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PITCHERBLACKER.COM NEWS ARCHIVES
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January to April 2007
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Site downtime
Bear with me, dear readers... Real Life (tm) is a real challenge at the moment. Be back soon.
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Lord Marshal Bobblehead coming!
Vaako over at Riddickstyle with the major scoop!
That's right, someone is making a new, officially licensed Riddick swag many years after the movie came out. That thing looks really nice! Head on over to the page at Sideshow Collectibles to check out more good pictures. The best part? It's only $13 bucks!
New goody, and changes, at The Propstore
Noticed that The Propstore Of London, who must have basically bought the entire production of The Chronicles of Riddick way back when, put up a new item a while back: Kyra's Necromonger Conversion Costume. It's only (*cough*) $1200.
The Propstore has also made some behind-the-scenes changes with their tech, which makes browsing their props a lot easier. For instance, on thing that people might like is that you can now sort Riddick props by price, so should you only want to spend some loose change then you can see what might be in your price range. I bought myself a single UD for seventeen bucks, back in the day :)
Replica Riddick//PITCH BLACK Shiv on Ebay
Spotted this auction on Ebay from longtime Riddick replica propmaker Scott, who looks like he might be starting to make replicas that are a little less costly than usual... this one is a replica of Riddick's "personal grooming appliance" made out of resin, and right now is only ten bucks.
PitcherBlacker on MySpace
I've been fooling around on MySpace recently, mostly because I can talk to my Heavy Metal heroes there, but for fun I tossed together a halfassed profile for PBer (hard to believe, but some dolt took "Pitcherblacker" as their URL: weaksauce!). If you're a MySpacer, come get an add.
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Christina Cox fanpage not to be missed
Something tells me I'm not the only Riddick fan that was pretty fond of actress Christina Cox's role as Merc hotness Eve Logan in TCOR (that something is my stat tracking, which shows an overwhelming visitor fondness for this photo of CC). So for fellow members of this exclusive club, make sure to hit this fan page for all the goods.
Update Thanks to Peter for passing along a link to another great CC fansite. This one has the added benefit of not appearing to be a street-team marketing effort :).
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Replica swingblades on Ebay
Scott, who is a frequent ebayer of his Riddick-related resin props, dropped me a message to let me know he has a new auction up for a pair of replica Crematoria Swingblades. The starting bid is $85 $65 UDs. Here's the relevant text:
The blades are made from resin, painted silver and are slightly flexible. The handles however, are made of metal which makes them like the ones that were used in the movie, not like most of the ones sold. These types of Swing Blades are unique and the Metal handles have a really good feel in the palm of your hand.
And a shot:
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Another fan movie (sort of)!
Thumbs up to the crew over at Riddickstyle for discovering another great Riddick lookalike named Alexander Andreska.
Alexander is from Germany where in 2005 he played the part of Riddick in a sequence for a movie called DER TRAUMJOB. You can view the entire sequence here on YouTube (make sure to watch some of his fight videos too, as Alexander is a kickboxer also).
Hit Riddickstyle for links to Alexander's MySpace page and personal site.
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Site maintenance worklog
More behind the scenes 'excitement', but at least I'll have a new interview soon.
Shoot me an email with a link if there are any sites, especially fansites, especially ACTIVE fansites, that you think should be added.
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Site maintenance worklog
Going to start doing some cleanup and updating around here, so you'll occasionally see a worklog list of stuff that I've done. Here's todays:
Note that I've never had a messageboard for this site... that page above is a list of links to other people's forums. If any readers know of any active Riddick-related forums that I've missed, then shoot me an email with a link.
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Voodoo Extreme places BUTCHER BAY on pedestal
Thanks to Alex for sending in a link to the Voodoo Extreme feature article, 3D Revolution - Top 20 First-Person Shooters that includes ESCAPE FROM BUTCHER BAY (at #19). Gamers will note that any top 20 list that includes such games as NOLF, Quake II, and the Half Lifes isn't messing around... this is no "Games You've Never Played" list, it's more like "Games You've Considered Getting Tattoos Of" so once again, GG to everyone involved with EFBB (even though this article doesn't include Quake I, but I'll let that slide just this once).
