crap out of everyone.

"And fuck you for cutting me... I mean Clark Kent off in the intersection."

Oh sure, Gladiator doesn't have five movies, several TV shows, a crapload of cartoons, a 70-year-old still going comic book and millions of dollars from merchandise. But he sure tapped way more ass than Supes.

No, we're not talking about the fact that The Lion King was Disney's take on Hamlet (interestingly, Shakespeare originally intended to have his plays performed by animals but had to reconsider when his lions escaped and caused the London Massacre of 1600).

But Disney wasn't happy to just rely on the bard, and massively ripped off an old Japanese cartoon just to wipe away any inadvertent hint of originality.

It is a Rip-Off of:

Kimba the White Lion.

Kimba, the small albino lion cub in the picture, is the creation of legendary Japanese cartoonist, Osamu Tezuka, creator of other famous characters like Astro Boy. And this is were you go "Kimba? But the Disney lion is called Simba. OH! Wait, they are lions and their names sound alike; that's all?" Oh no, that's not all, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Or should we say theftberg?

Even though Disney denies it, it has slipped more than once that The Lion King was initially a remake of Kimba, including this early sketch with Simba colored white that was included in one of the DVD versions:

Maybe the color blind won't notice.

At some point Disney decided not to inform whoever holds the right for Kimba about this remake, recolored the lion cub and went to town. The Lion King also borrows scenes and characters like the shaman monkey, Simba's bird friend and the evil comedy relief hyenas.

The main bad guy in Kimba was Kimba's aunt, while Disney's version gave her a sex change operation and she became Simba's uncle. And some of the most famous scenes from the movie were practically Xeroxed from Kimba, including the one where Simba speaks with the ghost of his father who appeared in the clouds.

Here's a little experiment. Turn the tables, and try to create a cartoon series about a high-pitch-voiced mouse called "Mikey" and his friend "Ronald Duck." Start selling merchandise for these characters, and see how long it takes you to hear from Disney's lawyers.

 

 

Although the G.I. Joe action figures have existed since the 60s, it wasn't until 1982 that they gained personalities, an actual story and their very own nemesis; becoming the G.I. Joe we know and love. And we're not talking about the 1996 "extreme" version which we prefer to ignore and hate.

The enemy was of course Cobra, a snake themed terrorist organization with a soft spot in their dark hearts for secret fortresses, giant lasers and parachutes (safety first!).

They are a Rip-Off of:

HYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYDRAAAAAAAAAAA!

Oh, and also:

KOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOBRAAAAA!

Cobra is what you get when two other snake themed terrorist groups, DC Comics's Kobra and Marvel's Hydra, get drunk one night and have awkward sex in the back of Kobra's dad's Honda Civic. And since both Kobra and Hydra were created by the same person, the legendary Jack Kirby, that's incest and it's wrong! Kirby had a Honda Civic? Yes, don't question us!

Hydra was created in 1965, as an enemy organization of Nick Fury's S.H.I.E.L.D. while Kobra was created in 1976, and even were the stars of their own comic. And let it never be said that the comics industry doesn't like to recycle good ideas, or at least snake-themed terrorist organizations.

When HASBRO decided to revive the G.I. Joe action figures, they contacted Marvel to publish a comic about the new version. Marvel then dug through the trash and rescued a rejected pitch for a new comic. It was about a group of elite S.H.I.E.L.D. soldiers and Nick Fury's son fighting against Hydra. They just changed "Hydra" to "Cobra" and "Nick Fury Jr." to "Duke" and the rest is 80s icon history. Considering this is the comic version of going to a restaurant and having the chef pull out a burger out of the garbage can, it worked pretty well.

Anything else besides all of them being snake themed ultra high-tech criminal organizations? Oh yes! Hydra and Cobra like to hire dominatrix girls and put them in charge of the troops. That way if the troops don't do their job the commander has to "punish" their naughty asses... Hmmm... maybe that's why these guys never win.

And here is another odd one. Lord Kobra, from DC's Kobra, had a brother, who was one of the good guys. Because they were twins, they could feel what happened to the other, which probably made masturbation creepy beyond belief. Twin brother who could feel what the other was feeling? Doesn't that sound a lot like Cobra's very own Tomax and Xamot?

We have to agree with Kobra here, Twinsy, you are just being an ass.

Wait... Tomax? Xamot?

Have you guys noticed they are the same spelled backwards? WHOAAA! It only took us 20 years.

Green Lantern is the only superhero who can make a giant cue the shape of a dong to play pool with planets, and yet get his ass kicked by Sesame Street's Big Bird because he's allergic to the color yellow.

He is a Rip-Off of:

The classic space opera series Lensman started in 1937, and since then, just like Thomas Jefferson before it, fought injustice and left enough bastard children around to populate a small city.

