OK, they have cosmetic differences. Space Chimps, as the title suggests, depicts a trio of chimpanzees on an outer space rescue mission (complete with aliens) and opens July 18. Opening August 8, Fly Me to the Moon depicts three young houseflies who secretly stow away on the Apollo 11 mission and thus share in the first moon landing experience with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. I shudder to think of the puns based on his name.

Now, I can get how the arm’s race-style competition between Hollywood studios yields to suspiciously similar movies like Antz and A Bug’s Life, or Deep Impact and Armageddon, or Dante’s Peak and Volcano (I could go on and on), but does either of these look like a good enough idea to be made — let alone twice? I dare you to watch them:

Space Chimps

Fly Me to the Moon

Fly Me to the Moon may have the edge, since it’s in digital 3-D.

PES’s fun food-related shorts are completely work safe and kid-friendly — which is more than you can say for his hilarious “Roof Sex,” which features furniture instead of food, as well as a killer punchline.

But that’s not all…

Now that the Iranian government’s fatwa against Rushdie has cooled off, it turns out that he’s not exactly a Thomas Pynchon-esque recluse. His appearance on “The Colbert Report” last year even had fun with his loosened security concerns. This year Rushdie plays Helen Hunt’s doctor in the film Then She Found Me (which David Lee Simmons reviewed earlier this year) and makes a cameo appearance in the music video for “Falling Down,” Scarlett Johansson’s cover of the great Tom Waits tune:

Incidentally, I find Scarlett as scrumptious as the next moviegoer, but her take on the song sucks — it’s overproduced, echoey slush. (Chanteuse Holly Cole did a cover album of Waits songs, and her version of “Falling Down” is awesome.)

For such a small theater company, Essential is particularly proactive about using the viral video powers of the Internet. Just like last year, Essential Theatre’s web site presents video previews (mostly interview-based) for its three shows running in repertory: the time-shifting comedy Valhalla; the crime-and-celebrity drama After Ashley by Gina Gionfriddo (opening July 2); and West of Eden, a comedy about Adam and Eve at middle age by Letitia Sweitzer (opening July 8). Here’s the clip for Valhalla; for the others, just click on the titles.

In writing the script for WALL-E, Stanton brought on board Jim Reardon, another “Mighty Mouse” alumnus who penned a wild Batman parody episode, “Night of the Bat-Bat,” in which the hero Bat-Bat fights the archvillain The Cow, a bovine with an inexplicably male voice. Other “Mighty Mouse” veterans include John Kricfalusi, the creator of “Ren and Stimpy,” and Bruce W. Timm, producer of “Justice League Unlimited” and most of the other great DC Comics animated shows of recent years.

Speaking of Stanton and vintage animation, other movie websites have reported that for his next project, he’s writing a big-screen adaptation of John Carter of Mars, based on the beloved, swashbuckling sci-fi pulp novels by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. In an interesting bit of movie trivia, John Carter of Mars almost had an animated, big screen treatment years ago: in 1936 and 1937, animator Bob Clampett worked with Burroughs and designed some test animation for a proposed series of John Carter of Mars theatrical shorts. Some of the test animation still exists, and offers a neat little glimpse of the early days of animation:

Finally, in my interview I mention the WALL-E teaser trailer that describes, with a near-mythic tone, a 1994 lunch with Stanton and others in Pixar’s creative brain trust about the studio’s potential movies in the future. If you haven’t seen it, it’s here:

My favorite WALL-E promo clip, though, is this ‘Buy & Large’ commercial for your own WALL-E unit.

I stayed up past my bedtime last night getting caught up on “Battlestar Galactica” episodes on Hulu. “BSG” isn’t as easy to watch on-line as, say “Lost,” which has the full library of its episodes available on demand on the ABC website, with the new ones going up the day after broadcast. Hulu posts the new “BSGs” eight days after air date, and takes them down about three weeks later, so if you snooze, you lose.