Back in action
Back to it. Took a week off and didn't get a damn thing done other than some reading, which I suppose means that I did get something done after all.
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Site downtime
I'll be off site work for a week so there won't be any updates until at least next Saturday. Part of what I'll be working on is catching up with people's emails. See ya.
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Screenshots of Starbreeze's next game
I don't know when I turned the corner and became completely firm in my conviction that there will be a second Riddick game and it will be made by Starbreeze, but here I am. Maybe it's because it would be insane for Vivendi to not make a sequel and not use the developers that did such amazing work with the first game. Anyway, with this assumption in place then it's a safe bet that you can look to their next game, The Darkness, to see what a BUTCHER BAY 2 might look like. And I'm thinking that it might look pretty damn spectacular.
Click here for a gallery of 20 shots from the game, and pay close attention to how realistic the characters look. One of BUTCHER BAY's strengths was it's character modeling and texturing, and this looks like a large improvement over that already unusually great work.
Now all I need is a press release announcing that they actually ARE making EFBB2....
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User-made Butcher Bay stuff
Spotted this thread on Starbreeze's forums where a user named King posted some shots of a guard tower he made using the game's map/geometry editor.
It's really strange and kind of too bad that the user editing community never took off for Butcher Bay... I suppose the lack of multiplayer might have had something to do with that, as single player maps require a lot more work. MP maps are hard enough, with geometry and textures and lighting (well, and good MP gameplay design), while SP maps need to have story and item placement and creature placement and sometimes scripted stuff. I miss the old Quake 2 days, when everyone and his brother was cranking out single player maps and you would be hardpressed to play even all the good ones. Anyway, let's just keep our fingers crossed that Butcher Bay 2 brings in the modders.
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Clips from INTO PITCH BLACK
Don't ask me how long I've had these four clips from INTO PITCH BLACK, and I won't have to confess that it's been from since before I launched PitcherBlacker (in April 2002, in case you were wondering). Let's just be glad that I finally got around to posting them!
Clip 1 (1.5 MB) -
Clip 2 (.3 MB) -
Clip 3 (3.3 MB) -
Clip 4 (3.1 MB)
Next Riddick game confirmation leaked?
I don't read Italian unfortunately, but I spotted two sites (here and here) carrying pretty much the same list of upcoming Xbox360 games that I think they're saying came from Xbox.com. Way, way down the list is the following interesting entry:
233. The Chronicles Of Riddick 2 - by - Release date 2007 TBA (Further Information)
I looked for anything about this on Xbox.com and couldn't find jack, so let's just keep our fingers crossed that this is the very first piece of information in a long string of news that will eventually end with another high-quality Riddick game tucked safely into the disk player of your favorite platform (*cough*PC*cough*).
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Costume Studies, 1 step 1 kill analysis, and more
Site visitor Sabine sent me an email a long time ago (sorry, Sabine) about some really interesting work she had put together on her costuming site related to Riddick. First off are character by character costume studies, where she uses detailed collections of photographs and screen caps to determine just exactly the makeup of various character clothes. In addition to that is a kill by kill photo journey through the Crematoria 1 step 1 kill sequence (I won't spoil the final tally of dead Necros) along with an analysis of the anatomically impossible unsheathing of the Crematoria swingblades.
Finally, there's an incredibly detailed line-by-line comparison of the Director's Cut vs. the Theatrical DVD versions, that once and for all explores the differences that I had done a halfassed job listing in my old DVD review.
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Awesome mock Riddick comic book cover
Ghost Man a.k.a. Rich sent along this mock up of a comic book cover, using one of his sketches of Riddick as the central image. Pretty sweet! Here's hoping he gets started a.s.a.p. on a full-length illustrated story.
Riddick.ru: holy crap!
