In what may be one of the biggest acts of nerdiness ever, a man in California has actually constructed a life-sized statue of the Transformer Bumblebee in his front yard. To make it even cooler, he based the design on the 80's cartoon and not the movie. In a final act of awesomeness, he used an actual VW Beetle to build the thing.

The funny thing is that the builder showed more respect to the original cartoon in this single act than Michael Bay did with the whole franchise (although I give Bay props for using some of the original cartoon voices in the movies).

Granted, car styles have changed a lot since the 1980's, but the VW Beetle is back in style and changing Bumblebee to Chevy Camaro seems sacrilege. My guess is that Michael Bay simply wanted to buy American.

So which Transformer do you think he should build next?

[via Topless Robot]

SciFiWire has a list of 10 Saturday morning TV series that inspired movies and the list seems to be, to say the least, a bit skewed. To begin, the title is misleading. Most of the examples they use rose to fame as something else before they were even shown on television. And once shown, they weren't necessarily on Saturday mornings.

Popeye started as a comic strip and then cartoon shorts shown at theaters. The Addams Family started as a comic strip in The New Yorker then a somewhat unique sitcom.