You only ever seem to hear about arcades closing these days, so let's break that depressing trend and welcome the opening of a big new arcade instead.
Pinball Wizard Arcade is located in Pelham, New Hampshire, and it opened its doors on January 12. Not only does it have a great name, but it sounds like it has a great collection, as it has over 200 arcade games and (perhaps more awesomely) over 70 pinball machines.
The arcade games are, as you'd expect, heavy on fighting games, with the roster including titles like:
X-Men Children of the Atom, Marvel Superheroes, Marvel vs. Capcom, Marvel Vs. Streetfighter, X-Men Vs. Streetfighter. SNK Vs. Capcom, SNK Vs. Capcom 2, Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, Mortal Kombat III Ultimate, Mortal Kombat 4, Street Fighter II, Street Fighter II Championship Edition, StreetFighter Alpha, StreetFighter Alpha 2, StreetFighter Alpha 3, Tekken 2, Soul Edge.
Some of the pinball games available include:
Roller Coaster Tycoon, Cirqus Voltiare, Bonzai Run, Family Guy, Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Black Hole, Eight Ball Deluxe, Black Knight, Whirlwind and Party Zone.
OK, yes, this may seem incredibly boring for some people, watching a guy flip through his own sketchbook, or seeing a video of an artist just slowly doodling away on paper... but I just love Adolfsson's style!
Adolfsson is an artist from Sweden, he uses watercolors and Namiki Falcon fountain pen for his work.
He often draws straight-ahead in pen, he's made illustration for many publications including WIRED magazine.
Frank Oz (Born May 25, 1944) is a British-born American film director, actor and puppeteer who is known for creating many characters for Sesame Street and The Muppet Show and for directing films including the 1986 Little Shop Of Horrors remake and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. He is also the operator and voice of Yoda.
Though he's own as a puppeteer first, he is also a master voice artist. Best recognized for performing with Jim Henson's Muppets. His characters have included Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal, and Sam the Eagle on The Muppet Show, and Grover, Cookie Monster and Bert on Sesame Street, among many others.
In addition to performing a variety of characters, Oz has been one of the primary collaborators responsible for the development of the Muppets over the last 30 years. Oz has performed as a puppeteer in over 75 movies, video releases, and television specials, as well as countless other public appearances, episodes of Sesame Street, and other Jim Henson series. His puppetry work spans from 1963 to the present, though he has retired from the Muppets. His Muppets were taken over by Eric Jacobson, though Oz still performs his characters on occasion. He also worked with the puppets on the movie Labyrinth, starring David Bowie.
Oz is also well known as the performer of Jedi Master Yoda from George Lucas' Star Wars series. Oz performed the voice and puppet for Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, and provided the voice of the computer-generated imagery (CGI) Yoda in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. The conversion to CGI was met with some criticism among fans but Oz himself said that was "exactly what [Lucas] should have done."[6] Oz had a great deal of creative input on the character and was himself responsible for creating the character's trademark syntax (whose nature some professional syntacticians discuss in their spare time.[7] George Lucas was so impressed by Oz's performance as Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back that he tried to get him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Here's just a couple of the hundreds of performances he did with Jim Henson, here's Frank as Cookie Monster and Fozzie Bear:
In 1964, while waiting to appear on The Jack Parr Show, Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Jerry Juhl, and Don Sahlin colorfully painted and decorated a set of pipes found in their dressing room's utility closet. Known as the "Muppet Pipes," this historical piece of "affectionate anarchy," as Frank Oz calls it, was excavated and is now a part of NBC's 30 Rock Studio Tour.
You can watch this morning's segment from the Today Show below where Frank Oz explains the history of these pipes and helps cut the ribbon on this new part of the studio tour:
Oz also appeared on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams that evening, and it includes a more lengthy interview with him. Watch it here:
You can watch the first installment of the Japanese CG animated war series here for a limited time only. It involves upright rabbits engaging in shockingly violent, realistic modern warfare against anthropomorphic camels.
I found all these great clips on Kyle Kenworthy's Vimeo, he's an animator at Schell Games & has worked on such projects as Toy Story Mania, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean Online & Disney’s Toontown Online. His channel has all this nice acting references on it, here's part 1.
