OK, first off, we here at Well Told Tales try to steer clear of politics — like Snake Plissken in “Escape From New York,” our official stance is “We don’t give a f*** about your president.”

But this Star Wars remix starring Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was too funny not to share.

We promise — we’ll leave politics to the Huffington and Wonkette crowd from now on.

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Technological advances in digital filmmaking have led to an explosion in the number of short films available on the Web.

I always enjoy finding good ones, so I’m glad someone tipped me off to this stylish, spooky horror short written and directed by Jacob Swanson.

More options at Vimeo.com.

Link >

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In honor of Mother’s Day, we here at Well Told Tales came up with our top 10 moms from horror, sci-fi and crime/hardboiled films.

Chime in on the comments section if you think we missed someone.

Happy Mother’s Day!

(more…)

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“Kolchak, The Night Stalker,” “One Step Beyond,” “The Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek” — lots and lots of “Star Trek” — are among the shows featured in this 30-minute documentary on sci-fi on American television.

Link (via ComputerLove)

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Attention So-Cal sci-fi fans: Ray Bradbury, author of the classic “The Martian Chronicles,” is slated to speak about his vision of the future on Saturday, May 17 during an appearance at “Chronicling Mars”/The 2008 Eaton Science Fiction Conference at the University of California, Riverside.

“What I’m going to talk about is going back to the moon,” Bradbury, 87, told The Press-Enterprise. “We should not have left the moon 30 years ago. We should have stayed there and built a base. And in the next few years, we need to build a base.”

Bradbury’s appearance (4 p.m. PT) is one of the free events at the conference. Check out this news story and the conference Web site for more info.

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National Public Radio had a great interview this week with Charles Ardai, award-winning author and founder of pulp-fiction publisher Hard Case Crime.

Hard Case Crime publishes mass-market paperback crime novels — both all-new stories and reprints of ’40s and ’50s books.

Authors include Golden-Age pulp stars like Erle Stanley Gardner, Donald Hamilton, and Cornell Woolrich.

Stephen King has a Hard Case novel (The Colorado Kid.)

And a new generation of pulpsters are represented — including Ardai, himself, who writes under the pen name Richard Aleas.

Be sure to check out the cover art of the books on the Hard Case Crime site.

NPR interview >
Hard Case Crime >

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The creators of Internet film sensation “Star Wreck” are at it again. This time with “Iron Sky,” a movie about … well, I’ll let them tell it:

“In 1945 the Nazis fled to the moon. In 2018 they are coming back.”

More from their site: “Iron Sky is a film about conformity: those who want to conform, those who want to make others conform, and those who refuse.”

The film is in pre-production (the trailer above contains no actual movie footage — just some conceptual look and feel) and they are looking for people to help out. Sounds like fun.

Link

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Editor’s note: We’ve invited our authors to blog on Well Told Tales. Jennie Kermode wrote WTT 19: “Type A” which ran November, 2007.

This is my first attempt at blogging for Well Told Tales - in fact, it’s my first attempt at blogging anywhere (!), though I’ve been involved in more traditional online forums - and newsgroups - for many a year. My publisher always tells me I have to keep up with the times, so I’m doing my best - please forgive me if I’m slow to catch on.

The thing about new technology is that it often serves to remind us that the old stories are the best. (more…)

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If you like the classic, grisly EC Comics of the 1940s and 1950s — or the entertainment they spawned, like the “Tales from the Crypt” TV series — check out this audio interview with David Hajdu, the author of “The Ten-Cent Plague” on the Sound of Young America podcast.

The Sound of Young America: David Hajdu

Be sure to click over to the Sound of Young America site to get a good look at the gruesome cover that helped seal the (censorship-fueled) demise of EC Comics. Hmm, looks familiar somehow.

(Link via BoingBoing.net)

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Greetings, loyal listeners and readers. You’ll notice we had a bit of makeover today.

In addition to the paint job, we’re adding a bunch of new content — comics, videos, text stories and a blog that will fill you in on all sorts of pulpy entertainment from around the Web and beyond.

Please take a look around, and then let us know what you think of the redesign. We’ve got comments on posts now, so you can sound off without the headache of registering.

Any and all requests/suggestions are warmly welcomed. And if you spot any goofs, let us know so we can sort ‘em out.

We’ll be rolling out more stuff regularly, so drop a bookmark or put us in your RSS reader.

Cheers,
Well Told Tales

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