Western Wednesday: The Hill

Western Wednesday is a weekly celebration of six-guns, steampunk, and sasquatch.



Photoshop image by Tim Babb.

This is stretching the Western Wednesday premise by even my loose standards, but I like Yetis almost as much as Bigfoot, so I'm going with it. Disney's making a Yeti movie called (at least for now) The Hill.

As they continue finding theme park rides to make films from (The Jungle Cruise, The Magic Kingdom, and a new Haunted Mansion are also in the works), the studio has hired a screenwriter named Jason Dean Hall to create a script based on Disneyland's Matterhorn. I'm a Disney World kid, so I've never ridden the Matterhorn, but I understand that Harold the Abominable Snowman has been a feature of it since the '70s. The ride was originally created in 1959.

According to /Film, the story is about "five young adventure-seekers who, for mysterious reasons, are called to the top of the mountain and encounter a Yetis [sic] on the journey down." Because of the grammatical error, I can't tell if that's one Yeti or a bunch of them, but I guess it doesn't really matter. Either way, I'm in.

Western Wednesday: Abominable

Western Wednesday is a weekly tribute to six-guns, steampunk, and sasquatch.

Coming Soon: Snow Beast

This...looks...AWESOME! I don't know which is cooler, that it has John Schneider in it or that the Yeti is a guy in a suit.

Friday: Jimmy Fallon gets it

There is nothing that cannot be made awesome.

Art Show: On my own like Tarzan Boy

Tarzan



By Pascal Campion.

The Beastman Stalks!



By Frank Frazetta. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Sheena



By Jessica Hickman.

Exciting!



By Alex Schomburg. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories

Jungla



By Pierre Alary

The Glob.



By Walt Kelly. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Hulkasaurus Rex



By David Resto. [Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs]

Not So Abominable



By Enosh Bar-Tur. [Art Jumble]

Alien Jungle Girl



By Craig Rousseau.

Gorilla Warriors



By Tim Hamilton. [Drawbridge]

Land of the Lost: Season Three (Episode Nine: Abominable Snowman)

Season One: Part One, Two, and Three.
Season Two: Part One and Two.
Season Three: Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, and Eight.

Episode 9: “Abominable Snowman”

The Land of the Lost gets wackier and wackier. In this episode, Will and Jack find a unicorn in the jungle and bring it back to Holly as a pet. When Enik wanders by the temple and sees it though, he warns the Marshalls that its presence is bad news. He says that it comes from the Land of Snow and is game for a creature called Tapa. Enik speculates that the recent earthquakes have opened a passage between the Land of Snow and the rest of the Valley. He’s also quite sure that the Tapa will come searching for the unicorn, bringing devastation with him.

Jack and Will are oddly unconcerned. They’ve given the animal to Holly and aren’t interested in taking it back. They say that if Enik wants Holly to get rid of it, he can ask her himself. Enik angrily agrees, but by the time he finds Holly, the unicorn has already gone missing.

Holly and Cha-Ka are franticly looking for it and aren’t attracted to Enik’s offer of a jeweled toad if they’ll forget about the pet. “I’ve heard toads give you warts,” Holly says, “and I don’t care to find out for sure.” I suspect that’s Holly’s sense of humor talking and not genuine belief in the old wives’ tale, but it’s still a weird response.

Yeti unicorn-ranchers, after the break.

Art Show: Yetea for Two

The Twisted Tree



Artist Unknown. [Curt Purcell's Flickr]

Night's End



By Berni Wrightson. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

The Bride



By Art Adams. [Frankensteinia]

Expeditions of the Mysterious



By Joey Chou.

Art Show: Frankenstein's a Big, Fat Cheater-Pants

Conan vs. Werewolves



By Alex Horley. [Illustrateurs]

Monster of the Mountains



By Ken Kelly. [Illustrateurs]

Xombi vs. Kinderessen



By JJ Birch. [John Rozum. Man, I miss Xombi.]

After the break: More monster madness.

Art Show: Sugar... ah, Honey Honey... You are my Jungle Girl

Judy of the Jungle vs. Something That Almost Looks Like a Shark



By Alex Schomburg. [Shanna the She-Devil Blogger]

Jungle Jamboree!



By Dan DeCarlo in homage to this. [Shanna the She-Devil Blogger]

Wonder City



By Alex Horley. [Illustrateurs]

More apes, monsters, and jungle girls after the break.

Dino Dolls (and other plushy awesomeness)

Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs turned me on to Megan Baehr's awesome, handmade plush dolls. She does a lot more than just dinosaurs though. Check out her Flickr stream to see her Yeti, Water Sprite, Quetzalcoatl, and tons of animals.

And Now the News: The Wreckage of a Woman's Soul

Still catching up on some old news...

The Deep Blue Goodbye



20th Century Fox is adapting John D MacDonald's novel about houseboat-dwelling private eye Travis McGee and some lost treasure in the Florida Keys. Leonardo DiCaprio is attached to star.

Pirates 4 Updates



Turns out, it is an adaptation of Tim Powers' novel as suspected. Powers and screenwriter Terry Rossio shed some light on why that news was slow in coming, explaining that Disney pretty much had to buy the novel because they were planning to do a movie about pirates looking for the Fountain of Youth. It sounds like that's where the similarities end, but Powers speculates that Barbosa may be standing in for Blackbeard from the book. And indeed, Geoffrey Rush has been signed to reprise that role.

Meanwhile, there's some cause for concern that Johnny Depp's enthusiasm for doing the film has been lessened by the departure of the Disney chairman who originally brought Depp on board.

Tarzan the Spy



The Double-O Section has a great look at how '60s Bond-mania temporarily influenced everyone's favorite jungle hero. You need to click through just to see Tarzan firing a machine-gun Rambo-style.

The Conspirator



I'd like to pretend that I'm excited about The Contender because it's about Lincoln's assassination and I'm always interested in learning more about that. But really I'm more excited because Rory's going to be in it.

The Asylum's Sherlock Holmes



You may have heard that there's going to be a big deal Sherlock Holmes movie coming out pretty soon. Which of course means that there's going to be a cheapo Asylum knock-off to go with it. I should remind everyone at this point that even though the poster promises dinosaurs, dragons, and some sort of giant cephalopod, the chances of being satisfied by the actual presentation of Holmes' fighting these creatures is very slim.

Not that the Asylum can't make entertaining movies. They can. But those are rare and it's best to go into them with some skepticism.

Speaking of which...



I guess the Asylum's getting a good headstart on Andrew Stanton's John Carter of Mars movie. With Traci Lords as Dejah Thoris, no less.

Refuge



Sam Raimi's making a Yeti film. [Illustration by Doug Bell.]

Thor movie update



They've cast Sif and Odin. I don't know anything about Jaimie Alexander, but I'm thrilled to see Anthony Hopkins as Odin.

The ABCs of Awesome

Since finishing that huge music meme, there's a hole in my Sunday blogging. Not sure what I'll eventually fill it with, but for today, I've totally gacked this idea from Cal.

Apes



Barbarians (fighting Apes)



Cephalopods



Detectives



Elasmosaurus



Frankenstein's Monster



Giant Things



Head Kicks



Islands



Jungle Queens



Keira Knightley



Lost Civilizations



Musketeers



Namora



Obelisks



Pirates



Quetzalcoatl



Ray Guns



Space Girls (with Ray Guns)



Treasure



Underwater Cities



Valkyries



Wonder Woman



X-Ray Vision



Yeti



Zorro