NEWS CORP. NEWS

News Corp. finally unloaded money-losing social network MySpace on Justin Timberlake (?!?) for $35 million (that’s about $1.50 per user!), $445 million less than what they paid for it in 2005. $445 million is only more than half of what News Corp. makes off of Simpsons merchandise per year. [Los Angeles Times]

TOON BEAT

Holy crap Lois, they’re making a Family Guy MMO (that’s massively multiplayer online game), for some reason. So if you’re tired of stomping around Warcraft or whatever you can pretend to be a virtual Family Guy character and walk around Quahog making lazy pop culture references with other Family Guy fanatics. Wow!!! It’ll be like TV Tropes and Second Life had a baby, except with over 9,000 times more epic random for the win purple monkey dishwasher. I’m guessing there will be some “game” elements, like, I don’t know, beating up the chicken guy or the evil monkey (remember the time Peter beat up the chicken? Remember?). Will there be gang wars between Simpsons fans and Family Guy fans? Who knows! Nobody knows anything about this thing yet, all we know is there’s a site where you can pre-register for a beta, and if you view the page source, the description says “Sign up for the Family Guy Online today and receive news & events about the upcoming MMO!” So yeah.

Any MMO based on an animated sitcom is going to be horrible, but I gotta wonder why they didn’t do this for The Simpsons first – Springfield is a dense location with lots of places to explore, people are still obsessed with “Simpsonizing” themselves and celebrities (I have never, ever seen anyone on the internet “MacFarlaneize” anything), etc. Maybe they tried and it never came to fruition? Maybe Fox did some studies and discovered “the gaming community” knows The Simpsons is horribly lame now? The world may never know.

Anyway, here’s some funny tweets:

Sounds like a plan, y’all. [Family Guy Online]

THE INSIDE SCOOP

super 8 Remember back in 2007, when about ten or so 7-Elevens across the country became Kwik-E-Marts as part of an unprecedented marketing push for the The Simpsons movie? Just about everyone agreed it was a genius promotional stunt. Well, now it’s 2011 and it looks like Hollywood hackman J.J. Abrams has shamelessly copied the whole thing. Over 2,000 Motel 6 motels across the United States and Canada have been transformed into “Super 8” motels in order to market Abram’s latest popcorn flick, Super 8. Each room has been specially designed to resemble the 1970s, the time period in which the film takes place. They’ve even made a super-convincing viral web site.

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ANIMOTION MACHINE

david silvermanKids, I have something to tell you. I know you love your Emmy-winning director of The Simpsons and Monsters Inc. David Silverman very much. Well, he’s been getting very sick lately and sick directors need lots of fresh air so they can get healthy again. Some nice men from MGM came by and they graciously volunteered to put him on a Punk Farm upstate. They’ll going to take good care for him and give him lots of love. He’ll have lots of room to run free, and play the flaming tuba, and direct a CG kids movie about “five barnyard animals who form an underground rock band.” Please don’t be sad. I’m sure David Silverman loves you very much and he wouldn’t want you to worry about him. He’s going to be so happy up there, and make lots of new animator friends. So don’t you worry your precious little head about ol’ David Silverman. He’s in a better place now.

[Variety]