Back To The Future?

This week Pixar released a trailer for their newest animated feature, Lightyear. I guess you could call it a prequel of sorts, as it's all about the "real life" Buzz Lightyear, who was the inspiration for the action figure featured in the Toy Story movies.

That's admittedly kind of a cool idea. There's one major problem with it though.

Based on the technology seen in the movie (such as spaceships with warp drive), it's clearly taking place sometime in the far future.

The action figures were modeled after the real Buzz Lightyear, right? That means they were manufactured AFTER he became famous. Which means all the Toy Story movies have to take place in the future as well!

Didn't think about THAT now, did you Pixar?

I Think NASA's Lost Its Damn Mind

This week NASA unveiled its new Z-1 prototype spacesuit, to generally universal hooting and mocking. And no wonder! Do you notice anything slightly familiar about it? Somebody at NASA must be a big Pixar fan. 

I'm guessing the leader of this project must screwed around on Facebook for the past several months, never paying much attention to what his team was doing. Once he did finally wander down to the lab for the big spacesuit unveiling he no doubt did a spit take, cursed loudly and hoped his superiors didn't have kids or had never seen any Toy Story movies.

Seriously, this is what my tax dollars are paying for? A space suit patterned after that of a cartoon character? I will grant you that there may be a finite number of ways in which to design a spacesuit, and some similarity to the one Buzz wears was inevitable. But did they really have to trim the thing in fluorescent green? The only thing missing is the pop out wings on the back, unless that's what's inside the large backpack apparatus.

Oh well. I guess they could have used a worse inspiration...