July 25, 2016

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Today in Movie Culture: Matt Damon Recaps the Bourne Franchise, Why All Superheroes Are Villains and More

Here are a bunch of little bites to satisfy your hunger for movie culture:

Franchise Recap of the Day:

Get ready for Jason Bourne with this video of Matt Damon himself recapping the first three Bourne movies in just 90 seconds (via Geek Tyrant):

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Franchise History of the Day:

In honor of the release of Star Trek Beyond, Burger Fiction chronicles the 50-year evolution of Star Trek in movies and TV:

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Cosplay of the Day:

There are many videos highlighting cosplay from Comic-Con, but only Vanity Fair has one where the cosplayers dramatically cover David Bowie’s “Heroes”:

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Fan Theory of the Day:

In a ranting video list for Cracked, Daniel O’Brien argues that every superhero in the movies is actually a bad guy:

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Fan Art of the Day:

With Pokemon Go all the rage, the latest Nicolas Cage meme comes to us from artist Sarah Wainschel. See more at BuzzFeed.

Studio Tribute of the Day:

In a video titled “Fan.tasia,” Lindsay McCutcheon honors Disney’s animated features of the last 38 years with a musical mashup (via One Perfect Shot):

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Mashup of the Day:

This time it’s a character trope being mashed together, as Dylan Nanayakkara shows how Le Samurai, The Driver and Drive fit so well together because of their stoic male antihero (via Cinematic Montage Creators):

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Movie Craftsman of the Day:

The Academy showcases title designer Dan Perri, best known for The Exorcist, Raging Bull and Star Wars, in their latest original video:

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Filmmaker in Focus:

Channel Criswell goes deep into the deconstructionism of Lars von Trier in this video on the filmmaker’s unique philosophy and style:

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Classic Trailer of the Day:

Today is the 30th anniversary of the release of Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive. Watch the original, King-hosted trailer for the campy horror movie below.

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Michael Jordan Speaks Up For Black Lives And Police Officers

Michael Jordan says he is giving $1 million each to an NAACP legal fund and a community policing group to help find solutions to violence against African-Americans and police officers.

Michael Jordan says he is giving $1 million each to an NAACP legal fund and a community policing group to help find solutions to violence against African-Americans and police officers. Charles Rex Arbogast/AP hide caption

toggle caption Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

Michael Jordan is condemning violence against both African-Americans and police. His forceful and emotional statement, released by ESPN’s The Undefeated, is a marked change for the NBA legend.

Jordan has been famously apolitical during his career — first as a Hall of Fame basketball player for the Chicago Bulls and more recently as an owner of the Charlotte Hornets — avoiding public statements on politics and civil rights, when other athletes have spoken out.

“I can no longer stay silent,” Jordan writes. “We need to find solutions that ensure people of color receive fair and equal treatment AND that police officers — who put their lives on the line every day to protect us all — are respected and supported.”

The statement comes after the recent police shootings of two African-American men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and two deadly attacks against police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge.

“I know this country is better than that,” Jordan writes.

Jordan says he’s making $1 million donations to two organizations, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Institute for Community-Police Relations, which was recently established by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The aim, Jordan writes, is to help “build trust and respect between communities and law enforcement.”

The donations come during a period of renewed advocacy and statements about social issues by professional athletes and sports leagues.

Current NBA stars LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade and Chris Paul opened the 2016 ESPYs, earlier this month, by asking professional athletes to speak up on issues of social justice and to help unite communities in the U.S.

WNBA players have spoken out, too, wearing solid black shirts during warm-ups, or shirts with the printed words “#BlackLivesMatter” and “#Dallas5,” in reference to the five police officers who were killed in Dallas earlier this month.

Most recently, the NBA announced that it was stripping Charlotte, N.C., of the 2017 NBA All-Star Game because of North Carolina’s House Bill 2 — the so-called bathroom bill — which has been called discriminatory against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

In making that announcement, the league stated: “While we recognize that the NBA cannot choose the law in every city, state, and country in which we do business, we do not believe we can successfully host our All-Star festivities in Charlotte in the climate created by HB2.”

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The Big Internet Brands Of The '90s — Where Are They Now?

A CompuServe system shows an index of stories by the Columbus Dispatch and Associated Press on July 9, 1980.

Verizon is buying Yahoo for $4.8 billion, acquiring its “core Internet assets” — search, email, finance, news, sports, Tumblr, Flickr — in essence writing the final chapter of one of the longest-running Internet companies.

Last year, Verizon bought another Internet pioneer, AOL (aka America Online) for $4.4 billion — complete with its ad targeting technology and content sites Huffington Post and TechCrunch.

