TVSquad

Eddie Murphy will star in the big screen remake of the popular series Fantasy Island.

I'll let that first sentence soak in. Ready? Okay, let's continue:

Murphy, much like in the Nutty Professor and Norbit, will play multiple roles in the adaptation of the series which starred Ricardo Montalban and Hervé Villechaize, ran from 1978 to 1984, and always creeped me the heck out when I was a kid. I'm not sure why it creeped me out, but it did. Hey, I was young and my parents watched it, plus I was kind of a wuss anyway. Maybe it was Montalban's accent.

In the original series, Montalban played Mr. Roarke, the caretaker of a mystical island where visitors could have any fantasy fulfilled, but there was always a catch.

Norbit screenwriters Jay Scherick and David Ronn are re-writing the script, and no director is attached to the project at this time.

[via Moviehole]

Now that we have all these fancy-wancy computers, it's easy to make funny videos like the one I've placed below, but this particular one was created in the late '80s, and no doubt took a long time to create. It's also one of the most hysterical things I've seen in a long time.

The video is an anti-drug promo with Ronald and Nancy Reagan, creatively edited into a call for more widespread drug use, especially among children. Yes, the video is manipulated to make it appear as if Ron and Nancy are advocates of drug use, but if you pay close attention, you'll also learn how important freedom is to this nation, especially the freedom to have less freedom.

The video is a little over seven minutes long, but trust me, it's worth it to sit through the whole thing. I laughed so hard the people in the apartment next to mine probably think I'm insane.

[via Boing Boing]

Henry and Matt at Brohans.com have compiled what they are absolutely, positively sure are the twenty greatest '80s television series ever. They are:

• Mr. Belvedere
• The Dukes of Hazzard
• Knight Rider
• Night Court
• ALF
• Perfect Strangers
• The Golden Girls
• Growing Pains
• Married ... with Children
• Who's the Boss?
• Magnum P.I.
• Doogie Howser, M.D.
• The Cosby Show
• The A-Team
• Miami Vice
• The Wonder Years
• MASH
• MacGyver
• Cheers
• Star Trek: The Next Generation

Anyone who had a collection of action figures growing up knows you can't have an action figure without the proper weapon. Chewbacca had his crossbow, Cobra Commander had his laser pistol, and the Battlestar Galactica action figures had all kinds of cool weapons. But what about MacGyver? What's the accessory of choice for his mass-produced toy lookalike? The answer, you'll find, is quite obvious. Sure, it may just look like a paper clip, but it's a MacGyver paper clip, which means you can use it for anything. You can open doors, blow up tanks, impregnate spider monkeys, improve your bowling score, go back in time, drill for oil, slice pineapple, raise the dead and many other things. That's power at your fingertips, boys and girls.

Oh yeah, and if you haven't figured it out, the "toy" isn't real.

[via Digg]

Does anyone out there remember Starcade? I sure don't. However, I've been getting up to speed by watching full episodes of the '80s game show. Starcade pitted two contestants together to answer trivia questions about video games and then play different arcade games for points. If you were a child of the '80s as I am, it's cool to remember all the games you used to play. They even have an episode that features Dragon's Lair, which I remember as being the most frustrating arcade game I ever played.

Reruns of the series popped up on G4 from 2002 - 2004, and according to both IMDb and Wikipedia, the second unaired pilot of Starcade was hosted by Alex Trebek. I assume he was taken off the show for asking contestants questions about both Kierkegaard and Frogger.

The episodes are worth checking out not just for the cool retro look, but also for the great "prizes," such as the portable record player pictured on the right.

Are you a fan of Cagney and Lacey, or do you just enjoy collecting things that have the words "Cagney" and "Lacey" on them for reasons you can't really explain? If so, I have good news: Cagney and Lacey is coming to DVD. TVShowsOnDVD linked to this USA Today story that reads the DVDs will be out soon, though what exactly those sets will consist of is still unknown.

Cagney and Lacey starred Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless as two female police officers working in a male-dominated profession. Gless replaced actress Meg Foster as Cagney after the first six episodes. The series ran from 1982 to 1988 and was almost canceled after the first season, but was brought back when ratings improved during the summer reruns and fans wrote to CBS in protest. The series actually began in1981 as a made-for-TV movie with Loretta Swit playing the role of Cagney.

Shhh, listen.

Hear that? It's the Magnum, P.I. movie rumor machine cranking up again.