I was perusing Fernando Dominguez' Hollywood Fitness Shows last night (ANOTHER new panel up! Man, those guys really work hard) and spotted that someone from a riddick fansite left a nice comment. Out of curiosity and because I also kind of suck at visiting other people's sites, I tossed Riddick.ru into Firefox, and was greeted by an unbelievably great looking site with masses of nicely organized and cool-ass media, including the sweet stylized sketch below that someone did of the Crematoria swingblades (click the picture for the fullsize shot over on the site).
Now, it doesn't look like there's been an update in a few months, understandable considering the state of news nowadays, but don't let that (or the fact that everything is in Russian, heh) stop you from taking a look around all the other art and stuff they've got. Good job, unknown Russian person who's name I probably couldn't pronounce anyway.
25 Images from INTO PITCH BLACK
Yesterday, site visitor Carissa sent along a warning about Japanese subs included with the version of INTO PITCH BLACK on the Region 2 DVD. Today we have more... she was nice enough to send along 25 screen captures from the film! I've put them together into a gallery: Enjoy.
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A warning about the JP version of Into Pitch Black
As some of you may know, when PITCH BLACK was heading for theaters the Sci Fi channel put together a sort-of sequel called INTO PITCH BLACK (more details are down the page on the PB FAQ). To date the only place to get a hold of this is on the Japanese (Region 2) DVD. Site visitor Carissa actually got a hold of one of these and was nice enough to pass along the following caveat:
Thought I’d let you know I bought the Japanese version of the Dvd from amazon.jp It contains Into Pitch Black BUT there are embedded subtitles. I think others should be warned about the Japanese Subs.
Thanks for passing that along, Carissa.
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Some stuff from Ebay
I was bored and looking at knives on Ebay, and came across some marginally interesting Riddick stuff that I thought might be post-worthy.
First up are a group of Thai Lobby Cards that are kind of neat. It kind of looks like the bullet holes were put in there after the fact, heh.
Then there's a replica breather device that frankly looks kind of shitty. But hey, beggers can't be choosers when you're standing at home in front of the mirror fighting off the Necromonger hordes.
Eyeshine hits Butcher Bay: Memories
If there's anything that interests me more than extremely beautiful women with guns, it's Riddick's eyeshine, and lucky for me Butcher Bay: Memories has both! New panels are up, featuring more Morgan and the introduction of Riddick's special sight. Looks clear.
Butcher Bay scriptwriters working on 300 game
The guys who wrote the script for ESCAPE FROM BUTCHER BAY, Flint Dille and John Zuur Platten, are working on the game adaption for 300, due out hopefully someday soon. You can check out the website for these guys here (Flash required, epilepsy likely).
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Eve Logan in new TV series: Will continue to be hot
Actress Christina Cox, who supplied the abs for the Merc character Eve Logan in TCOR, has a new show coming out on Lifetime called "Blood Ties". She's a cop, they're vampires, will their star-crossed love ever be realized? Anyway, here's a trailer on YouTube that focuses mostly on the dreamy boy-vampire, who looks to be moonlighting from his day job singing for Winger.
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Butcher Bay Memories images: Now With Girls
If you're anything like me, you can only look at so many pictures of super-buff Fernando Dominguez and all his extremely fit crew before starting to think, "Hmm, maybe I should put down the Ben & Jerry's and... nah." Anyway, the crew working on the Butcher Bay comic have put up even more new pages, three again, this time marking the first appearance of what looks to be a female Merc named Morgan.
These new pages, done in the cool pencil-like style that Mauro has come up with, show the legendary fight between Johns and Riddick where Johns gets the knife tip in his spine which leads to his "morning coffee" habit. In addition, according to Fernando:
Finally we got enough snow,here in Tenerife and we shot the urso intro
sequence for the video!! real snow,real freezin´cold !!at 3.000 mts. we´re damm crazy at 8 a.m at
3.000mts with minus 3 º celsius!!! I didn´t even feel the fingers.
You can find some behind-the-scenes shots of this work over on the BBM thread at VX. Not only does this illustrate the kind of amazing dedication Fernando and his crew are putting forth for all this Riddick fun stuff, it also reveals that they are planning on doing a video also... I had thought that the Butcher Bay project was only going to be a comic.
