Last night I was watching The Simpsons and I noticed that the intro looked different. A few seconds on Google and I had my answer. Gotta love the internets.
Sure enough, it has been redone and some mad fan has gone to the trouble of generating a comparison.
There is also a side-by-side video comparison on YouTube.
Cracked.com has an article exposing “6 famous characters you didn’t know were shameless rip-offs”. One that surprised me was The Lion King which is pretty obviously a rip off from a Japanese cartoon called Kimba the White Lion.
They copied an incredible amount from the original Kimba cartoon. Several characters including the shaman ape, the hornbill advisor, the comedic hyenas, the evil uncle (it was an aunt in Kimba) were obvious copies.
Many of the scenes are also pretty obvious copies from Kimba. Disney, however, claims that all this is a coincidence. What a load…
Not convinced? Check out the examples below or take a look at this more detailed page.
As the guys from Cracked say:
“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.”
Do you know what “the gamut” is? Until I read this article on laser digital-cinema projectors I didn’t either.
Apparently “the gamut” is the range of colors visible to the human eye.
Modern TV sets can only produce about 50% of the colors that we are able to see! Traditional cinema film comes in at 60% of visible colors – a big improvement but with plenty of room for further improvement.
The image alongside shows a representation of the gamut and the subsets of that space that we routinely see. There are plenty of colors that can’t be represented on our screens.
The article discusses an ingenious system using laser film projectors that is able to produce images with up to 90% of the gamut. Very cool – I can’t wait to watch a movie using that system.
This site shows how common your surname is around the world (actually a quick look at the FAQ reveals that only 22 countries are covered). Anyway, I pumped Pott in and found out that:
Pott is most common in Germany although there appear to be quite a few Potts in Canada too
The highest density that I could find was Murphy in Ireland with 17,080 people per million!