Author: Trafficblast

Hanna-Barbera has never been afraid to play around with their characters, as seen with Adult Swim series like Sealab 2021 and Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law. Now, all the animation studio’s classic characters are coming back to life in the latest trailer for Jellystone!, the upcoming HBO Max animated series.

Jellystone! follows a whole list of Hanna-Barbera characters as they “live, work, play and (as is often the case) destroy the town in some silly way together.” Characters like Yogi Bear and Boo Boo, Huckleberry Hound, Jabberjaw, Magilla Gorilla, and Peter Potamus populate the town and interact regardless of what show they originated on.

If you recognize the visual style, it’s because the show comes courtesy C. H. Greenblatt, creator of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, Chowder, and Harvey Beaks.

“I grew up watching tons of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and have a deep love for these characters,” Greenblatt said in an official statement. “The massive amount of both classic and not-so-classic characters we were able to use from the Hanna-Barbera library is what really makes the Jellystone! universe special. Rather than recreate the feeling of cartoons of the past, we wanted to have silly, weird fun with these characters and expand their personalities to give them more depth. Chances are if there’s a character you love, you’ll see them somewhere in this world eventually. We hope longtime fans appreciate our take on this world, and we’re excited that parents get to introduce and enjoy their favorite Hanna-Barbera characters with their kids.”

Greenblatt serves as showrunner, executive producer, and voice actor on the show. Other confirmed actors include Grace Helbig, Ron Funches, Paul F. Tompkins, Thomas Lennon, and more. Jellystone! debuts on HBO Max on Thursday, July 29.

Every generation has its Superman, and for many kids who grew up in the early 2000s, that’s Tom Welling’s Clark Kent of Smallville. Now, Welling and co-star Michael Rosenbaum are looking to revive the characters for an animated series, the actor says.

“Michael Rosenbaum and I are actually working on an animated series to bring those characters back to life, and use as many of the original cast members as possible,” Welling said in a video message to a fan via Cameo. “Don’t tell anybody, though. It’s a secret–we’re still working on it.”

On the one hand, this is coming straight from the mouth of the actor who played the character for many years on the original show. On the other, it’s far from a confirmation. Importantly, Welling says that he and Michael Rosenbaum are developing the show–no mention of the show’s original creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, nor of the likely rights holders, the CW television network.

Michael Rosenbaum has been talking about the idea for a few years now, and has addressed the idea as recently as this spring in an Instagram Q&A. There, Rosenbaum was very non-committal, stating that “Tom Welling and I had the idea of Smallville returning as an animated series, so we’ll see if that ever happens, but we’ll try to get that going.”

Smallville ran on the WB, and then on its replacement network, the CW, for 10 seasons with a strict “no tights, no flight” rule to keep the show, which focused on Clark Kent’s early years as a superhero, grounded. Since then, Welling has had a couple brushes with the DC universe, playing Marcus Pierce on NBC/Netflix’s Lucifer, and reprising the Clark Kent role in a cameo on the CW’s Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover last year. Rosenbaum did not appear in that crossover, but has voiced a number of DC characters including The Flash and Kid Flash in several projects, as well as Scarecrow, Deadman, and others.

Smallville itself, meanwhile, found new life in comic book form. Smallville: Season 11 ran from 2012 through 2013 and indeed brought in both tights and flight.

It seems like the pair has been trying to get the project going for a while now. So while this is the first time Welling has said explicitly on camera that they’re working on this project, we shouldn’t hold our collective breath for the time being. If you want to get your Superman television fix right now, the CW’s Superman and Lois stands out from the rest of the Arrowverse. Further out, Warner Bros. is developing a Superman film with a Black Superman character, and game developer Rocksteady is working on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

In the Apex Devstream for Apex Legends‘ upcoming Genesis event, Respawn revealed that it’s been much easier for the team to make adjustments to the battle royale game’s maps since Season 7. With three maps now in rotation in Apex Legends, Respawn can take a whole season to discuss how a map should be altered based on community feedback.