This got us thinking: What happened to all those other big brands that dominated the early Internet experience? Here’s a nerdy remembrance of a few of them. (A TL;DR preview: Yahoo and AOL bought a bunch of them, though many survived far longer than you might think.)

CompuServe

A CompuServe system shows an index of stories by the Columbus Dispatch and Associated Press on July 9, 1980. AP hide caption

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The original Internet service provider launched for consumers as a dial-up online information service in 1979, and its popularity skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s. It was the original portal to the web, with news, chats, file sharing — a first Internet experience for several generations of users.

H&R Block (yep, that tax-prep company) bought Compuserve in 1980 and in 1997 sold it to WorldCom, which in turn passed on the subscriber base to the growing rival AOL. After itself going through a merger and then a spin-off with Time Warner, AOL officially shut down CompuServe in 2009.

But! A relic version still exists here.

Prodigy

A younger competitor to CompuServe, Prodigy was a “home computer information service” launched nationally in 1990 by a partnership of Sears and IBM, distinguishing itself with the addition of graphics and advertising support. The service lost money and users in the early ’90s and went through a reboot in 1993, according to Wired.

Prodigy Classic officially shut down in 1999, citing the “Y2K problem,” and the Atlantic has a great long read on what went wrong. The company re-imagined itself as an Internet provider and got fully acquired by SBC communications, now known as AT&T.

AltaVista

CEO Rod Schrock shows AltaVista's new look in 1999.

CEO Rod Schrock shows AltaVista’s new look in 1999. Paul Sakuma/AP hide caption

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Launched in 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation as a demo project, AltaVista — aka a web “super spider” — was essentially an indexing predecessor of Google.

It changed hands a few times: Compaq Computer bought it in 1998 (for $3.3 million), one-time Internet giant CMGI bought it in 1999 (for $2.3 billion), ad company Overture Services bought it in 2003 (for $140 million) and it was acquired by Yahoo later the same year. Yahoo officially shut down AltaVista in 2013.

GeoCities

This was like the original Facebook — or, um, MySpace? You could find a community and build your own neon-colored, spinning-animation, multi-fonted, totally cool personal web page! After its mid-’90s launch, Yahoo bought GeoCities for more than $3.5 billion during the dot-com boom in 1999, ran it as Yahoo! Geocities and eventually shut it down in 2009.

But if you’re nostalgic, you could still Geocities-ize websites, thanks to the Internet.

Ask Jeeves

Jeeves came and went as the friendly online butler, eventually retired by Ask.com.

Jeeves came and went as the friendly online butler, eventually retired by Ask.com. Adam Berry/Bloomberg/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Adam Berry/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Remember that web butler Jeeves who answered your web queries in a distant echo of today’s Siri?

Launched in 1996, Jeeves didn’t live up to Google’s search engine ascent: Bought in 2005 by IAC (whose businesses include OkCupid, Tinder, The Daily Beast, CollegeHumor and Vimeo), it went through several relaunches, abandoning the search engine and emerging as Ask.com.

Angelfire

The website host/builder is still around! Launched in 1996, it was bought a year later by another dot-com startup WhoWhere, which in turn was bought in 1998 by Lycos, described by CNN at the time as “the world’s fourth most popular Web site, behind America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft.” Lycos, after trading hands many times, currently belongs to Indian digital media company Ybrant Digital.

Netscape

The original caption of this photo read: “The Netscape Navigator home page on the Internet’s World Wide Web is seen Wednesday, Aug. 9, 1995.” AP hide caption

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A brainchild of now-legendary Mark Andreessen and Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics, the Netscape browser beat Microsoft to the market in 1994. After intense “browser wars,” detailed by Engadget, Netscape’s release of the source code spurred the creation of Mozilla.

AOL bought Netscape for the dot-com-bubbleprice of $4.2 billion in 1998, though it ended up costing $10 billion. As Firefox gained prominence, AOL made several attempts to revive Netscape’s popularity, but eventually stopped supporting it in 2008.

ICQ

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YouTube

Launched in 1996 by Israeli company Mirabilis, the “I seek you” chat service was an alternative to AIM and Yahoo Messenger (both of which are still around, and the latter is apparently beloved by oil traders).

AOL bought Mirabilis in 1998 for $287 million and sold ICQ in 2010 to Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies for $188 million.

Bonus ’90s Brands That Are Still Around

  • eBay (owns Stubhub; previously also owned Skype, Craigslist and PayPal);
  • Match.com (now owned by IAC, along with Tinder and OkCupid);
  • Amazon.com (owns Audible, Zappos);
  • MapQuest (launched as a web service in the 1990s, it was bought by America Online, which is now owned by Verizon);
  • WebMD (formed as a result of a 1999 merger, backed by Microsoft and featuring the co-founder of Netscape).

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