When do you sleep, Tenerife body-building Riddick fans???
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new Butcher Bay Memories images
As I've posted before downpage, Fernando Dominguez is hard at work with his crew including artist Mauro Rodriguez on a Butcher Bay-themed comic. Today they have posted three new images from the comic at Hollywood Fitness Shows. VX readers will thrill at the shirtless bad guy, Scorpio, and along with that is a shot of the welcoming committee at Butcher Bay's front door and another of Fernando as Riddick executing a leaping stab thing.
Light-up necro rifle at the Propstore
Are you like me and have $2400 in cash in your pocket with nowhere to spend it? Right, neither am I. But someone out there will probably want to hit the Propstore's Riddick page and snag it, and then hopefully run off to buy the Munchausen script they have for me for my birthday.
More Judi Dench Hah Hah
I just thought this quote about Aereon by film critic Nick Curtis was funny:
I don't think she's ever been given the chance to be so brilliantly unsympathetic on film (unless it was by accepting a role in The Chronicles of Riddick, and she even came out of that with dignity).
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Starbreeze wins Vin Diesel modeling contest
Look, don't take this the wrong way... I want Vin's next game, The Wheelman to be a success as much as the next guy. I just think it's interesting that Starbreeze's in-engine Vin from a few years ago
is about a hundred times better than the pre-rendered Vin in The Wheelman trailer that's just been released.
This just goes to show that no, Clawfinger and the Bikini Team aren't the only great things that Sweden has ever produced. GG Starbreeze, once again.
Downtime
I'll be in the field for work for three days next week, so look for another update sometime Thursday unless the bears get me.
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Dench is 'shameless'?
Entertainment Weekly put together a piece called "25 Most Shameless Paycheck Grabbing Roles In History" (read about it here, Deniro wins #1 by the way for ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE) and sliding in at #8 is Judy 'Aeron' Dench for THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK. Now, to be fair to the actress, I don't think she should be blamed for rolling the dice that she might become part of some huge historic SF franchise like Alec Guinness did in STAR WARS. Hell, Ossie Davis said yes to playing JFK in BUBBA HO-TEP and ended up ascending to Olympus with yet another truly great film to be remembered by, so it's just the gamble that film makers take.
Pirates love Riddick
I don't know if that's actually true for sure, but it seems reasonable no matter what definition of pirates you use. In this case I'm talking media pirates, who apparently have cracked the magic code on HD-DVDs and have started passing around movies including PITCH BLACK and TCOR.
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New Starbreeze Forums
The developers of ESCAPE FROM BUTCHER BAY have got some swanky new forums up and running in preparation for their new (non-Riddick) game, THE DARKNESS. Those looking for BUTCHER BAY stuff have a subforum, but note that all the previous BB discussions are still in the 'Ogier general forum'. Old logins and passwords still work. Never particularly active, there's not much going on now but there is at least one interesting thread where BB developer Theo Savidis was participating semi-recently in a discussion about BB's status as an Xbox port to PC.
If the PC version has more stuff in it it's not really a port right?
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New goodies at the Propstore
Goodies, man. Wish I had more spare money. Anyway, The Propstore has two new fun toys from TCOR for sale that I spotted; the complete Toombs costume, and a hero lightup Necromonger gravity pistol on a stand. The latter has a little movie you can download showing it's Incredible Lightup Action (tm)! The costume is $629 and the pistol (which includes a stand and little engraved plaque) is a whopping $1599. Good, detailed closeup pictures are available for replica propmakers...
