A happy 69th birthday today to one of the most revered, intense, influential, and inspiring actors of his or any generation, Robert De Niro. For over 4 decades now, the actor has been delighting fans and peers alike with an approach to his craft that’s mostly mired in a method style, a naturalistic, realistic approach to his many memorable characters.

The son of an artist and sculptor in his mom and dad, he was born in the bohemian Greenwich Village on August 17, 1943. After appearing as the Cowardly Lion in a school stage production of The Wizard of Oz at age 10, De Niro dropped out of school a few years later to follow that muse and study acting, which he did at the esteemed Stella Adler Conservatory as well as with possibly the chief mentor at that time to his generation of actors, Lee Strasberg and his Actor’s Studio.

Hello there, fellow cultural mutants. Humble writer BAADASSSSS! is here to announce the launch of a special new regular column for Geeks of Doom, “If BAADASSSSS! Controlled The Universe.” I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of alternate timelines where certain events had radically different outcomes than the ones we know of, outcomes that forever altered the course of human history. Many books and articles have been written about the greatest movies that were never made. Most of those aborted features would have been dreams made reality for movie fans the world over were they made. With that in mind I will devote each edition of “If BAADASSSSS! Controlled The Universe” to the construction of my own personal alternate history of cinema where the movies that we beat ourselves over the head with our own shoes wondering how come they were never made did in fact make it to the big screen, and each time the results were glorious.

For this inaugural edition I take a look at The Expendables, but not the one we all know and mostly love. The all-star 2010 action epic headlined by Sylvester Stallone and a small army of the screen’s greatest ass-kicking manly men defied the odds by becoming a global box office sensation and giving rise to a sequel set to open this Friday that looks even better than the original. But let us consider for a moment what would The Expendables have looked like if it was made with an entirely different cast in a much different time. In this alternate reality the Stallone movie is actually a unacknowledged remake of a star-studded spectacular of bullets, bombs, and babes from the late 1970s that unfortunately remained unfinished and unreleased. Now imagine that the footage from the production of the original Expendables that survived had recently surfaced and we were about to get a first hand look into a movie that had the potential to be one of the greatest action films ever made.

So you thought you’d heard it all, didn’t you? Read that headline one more time slowly, cross it off the list, and prepare for whatever wild and wacky new one surfaces tomorrow. It’s just another day in the world of geek.

It’s being reported that Warner Brothers is teaming up with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) to make a movie. Considering that the WWE has their own film production company and has for quite a while now, this should come as no great surprise. But what may be a little surprising is what they’re actually making.

According to the reports, the two companies will be making a new animated Scooby-Doo movie, in which the big mystery will be set at the wrestling powerhouse’s biggest yearly event, Wrestlemania.

With Dexter: Season 6 recently released, Amazon has the Dexter: Seasons 1-5 Blu-ray bundle for only $126.49 (that’s 57% off the list price of $291.99).

This 20-disc bundle contains five seasons of the hit ShowTime series Dexter, starring Michael C. Hall, Jennifer Carpenter, Lauren Vélez, David Zayas, and James Remar, and each season comes in its own individual case along with bonus features.

The $10 t-shirt deal of the day over at RIPT Apparel is a Transformers-themed shirt called “Samurai Formers” by Ninjaink.

The sale at RIPT began today, Friday, August 17, 2012, at midnight CST, and will continue for 24 hours from then, and once it’s over, it will not be sold on the site anymore.