Every sci-fi series with some sort of space police owes something to Lensman, from the Jedi Knights of Star Wars to Buzz Lightyear. If it has space policemen then it's ripping off Lensman or ripping off something that ripped it off first. The apple that fell closest to the tree was the Green Lantern Corps.

The first Green Lantern was created just one year after the first Lensman story was published, but back then Green Lantern was just one guy who found a magic ring and he wasn't weak against yellow but to wood, making the banana tree the only natural predator of all Green Lanterns. Or maybe, also, really racist cartoons of Asian people with baseball bats.

In 1950, the original Green Lantern had been out of print for quite a few years and DC comics thought it was time to bring back the name. Now this time he was part of a group of space policemen, which are like regular policemen but they stop black people in fancy cars in space. Now, unlike the Jedi Knights who were happy to just copy the general idea of space policemen and a few things here and there, the Green Lanterns Corps went overboard.

The Lensmen were created by the most advanced alien race in the universe, the Arisians. The Green Lanterns were created by the Oans. The Lensmen are chosen for being the epitome of bravery and honesty, just like the Green Lanterns (how they even measure that is never explained, probably have them fill out a questionnaire). Finally, both organizations give their member a special, unique weapon that can be used by nobody else but the person to whom it was given. In Lensmen's case a lens that gives them telepathic powers, and in Green Lantern's case the ring that can't protect you from banana peels.

The creators of Green Lantern deny even knowing about Lensman, which is odd coming from sci-fi writers talking about a sci-fi series that was well known in its time. It would be like "Star Wars? Nope, doesn't ring a bell..." coming from your local nerd. As a bit of a nod and wink, a Green Lantern was created as a homage to the Lensman series (Arisia, named after the planet where the Arisians from Lensman come from).

Also, although it doesn't count as a rip-off, according to comic historians the Oans, the blue midget aliens who go around giving out Green Lantern rings, are based on David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel. And we are including the picture because we love the side by side comparisons pictures thing.

That's just weird.

Oh, shit. We went there.

He is a Rip-Off of:

El Zorro! Yes, the guy with the sword.

Zorro, created by Johnston McCulley, debuted in 1919 in the pulp magazine All Story Weekly. And while some of the things that make Batman Batman were inspired by other sources (his rogues gallery was inspired by the army of fugly mutants Dick Tracy has been putting in jail since 1931) a big bunch of them were copied from Zorro.

Zorro was first at being a millionaire playboy-slash-dark costumed evil face puncher. Zorro had a secret cave under his mansion where he kept his horse and Zorro stuff, not unlike a certain caped crusader. The big difference being that Zorro didn't call it the Zorrocave or the Zorrohorse.

Zorro was also the first hero with a butler, his trusty servant Bernardo. But Alfred is probably more useful since Bernardo was deaf and mute. With Alfred you just have to yell "Hey, go make me a hotdog." With Bernard you have to mimic putting a sausage in your mouth, rub your tummy and then hope he doesn't think you want him to fellate you.

And last, Zorro also hid his secret costumed persona by pretending to be a complete foppish rich douche long before Bruce Wayne. Although, to be fair, the Scarlet Pimpernel invented this one in 1903, but nobody counts him since he committed the crime of having a superhero name that was lame despite having the word "pimp" in it.

The connections are so obvious DC comics doesn't bother to deny them. In fact, the movie lil' Bruce Wayne goes to see with his parents the night they're shot is The Mark of Zorro.

A clever nod to the original masked vigilante? Maybe. Or maybe in an effort to keep their secret safe, Batman's creators were trying to send a message to children: if you go see anything with Zorro in it, your family will be killed.

Awesome Interactive #Avatar Trailer

In a few weeks, one of the most anticipated and expensive movies ever made will debut on movie screens across the world: Avatar. The sci-fi epic is making huge buzz for its unparalleled filmmaking technology, its award-winning director (James Cameron), and its record-breaking $230+ million budget.

As you might expect, the promotional campaign is in full swing. While several trailers have hit the web, we hadn’t stumbled across any very unique web campaigns. That is, until we discovered the official Avatar Adobe AIR app/interactive trailer.

Billed as the “Official Avatar Interactive Trailer,” the AIR program brings Avatar’s Pandora natives straight to your desktop. Not only does it house all of the already-released Avatar trailers, but it includes dozens of video shorts that go in-depth into the making of the movie and the background of the main characters.

Now for the interactive part: whenever you watch a trailer, special “hotspots” will come up where you can learn more about the characters. Even cooler though is the integration of Avatar’s Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube feeds. You can get all of the latest news right from the interactive trailer.

Honestly? We’re very impressed with Avatar’s app. It’s slick, easy to use, and chock-full of content. If this doesn’t fulfill your need for an Avatar fix, then nothing but the actual movie will.

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BONUS: An Avatar Trailer!

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