 
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Fernando Dominguez' Butcher Bay comic
Man, I feel like I should be putting exclamation points on all of these updates, there's a lot of cool stuff I've been sitting on. Anyway, the latest goodness is that Fernando Dominguez, so recently starring both in his great Riddick fanfilm RIDDICK'S REDEMPTION and also David Twohy's latest website update, has corralled his RR collaborator Mauro Rodriguez into working with him on a Butcher Bay-themed comic. The title is Butcher Bay: Memories. Mauro, who has the comic book store Krypton Comics in Tenerife (an island in the sea where everyone is apparently very, very buff) and is also a graphic designer, has taken photos of Fernando and other people from their crew all dressed in the props they've been busy making and then mixes them with original graphics. Panels are popping up over on Fernando's site, and Mauro sent me a large-size panel to share (click it, 460kB):
The guys also sent along large sized versions of the cover and inset pages.
Stay tuned to Hollywood Fitness Shows where new panels are being posted regularly.
Another fanfilm: CONQUEST
Imagine my stunned amazement when I discovered that the Necromonger Legion, the formerly-Yahoo-centered group with thousands of dollars worth of Necro costumes, had a nice looking new site that featured footage from a great looking short film called Necromonger: Conquest. It's got explosions, Riddick props galore, muzzle flashes, and lots of dudes in Necromonger costumes looking very very serious. Check it out!
 
 
Twohy updates!
Director David Twohy made a fat update to the News section of his personal site. In addition to talking about his new projects, he also singled out some of the interesting people that have contacted him through his internet presence. There's career advice for upcoming filmmakers, a shout out to Fernando Dominguez, website stuff, past history, and most importantly the confirmation that not much is going on Riddick-wise. Twohy does mention something I've been guessing for a while, that another game is more likely. Not sure I like the faintly ominous "And maybe we should leave it at that" comment, but we'll have to see how this plays out. Anyway, an interesting bit of material that's not to be missed.
DavidTwohy.com
Riddickstyle.net: A new user-driven fansite
Just launched and seeking to build up an active userbase is the massive Riddickstyle.
This site looks to be the place to go for Riddick fans seeking active community involvement. There are forums, comments, and the ability to actually contribute to the site yourself. So if you've been wanting to get a bit more involved than endlessly refreshing PitcherBlacker hoping in vain for an update, now's your chance!
New Banner Image
A hearty thanks to longtime site reader Kat for the new banner image, thankfully replacing the utterly shitty Necromonger one that was in need of deletion the second I put it together. Now we can enjoy a little BUTCHER BAY goodness, which is fine by me since I'm a major game whore anyway. Thanks Kat!!
Happy New Year
Hope this post finds you all already elbows-deep into a great new year. Believe it or not, the site isn't dead. A combination of me being very busy, me being very lazy, and me finishing up my annual DEUS EX playthrough led to an embarrassingly long hiatus. Thanks to anyone that stuck around.
As some of you may know, I'm actually a grown man who is frankly Way Too Old For This Shit. When I originally shut the site down, it was to bear down on stuff related to growth of my personal character, job, career, and profession. In the 18 months of non-PitcherBlacking, I made some huge strides and really started to enjoy the fruits of the changes I had wrought. Eventually I figured that I was more on the ball and could revive the site, accepting my own personality quirks and fitting them into my Grownup schedule with my new and improved production mindset.
What I didn't plan for was EVEN MORE success and LESS free time, heh. I honestly don't know what this will mean for the site, going into 2007, as my priorities have shifted toward abandoning hobby stuff whenever Real Life calls, a change from the first run of PitcherBlacker. While this is all well and good and proper, it will realistically mean some times when the site goes dark for longish periods. Should this occur, readers should never feel shy about checking my blog (which is very quick and easy for me to update, therefore it gets done more often) or just shooting me an email to find out where the hell I'm at.
I think the biggest effect all this will have will be on the big, ambitious plans I harbored when I re-launched. I don't know if I was foolish enough to say any of that stuff out loud, but if I did, then forget it. I think news updates and the occasional feature content will be just about all I'll be able to muster. But at least I plan to throttle the various ideas I have swimming in my head for several new fansites that would most definitely mean the end for this one. Maybe if I win the lottery...
Anyway, enough with the Dear Diary crap. On with the updates, hopefully frequent and meaty. I've moved all the recent news items into the archive, mostly to hide the fact that I haven't updated in a month.
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