Welcome to this week’s On the Radar where we delve into all corners of the entertainment, tech and geek Internets for news, views and whatnot that may have escaped our regular coverage this week. Let is know if we missed something interesting. Otherwise, on to the links!

• In honor of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World hitting theaters today, here’s a frame-by-frame trailer replaced with the panels from O’Malley’s comic.

• EW’s Michael Ausiello says that the replacement for Steve Carell on The Office comes down to Danny McBride and Rhys Darby. If we put money on it, we’d say that NBC can’t contain the awesomeness of Kenny Powers.

• Comics meet games in this awesome list of your favorite comic books turned into classic 8-bit video games.

• U2′s Broadway musical about Spider-Man, unfortunately titled “Turn Off The Dark” is back on. Darn.

• Disney is relaunching their Star Tours ride at both parks next year. The new ride offers a tour of Bespin, Alderaan, and Endor. Sadly, you have to pay extra to hunt an Ewok.

• For those of you who missed it, here’s the Bangladeshi Hulk movie trailer that has been sweeping the monitors and hearts of everyone for the past week.

• Your weekly list worth reading: The 9 Worst Children’s Movies of the 1980′s.

• What would an Avengers film from 1952 look like? These guys have it covered.

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It’s unfortunate that Saturday Night Live has gotten a rep for being pretty unfunny in the past couple of years. Everybody will, of course, claim “the show stopped being funny when X left” but the truth of the matter is that it becomes a completely different beast every few years, starting when they made the first major cast change back in 1980.

These days, the level of writing, led by head writer Seth Meyers, has been adapted to a younger audience. With bits like music videos from The Lonely Island or the one-liners in Weekend Update, they are definitely appealing to a crowd under the age of 30. Even a skit like MacGruber, which is based on a bumbling protagonist (Will Forte) and the inevitable explosion ending isn’t exactly highbrow comedy, but mostly visual humor and random vulgarity.

Sadly, that’s exactly where the film adaptation of MacGruber picks up. It continues the trend of sight gags that don’t really pay off and more vulgarity than an uncensored episode of South Park. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of SNL, Forte, and the MacGruber skit, but the film lives up to the low expectation everyone had for it, in just being a 30 second skit stretched out into 90 minutes.

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Saturday Night Live has had fans of comedy split into groups since its first major cast change in 1980. Since then, dozens of factions have formed who believe solely that “SNL stopped being funny when [INSERT NAME HERE] left the show.” That statement has been said about just about every past cast member going as far back as Chevy Chase and as current as Amy Pohler.

Recently, the show has had a resurgence in popularity. With the weekly digital shorts of Andy Samberg and his band, The Lonely Island, to some of the more popular skits getting made into feature-length films, such as MacGruber, which is in theaters Friday.

Two weeks ago, Lorne Michaels and his team did something a bit off-beat, and took a cue from a grassroots campaign through Facebook to get Betty White to host. The show got enormous ratings, pulling in nearly 12 million viewers during the live broadcast, which is a rarity in the era of DVR’s and HULU.

It seems that they were able to keep the ball rolling, as the next episode, which was this past Saturday’s season finale, pulled in some of the highest ratings for the show in half of a decade. The finale, which featured host Alec Baldwin and musical guest Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, averaged a 5.8 rating and a 14 share, which is the highest for a season finale since 2005 when Lindsay Lohan hosted.

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This week On the Radar bring a whole slew of new and interesting stuff. Let us know if we missed anything.

• The Flickcast’s own Elisabeth Rappe reports from the set of Jonah Hex (for another site but we don’t care, we love her).

• James Cameron says 3D will replace 2D soon. Yes, but when will substance replace style?

• True Blood gets a comic book. At least that’s better than a Lady Gaga comic. . . oh, wait.

• Heroes to get the axe? Isn’t it about time, really? The show has pretty much sucked sense Season One.

• Judge Dredd is returning to the big screen. He is the law, dammit!

• Some guys made a Mega Man movie. Why? Why the hell not?

• Hayden Christensen to help rip off The Da Vinci Code in The Genesis Code. But what about the younglings?

• Michael Bay says the Racist Robots will be banished from Transformers 3. On a related note, Michael Bay is a liar.

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We’ve all speculated that the time would come when everyone’s favorite free TV and movie streaming site, Hulu.com, would start charging a subscription for people that wanted to use the site to its full potential. Now it seems that time has finally come.

Even though the site is a close second to Google’s YouTube, and has generated more than $100 million in revenue from advertising, major networks are now vying to take some of that profit. The solution? A monthly subscription plan. From LA Times:

Under the proposal, Hulu would continue to provide for free the five most recent episodes of shows like Fox’s “Glee,” “ABC’s “Lost” or NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” But viewers who want to see additional episodes would pay $9.95 a month to access a more comprehensive selection, called Hulu Plus, these people said.

Hulu plans to begin testing the subscription service as soon as May 24, according to people with knowledge of the plans.

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While we’re still winding down from our crazy week over in Austin for SXSW, there are still plenty of great goodies and stories to share with you. One of which is for a film that debuted at the show, MacGruber, starring Will Forte.

The film is another skit-turned-film in the vein of Night at the Roxbury and Wayne’s World as the character is taken straight from Forte’s performance on Suturday Night Live. The film is directed by SNL writer Jorma Taccone, and written by the trio of Forte, Taccone, and John Solomon, another SNL writer.

With three writers from SNL working on the film, it only makes sense that head writer Seth Meyers would have some input on the film as well. He was down on the set for a while with the cast and crew. After the jump, check out a panel for MacGruber at SXSW in which Meyers discusses a harrowing  story about his experience.

MacGruber hits theaters May 21st.

