We can all agree that the movie version of “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” failed, right? I mean, it was terrible. It wasted the talents of some very good actors like Martin Freeman and Sam Rockwell (I am literally traumatized to the point where I can’t watch “Moon”, because I can’t believe that the man who gave that performance as Zaphod Beeblebrox is actually capable of acting) and spent a lot of its time cutting away brilliant dialogue and clever narration to focus on action sequences and set-pieces that should never be the focus of a comedy to begin with. It made back its money, it didn’t get totally shredded by the critics, but I think it’s safe to say that history has not been kind to it.

And we can all agree that while it was better-acted and better-scripted, the original TV adaptation of “Hitch-Hiker’s” had some serious problems with its production values, right? I mean, trying to do a story on the scope of Douglas Adams’ novels, one that starts with the destruction of the entire planet and moves on to the building of a whole new one, taking in two-headed aliens and vast varieties of epic visuals along the way, on a BBC budget in the 80s…let’s just call it over-ambitious and leave it at that.

But there is a version of “Hitch-Hiker’s” that’s already very well-acted and perfectly-scripted. It’s the original audio play that aired on BBC Radio, the one that Adams adapted into his novel. And there is a medium where budget doesn’t matter and anything that the mind can conceive, the screen can portray. It’s animation. And with the advances in computer animation, it’s easier than ever for the average computer user to make professional-quality animation.

So this is what this leads me to: What if you took the BBC Radio play as the soundtrack for an animated adaptation? Sure, it’d be a copyright violation, and doing the whole thing would probably be out of the financial reach of most hobbyist animators…but if you broke it up into five minute chunks, say, and had each person just animate their five minutes, you’d wind up with a fascinating range of visual styles and a potentially high-quality adaptation of what has famously been seen as one of the great unadaptable sci-fi stories. And as long as nobody made money off it and nobody sued, who’d complain?

Call me crazy, but I actually think this is a good idea.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

So Google has decided that the best way to advertise its various products is to get you, the user, to do it for them:

The crowdsourcing of advertising in ways like this always interests me because originally the point of these things was to get innovative advertising at lower cost: enticing people to submit creative marketing work on spec by dangling a prize has only really started to come of age. However, what’s new in this case is that nowhere on Google’s Demo Slam website can I find even a hint of a prize. It seems that the prize is bragging rights. (It’s entirely possible that Google will give out some neat prizes to the people they consider winners or the ones they really like, but somehow I don’t think the prize will be “a bunch of money” so much as it will be, I dunno, a few Android phones or something.)

And here’s the thing: I’m going to guess that people are still going to jump at the chance to advertise Google’s stuff for them. Partially this is because people like Google as a company and like Google’s products (even if, in some cases, they probably shouldn’t). Partially this is because people want to be famous or at least recognizable, because personal fame is now a sort of currency, and advertisers are rapidly coming to realize that said fame is perceived to have value in and of itself and don’t need to add money to sweeten the deal.

Or maybe just saying “chubby bunny” with marshmallows in your mouth is awesome. I dunno.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist. Find the extra bonus Youtube link for double points!

As you may or may not be aware, DC Comics is getting ready to launch their foray into the world of MMORPGs with an online game that’s coming out sometime next year. (As with pretty much every MMO, “sometime next year” was “sometime this year” until they decided that it needed more work. You definitely don’t want to plan your life around the launch of an MMO, is all I’m saying.) The hope of the developers…well, the hope of the developers is that it’s going to be a spectacular success that will dethrone “Worlds of Warcraft”, be universally hailed by gamers everywhere, and make them all so much money that they can buy their own giant robot made out of smaller robots. But the realistic hope is that it will knock over “City of Heroes” as king of the much smaller “superhero MMO” mountain.

My guess is that it won’t. This is not the same thing as saying it’ll fail; I want to stress right off the bat that I think it’ll make money. It’s actually pretty easy to make money on an MMO, because you’re charging people $10-15 a month to play a game you’ve already paid the development costs for. You’d have to make a spectacularly bad game in order to fail to cover the costs of server maintenance and QA with a subscription-based model, and very few people have made spectacularly bad games. (That said, it is theoretically possible for the game to fail, long-term, if the game gets enough negative reviews that DC decides to pull their license with Sony when it comes up for renewal. But that’s pretty unlikely.)

But just because it doesn’t fail, doesn’t mean it’s going to succeed. And I do think that DCUO is going to wind up in that same shadowy limbo of “making enough to keep going” that Champions Online wound up in, instead of making the push to topple CoH. (Full disclosure: I have a 72-month veteran’s badge in CoH. I don’t know that I’d call myself a raving fanboy, but I’m not unbiased and I know that the hardest thing about bias to recognize is how much of it you have.) DCUO has a lot of the same problems CO did–it’s much easier for CoH to zip in and copy their relatively small innovations than it is for a new company to design an entire game from the ground up that does everything CoH does and does it better and then add new things on top of that. CoH might have an older game engine, but it’s also got the benefit of six years of additional content and depth of development. (Although thankfully, DCUO is not making the colossal mistake CO did of not having villains available at launch. That right there was a deal-breaker for many.)

