g.i.joetheriseofcobra

NORAD is already tracking Santa Claus and his airborne reindeer team as it heads south from the North Pole and ignores boring Canada to give delightful Christmas presents to all the good American boys and girls. Fortunately, the U.S. Air Force apologized for that anti-aircraft missile that almost nicked Dasher. They sent a fruit basket and everything.

The point is that you don't have much time to snag holiday toys for your TV fan friends and those few kids you actually like. Fortunately, there still some popular toys out there that can serve multiple gift giving purposes.

The I Love Lucy Barbie from Mattel (right) sells for $45, so it might be more appropriate for an adult toy collector (an adult who collects TV-related toys, I mean). But, a Barbie is a Barbie, and few girls would turn one down -- even if it features Lucy Ricardo auditioning for a part in Ricky's show at the Copa.

Director Stephen Sommers might want to discourage the production of animated lead-ups to his feature films. They keep outdoing the movies they're supposed to set up for audiences.

Before his Van Helsing reached theaters in 2004, Universal released Van Helsing: The London Assigment. Written by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, the animated half-hour was clever and action-packed. Van Helsing? It was not clever and action-packed.

Now, the DVD release of G.i. Joe: Resolute, an 11-episode series of animated shorts that originally aired on Adult Swim before the release of Rise of Cobra, brings a cooler and more visually compelling "Yo, Joe!" to screens.

G.I. Joe and Transformers climbed to their lofty perches atop Hollywood's food chain from their iconic beginnings on 80's television.

Now, IDW Publishing is helping to bridge the gap between those classic 80's shows and their 21st Century big screen adaptations with new series of digital comic books based on the adventures of Snake Eyes, The Baroness, Optimus Prime and Megatron.

Made especially for online devices like iPods and the iPhone, these digital comics should be a welcome site for hardcore fans of the original TV hits as they're not blown away by the CGI-driven movie adaptions. Yes, the animation of those after-school cartoons was about one frame every four minutes, but they had such purity and charm to their morality plays.

G.I. Joe is my favorite 1980s action-adventure cartoon. So naturally I was crushed when I heard that hackmaster Stephen Sommers (Van Helsing, The Mummy) was directing the big screen adaptation, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. But now I'm actually looking forward to the thing.

Sure, Snake Eyes is wearing slacks, Cobra Commander looks like a frakkin' Troma reject, and the movie has way more Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans than I can handle, but check out this cool new French trailer:



First off, I love that this French trailer starts out with the Eiffel Tower getting nuked and someone telling the president, "The French are pretty upset!" Then we're introduced to the Delta 6 "accelerator" which, thankfully, is a high-tech power suit that turns boring old Channing Tatum into a super-charged flying cyborg.