Blank Check with Griffin & David - Finding Dory with Zach Cherry

Episode Date: July 12, 2026

Have you seen Dory? We have! Zach Cherry joins us to talk about 2016's Finding Dory, a film that made a kajillion dollars and set off a run of four Pixar sequels in a row. In this episode, we're talking about Ellen DeGeneres, animating characters without mouths, the success of Modern Family, live action remakes of already live action films, and Zach's proposed future spinoffs for the Nemo franchise. Young Marlin, Old Marlin, Old Nemo - the possibilities are endless! Read: After 30 years of Toy Story, Woody and Buzz face the tech age as a Pixar legend comes full circle in E.W. By Nick Romano. Watch the trailer for The End of Oak Street. Sign up for Check Book, the Blank Check newsletter featuring even more “real nerdy shit” to feed your pop culture obsession. Dossier excerpts, film biz AND burger reports, and even more exclusive content you won’t want to miss out on. Join our Patreon for franchise commentaries and bonus episodes. Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter, Instagram, Threads and Facebook!  Buy some real nerdy merch Connect with other Blankies on our Reddit or Discord For anything else, check out BlankCheckPod.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An unforgettable podcast. She probably won't remember. So that was one of three taglines for this film. An unforgettable journey she probably won't remember. That one's kind of clever. I don't know if you caught this. It's a subtle thread, but the character of Dory and finding Dory has memory issues. That's so true.

Short-term memory loss. Second tagline, have you seen her? Yeah, that one I liked. I remember those are the teasers because she'd be hiding in the poster. She'd be really small and it would be like the Manta Ray migration or whatever. you'd see sort of the stingrays. Is that right? And then the third one was she just kept swimming.

She just kept swimming. Now, I like this movie. But those three taglines show why this movie needed to happen, which was basically the Walt Disney Company being like, if we just put out a poster with a picture of Dory and any of those three jokes that are just right there for the taking, it will make $1 billion. All you need to do is be like,

here's Dory again and she's still Dory. That is exactly what happened. Have you seen her? Great. She's gone missing. She just kept swimming. That's the thing she does. Sure. Dory. An unforgettable journey she probably won't remember. Love it. I'm laughing and my heart is warm. She's a fucking fish.

Come now. The theater has seats. You can sit down in any of them as long as you, you know, paid for your ticket and we'll show you the fish and then our business is done. Right. That's how Pixar should advertise things. We fulfilled our end of the bargain. That's how sequel should.

She's a fucking fish Can you come? I'm really... I got other stuff to do. She's a fish. It was one of those movies where there was a lot of marketing, but it didn't feel like there was

like audible hype or excitement for it? No, because like Monsters University had to be like, remember the Monsters. They went to school. I'm like, I guess they did. They're like, well, they did. Okay, listen to me, okay?

And they did and it was called this. Monsters University was selling you a weirder take So there had to be more of a conversation with the public. Finding Dory was like, we got the Nemo. And everyone was like, got it. I'll circle it on my calendar. I won't talk about it until then. I'll show up. I'll give my money. I'll see it. How far apart were monsters one and two?

12 years. Okay, so about the same amount of time. And Dory is 14. 13. 13. 13. I was shocked. I was shocked to, in my memory of the timeline of Pixar, it was finding Nemo and then finding Dory came out like two years later. Right.

Like, I had no. recollection that it was a full 13 years later. You're sitting down to finding Dory being like, I just found Nemo. I got to find her too. In my memory, that's how it took place. And then when I like, you know, when I plugged in to do my part of the podcast,

I was shocked to learn that there was like a huge gap. I had no memory of that. Yeah. I mean, first, we lost Nemo under the Bush administration. Yeah. W. And Dory was found under the Obama administration. And was it like, what was happening with Pixar?

at the time. Trump has not had to deal with Marlon yet. He is the first, well, I guess Biden didn't either. Where's Dory? Yeah, but I was going to say, Biden did have kind of a bit of a dory brain.