“We only had Kings Canyon at first,” design director Jason McCord said during the stream. “In Season 2, we needed to do a map update–I was working on that, probably pre-launch of the whole game. So I didn’t know what to tackle–besides our own playtests–for what I would change, what the designers wanted, and whatever everyone else would want to see different.”

McCord went on to say that he had to make “blind assumptions” in those early days, hoping to correctly guess what players would want to see changed based on little available data. “Which is really scary,” he said.

These decisions can’t be pre-planned either as Respawn does not design Apex Legends’ maps with future adjustments and changes in mind. “Everyone has ideas while we’re working on the [map]–like, maybe later, sometime down the line, we can do this cool idea that they have,” McCord said. “But generally, a map is so much effort that everyone is just really focused on making that first [iteration] good.”

The addition of World’s Edge in Season 3 didn’t help in alleviating the problem too much, McCord continued. With previous seasons taking place on Kings Canyon, it was decided that World’s Edge would get the update in Season 4. According to McCord, that meant, “We have to start working on it before World’s Edge even launches. So we don’t really know what to change–we don’t know what the community wants us to change.”

“Now we’re in a better position where we’ve got more maps. So we saw Olympus come out in Season 7. And we thought about doing map updates for Olympus in Season 8 but we thought, ‘Why don’t we take a beat, and let the community talk about it, let us figure out what we like about it. We’ll go back to Kings Canyon for Season 8, and then come back to Olympus for Season 9.’ That’s been a really good benefit for us, to actually adjust the maps based on what the community thinks instead of what our gut is.”

Beginning June 29, Genesis is a limited-time event that temporarily reverts Kings Canyon back to how it appeared when Apex Legends first launched and World’s Edge back to how it first appeared in Season 3. The event also sees Kings Canyon’s Skull Town landmark (which was destroyed in Season 5) return as a new map in Apex Legends’ new PvP Arenas mode, and several balancing adjustments to certain characters and weapons. All of the changes are listed in the Apex Legends Genesis patch notes.

Welcoooome to Nintendo Voice Chat! This week, Zach Ryan takes a final spin in the hosting chair. He’s joined by Miranda Sanchez and Simon Cardy to talk about IGN’s review of Mario Golf Super Rush. Plus, this week, the NVC panel is joined by Dan Salvato, creator of Doki Doki Literature Club, to talk about the visual novel’s release on Nintendo Switch. And, final thoughts on the E3 Nintendo Direct, a quick celebration of the N64’s 25th anniversary, and a whole lot more.

NVC is available on your preferred platforms!

• Spotify
• Apple iTunes
• Stitcher
• Podbay
• PlayerFM
• Podbean

You can also Download NVC 566 Directly Here

You can listen to NVC on your preferred platform every Thursday at 3pm PT/6pm ET. Have a question for Question Block? Write to us at [email protected] and we may pick your question! Also, make sure to join the Nintendo Voice Chat Podcast Forums on Facebook. We’re all pretty active there and often pull Question Block questions and comments straight from the community.

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Logan Plant is the Production Assistant for NVC. You can find him on Twitter at @LoganJPlant.

With Disneyland’s highly anticipated Avengers Campus now open, the un-caped, un-super powered, and un-ripped masses finally have the opportunity to join the ranks of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes – if only for a day. The first step toward becoming authentically superheroic comes in the form of Web Slingers, a brand-new half-ride-half-game experience that sees you team up with Spider-Man to save the day. However, while it will more than likely provide some degree of fun for the whole family (even the very little ones), thrill chasers and video game enthusiasts may find Web Slingers’ hybrid approach a bit lacking on both fronts.  

Situated near the entrance of the Avengers Campus and just beyond a very cool Spider-mural credited to Miles Morales, the Web Slingers ride queue is full of Easter eggs sure to delight Marvel fans who look for them. The concept is that Web Slingers is a collaboration between Stark Industries and Pym Labs where young geniuses let their inventive minds run wild. Outside of the main building, plaques are dedicated to the likes of Lunella Lafayette (aka Moon Girl), Harley Keener (who you might remember as Tony’s little buddy from Iron Man 3), and Wakandan engineering prodigy Onome. Inside are diagrams with formulas taken directly from the MCU’s Spider-Man movies which may or may not hold the secret to web fluid.

