HowTheGrinchStoleChristmas
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Some of Hollywood's best animatronics are going to auction
If you're a movie buff who can't get enough of Hollywood's monsters, you might want to brace your wallet for impact. Famed special effects guru Rick Baker is auctioning over 400 items from his collection, including animatronics that were key to livening up aliens, apes and other creatures in big movies ranging from Gremlins 2 to the Men in Black series. The amount of technology involved might surprise you -- in many cases, what you saw on screen was just a small part of what was going on. The bidding doesn't start until the 29th, but we've rounded up some of the highlights in the gallery below if you can't wait to see what's up for grabs.
Dr. Seuss iPhone apps get supersized for the iPad
Oceanhouse Media has updated three of their popular Dr. Seuss iPhone/iPod touch apps for the iPad by updating their existing apps to universal binary. If you are already an owner of The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss's ABC, or How The Grinch Stole Christmas! (US$2.99 each), all you need do is accept the free update and presto, you'll get a version that takes full advantage of the larger iPad screen while still working exactly as before on an iPhone or iPod touch. This is a wonderful idea, and one that I'd love to see other developers follow. We briefly covered some of these apps but haven't yet done a proper review, so it's about time we did. Oceanhouse has partnered up with Dr. Seuss Enterprises LLP, and they have done a remarkable job of turning these classics into apps. They put together an engine that they can plug any Dr. Seuss book into, since the apps all work exactly the same way. I don't think this was done to make it easier on themselves, but rather to address their market of ankle-biters. If you learn one, you've learned them all, and even for small children, mastering them is easy.
Holiday apps that'll make your Grinchmas merry
My wife is probably one of the biggest Grinch fans out there. Yes, we have Grinch holiday decorations and end up watching the movies several times throughout the holiday season. We're sitting at 3 times already... I'm praying we don't pass 5. It's not that I don't like The Grinch -- the animated or Jim Carrey version -- I'm usually not a multiple viewing kind of guy. To help fuel her love -- or obsession -- the folks over at Oceanhouse Media have partnered with Dr. Seuss Enterprises to fill our holiday minds with the Grinch. The first app in the iTunes App Store is called "Grinchmas" [iTunes Link]. It's a simple game where you choose to be a mean or a merry Grinch. I, of course, chose to be mean the first time around... I found myself throwing snowballs at noisy houses with a goal of keeping the noise meter from reaching its max. Next, I tried the merry side: I was given presents and a timer and challenged to toss the most presents before the time ran out. It was a fun little game, good for true Grinch fans and a quick time waster but it's definitely not something that you're gonna play for hours on end. They also created a pretty cool camera application that has a lot of pre-made greeting cards that you can email to your friends and family (the pic on this post is an example). It's called "Dr. Seuss Camera - The Grinch Edition" [iTunes Link] and is pretty awesome for sending fun cards to your friends. Unfortunately it's nearly impossible to line up the picture with the backgrounds if you're doing them yourself. It would have been nice of them to allow zoom and give you the ability to move your face to the correct spot: without that, you're pretty much limited to taking pictures of other people and sending them to your friends. My wife and I still had fun going through the different pictures and getting her to pose for the cards. For those of you who have yet to be Grinch'd, Oceanhouse Media also has produced a visually stimulating e-book (it does the original justice) to go along with the Grinch-themed holidays. "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" [iTunes Link] is an interactive e-book that not only reads to you but plays sounds depending on what you touch on the screen. This is a great way to share a holiday classic with your kids. Read them the book, then let them play with the other two apps for a Grinch-tastic holiday. Don't forget to snag the movies too. My wife made me say that.
HDTV Listings for December 12, 2006
What we're watching: If the Jim Carrey remake of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas didn't satisfy, check out the 40th Anniversary edition of the original tonight on ABC. Also premiering tonight is Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride: Hunter S. Thompson On Film, featuring Nick Nolte as the narrator of this documentary on Starz HD. If you didn't get enough sports this year, be sure to take a look at SportsCenter's Year in Review on ESPN-HD.Our traditional high-def listings continue below.