Biden kept asking for Dory and Nemo. Which one's lot? Well, maybe this inspired him. What were you going to ask? What was happening with Pixar at the time? Great question. I'm so ready to answer. Was it like,

we will. We need a big win? Yeah, for sure. That was, I do remember it feeling like, oh shit, they're actually doing a... They're like... I'm gonna correct Sims here.

Coming back to Nemo. It wasn't you need a big win. It was, guys, it's time to play ball. You're right. The internal politics, you're right. Totally. It was, we respect the artistic purity thing. Once in a while, we're gonna fucking do something like this.

We got a cash check. Yes. Toy Story 95. Toy Story 299. They don't make another sequel for 11 years. From 99 to 2009, it's all original. Right. And then 2010 is Toy Story 3. 2011 is Cars 2. That's true.

2013 is Monsters University. 2016 is Finding Dory. 2018 is Incredibles 2. You're forgetting in 2017. Is Cars 3. And then 2019 is Toy Story 4. That's right. That's right. And suddenly a lot of sequels.

Yes. And it was just kind of the backlog of we respect what you've done, but come on, guys. Right. So Dory is right in the middle of this. Yes. Right, which is, boom. I remember when it came out, my reaction being like, fine, I guess so.

I did see it. This movie was a ginormous success. It's a little memory hold just how huge it was. But I do think this was the start of the kind of Pixar fatigue of, is this really what we're doing now? You know, Toy Story 3 was beloved. Monsters University less so, but it had novelty to it. We haven't been sequelizing all of these.

Cars had already kind of been written off as like, that's the junk one. Yeah, sure. This is for babies. I consider that almost a different. Totally. But then the accumulation of it by the time you get to finding Dory is really already just.

This is so much better than Monsters University. Yeah. Huge. Monsters University, I don't like. I know you do. I like it a lot. I defend it. How do the originals compare?

Like, was Nemo a much bigger hit than Monsters? Finding Nemo when it came out was the, highest grossing animated film in history. It was the sixth highest grossing movie period, I believe. Something like that. It was in the top ten of all time. It was a big hit. All for that, Little Fish? Yeah.

It doesn't even have two whole fins. But that was there, it was like, Toy Story, a Bug's Life does about the same, maybe a little less than the first Toy Story. Then Toy Story 2, huge jump up. Monsters Inc. huge jump up. Finding Nemo. Gynormous jump up. And then they sort of hit a plateau.

Incredibles is down a little bit. It's like Ratatoui up and Wally are all in the like $200 to $300 million range. And then when they pull the Band-Aid off the sequel thing, the numbers go through the roof. It's humongous because there had been so much built up. You have successfully built these characters that have endured and are beloved and have now been like activated across multiple generations. Kids are being raised on these who weren't even born when the first one came out. I will say I'm ready. I am ready for a whole.

lot more in the finding universe. Zach, they announced this week that Ellen DeGeneres, who of course has retired from public life and told us all a year ago that we were never going to see her again, has signed on to reprise the role of Dory in some sort of undefined short film. Interesting. They are doing something new with Dory. Short film, I'm not. I'm not either.

But it was just interesting. The announcement in and of itself doesn't feel that big, but it feels like it's more of a, is she coming back? and is Dory going to do more? This is her last film role currently. Yeah. This is the last time Ellen was in the film.

Who would get lost this time? The teacher should get lost. Stingray? When this came out, the cynical jokes like, do you do finding Marlon to complete the trilogy? And it's like,

there's no movie there. Nothing's being activated by him being lost or found because he also ostensibly is lost in... But he's... Maybe he's... Maybe he's... setting a little bit. He's starting to...

Oh, he Biden's... He could Biden. He won't stop talking about Pintosh. You got some juice there. Wait, the little ass turtle. The little turtle. I could fuck with the... Not a spinoff about him.

