For those of us who grew up in the 1980s, who doesn’t have fond memories of playing with action figures? Whether you were plotting elaborate battles and all-out dirt mound warfare with GI Joe and Star Wars characters, or continuing the adventures of She-Ra and Strawberry Shortcake, those toys were a big part of our childhood.

Today, some lucky — and very talented — people still get to play with those toys, and get paid for it. Breathing life into these inanimate objects, the hit Adult Swim TV show Robot Chicken resurrects classic action figures and projects them into wild scenarios, or the everyday mundane world of real life, making for some side-splittingly hilarious situations.

Marking the end of the special exhibit "Between Frames: The Magic Behind Stop Motion Animation at the Walt Disney Family Museum," the creative team behind the show is coming to the city this weekend for several special events celebrating their craft. Seth Green, Matthew Senreich, John Harvatine IV, Eric Towner, and Alex Kamer will be on hand Fri/26 for an after-hours party featuring food, drinks, an audience Q&A and screenings of behind the scenes footage, and then on Saturday for a special animation workshop followed by a panel discussion.

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 The 28th season of The Real World premieres tonight, and the trailer features some crying bros and a lot of slapping in Portland, Ore. To remind us of the show's less … well, shitty origins, MTV ran a “retro marathon” of its first three seasons last weekend.

Before the Teen Mom franchise, before Jersey Shore (and its ever-multiplying spin-offs), and before something called Buckwild that I don’t feel like researching, there were true stories of seven strangers picked to live in houses in New York and Los Angeles. And then in 1994, some strangers came to the wonderful city of San Francisco. The third season, last weekend’s grand finale, often gets credited with sparking the show’s popularity and indirectly launching the reality TV craze. It almost lives up to its reputation.

Usually, watching a reality television show after it's finished airing presents a predicament; the knowledge that the cast has returned to the world outside the screen takes away the precept -- flimsy as it is to begin with -- that we are seeing reality unfold. Watching the San Francisco season is a different experience. The 19 years of distance, a huge cultural gap (OMG, no smartphones!), makes the show a historical document.

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Savaged by anti-war activists, tut-tutted by nine Nobel Peace Laureates, and mocked by television critics, NBC's new competition show Stars Earn Stripes, which had its two-hour premiere last night, can add another pissed-off demographic to its rolls: fans of reality TV. Read more »

My pick for movie of the week is The Queen of Versailles, a likely (I'm callin' it in July) inclusion on my top 10 list for 2012. Seriously, this doc is revealing, timely, surprising, beautifully lensed (by photographer-turned-director Lauren Greenfield), and affords an insidery peek into the mysterious borderlands between extreme weath and excessive tackiness.

Hollywood would like you to see either an alien-invasion comedy with Ben Stiller or the fourth Step Up entry ... you could do worse, but you could do better. Frankly, I'd pencil in The Queen of Versailles for your Saturday night, and settle in tonight for the 2012 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, which comes complete with the amusement park-ish title "Isles of Wonder." All the buzz indicates that the extravaganza, directed by Danny Boyle (not known for his subtlety), will be one for the ages, or at least supply some juicy fodder for the meme generation.

Reviews of everything opening this week (spoiler: there's a lot) below the jump.

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Okay, I thought American Idol was getting bad. And I missed Simon Cowell. But the Next Big Thing, called The X Factor -- featuring not just Simon but Paula Abdul, along with L.A. Reid (who discovered Rihanna!) and Nichole Sherzinger (from Pussycat Dolls, and she once won Dancing With the Stars) -- is out of control.Read more »