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This week on The Flickcast, Matt is back home from his trip to sunny LA and he and Chris are back in action with a whole bunch of new topics. Some of what gets discussed in this episode includes Mark Strong as Sinestro in Green Lantern, Conan in 3D, Wal-Mart buying Vudu, Betty White on SNL, Call of Duty and its many incarnations, Ian McShane as Blackbeard, the sale of Action Comics #1 and a whole lot more.

They both also made some good picks again this week incuding Matt’s pick of the short film The Legacy and Chris’ pick of the classic 80′s TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey, featuring Stephen Collins and Roddy McDowall.

As always, if you have comments, questions, critiques, offers of sponsorship or whatever, feel free to hit us up in the comments, on Twitter, at Facebook and MySpace or via email.

Not very long ago, some die hard fans of former Golden Girl Betty White put together a grassroots campaign through Facebook to get fans behind the idea of her hosting Saturday Night Live. The moderator put out a plea for people to protest and request NBC employees for her to get a chance to host. Practically over night, the fan group blew up, and is still running strong with over 430,000 members.

It was announced about a week ago that NBC is “this close” to booking White on the show, but she unfortunately comes with a caveat. From Entertainment Weekly:

White would not be hosting alone. Rather, I hear SNL is putting together a “Women of Comedy” episode that would team the former Rose Nylund with several of her younger contemporaries. Ex-SNL MVP Molly Shannon is on board, I hear, and feelers have also been put out to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. (An NBC spokesperson insists no one has been confirmed at this time.)

While the prospect of White hosting all by her lonesome is kind of an awesome one, the thought of having a super show with names like Molly Shannon, Fey, and Pohler back is pretty cool too.

The show is on hiatus for the Olympics, but will return to a full schedule soon with Jennifer Lopez hosting and performing one week, and on of our favorite comedians, Zach Galifiniakis, hosting the following week.

Many people speculated that MacGruber, an upcoming film based on a series of 60-second spoofs on Saturday Night Live, would be a terrible idea. Then we saw the first two trailers for the film and realized it may actually turn out to be pretty funny. Now that the rest of the world is in agreement, there seems to be trouble ahead for the filmmakers.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the creator of the original MacGyver, Lee Zlotoff, had a deal with New Line back in March of 2009 to produce a film based on his 1985 series. The idea sat on a shelf for other projects like Friday The 13th and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past could come to fruition. Months later, Relativity Media went forward with their MacGruber production, which was basically a script mocking Zlotoff’s original premise.

Zlotoff was not happy about this, and began drafting cease-and-desist letters to Relativity. From THR:

“We feel they’re infringing our rights,” Zlotoff lawyer Paul Mayersohn told us Tuesday. As the film’s April 23 release date approaches, Mayersohn says he’s meeting with litigators to determine a course of action, which might include filing a copyright and/or trademark lawsuit and attempting to get an injunction against the film’s release.

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While everything will be coming to a screeching halt pretty soon on NBC for their wall-to-wall coverage of the Winter Olympics, this Thursday is an all new night of comedy for the network. A big chunk of that will be 30 Rock as SNL alum Jan Hooks pops by as Jenna’s mom. From NBC:

Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) takes Frank (Judah Friedlander) in as a roommate, and is pleasantly surprised when the two make a pact to help each other kick their bad habits. Meanwhile, Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) turns to Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) for help with her mother, Verna (Jan Hooks), who has come to visit.

Hooks has remained pretty active in TV since she departed from Saturday Night Live back in 1994. She went on to be a recurring guest on 3rd Rock From The Sun and even a few episodes of The Simpsons.

Check out four new clips from the upcoming episode of 30 Rock entitled “Verna” after the jump, and be sure to catch it this Thursday on NBC.

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While most of the internet community got to bask in the glory which was the MacGruber red-band trailer earlier this week, some people wouldn’t mind it with a little less profanity, and a little more action. Luckily, the first official green-band trailer recently hit the net for all of those folks.

The new trailer doesn’t give us a whole lot more, with the exception of a few more great lines like “I was talking to the missile”, a few more explosions, and way more WWE wrestlers. MacGruber’s “team” consists of WWE’s Kane, Christ Jericho, Great Khali, Mark Henry, and The Big Show. It’s surprising that Vince McMahon himself isn’t producing the film.

The film, for those not “in the know”, stars Will Forte as he reprises his character from Saturday Night Live, which is basically one big MacGuyver spoof. The film also features fellow SNL cast member Kristen Wiig, Powers Boothe, Ryan Phillippe, and Val Kilmer as Dieter Von Cunth.

Check out the official green-band trailer after the jump, and expect to see MacGruber blow stuff up on the silver screen starting April 23rd.

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Fans of Saturday Night Live and Will Forte rejoice! The very first trailer for the upcoming MacGruber, based on the Will Forte SNL skit, has finally hit the web, and it looks pretty damned funny.

Penned by Forte, along with other SNL writers Jorma Taccone (Hot Rod) and John Solomon, the script adapts the 30-second MacGuyver spoofs in which MacGruber must disarm a ticking bomb, which never happens due to the ensuing antics. The film was stretched and fluffed into a almost spy-like plot in which MacGruber must take down international terrorist Deiter von Cunth (Val Kilmer), all while sporting a blond mullet and looking cool.

This is the first SNL alum-starring, Lorne Michaels-produced film since 2008′s Baby Mama starring Tina Fey and Amy Pohler. Expect this film to do better than the aforementioned film, given the talent involved. MacGruber also stars Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, Ryan Phillippe, and others.

Check out the very first trailer (Red Band, so NSFW due to language) after the jump, and expect to see MacGruber blowing stuff up on screen on April 23rd.

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