Isn't it? Well, the big one's crush. Oh, so, but it's scorch. It's scorch, I think. Yeah, totally. But I was more... I'm in the mood for a young Marlin prequel series.

Sure. I want to see Nemo go on his own epic journey. Sure. I sort of feel like... You want to... Here's what you want. You want young Marlin before he's this boring henpecked family man.

Before his trauma. Right. His trauma. Just sowing his wild oats in the ocean. Yeah. So that's prequel. And then on a separate track, you want Nemo flash forward to his 20s. And you want him sewing his wild oats in the ocean.

For me. You want two separate stories about those young fish fucking around. Marlin is Bilbo. Okay. Okay. And finding Nemo is, finding Nemo is, finding Nemo and finding Dory are sort of hobbit-esque. and then we need Nemo's Lord of the Rings. That's coming down the pipe.

He's Frodo. And then Young Marlin is more sort of the lore and Silmarillion and that type of stuff. That's what I'm looking for. So then what's the hunt for Gallum of the finding universe? Wait, if we do Peter Jackson, do you want to do a Hobbit movie? I love all of Hobbit. This is the answer I was looking for.

The Hobbit was like one of the first like real book. I ever read. Sure. Absolutely. I mean, for me, too, but the movies... Oh, I love the movies. Right. You exited satisfied.

We get excited anytime we can identify a cherry pick on this podcast. Exactly. If there is a... This is where I was kind of like, hmm. Because, like, if you go to chat GPT and you were like, predict a Zach Cherry Blank check episode. You can't always do it. Where it's like, he's been on yesterday, the Roller Ball remake. Now Finding Dory.

ChatchGPT is like, I don't know, man. I need more information. And you'll swing in. back sometimes with a cold, like, hey, if you ever did this director, I would want this. That's right. 1517 to Paris. Yes. It's my ultimate desire.

You called your shot before March Madness on Man on Fire. Love Man on Fire. And Tony Scott came close. He came close. We'll do him someday. But like, a year ago maybe we threw to you and we're like, this is what we're thinking. And you were like, I like the Kohn brothers, but like, respectfully, none of these feel like they have to be my episode. You've always been very kind of like, I'm not going to be.

do it unless I feel the pole. Yeah, well, except for this one. That's what's weird. Somehow we just all landed on, that sounds funny. Well, do you know how I found out I was doing the Finding Dory episode? How? Our mutual friend Alice and Wilmore was here. Oh, sure.

Recording an episode. She goes, I saw you on the calendar for Finding Dory. Yes. I went, oh, okay. I guess that bit was real. We had sent you like the year's schedule and you said, Hmm, Finding Dory. I have been eager to defend my good friend, Ellen.

DeGenerous on Mike, which was a joke. Yes. But then David and I looked at each other, stroked her chins and went, does sound like a good episode. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to hold him to this. And I will defend her to this day over her sitcom.

Great sitcom. I thought that was good. Yeah. We were talking about this in the Nemo episode of just like Ellen was so fucking funny. Oh, she's so funny. I mean, she genuinely, there was a time when I was like, she's the funniest person on the planet. Like, I, you know, I sort of cycle through my, who's, like, doing it for me at the moment.

And there was a time when I was like, I would watch her talk show and just everything she said would make me laugh. It was impressive that she was still funny on the talk show. Yeah, she's hilarious. That there was, you know, she still was able to be kind of dry and cutting. And then off camera. Off camera, occasionally she had a bit of a sharp edge, possibly. Have we discussed the second Ellen sitcom, the Ellen show? We talked about it in the Nemo episode, where she owns the bookstore.

No, that's the first Ellen, she owns a bookstore. Oh, the second one is the radio show? It's set in the wake. I don't see that. No, it's set in the wake of the dot-com bubble bursting. This was a 2001 sitcom. You know, it's like really, really. And her internet company goes bankrupt.

