A “teaser” for Joss Whedon’s Marvel TV franchise “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” is set to air during tonight’s season finale of “Once Upon A Time.” For now, here’s the – um… teaser for the teaser?

Egh. Y’know what? There’s still enough residual goodwill from “The Avengers” that I can’t even be mad about this kind of marketing. Yes, Marvel (and Whedon) are allowed a pass on this – they did the impossible, they earned it.

The curse of being a “Venture Bros.” fan is that a big part of the show’s charm (at this point) is the way it’s gradually turned making fun of the self-referential moebius-strip nature of comic books and “cult” genre series (OMG! This suddenly super-prominent character was in the background on that random flashback three seasons ago!) into a functioning continuity that’s rewarding in it’s own right… which becomes REALLY hard to keep track of since there are such lengthy breaks between seasons.

Fortunately, since the break between seasons 4 and 5 (debuting June 2nd!) was longer than usual, Adult Swim has posted this compressed recap of the important-ish stuff – though what I’m most excited about is the apparent Season 5 returns of Captain Sunshine and Ghost Robot (a ghost living inside a robot, which we are told is completely different than a machine with a soul.)

I liked it.

RIP Ray Harryhausen.

I don’t generally get professionally jealous of other people in my industry, but seeing James “AVGN” Rolfe getting to work with Troma founder and “Toxic Avenger” creator Lloyd Kaufman recently got me close – damn, that must have been awesome. But then, James has worked his ass off building his brand and more-or-less inventing a big slice of web video business – if anyone deserves to have things finally start paying off big-time, he does.

In any case, Kaufman is still doing his thing as a vanguard of authentic, no-bullshit independent moviemaking. He and Troma’s latest offering, a reboot(?) of “Class of Nukem High” (one of their better 80s offerings, about a High School whose student body is mutated by a leak at the nearby nuclear power plant) officially titled “Return to The Class of Nukem High” has had a teaser up for a bit now promoting the film’s scheduled premiere at Cannes 2013 – ULTRA NSFW, but check it out if you haven’t already:

Hey, Internet? You want borderline-obsessive, Zapruder-esque coverage of a likely-middling movie based on a bunch of toys from the mid-1980s!? Of course you do. Here’s the first BTS video of the Michael Bay produced “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” movie, featuring our first glimpse of Megan Fox as April. Does this meaningless, masturbatory entertainment “journalism” puff-piece tell us anything useful about the movie?

(with apologies for the wonky formatting caused by aol’s shitty video embed)

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UPDATE: CBM has some higher-quality set pics: Hair has some red highlights (seriously, though – this is the weakest detail to flip out over) and she does indeed have a yellow coat. So… yeah.

1.) She’s not a redhead. Everybody lose your shit now.

 2.) No yellow jumpsuit. Not terribly surprising, but interestingly enough the outfit she is wearing in this clip is just a skirt away from the (in)famous “Ravishing Reporter” action figure. Coincidence or fanservice? You decide.

 3.) She’s a reporter, which means they really did change that script. The “leaked” screenplay that infuriated fans last year was also allegedly so hated by the producers that it helped scuttle the first incarnation of the project entirely; and reports were that it was either extensively rewritten or even thrown out entirely. In that version, April was primarily onhand as Casey Jones girlfriend, a small-town girl who claims to be on her way to journalism stardom in New York but is revealed to actually have only managed to finagle a job as an intern/gopher. In this video she’s clearly playing a TV news reporter (note the microphone) doing some sort of human-interest piece that involves a trampoline. CONJECTURE: New April’s arc will be “reporter sick of doing cheezy daytime-news filler, stumbles on Turtles etc. while chasing out-there scoops for legitimacy.”

 4.) She may or may not work for Channel 6. The resolution on the video is iffy, but if a few shots the logo on her microphone looks a bit like a “6.” That doesn’t actually mean anything, other than to indicate that the production may have doubled-down on fanservice for whatever reason.

The next year or so will find Tom Hanks back in American Hero mode in a big way: He’s slated to form an Americana moebius-strip by playing Walt Disney in the making-of-“Mary-Poppins” drama “Saving Mr. Banks” soon enough, but first up he’ll be “Captain Philips,” the real-life captain of a freighter attacked by Somali pirates a few years ago. Directing duties went to Paul Greengrass, so… “United 93. But On A Boat. And With A Happy Ending.”

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The (perhaps unwitting) con-job Lee Daniels is running on the old guard movie press is kind of a joy to watch: His penchant for social-consciousness casts him as a helmer of Award Season middlebrow pablum, and the halo-effect of his Oprah connection seems to make many unable to discern that his films are actually sleazy, trashy, batshit-insane exploitation junk of the highest order. Seriously, go back and actually watch “Precious.” The only question is whether Daniels himself is a subversive genius in on his own joke or if he thinks his Hallmark-meets-Grindhouse schlock is serious drama, too – the guy is like Tyler Perry’s George Stark.

Anyway, Daniels’ big movie this year is “The Butler,” aka “Black Forrest Gump,” aka “We SWEAR This Is a Real Movie, Not an SNL Sketch.” Forrest Whitaker stars as a White House butler who has a front row seat to turbulent decades of American cultural change as he serves in the background of the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and Reagan administrations. It already looks completely nuts, mostly due to a rosters of stars running the gamut from disastrously bad casting to ingeniously bad casting (JOHN FUCKING CUSACK AS NIXON!!!) – and this is only the early “hide all the ridiculous Lee Daniels stuff” trailer!

And so, the countdown begins: Orson Scott Card now just under six months to find his way in front of a camera, microphone or keyboard and create a “sugar tits”-level public-relations nightmare for Summit Entertainment. Smart money says he’ll find a way…

I’ll admit, there’s a certain incredible finality to finally seeing one of the more influential Young Adult scifi novels of the later 20th Century finally get its movie; but taken on it’s own… wow this is kind of a bland, lifeless trailer, isn’t it?

Apart from fans of the book/series, who is this trailer for? Almost no sense of plot, no context, no real clue as to who the characters are outside of their genre stock-types, not a single piece of action, line of dialogue or even sliver of design-aesthetic that might differentiate it from a thousand other generic scifi pastiches. It’s way too dour and nonspecific for the Ender-aged kids who ought be the target demo, but it also dwells too much on the child characters to fool older audiences into thinking this is “Harrison Ford Barks At Middle-Schoolers: The Movie.” I’d say it calls to mind the “Wing Commander” movie… but nobody remembers that well enough to call it to mind.

Also… I could be mishearing, but I’m reasonably certain nobody said “Buggers” once. Willing to bet they decided to just not bother trying to make that work. Probably a good decision, overall…

Ray Harryhausen, one of the greatest (and by far the most influential) special-effects masters of all time, died today. So today sucks.

More to come, obviously. But until then, here’s a montage of all his famous creatures: