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Today in Movie Culture: Basketball In the Movies, 'San Andreas' Without Special Effects and More

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

In honor of the NBA finals, here’s a supercut of the best basketball dunks in movies:

This Jurassic Park print by Rich Kelly is part of Mondo’s “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” exhibit. See more at Business Insider.

See what San Andreas looks like without special effects:

Now watch what San Andreas gets right about West Coast fears of “The Big One”:

Velma and Scooby-Doo try to hurt their competition in this fun Ghostbusters art. See other vehicle-based mash-ups at Geek Tyrant.

Speaking of movie vehicle mash-ups, here’s your latest Mad Max: Fury Road parody, mixed with Cars, which should be called Mad Mater: Fury Road (via Pixel Faker):

Cosplay of the Day: Dogs as Minions is a thing. See more on Twitter via Jordan Zakarin here and here.

Watch the intro to the old Superfriends cartoon redone with the characters’ live-action counterparts (via Geek Tyrant):

Here’s a poster mashing up all your favorite movie robots (via /Film):

Today is the 95th anniversary of Max Fleischer‘s very early live-action/animation hybrid The Ouija Board, from the Out of the Inkwell series. Watch it in full below.

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The Last Sci-Fi Blog: Celebrate 'Jurassic World' by Watching a Movie Where Astronauts Fight Dinosaurs

Jurassic World hasn’t even opened yet and people are already talking about a sequel. And why not? The fourth film in this ever-beloved franchise is on track to make a ton of money in its opening weekend. Unless the movie is a total critical disaster that everyone hates, a follow-up will happen, even if director Colin Trevorrow won’t be around to yell “Action!” and “Cut!” It’s inevitable.

So that brings us to the question of the moment: where do you go after Jurassic World? After all, they’ve already upped the ante from “park” to “world,” which is one helluva jump. The next step is obvious and natural: it’s time to send the dinosaurs to outer space.

Okay, this is where I’ll get serious. No, I do not think a fifth Jurassic Park movie should take place in space. That’s a terrible a terrible idea. Granted, it’s a terrible idea that I would pay big bucks to see, but I would never actually endorse it…even though the thought of a T-Rex floating through a zero-g pen desperately trying to devour hapless astronauts makes the caveman corners of my brain light up with idiotic glee. The real reason I bring this up is because Jurassic World is currently saturating the market with all things dinosaur and I can’t stop thinking of one the best bad science fiction movies I have ever seen: Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet.

Since no one has actually made “Jurassic Park in Space,” Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet has the unique honor of being the only film to remotely come close to that delirious logline. Released in 1965, the film follows a team of space explorers who land on the surface of Venus, only to learn that the Earth’s next door neighbor is, inexplicably, home to dinosaurs. The result is 74 minutes of poorly dubbed actors running around inexpensive but surprisingly gorgeous sets while getting in firefights with people in dinosaur costumes.

To be fair, the version that you will find in every B-movie box set is the ruthlessly re-edited American cut of a supposedly superior Soviet movie. However, we will say this much for what the American distributors did to the film: they did everything in their power to make the whole thing incomprehensible.

No one will ever accuse the American cut of Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet of being good, but I will stand here and accuse it of being one of the best movies you will ever watch when you’re under influence of your choice substance. Like many cheap genre movies, it takes a little while to get going (and there are endless scenes of characters flying or driving nowhere in particular), but the good stuff is so good that it has to be seen to be believed. This is the only movie ever made where astronauts, with glass bubble helmets and everything, fire handguns at velociraptors.

And while you will find plenty to laugh about when you watch this movie, a part of you, deep down inside, will realize that this thing is ripe for rediscovery. Hell, it’s ripe for a remake! Imagine astronauts battling dinosaurs on a $150 million budget! Imagine a certified genius like Guillermo del Toro calling the shots. If that doesn’t stir up your nerdy interest than you have to answer an important question: what is it like to not know joy?