She moves to her hometown. She's got a crazy mom, played by Clarice Leachman. Scatterbrained Sister, played by Emily Rutherford. I love that actress. Great actress. Meets an old prom date who thinks they can pick up where they left off, but she's gay, so he doesn't

get that, played by Jim Gaffigan. This was the gay show. This was the... And Martin Moll plays up a befuddled teacher. Oh, yeah, that's really hard for Martin Moll. The Great Carrie Kenny on it as well from the state. And then she becomes a guidance counselor at high school. Yes. So it's like a very kind of like star-

leaden thing. Co-created by Mitch Hurwitz. Mitch Hurwitz of Arrested Development. And Carol Leifer. Legendary. Legend.

Yeah. But like one of those things where I feel like they were like, we got A-List talent. Yeah. Ellen is now a fully realized like, you know,

society's on board with like gay Ellen. Like, there's no shock here anymore. And it aired and everyone was like, no, thank you. I got canceled. This is.

I think the dot-com boom of it all may have doomed it. Who cares? Not to psychoanal too much, but it was interesting when she was doing... Her episode of the Letterman Netflix show was before the toxic workplace stuff came out,

but was the first time where I saw the mask kind of fall of, she's really angry. And maybe she did a Marin, and I felt this as well. She has so much lingering anger of how much the industry threw her out while celebrating her bravery for coming out, and then all of the stuff she did after coming out was rejected. And then she has this incredible, like, Nemo comes out May 2003.

The Ellen show premieres that September or October. Like, within the year 2003, she has completely rebounded to the height of American pop culture. And yet, it feels like the longer that success extends and the bigger it gets, the more her resentment bruise of what happened in that five-year wilderness period, and it just like metastasized into this pit of like... Wait, do you see this short film? It's called Dory Settles Some Grudges. Yeah, right.

Dory's like, it's fine that I'm rich. Actually, it's good. Yeah. She's just swimming back and forth really angrily. But I get the angle of she was sort of pressured into coming out. There was this feeling of good for you. Yeah, sure. And then everyone was like, but by the way, we're done with you.

Yeah, you can't work anymore. Right. Come on. Right. Like you're a gimmick now. I think Ellen's good. I'm pro Ellen. I think she's brilliant.

I think her performance in finding Nemo and finding Dory is so good. I think she's... We were making the case in the Nemo episode that she should have been nominated for best supporting actress. For that one, for sure. And when you look at the lineup of who got in that year, it's almost absurd that she didn't get in. Does anyone ever been nominated for a voice performance? Never happened. She was bandied around at the time

because I do feel like it was such a breakout thing what she was doing. And the BAFTA Awards had nominated Eddie Murphy for Shrek. Which is incredible because... Oh, he's so good in that. He is. The BAFTA Awards have historically

had such a bad track record with black actors manifesting in... Some weird things that happened at this ceremony. There have been no recent incidents. What are you talking about? But, like, the BAFTAs have never nominated

Denzo Washington one time. Is that really true? It's true. Of course they often snub him, but I was like, really, they never got them in there. After the, I swear thing, I was like, let me do like a full cataloging of this. They literally never nominated Denzel. But then also you look through like, who are the black actors who get the Oscar noms? And how often do they miss the Baftanom in their same year?

And it's crazy. It's telling. Wild that it's like the only one of the major groups. If you, you know, if you go, Gloves, Thags, Basta Academy. The only one of them to ever nominate a voiceover performance is BAFTA, Eddie Murphy, Shrek. It's a great performance. It is. So, like, I salute them doing it.

Yeah. But at the same time, is it insulting where they're like, we loved you as donkey? A little bit? There's a little bit of a, like, is this backhanded? It's a makeup nomination for Mushu. This is true. Oh, so true. They didn't get him for Mushoos.

Disney definitely would do the exact same thing next time. We're going to do a big Chinese epic. Lucy Dragon in Moulon. In Moulon. Oh, sure. In the 90s post-Genie, it was basically like, there better be a little guy, and he better be voiced by someone. And it is genuinely another incredible

performance. He's good as Mushu. The live-action remake had no Mushu, right? Like, no... Correct. I think there's like a statue at one point. Cool. That they point at. It's like an exclusively mushu moment, but there is no actual living representation of Mushu. But yes, you're right.

