-Telltale Games, creators of Sam & Max and Monkey Island episodic games, are hard at work on all-new Back to the Future games chronicling the time-traveling adventures of Marty McFly and Doc Brown. Today, they bring good BTTF news. The developer has tapped the talents of Christopher Lloyd to voice ol’ Doc Brown, with Back to the Future screenwriter Bob Gale coming onboard to “consult” on the creation of the episodic game series. Telltale’s Back to the Future games are timed to hit later this year, after the Back to the Future 25th Anniversary Trilogy hits Blu-ray and DVD. Telltale’s Back to the Future series has also secured the likeness of Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly and the iconic DeLorean time machine, so expect authenticity to assault your eyeballs later this year.
-Gravity, the 3D film that Warner Bros is mobilizing with director Alfonso Cuaron and Robert Downey Jr., is suddenly in danger of falling back to earth after Angellina Jolie said no to a full court press and a big money offer to star in the film. It has put Warner Bros in a bind. The studio needs an actress who can hold the screen and draw an audience to an $80 million film. Much like Tom Hanks’ role in Cast Away, the Gravity heroine is the only person onscreen for a large part of the movie.” This was first announced back in March, but today Syfy said production is going to start next week on its 4-hour Peter Pan prequel called Neverland. It’s being written and directed by Nick Willing, who worked on Syfy’s Tin Man and Alice, which were reimaginings of The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland.
-Here’s an interesting statistic: There are 4,700 freshwater fish species in South America right now. On average, over 100 species per year have been discovered. This year alone, 69 new species have been described thus far. These numbers show very clearly that we are far from knowing the number of freshwater species in South America. And oh, scientists have found a new species. An armored, Amazonian catfish. That eats wood from fallen logs — and, when desperate, the feces of its fellow catfish. With teeth shaped like spoons to make the eating easier. The largest one is about 65 centimeters, the other two are half that size.
-Seth Green is about to let the world take over someone’s life for six weeks. In the show, “Control TV”, the central twentysomething figure, who has yet to be cast, will take orders, in real time, from viewers on every aspect of his life — from what he wears and eats to where he works and whom he dates. The human puppet will drive Ford’s new small Fiesta and receive calls and texts using the HTC EVO 4G phone. “‘ControlTV’ places the audience in complete control of a show for the first time ever, and we are eager to learn what they will decide for our protagonist,” Green said.
-In the last year, Ghostbusters 3 has gone from “someday, maybe” to “getting more and more likely.” They’re writing a script, Ivan Reitman’s involved, and even Bill Murray says he’s interested. Now it looks like Sigourney Weaver is ready to get on board. “I’ve also been contacted,” Weaver said in an interview on Aug. 27 in Beverly Hills, Calif., where she was promoting the comedy You Again. “All I said was I really think my little boy Oscar, who went through that traumatic kidnapping, should be a ghostbuster. So I think that might happen.” Weaver said the next step for a new Ghostbusters movie is just getting a good script done.
-NASA has created the clever Space Rock program that lets the public vote on what song shuttle astronauts flying on mission STS-133 will wake up to. As they put it, “The wakeup song has been a part of the space program since the days of the Apollo missions, and now NASA is giving you two chances to be a part of this history! We need your help selecting wakeup songs to be played during the final missions of the Space Shuttle Program!” To what should be exactly no one’s surprise, the Star Trek theme song by Alexander Courage is leading the pack with nearly 400,000 votes. What’s actually somewhat surprising though is that lagging behind in a distant sixth place is the theme from Star Wars, written by John Williams, which had an insignificant 12,661 votes the last time we checked.
-The goal is to get humans to Mars by the mid-2030s, but what are the stepping stones that will get us there? Returning to the Moon gets a lot of publicity, but the better test might be a near-Earth asteroid. Space.com columnist Leonard David has an intriguing feature on Lockheed Martin’s research into sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by the mid-2020s. Nicknamed the “Plymouth Rock” mission, landing on an asteroid wouldn’t only be a great dress rehearsal for the long trip to Mars; it could also allow us to set up planetary defenses against asteroid impacts. (Armageddon is turning into a documentary so slowly, no one’s even noticing.)