Don’t take my word for it. Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet has fallen into the public domain and you can watch it in the YouTube embed below. I can guarantee that you will have as much fun with this movie as you will with Jurassic World (even if you have fun for all of the wrong reasons).

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University of North Carolina Charged With Five 'Level 1' Violations By NCAA

The Old Well on campus at The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N.C. Reports from the school and the NCAA say UNC-Chapel Hill faculty and staff oversaw a student-athlete grade-inflation scheme that lasted almost twenty years.

The Old Well on campus at The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N.C. Reports from the school and the NCAA say UNC-Chapel Hill faculty and staff oversaw a student-athlete grade-inflation scheme that lasted almost twenty years. Gerry Broome/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Gerry Broome/AP

Last October, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill released findings from an internal investigation that revealed approximately 3,000 students — mostly student athletes — had their grades inflated through sham courses in the school’s African and Afro-American studies department over a span of almost 20 years.

Now the NCAA has hit the school with five “Level 1” violations, or “severe breaches of contract” because of that grade-inflation. The NCAA says UNC faculty and staff did the following:

-University faculty and staff provided “special arrangements to student athletes that were not generally available to the student body,” including offering classes as independent study courses with little if any attendance requirements and “artificially high final grades.”

-A philosophy instructor who also served as an athletic academic counselor “knowingly provided extra benefits in the form of impermissible academic assistance and special arrangements.”

-The head of the school’s African and Afro-American studies department and a student services manager in that department withheld information from the NCAA during their investigation and refused to participate in interviews with UNC officials and NCAA enforcement staff.

-The university failed to monitor the behavior of faculty and staff involved in the grade inflation scheme. The school also failed to monitor the academic departments involved. The NCAA says the sham courses existed for 18 years and went mostly unchecked by the school.

UNC-Chapel Hill says it received the notice of allegations from the NCAA on May 20, but waited to post it until the school’s Public Records Office could review it. School Chancellor Carol F. Folt and Director of Athletics Bubba Cunningham issued a statement that says the school takes the allegations seriously and will respond to the notice “using facts and evidence to present a full picture of our case.” The statement continues:

“We believe the University has done everything possible to address the academic irregularities that ended in 2011 and prevent them from recurring. We have implemented more than 70 reforms and initiatives to ensure and enhance academic integrity. We will continue to monitor the effectiveness of those measures and, wherever needed, put additional safeguards in place.”

The statement also says, “Although we may identify some instances in the NCAA’s notice where we agree and others where we do not, we are committed to continue pursuing a fair and just outcome for Carolina.”

UNC-Chapel Hill says once it responds to the NCAA’s notice of allegations, the NCAA has 60 days to send its own response. A hearing will then take place “later this fall,” with final infractions expected six to eight weeks later.

NPR previously reported on UNC-Chapel Hill’s grade inflation scandal, which first came to light in 2011. Last October, the school said it would launch a new public records website to “enhance accountability,” add faculty to a group that reviews student athlete eligibility, establish a working group to help people share concerns about academics, and implement a plan to “stabilize” the school’s Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies, the department where most of the grade-fixing took place.

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Former Goalie Says U.S. Women's Soccer Team Looks 'Incredibly Strong'

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The 2015 Women’s World Cup opens in Canada Saturday. NPR’s Melissa Block talks to former goalie Briana Scurry about the U.S. team’s prospects. Scurry was on the last U.S. team that won in 1999.

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

You can count me among the many millions who can’t wait for the Women’s World Cup to get underway this weekend. Over the next month, 24 national teams will be playing in six cities across Canada. Japan is the defending champion. The U.S. women will be trying to end a long drought. They haven’t won the World Cup since 1999, and they won that championship in large part thanks to goalie Briana Scurry. She’s retired now from soccer and joins me here in the studio to talk about what’s in store for this World Cup.

Welcome. Thanks for coming in.

