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NASA Press Release NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission is on its way to the Red Planet to search for signs of ancient life and collect samples to send back to Earth. Humanity's most sophisticated rover launched with the  Ingenuity Mars Helicopter  at 7:50 a.m. EDT (4:50 a.m. PDT) Thursday on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. "With the launch of Perseverance, we begin another historic mission of exploration," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. "This amazing explorer's journey has already required the very best from all of us to get it to launch through these challenging times. Now we can look forward to its incredible science and to bringing samples of Mars home even as we advance human missions to the Red Planet. As a mission, as an agency, and as a country, we will persevere." The ULA Atlas V's Centaur upper stage initially placed the Mars 2020 spa...

The series, called "Giant Robo" in Japan was produced by Toei Company Ltd., and aired on NET (now TV Asahi) from October 11, 1967 to April 1, 1968, with a total of 26 episodes. The English dubbed version of the series was produced by American International Television as "Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot". The entire series was first broadcast in the United States in 1969 by American International Television, and became quite popular in syndication over the next several years, particularly from 1971-74 when it reached its peak in distribution. The series was still in active syndication through the early 1980s. In 1970, several episodes were edited together to create the movie Voyage Into Space, which has now reached cult film status. The series was astonishingly violent by American standards of children's programming in the 1960s (in its home country of Japan, though, it was no more violent than any other tokusatsu airing at the time). Gunplay are staples of eve...

From The Monster Island News Archives I thought that it would be a good idea to explain just how I became a fan of Godzilla fan and how much the Japanese giant monster genre has influenced my life. If you grew up in the 1970s you know that pop culture during that decade was dominated by dinosaurs. You really couldn't escape them. There were Saturday morning kids shows like Land of the Lost and Valley of the Dinosaurs, movies like The Land That Time Forgot and The Crater Lake Monster, and movies on TV like Last Dinosaur, they were even in comic books like Turok Son of Stone and Devil Dinosaur. That's not to mention all the toys, lunch boxes and T-shirts. It would have been a miracle if I had not loved dinosaurs. The pivotal moment when I went from just being a dinosaur fanatic to a Godzilla fanatic came in 1977 when the NBC aired Godzilla vs Megalon on prime-time television. I remember thinking to myself as I watched the commercial for the show, "That is the biggest...

"The Ministry of Silly Walks" is a sketch from the Monty Python comedy troupe's television show Monty Python's Flying Circus, season 2, episode 1, which is entitled "Face the Press". The episode first aired at some point in 1970. A shortened version of the sketch was performed for Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl. This sketch involves John Cleese as a bowler hatted civil servant in a fictitious British government ministry responsible for developing silly walks through grants. Cleese, throughout the sketch, walks in a variety of silly ways. It is these various silly walks, more than the dialogue, that has earned the sketch its popularity. Cleese has cited the physical comedy of Max Wall, probably in character as Professor Wallofski, as important to its conception.   The sketch as originally depicted in the series begins with John Cleese playing a nameless civil servant who, after purchasing The Times from the newsagent in the previous sketch, walks ...

I Okay folks here is my first post honoring the late night video program from the 1980s called Friday Night Videos. I had planned to feature the first music video I ever saw on the program in this initial outing, but thanks to my life-long friend Steven Colby, I was forced to change my plans.  Okay ... forced is a strong way of saying it.  Let me explain. My original plan was to showcase the music video for Berlin's "No More Words", which is great classic video. However, last night my buddy Steve chose to post a video of the Human League's "Don't You Want Me". This isn't the music video for the song that most of us here in the United States remember ... oh no ... Steve found a rare Dutch clip from a show called Top Pop (not to be confused with the popular UK music program Top of the Pops).  I loved the clip so much that I've watched it four times.  Well so much for my plans. Unknowingly Steven just hijacked my post and I'm switching from Berl...

As many of you may or may not know I have been running a very popular pop culture blog for the past ten years called The Monster Island News. That creation of mine has been a haven for old monster movies, television and comic featuring articles written by myself, fellow fans and real journalists who knew the genre inside and out. It was a strange, interesting and very fun ride.   Like all good things the time has come for MIN to end and a new course charted. The blog as a whole had run its natural course and to be honest, I found myself just going through the motions with it. If you are a regular reader you would have probably noticed that the bulk of my posts lately consisted of reposts of past articles. I had lost my passion … and it showed.   During last week’s church service, a divinely inspired message entered my foggy little mind. The Lord told me to start a new blog, one that would inspire people and reflect the true me. After a night of prayer, I decided to f...

Review By: Ken Hulsey   In the early 1970s’ Amicus Pictures (Owned by Milton Subotsky and Max J Rosenberg) decided to pump so life into the declining British fantasy film industry by bringing the works of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs to the big screen. The company’s rival, Hammer, had abandoned its standard horror films for features starring half naked women in an attempt to put more bodies in the seats and the time seemed right for Burroughs strait forward action tales to fill the void. The first of the four Burrough’s stories to be produced by Amicus would be an adaptation of the short story “The Land That Time Forgot” which was first published in Blue Book Magazine in 1918. Milton Subotsky had first penned a screenplay for the film back in the early 1960s’ but this first draft was initially rejected by the late Burrough’s estate. It was under their prodding that the script was rewritten by Jim Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock. Their dialogue heavy, light on the action ...

Written By: Terri Hulsey  In 1961, Northern California was hit by a deluge of seabirds that flew into homes, attacked and frightened seaside dwellers near the once sleepy California coastal town of Monterey Bay, Alfred Hitchcock decided that he would make a film about the incident and do what he does best. Scare the heck out of moviegoers. However, what caused the birds to attack to begin with? Hitchcock, pioneer and master of psychological thriller, left cinema-goers terrified in 1963 with his movie The Birds, in which the life of a couple who live in a small, coastal Northern California town is turned upside down as birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people in increasing numbers and with increasing viciousness. Can our feathered friends can actually turn into vicious killing machines? The mystery seems to have been solved by Sibel Bargu, an oceanographic researcher at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Bargu, an ardent fan of Hitchcock's movies, was left deep...

From History,com At 10:56 p.m. EDT, American astronaut Neil Armstrong, 240,000 miles from Earth, speaks these words to more than a billion people listening at home: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Stepping off the lunar landing module Eagle, Armstrong became the first human to walk on the surface of the moon.  The American effort to send astronauts to the moon has its origins in a famous appeal President John F. Kennedy made to a special joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961: “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” At the time, the United States was still trailing the Soviet Union in space developments, and Cold War-era America welcomed Kennedy’s bold proposal.  In 1966, after five years of work by an international team of scientists and engineers, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conducted ...

From History.com On July 19, 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, a French soldier discovers a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles east of Alexandria. The irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic. The ancient Greek on the Rosetta Stone told archaeologists that it was inscribed by priests honoring the king of Egypt, Ptolemy V, in the second century B.C. More startlingly, the Greek passage announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been “dead” for nearly 2,000 years.  When Napoleon, an emperor known for his enlightened view of education, art and culture, invaded Egypt in 1798, he took along a group of scholars and told them to seize all important cultural artifacts for France. Pierre Bouch...