“Battlestar Galactica” recently aired its “mid-season” finale for its fourth and final season. The terminology’s a little confusing, but what happened was, the show produced 10 fourth season episodes before the writer’s strike, and just finished broadcasting them. The remaining 10 episodes have apparently been filmed, but Sci Fi may not complete the show’s run until 2009.

The last episode ended with the kind of jaw-dropping, how-will-they-deal-with-THAT twist that’s the show’s speciality, but overall the fourth season has been a head-scratcher. The most critically respected of any space opera TV series, the reboot of the 1970s Star Wars knock-off won over skeptics with its fusion of sci-fi conventions (space ships, killer robots) and sociopolitical themes drawn right from the post-9/11 zeitgeist (abuse of authority, torture, terrorism, paranoia, etc.) A certain amount of spirituality also informed the show, driving the human characters’ quixotic search for the mythic planet “Earth.” The fourth season’s promotional cast photo, shown above, even riffs on “The Last Supper,” and this year the mystical mumbo-jumbo has superceded the political allegories.

Some of the spiritual content perfectly fits the characters’ development, like the way President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) has been wrestling with terminal cancer, or (less obviously) the way Lt. Kara Thrace (Katee Sackhoff) experiences inexplicable visions that point the way to Earth. In one of the weirdest, most contrived plot points, though, the conniving Gaius Baltar (James Callis) has become the devout leader of a cult-like religious sect populated almost entirely with comely women. In an intriguing wrinkle, Baltar prosthelytizes for the God of the monotheistic Cylons, who resembles the deity of the Christian faith. Still, we’ve bought Baltar as humanity’s traitor, a Quisling, puppet president and war criminal, but making him Jim Jones in space is like one twist too many.

The whole season has been marked by series regulars behaving either out of character or having their identities changed. The romance between Commander Adama (Edward James Olmos) and Roslin has been one of the show’s warmest touches, but the relationship chipped away at Adama’s impeccable military professionalism in ways that are hard to accept. This season has been dealing with last year’s big surprise that four regulars are in fact robotic Cylons, a detail unknown not only to themselves, but the other Cylons as well. The secret of the “Final Five” Cylons has fired lots of on-line speculation and fueled some juicy subplots (particularly the ones involving Michael Hogan’s crusty Col. Tigh and Rekha Sharma as the show’s latest femme fatale). But the revelations seem to have painted the show into a corner.

One can only hope that the endgame, no matter how far off it’ll be, will provide satisfying answers. Fortunately, “BSG” creator Ron Moore and the rest of the show’s brain trust generally seem more sure-footed at setting up and resolving long arcs than the creators of “Lost” have been. And “Battlestar Galactica” has been and will doubtlessly continue to be exciting and eminently watchable. It wouldn’t keep me up nights if it wasn’t.

(Image courtesy of Sci Fi/Universal)

A listener hearing New York’s WBAI-FM play Carlin’s “Filthy Words” routine on Oct. 30, 1973, in its unaltered entirety lodged a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC, in turn, threatened to pull WBAI’s license. WBAI appealed the FCC’s bark all the way to the Supreme Court, where in 1978, the justices ruled in favor of the FCC, agreeing that the seven words “you can’t say on television,” shouldn’t be said on the radio, either—not during hours that children might hear them.

Carlin’s comedy encompassed more than just taboo-breaking profanity, however. He frequently examined life’s amusing minutia (”Urinals are 50 percent universal”) in a way that anticipated the observational humor of Jerry Seinfeld. He also delighted in wordplay and simple absurdity, like the headlines in his faux-news report: “A man attempting to walk around the world … drowned today.”

If you’ve been online at all on Monday morning, you’ve probably either seen the clip of “Seven Words” or a link to it. Here’s something a little different: an expanded, exhaustive version of the list from Carlin’s 1982 concert at Carnegie Hall. It features the familiar seven, as well as some terms that you may have never heard before (”donaker,” “sugarbowl pie,” “boy in the boat,” “71″) :

Updated: In case the Carnegie Hall footage gets pulled, here’s a similar routine, with Carlin’s audio synchronized to some extremely odd video.