BRIANA SCURRY: Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

BLOCK: And let’s start with the U.S. team. You’ve been watching them play in friendlies leading up to the World Cup. How do they look to you? What are the strengths, what are the weaknesses?

SCURRY: The U.S. team looks incredible strong. One of the reasons is because they have a great mixture of players who have incredible experience, like Abby Wambach, Christie Rampone, Shannon Boxx, and then some young players that are coming into the team that are really making a difference like, Sydney Leroux and Alex Morgan. And so it’s very encouraging to see this great team coming in. They didn’t have the greatest result on their friendly game that they played last week against South Korea, but I’m not really concerned about that because I know that there’s different things that go on with a lead-up game that may not be a factor for the actual finals.

BLOCK: What other teams – what other countries are you looking at that look like really strong threats to you?

SCURRY: I feel, honestly, five teams have a very good chance of winning. The USA of course, is always a favorite. You have Germany, who won in 2007, didn’t do that well in 2011. They have a score to settle. France is looking very good as well. They’re not a team that the U.S. is playing until later in the round. And Japan, who’s the defending champion, they’re always a contender. And one dark horse that I do want people to pay notice to is Canada. They are having the World Cup in their home country. There is a intangible element to being the home team that can lift them up and maybe help them rise further in the tournament than you think they would go otherwise.

BLOCK: This World Cup is opening of course in the shadow of the FIFA scandals – the corruption scandals, the arrests, the announced resignation of FIFA’s president, Sepp Blatter. What’s your take on FIFA and what’s going on there?

SCURRY: Last Wednesday when I heard the allegations, the one thing that made the biggest impact on me was, oh no, look at these horrible allegations that are coming out 10 days before the Women’s World Cup begins. As a soccer player, as somebody who loves the game, I wanted the focus to be on the 24 teams, especially the USA. That was my initial feeling. And now that this has ruled-out a little bit, now I feel like, you know what? It’s better that FIFA gets this handled and that this gets taken care of and that we get the bad elements that were clearly in FIFA out of FIFA so that we can really do a transformation.

BLOCK: I want to take you back, Briana, to the 1999 World Cup final against China. It was a scoreless game, so it went to a shootout – to penalty kicks to determine the winner. You’re in goal for the United States. China and the U.S. both score on their first two shots and then – let’s listen to what happened next.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED BROADCASTER: Ying will go next, the first starter for China to take a penalty kick

(APPLAUSE)

UNIDENTIFIED BROADCASTER: The shot. Save – Scurry.

(APPLAUSE)

BLOCK: (Laughter) Briana, you just did a fist pump in the studio. You’re still re-living that moment, 16 years later…

SCURRY: It never gets old. It never gets old.

BLOCK: …When you made that save.

SCURRY: It’s awesome. It’s awesome. I still – I mean, hearing that for me, it just brought me right back there, which is really cool.

BLOCK: After you make that save, you are ferocious on the field. You are pumping your fist and I don’t know what you’re saying. Are you saying yes, or…

SCURRY: Yes, that’s exactly what I was saying.

BLOCK: Shouting.

SCURRY: Yes. For me, in focusing for huge moments like that, I consider myself someone who is like a coil. So I was coiled-up, ready to spring for every penalty kick, and so I was a coil. And then once I sprung to make that save, all the emotion, all the training, all the years of waiting to be able to have this moment and planning for it in my mind and doing the mental work it takes for the mentality of it, in that moment, I was living what I had envisioned for so long. And so emotions were just flowing out of me, and that’s what you saw.

BLOCK: Briana Scurry, thanks so much for coming in.

SCURRY: Thank you for having me, appreciate it.

BLOCK: And enjoy the World Cup.

SCURRY: I will. You too.