Before hitting up the boarding line, the MCU’s own Peter Parker, Tom Holland, sets the scene via a screen behind what appears to be a messy lab. Peter’s latest experiments are some very cute little robotic spiders that, wouldn’t you know it, come with a self-replicating capability that quickly sees them multiply beyond control. Instead of calling Iron Man (who is alive, apparently, indicating that the ride takes place either outside of the official MCU canon or sometime before the events of Endgame), Peter gets his buddy (wink, wink) Spider-Man on the case. After walking past some lockers with the names of other lab workers (including Miles once again) and some Stark Industries employee time cards (with the clock permanently reading 6:16 in a nod to Marvel’s Earth-616), you board the narrow vehicles that take you through the ride.

Each cart is designed to fit about four passengers, but could comfortably fit five. Along a winding track, the cart slowly stops at various screens that, with the help of some special 3D glasses, quickly fill with runaway robots. Your job is to quickly and forcefully extend your arms toward the bots in Spider-Man’s patented THWIP motion, which then magically sends a web shooting from your hand into the screen that (fingers crossed) takes down the bot and doesn’t accidentally hit some other piece of lab equipment. 

Before you’re truly able to appreciate or examine the mechanic, you realize you need to be pumping your arms a LOT in order to catch as many bots as possible due to your amusing but frustrating initial lack of accuracy. My companions and I were laughing with glee at the silliness and frantic pace demanded of our arms while four screens embedded in the vehicle dashboards kept track of our overall scores. After further inspection, it becomes clear that some spider bot color variations are worth significantly more points than others, but I didn’t really feel like I had the time to hunt for the most valuable ones. This information also would have been helpful to know before entering the ride, and I hope Disney considers adding it somewhere in the line queue where, on busy days, riders will definitely be looking for something to stare at to kill time.

After about five minutes, four or five screens, a pair pretty hilarious of boss fights where your team must join forces to take out a few giant spiders, and what feels like a medium-strenuous upper body cardio workout, individual and team scores are tallied and you exit the vehicles to scoreboards displaying both the hour’s and the day’s highest scores. The immediate gamer instinct, of course, is to repeat the ride with your newfound knowledge in an attempt to top the leaderboard. However, unless you are able to fill out a full four-person vehicle with competitive types (I was only in a group of three), a top spot may seem unreachable…without some enhancements.

To no one’s surprise, a cart directly outside Web Slingers is there to provide you with web shooter upgrades. A base model Web Power Band and four options for secondary extensions (including an Iron Man-themed option) will cost you about $60 if you buy both. For research purposes, I purchased the enhancements and was able to more than double my personal score with some new nifty-looking electrified and seemingly higher scoring webs, despite the new hunks of plastic feeling pretty uncomfortable on my arm. I rode by myself this time around, and while it was nice to see my score go up, it wasn’t nearly as fun as riding with friends, nor was I anywhere close to cracking the overall leaderboard. I also had the benefit of visiting the park on a preview day with little to no line, so riding again was very easy. But for the average rider, the prospect of waiting in a long line, paying about half the price of a ticket to California Adventure for a few plastic upgrades, and waiting in another long line to play again may not be very appealing. (Though it’s nice to give your arms a break between runs.)

After a surprise reprisal on The CW’s Arrowverse crossover event Crisis on Infinite Earths, Smallville fans can look forward to even more of Tom Welling’s Clark Kent in the future. In a new Cameo post, the actor stated that an animated sequel series to Smallville is in the works, with actor Michael Rosenbaum also attached to reprise his role as Lex Luthor.

“Michael Rosenbaum and I are actually working on an animated series to bring those characters back to life and use as many of the original cast members as possible,” Welling said. “Don’t tell anybody though. It’s a secret. We’re still working on it.”

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Welling’s Cameo found its way onto Twitter. In the video, Welling also hinted at a potential Smallville marathon happening in the future, though the actor didn’t provide details.