In the world according to Jay Louis, there’s no such thing as too many douchebags. No, not the countless politicos that Jon Stewart likes to skewer on “The Daily Show,” but the tatted-up, hair-spiked, shiny-foreheaded, six-pack-packed, hand-symbol-thrusting, shades-sporting, wife-beater-wearing, tongue-thrusting, hand-gesturing and pec-bearing American men who somehow wind up with really attractive women in living color.

Louis, aka douchebag1, hosts the phenomenally popular website Hot Chicks with Douchebags, in which he and alert readers hip the rest of us “normal” folk to the cheesily over-packaged American men hanging out with women who would seem way out of their league. As popular as the site is, the next logical step would seem to be a book, Hot Chicks with Douchebags (Simon Spotlight Entertainment), which fell into our reluctant hands this week and will hit bookstores July 8. The book’s thesis seems simple enough:

In this book, we will identify every type of ’bag within the douche spectrum, from the youthful stage-1 Fratbags to the polluted, noxious stage-4 DJ Club Douche. We will tap directly into the core of not only how douchebaggery manifests, but also how it corrupts the hottie within its wily, greased-up charms. These unnatural cohabitations must be exposed to the disinfecting light of detailed scrutiny if we have any hope of societal redress.

Louis fancies himself a culture critic; his diary-style blog posts are laced with heady name-dropping that actually lead nowhere: “Lighting up a stogie and pouring a shot of rum for Jobu, I contemplated the famous words of 16th Century astronomer Tyco Brahe, who stared up at the Prague skyline one night and casually remarked, ‘I have to pee.’ So I peed.”

It’s all kind of dismissive, smug and superior in a Greg Behrendt/He’s Just Not That Into You kind of way that isn’t nearly as female-empowering as the title suggests. (Women don’t exactly come off that well either.) But HCWD is at its funniest when coming up with the seemingly endless labels for these poor creatures: The Greasy Euro-Douche, The Garden Gnome, The Furry-Man, The “He’s My Best Friend” ’Bag,” and so on. The book’s denouement suggests a 12-step program of “De-Douchification,” which starts with “Accept That You or Your Loved One is a ’Bag” and concludes with “Disband the Woo Hotties and Douche Scrums,” a form of bold group disassociation that would appear to be the height of naivete. (These douches ain’t going away anytime soon.)

Ground Zero for the douchebag, according to Louis, is former ’90s power couple Richard Grieco and “Baywatch” babe Yasmine Bleeth, whose tragic tale is recounted in these pages. It’s all not nearly as funny as Louis thinks he is, but the photos of them, and all the other douchebags/hotties, suggests incontrovertible evidence of their existence.

Now, if we could get a book featuring Dick Cheney, Lord High Douchebag, and his minions, we’d be getting somewhere. But I fear we’ll never see Condi in a thong.

(Photos courtesy Simon Spotlight Entertainment)

The current collection includes favorites from previous shows, including Don Hertzfeldt’s “Rejected,” which may be one of the best short films I’ve ever seen of any kind. Other items on the line-up are “Save Virgil,” starring “The Man Show’s” Adam Carolla providing the voice of a animated guy born in a live-action world, plus some new adventures of “Happy Tree Friends,” cute forest creatures who suffer grisly, unfortunate mishaps. The evening reportedly concludes with director Breehn Burns’ “Roybertitos,” the latest appearance from the amusing Dr. Tran, American’s #1 action star — or is he?

The character originally appeared in “Here Comes Dr. Tran,” an extremely funny (if overly drawn out) short from 2003 with an online cult following. If you like “South Park,” you’ll love it.

I’m especially intrigued by Dr. Tran Doles Out the Harshness.

Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Animation Festival plays at 7:45 and 9:45 p.m.