BLOCK: Briana Scurry, goalie for the world champion 1999 U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team, also a two- time Olympic gold medalist.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

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Lightning Hope Lesson Was Learned In Opening Game Loss To Blackhawks

With a 2-1 victory over the Tampa Bay Lightning in the Stanley Cup finals safely behind him, Chicago Blackhawks’ goalie Corey Crawford summed up what it took to win: “They sat back in the third.”

In the third period Wednesday night, the Tampa Bay Lightning did sit back and, in doing so, dropped a relentless attacking style that had got them to their first Stanley Cup final in over a decade.

The Lightning got the lead early in the game, with one of the more spectacular goals in recent Stanley Cup history. With his back to the net, forward Alex Killorn batted a shot out of mid-air and past a stunned Crawford.

Tampa kept up the pressure for the first two periods, but Crawford, who has become more dominant as these playoffs have progressed, kept them off the scoreboard.

After that, the Lightning appeared content to protect their slim lead.

Two third period Chicago goals, minutes apart, proved what a mistake that was. The Lightning didn’t recover.

“Against a team like Chicago, you can’t let them keep coming at you the way we did,” said Tampa coach Jon Cooper after the game.

Still, there are plenty of upsides here for the young, talented Lightning team. In losing by only a goal, they proved they are a match for a veteran Blackhawks squad that is making its third Stanley Cup final appearance in the six past years. The ‘Hawks are a team of living legends, featuring stars like Jonathan Toews, Patrick Sharp, Duncan Keith and Patrick Kane, whose stickhandling abilities border on wizardry.

But Tampa has arguably the best young talent in the NHL right now. Its usually dangerous triplets line, featuring Tyler Johnson, Nikita Kucherov and Ondrej Palat, all in the top eight playoff goal scorers, failed to score a point Wednesday night. If they start clicking, what is already shaping up to be an entertaining series will only be more so.

Game 2 is in Tampa Bay at 8:00 PM.

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Thomas Mapfumo, Zimbabwe's Cultural Advocate In Exile

Thomas Mapfumo performs on stage during Live 8, Africa Calling, in 2005.
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Thomas Mapfumo performs on stage during Live 8, Africa Calling, in 2005. Matt Cardy/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Matt Cardy/Getty Images

As Bob Marley is to Jamaicans or Fela Kuti is to Nigerians, Thomas Mapfumo is to Zimbabweans. The bandleader is a superstar in his home country, both for his masterful blending of traditional sounds with world music and for his powerful political messages. Mapfumo has been a tireless critic of the colonial government of former Southern Rhodesia, as well as the dictatorship that presently rules Zimbabwe.

Music critic Banning Eyre has written a new biography of Mapfumo and compiled an album of his music, both titled Lion Songs: Thomas Mapfumo And The Music That Made Zimbabwe. Eyre recently joined NPR’s Robert Siegel to discuss Mapfumo’s music and his career of moving people — both on the dance floor and in their political views.

“He is a singer and a bandleader,” Eyre says, “but also an activist: a social critic who has kept in his heart the interests of poor people and rural people and people who become the victims of governments, whether it’s the white, racist Rhodesian regime or the corrupt regime of Robert Mugabe. He’s a politician in the sense that he has really moved the politics of the country forward. But really, at a deeper level, he’s an advocate of culture.”

One element that stands out in Mapfumo’s music is the way he uses a traditional thumb piano called the mbira, which Eyre explains is believed to have the ability to contact the spirits of ancestors. Mapfumo translates music traditionally played on the mbira — a repertoire of songs thought to have been around since ancient times — to the electric guitar.

“And so, when Mapfumo started putting that music on electric guitars in the 1970s and singing songs that were both bringing forward the culture but also attacking the regime and encouraging fighters,” Eyre says, “it was a really powerful package.”

Other former British colonies in Africa saw black-majority governments take over once given independence, but in Southern Rhodesia, colonial whites declared their own independence and wanted to remain a white-ruled country. A 1977 song, “Pamuromo Chete (It’s Only Talk),” was Mapfumo’s response to a statement by the leader of the white government, Ian Smith.