With only Welling’s tease to go off of, it’s uncertain whether the Smallville animated series will retell events of the original series or pick the story up where things left off, with Clark Kent officially holding the mantle of Superman.

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DC has also expanded on the story of Smallville before, running a comic series titled Smallville – Season 11 that picked up after Season 10’s final moments. Whether the events of the comic series will bear any impact on the new animated project remains to be seen.

Smallville ran for ten seasons on both the now defunct WB and The CW, remaining a television mainstay from 2001 to 2011. While the series initially restrained itself to a smaller setting, later episodes began to introduce other DC Universe characters. An animated sequel series could potentially see Welling’s Superman work alongside other superheroes.

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J. Kim Murphy is a freelance entertainment writer.

Friday the 13th: The Game was never able to reach its full potential after legal disputes over the brand prevented developer Gun from producing any more new content for the game. Now, we finally have an idea of what the developers were forced to stop working on, including an Among Us-style werewolf mode.

As a quick refresher, Friday the 13th: The Game fell into a sticky legal dispute involving different parties who worked on the original movie and the 1976 Copyright Act. This dispute spilled over to Gun’s Friday the 13th game, and the studio was forced to halt all new development on the title in 2019.

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Gun CEO Wes Keltner has taken to Twitter to finally reveal exactly what he and his development team stopped working on when the Friday the 13th legal kerfuffle erupted. According to a TwitLonger post titled “Enough Time Has Passed,” Keltner shared three content packs that were in the works but never completed.

Some of the unfinished content were cosmetics like the “Slumber Party” clothing pack with all the counselors getting new sleepwear attire and a “Prom Pack” that turned Camp Crystal Lake into prom night complete with a visual overhaul for the level.

The final bit of content was something called Paranoia which was a new game mode featuring counselors but no Jason. Players would have to find the Part 5 mask and then become Jason to begin hunting other players. If the player was killed in counselor mode somehow, their killer can pick up the mask and become Jason, and so on and so on.

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“I feel enough time has passed to share these things with you,” Keltner writes. ‘Ik now they are bittersweet. Some will lament, some will think they are cool ideas, some will be angry. I understand that anger, I feel it too. But I wanted you all to know that we loved this franchise and this game. We had big ideas for it.”

Friday the 13th was an enjoyable, asymmetrical PvP game where a player took on the role of Jason while the other players were counselors forced to survive. New successors have risen in their place like Dead by Daylight and Predator: Hunting Grounds.

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Matt T.M. Kim is IGN’s News Editor.

Like the Avengers after Endgame’s reverse-snap, the MCU is returning to life after a year-long COVID-19 hiatus–and that means a whole slew of new superhero movies to look forward to. Black Widow is just around the corner, but it will be followed by the highly anticipated Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings which hits theaters in September.

In preparation for Shang-Chi’s big screen debut, Marvel has released a new trailer giving us a closer look at the complicated relationship between Shang-Chi and his father, Wenwu, the holder of the ten rings and a supervillain known as the Mandarin. No, not the one from Iron Man 3, the real one.

Take a look at the new trailer now.

While the bulk of the trailer is focused on Shang-Chi’s tumultuous upbringing, there are a few surprises in the mix as well. Notably, a cameo from Wong (Benedict Wong), associate of Doctor Strange, fighting Abomination–a monstrous supervillain who hasn’t been seen or referenced in the MCU since The Incredible Hulk, the movie where Bruce Banner was played by Edward Norton rather than Mark Ruffalo. It’s unclear in the trailer if Abomination will still be played by Tim Roth. It’s also not entirely clear what this magical, superhero/supervillain cage match situation actually is–but whatever’s happening here seems really intense.

In addition to Wong and Abomination, we also catch a glimpse of a massive dragon. Though many Marvel fans may be hoping for Fin Fang Foom, early looks at Shang-Chi toys and merchandise have called the movie’s dragon “The Great Protector.” This doesn’t necessarily mean this isn’t the MCU’s incarnation of Fin Fang Foom, but if it is it would seem some changes are being made.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings hits theaters on September 3.