But DCUO has the DC superstars! That’s got to count for something, right? Well, it does and it doesn’t. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword, honestly; on the one hand, it does have a brand recognition that CoH doesn’t. Superman is more exciting than Statesman, Batman is more exciting than Manticore, and so on. But on the other hand…let me put it this way. Imagine buying a game called, “DC Universe Online”. Imagine getting home, spending the half-hour to an hour that it takes to install the game, jumping through all the hoops to get registered, logging in…and finding out that you can’t play as Superman. Or Batman. Or Robin, or Wonder Woman, or Elongated Man, or even frickin’ Turtle Boy. Instead, you help those characters. That’s right, you’re the DC Universe’s newest sidekick! (Or, for those of you who would rather play a villain, you’re the Joker’s newest henchman. The strict continuity-correct version of the game has you getting shot in the face by your own boss at level five.)

The interesting thing about this is just how small a mountain we’re talking about, by the way; CoH probably has about 125,000 subscribers (although it’s gotten something of a bump from its recent expansion) while WoW, king of the MMO market, has about ten times that. It really shouldn’t be all that difficult to set your sights higher than CoH, and yet the first game to go head-to-head with it failed. Part of it might simply be the “sunk costs” factor; for me to go to a new super-hero MMO means giving up six years of character development, perks, and time, and DCUO is simply not convincing me that it’s worth that right now. That might change, of course; part of the “fun” of blogging is being forced to eat your words in a year’s time. But my guess is that DCUO is going to be a modest success, which will be a failure by the standards it has set for itself. Only time will tell if I am correct.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Toronto’s papers did not react particularly well to the recent superior court decision striking down prostitution laws, so I wrote about it.

L’il Wayne (@liltunechi)
TWEETS LIKE: Somebody in prison who is passing on messages to a friend to tweet for him, go figure
TYPICAL TWEET: “Kelsey Veert- I appreciate you for puttin your family on to my music & i hope they know that they have an angel for a daughter”
GOOD THING: Seems genuinely happy to pass along tweets via phone from prison, very considerate towards fans
BAD THING: Spells the F-word with two Ks

Russell Brand (@rustyrockets)
TWEETS LIKE: Someone reasonably clever who wants you to give him money
TYPICAL TWEET: “Dear Pope I’m not sure I understand your doctrine. Please send me an outline of the basics. And condoms.”
AMUSING BECAUSE: Gets into interesting exchanges with fans which always sound witty
UNTIL: You read both ends of the conversation and realize it’s a gunfight between the Terminator and Abe Vigoda, the latter of whom is carrying a squirt-gun

Tom Hanks (@tomhanks)
TWEETS LIKE: An assistant being told to tweet for her famous boss person
TYPICAL TWEET: “Nice props from JR on Dave last night. Bless you, “Mercy”. Hanx”
UNINTENTIONALLY AMUSING: Use of “Hanx” at end of every tweet to confirm that, yes, this is in fact Tom Hanks
BUT SECRETLY THE X IS A CLUE TO A VASTER CONSPIRACY! Probably not

Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano)
TWEETS LIKE: That person at the office who means well and sends you email about absolutely anything that somebody forwards her that she thinks people need to know about
TYPICAL TWEET: “iHouse! The Plans 4 Steve Jobs’ New House➛ http://is.gd/fA1rq”
MOST ENDEARING FEATURE: Willingness to get into actual conversations with other people
MOLLIFIED BY: Short attention span

Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago)
TWEETS LIKE: Somebody vastly smarter than you who is enthused about the new possibilities for communication that the medium presents, has considered their various plusses and minuses, and then decided that simply posting pictures of dogs is a waste of time
TYPICAL TWEET: “”When I get out of prison the only people I would care to be with are those who know what beauty is and those who know what sorrow is” – Wilde”
DEMOCRATIC BECAUSE: Retweets messages by new followers on frequent basis, tries to be deeply involved with his followers
UNDEMOCRATIC BECAUSE: He will never retweet anything you say

Dane Cook (@danecook)
TWEETS LIKE: Someone trying out his own material for the very first time
TYPICAL TWEET: “Isn’t everyone a food critic? When I eat a terrible sandwich I don’t need someone else to confirm this with a review.”
SURPRISING: You want to kick him in the nuts less when he’s only in text form
UNSURPRISING: He still mostly sucks

Ryan Seacrest (@RyanSeacrest)
TWEETS LIKE: A fourteen-year-old girl
TYPICAL TWEET: “On radio asking…do u think u can find true love thru online dating?? I think yes but u have to be careful!! What do u think?”
BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT: Lack of tweets asking fans if they think Simon Cowell is gay defies expectations
SECOND BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT: Not fake

Jewel Staite (@JewelStaite)
TWEETS LIKE: Your cousin, you know the one
TYPICAL TWEET: “Doing a Q&A at sachorror at 11am this morning! I better see at least one Jayne hat in the audience…”
MOST VALUABLE SERVICE: Reminding you that celebrities can be really, really boring
SECOND MOST VALUABLE SERVICE: Reminding you that celebrities can remain celebrities even nearly a decade after the last noteworthy thing they did

I’m almost getting sick of writing about Rob Ford and his demented, dishonest mayoral campaign, but what the hell, really.

Even non-Torontonians should see that Youtube. It’s amazingly bad. Watch it, and then realize that Ford is the frontrunner in an election for one of the largest governments in Canada.

My weekly TV series is up at Torontoist.

So Toronto’s mayoral candidates had their seven billionth debate last night and, as always, I was watching.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Rosie DiManno thought today was a great day to write an anti-mosque column. That made it a great day for me to mock her.

Including liveblogging municipal debates for Torontoist.