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Oh god I just realized a lot of our readers weren't born when this movie came out.

Nintendo is in the early stages of a plan to bring its familiar characters to the big screen through feature films, the company said in reports from over the weekend.

President Tatsumi Kimishima told the Japanese Asahi Shimbun newspaper that the company is in talks with a number of movie-production houses to create Nintendo-branded films within the next two or three years. A Nintendo spokesperson speaking to the Wall Street Journal confirmed that report, saying that Nintendo would use some funds from its recent sale of the Seattle Mariners baseball team to help finance the projects.

The reports suggest that Nintendo wants a more direct role in managing its movie ambitions this time around, after 1993's live action Super Mario Bros. movie was a critical and commercial flop (a series of animated Pokemon movies were managed by The Pokemon Company, which is only part-owned by Nintendo). "We will be providing the funds, and we’ll be included more [in the decision-making]" Nintendo spokesman Makoto Wakae told the Journal about the current plans.

(credit: BMW)

Electric vehicles are making up an ever-increasing percentage of BMW's sales, both here in the US and worldwide, according to a statement released by the company on Friday. In April in the US, the BMW i3, i8, and X5 xDrive 40e accounted for just under 15 percent of all BMW passenger vehicle sales—a combined 2,572 cars out of a total of 17,786 cars sold last month.

More than half of BMW's EVs have been sold here in the US, which, along with Scandinavia and the UK, is the company's best market for hybrids and EVs. BMW's electrification strategy is a two-fold affair. There's the i sub-brand, which currently features the i3 city car and i8 sports car (two of our favorites here at Ars), and it's believed that a third i model is in the works, a crossover called the i6.

The company is also building hybrid versions of some of its regular vehicles, including the 330e, X5 xDrive40e, and now a 740e as well.

(credit: soumit)

Amazon's Fresh delivery service is only the tip of the online retailer's grocery iceberg. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Amazon will soon sell private-label goods on its website, including perishable food, starting as early as the end of May.

Happy Belly, Wickedly Prime, and Mama Bear are among the names of new brands Amazon will sell, and the company will stock items such as nuts, spices, baby food, and coffee. According to the report, Amazon has been developing private-label products for many years. The company reached out to branding consultants and manufacturers like TreeHouse Foods, Inc. to get ready for the launch.

Amazon is following in the footsteps of many large brick-and-mortar retailers like Walgreens and Sephora, who have their own private-label brands and products. Amazon already sells some private-label goods under its Amazon Basics brand, but those items are mostly limited to electronics like HDMI cables, batteries, and power strips. The company's currently private-label products have had some issues in the past. In 2014, Amazon had to recall its Elements diaper brand because of a design flaw. Undoubtedly, branching out into food, particularly perishable food, will pose its own unique challenges for Amazon.

(credit: "Kraftwerk Volkswagen VW" by Kintaiyo)

According to the Financial Times, Norway's gigantic sovereign wealth fund is planning to join the class-action lawsuit filed against Volkswagen Group in Germany. The lawsuit concerns VW Group's emissions shenanigans—the company was caught falsifying emissions tests for its diesel engines in the US and around the world.

The German class-action lawsuit is just one of a number that VW Group is facing. Here in the US, the automaker is facing more than 600 lawsuits, which are being overseen collectively by US District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco. Last month we reported that as part of that legal action, the automaker has agreed to buy back more than 500,000 cars with the affected 2.0L diesel engine.

The scandal hasn't been good for VW Group's bottom line, either. In April, the company released a delayed financial report showing it had lost $6.2 billion in 2015.

(credit: JOHN THYS/AFP/Getty Images)

Google could be hit with a fine as high as $3 billion (~£2.09 billion) in the European Commission's long-running antitrust case against the ad giant's alleged abuse of dominance in the search market.

The Telegraph reported the potential record-breaking multi-billion penalty on Sunday, but noted that the figure hadn't been decided yet.

Sources have similarly told Ars that Google could be whacked with a fine in June, after it was formally charged in April 2015 with favouring its own shopping comparison products over those of its rivals in the European Union.

Statue of the late cosmonaut Gherman Titov. (credit: Senza Senso)

The recklessness and bravado of the first seven Mercury astronauts are immortalized in the 1979 Tom Wolfe book (and 1983 film) The Right Stuff. You'd think the Soviet space program wouldn't have tolerated such misbehavior—early cosmonauts were supposed to represent the superiority of the Communist system, after all—but you'd be wrong. And this reality is best understood through the story of Gherman Stepanovich Titov, the Soviet Union's second man in space.

Decades before astronauts and cosmonauts made months-long jaunts to the International Space Station (ISS), Titov was the Soviets' first “long-haul” space traveler. To this day, he remains the youngest person to have flown in space. Just one month shy of his 26th birthday and nearly two years before Gordon Cooper's day-long Faith 7 flight, Titov spent over a day in space. This milestone came during his August 1961 Vostok 2 mission (call sign: Oryel, or Eagle), covering a then-staggering 17-and-a-half orbits. He traversed over 700,000 kilometers—430,000+ miles—which is nearly the distance from the Earth to the Moon. His achievement proved humans were able to survive this sort of travel in space.

But there's more to this cosmonaut than just long distances and world records. With his healthy supply of attitude, Gherman Titov embodied the youthful, rebellious spirit that drove both the early US and Soviet space programs. He didn't emerge unscathed from the vices of his youth, but he eventually matured into an elder statesman of space and is responsible for Cosmonautics Day, observed in Russia on April 12 to commemorate the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic first spaceflight.