“Smith had declared that there would never be a black-majority government, not in a thousand years, so Mapfumo was right there with his response: ‘You’re just talking, it’s only talk,'” Eyre says. “And he was right. Within a few months, Smith had to walk that back. And you can hear this kind of moral authority in [Mapfumo’s] voice in that song. This is the moment when he’s really discovering that he can harness traditional rhythms, melodies and attitudes and make it really sting.”

Now living in exile in Oregon due to his outspoken criticism of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, Mapfumo yearns to go home, according to Eyre.

“He still has this … sense of unfinished business: that he’s needed at home,” Eyre says. “He tries his best to record music and release it, but you never really lose that restlessness, that desire to get back.”

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Latitudes: The Global Music You Must Hear In May

Galician bagpiper Cristina Pato and her band.

Galician bagpiper Cristina Pato and her band. Xan Padron/Courtesy of the artists hide caption

itoggle caption Xan Padron/Courtesy of the artists

One of the biggest pleasures of listening to global music is hearing artists wed the past, present and future — especially as they create smart, innovative juxtapositions of elements you might think have no musical or cultural commonalities. And this month’s roundup is full of those kinds of surprises.

If you’re a fan of our Tiny Desk Concerts, you may remember a highly unusual, enormously vital and joyous performance by Galician bagpiper Cristina Pato. She’s back with her quartet for an album called Latina, which explores all kinds of great sounds, textures and rhythms from the Latin world, from Spain to Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and beyond. Here’s a fandango written by one of her band members, bassist Edward Perez, that tweaks a popular dance rhythm from Spain that migrated across Europe and into the Americas.

Moroccan pop star Saad Lamjarred’s new song “Lm3allem” (“Teacher”) is not exactly breaking new sonic ground, but the eye-popping video is a total blast — and it seems to be a direct homage to the exciting work of the Moroccan-born, U.K.-based visual artist Hassan Hajjaj (whose work happens to be on display right now at the Newark Museum in New Jersey), down to repeating some of his most familiar images, beginning with those young women on motorbikes.

This video isn’t new, but I just came across the 18-year-old female Afghan rapper Sonita Alizadeh, and her song “Brides for Sale,” through a feature broadcast earlier this month on the public radio program The World. Raised since age 8 in Tehran, Alizadeh was told by her parents that she would be married off to a man in Afghanistan — because her family needed the dowry money to pay for her brother’s wedding. In response, the anguished Alizadeh wrote this song, by turns anguished and acidic.

The upshot: Alizadeh’s parents loved the video and told her she didn’t have to marry. She is now studying in Utah, but she told The World she’ll always sing about Afghanistan.

And the dawn of summer should bring dance parties, so here are two songs to get your groove on. I’ve been a fan of the band Yiddish Twist Orchestra for a while now. They call what they do “London retropolitan.” It’s a throwback to the 1950s and early 1960s mashups of big band, mambo, calypso — and Eastern European Jewish music. (See: Bagels and Bongos.) Their new album, Let’s!, is hugely fun, and I bet you’ll never hear the chestnut “Bei Mir Bistu Shein,” birthed in the Yiddish theater of New York’s Lower East Side, in quite the same way ever again.

The other is “Tepotzteco,” a track from the Oakland duo Dirtwire (David Satori and Evan Fraser). Its name hearkens back to an ancient Aztec temple that attracted worshipers from as far away as Guatemala. But here, it’s a song that weaves electronic sounds with cumbia and a West African ngoni lute. But rather than sounding sleek and cold, the song is full of grit and pulsates with life. The video was shot in Guatemala City with dancers from the Heroes Company crew.

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Arkansas Storms

Two people died in Tushka, Oklahoma, as a tornado ripped through the tiny town late Thursday afternoon. The storm system also spawned 80-mile an hour winds in Arkansas, where five people were killed. The twister…