Jonathan told y'all back in June that Ben Affleck was the favorite to take on the role popularized by Tom Selleck on the original '80s TV series, but now Dark Horizons is reporting that Matthew McConaughey has been listed as the new Magnum by Rawson Marshall Thurber, who recently finished a redraft of the script. Other actors supposedly involved with this "on again, off again" project include Steve Zahn as Rick, Tyrese Gibson as T.C. and William H. Macy as Higgins. Also, Optimus Prime, not wanting to be typecast for his role in The Transformers, will play the helicopter.

One other thing: in the movie, Magnum will be an Iraq war veteran, not a Vietnam veteran.

Adam De La Pena, creator of the Adult Swim series Minoriteam and creator and co-star of the Comedy Central series I'm with Busey has created a new animated series for G4 called Code Monkeys. The series, which was recently picked up for fourteen episodes, takes place in a world that resembles an actual video game from the '80s and will include several allusions to games from that era. De La Pena will direct all the episodes, and will also serve as a writer and the voice of the main character.

Meanwhile, he's also developing another animated series for FOX with the working title Think Tank. The series will spoof office politics and is based on the idea that everything in pop culture is controlled by a single "think tank."

Out of the two projects, I must say Code Monkeys looks the most interesting to me. The idea of a cartoon set in a world resembling the blocky look of old Atari games could be really cool. The series will hit G4 this spring.

[via Toon Zone]

Those of us who grew up in the '80s tend to look at cartoons from that era in two different ways: we remember them fondly because they were a part of our childhood, but at the same time the '80s signified a significant decline in the quality of animation. While toys and games based on cartoon characters were certainly not an '80s invention, many of the cartoons from that era were essentially half-hour toy commercials weighed down by bad animation and stilted dialogue. Some may argue that televised animation never fully recovered from the rote quality that ruled most of the animation from that decade.

BlueSky Studios, which is owned by Fox Film Filmed Entertainment and helped bring the movie Ice Age to the screen, has a weekly challenge for their staff in which artists, animators and others are given a subject and asked to draw their interpretation of it. The work is displayed on the BlueSky Studios Challenge blog, and it's worth checking out. Some of the subjects are things like movie robots or dinosaurs, but there are also a bunch of great drawings of television characters, such as the Muppets ( I love this humanized version of Bert) and SpongeBob SquarePants. Also take a look at the '80s cartoon characters challenge, which includes this film noir version of Inspector Gadget. I love seeing these characters completely re-imagined the same way I love it when a band covers another band's song and completely changes it, making it their own. I'd love to see whole animated programs re-imagined this way, which wouldn't be anything new since The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Mighty Mouse, Alvin and the Chipmunks and Beany and Cecil were all at one time brought back by different artists with a whole new design. Still, I'd love to see more of that.

[via Cartoon Brew]

Everyone has to start somewhere, and long before Bill O'Reilly made a name for himself on Fox News cutting mics, gesticulating toward the camera and telling people to shut up, he was the host of Inside Edition and getting to the bottom of this strange new phenomenon called Super Mario Brothers. College Humor has the video, and a very youthful Billy bookmarks the segment. The stuff in between is typical Inside Edition pabulum, though I was actually one of those nerds who would call the Nintendo hotline to figure out how to complete different levels. Nintendo was about as far as I ever went, though. If you were to sit me down in front of a PlayStation or an Xbox I'd probably start crying from not being able to figure anything out.

[via Best Week Ever]

Amy Heckerling, the woman behind such movies as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Clueless, Johnny Dangerously and the Look Who's Talking films, is developing a series for NBC with the working title of 1985. The series will serve as a sequel to George Orwell's 1984, except it won't, because I'm lying. Actually, the series will focus on a young girl growing up as a teenager during the Reagan era. The sitcom has been picked up as a script by NBC, with Heckerling slated to write, direct and executive produce. The project will also use music from the 80s, which makes sense because using songs from the Civil War would just be confusing. The show will also have a voiceover of the young girl as an adult reflecting back on her childhood. I've always found it interesting how narrators on TV shows can recall every detail of their childhood when I can't remember what I ate for breakfast three days ago. I guess that's the magic of TV for you.

[via tv filter]

If you happen to be an insomniac or someone who just wakes up really early, and you really enjoyed the animated series Mister T and The Super Globetrotters, then November is your month, Maynerd. The original Mister T cartoon, which I only vaguely remember and had something to do with T and his gang of gymnasts fighting bad guys, will follow the late seventies Super Globetrotters cartoon, a series in which the basketball wunderkinds would occasional develop super powers to battle the forces of evil. The shows will air on Cartoon Network at 5:00 a.m. starting November 5. I never did watch the Globetrotters, and any memories of Mister T has been replaced by Robert Smigel's "TV Funhouse" version. I guess that's not entirely a bad thing.