WHAT IF… Soul Train's animated locomotive raced against the Neighborhood Trolley from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood?

Superman: The Animated Series once pitted super-fast Superman against the equally super-fast Flash in a charity footrace that got interrupted by a supervillain's plot to make the sky rain cats and dogs or some shit. When Supes and The Flash resumed their around-the-world race after saving the weather together, the episode left the race unresolved. Nerds everywhere must have hurled their Hot Pockets at the TV screen in frustration--this must have been their equivalent of the famously infuriating Sopranos series finale ending (pre-Battlestar Galactica/Lost, of course)--but I thought concluding the race on an ambiguous note was a brilliant, post-show-discussion-sparking move.

Soul Train's recent re-emergence as a trending topic due to Don Cornelius' death has got me thinking which lovable TV show mascot from my youth would win a Supes-vs.-The Flash-style railroad race: the animated Soul Train itself or Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Trolley?

For a locomotive, the Soul Train moves kind of slow, like the similar-looking Batmobile in the 1989 Batman with Michael Keaton (who happened to start out on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood as an assistant whose tasks included helping the crew with the Trolley). It's kind of difficult to build up speed when your chassis is swaying back and forth to O'Bryan or Shalamar.

Because it's much smaller and it doesn't dance (that inability to dance, even during its own piano theme music, means it must be really white), the Trolley is faster.





Even though the Trolley would win and everyone in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe would lose their minds, I'd still root for the Soul Train. I'd rather root for the not-so-white underdog who can't resist grooving to Shalamar.



Shit yeah, Cheryl Song! Represent!

And this concludes this edition of "Watch What Happens When I Sound Like a Discussion Someone Had with a Housemate While Sharing Some Indo at 2am."

Production design porn from the Topps Batman Official Movie Souvenir Magazine

Long before movie studios promoted their tentpole releases through elaborate sites or postings of HD trailers on Apple's trailer site ("Watch the Avatar trailer a day before its premiere in theaters or James Cameron will shoot a puppy!"), there were these things called official movie souvenir magazines that were exactly like the studio sites promotional material-hungry film geeks can click to nowadays. When I was a kid, either Starlog Press or Topps would devote an entire one-shot mag to an upcoming blockbuster and fill the mag with a spoilerrific photo summary of the movie, fluffy cast interviews, slightly less fluffy crew interviews and the only part of the mag I liked, behind-the-scenes pictures and concept art. Starlog Press did tie-in mags for the Star Trek, Rocky and James Bond franchises, while Topps focused on blockbusters that it produced trading cards for, like Tim Burton's Batman and Touchstone Pictures' wannabe Batman, the Warren Beatty Dick Tracy reboot.

Do mag publishers still put out official movie souvenir mags? I wouldn't be surprised if High School Musical: The Musical or whatever it's called recently had one.

In 1989, Batman was my favorite movie. Twenty summers later, uh... not so much. But both score music-wise and production design-wise, the film remains one of the most impressive from that decade. Production designer Anton Furst's bleak vision of Gotham City won him an Oscar and was so pitch-perfect for this incarnation of Batman that DC incorporated the late Furst's architectural designs into the early '90s comics.

Here are several interesting photos and drawings from my well-preserved copy of the 1989 Batman Official Movie Souvenir Magazine, which I still like to occasionally leaf through even though the Pop Art-colored backgrounds and frothy late '80s fonts are a poor match with the photos from this darker-toned Batman movie--the mag looks like it was designed by the Saved by the Bell opening titles designer.


A visual effects crew member inspects the miniature Gotham set that was built for the Batwing attack sequence.


Was this where the Gotham Central police headquarters name and comic book series title came from?