It is funny that they were just like... Might have been a mistake. We want to explore, like, Chinese folklore. Also, there is a dragon who just sounds like 80s, Eddie Murphy. And he's called Mooshu He's called Mooshu Come on And the bit is that he's got like

A kind of inferiority complex He's like a little He's like a little dragon Right Right But he also kind of finesses Everyone in conversation Uh

We're not talking about Moulon But we might talk about Mooshu some more Nobody from Mario was nominated for an Oscar You mean the recent Super Mario movie Yeah Now who are you going for Who's getting the trophy in your eyes

I've seen that movie I would say 15 to 20 times at this point. We're talking the first one. The Super Mario Brothers movie. I'm thinking of this. I'm thinking of Galaxy. Okay. Galaxy. It's not eligible yet.

Yet. Yeah. Okay. Right, right, right. Never know. Who's getting the win for Galaxy. I actually haven't seen it. No, I've seen it.

I've seen it with my daughter. She loved it. She would give everyone an Oscar if she knew what an Oscar was. We, in our, in our blankies, we always try to do a best voiceover category. Yeah, sure. If that existed at the Oscars, they would have nominated. to Jack Black for the first. Oh, yeah, he's great.

And not Chris Pratt. Yes. That would have been the lone nomination. Who have been some of your nominees in the recent years in that category? You know, like Ben Wishon Paddington is a good example. Both are really outstanding voice performance. What are some good ones? I'm trying to think.

I feel like Jake Johnson and Spider-Verfs was one we called out. Yeah, now I want to look through the history. You know, I love Holly Hunter and the Incredibles movie. Yes. Right? Like, that's a really, I mean, honestly, there would be quite a few from both Finding Nemo and Finding Finding Nemo and Finding

a lot of great voice acting and we're going to talk about Finding Dory it does kind of the same thing as Nemo that I appreciate of like we're not getting the Super Mario route of just like who's famous right now? Like we're going to get character actors, sitcom actors, you know.

Ty Borell is great in Finding Dory. He was the ultimate triumph of this movie for me and I feel like this is rarely the case in a sequel. Every new character introduced in this film is excellent. Yeah. There is no like, you're trying to make this happen.

Hank? Yeah. Or is he Frank? Hank. He's Hank. He's Hank. He's good. But I think all the new characters

are great, well designed, funny, well-developed, well-cast, don't feel like... There's also not that many. No. It's a good batch. It's not overwhelming you

with a bunch and you, yeah. Which often is the thing. They're like, can we throw 20 new darts at the board and see which one of these sells merchandise? Well, I have some issues

with Gerald, but we'll get to him. Gerald. And not Becky. You're fine with Becky, but not Gerald. Becky, I have less issues with, but Gerald. There was touchiness at the time. Gerald and Becky. I have minor quibbles. Okay. Becky's the bird with the bucket. Oh, right. And Gerald is the sort of massive eyebrowed. Right. Right. This is Blank Sheck with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. It's a podcast about filmographies. David's giving me a thumbs up. Directors who have massive success early on in their career, such as making finding Nemo. and are giving a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want, such as Wally or John Carter. Sometimes those checks clear.

See Wally. Sometimes they bounce. See John Carter. I did like John Carter. Yeah, you would have been good on that up. I mean, it's a good app. Yeah. Sometimes a filmmaker is holding such an incredible

get out of movie jail free card. That they can immediately recover from the most notorious flop of the decade, the century. Disney calls him and was like, hey, by the way, John Carter is going to lose like $200 million. And he's like, I think I just found DOR. We'll see you tomorrow, baby.

You can do anything you want. I can cover that. I'm good for it. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. It's fascinating. I think the best voice performance in Super Mario Galaxy

is Benny Safdi as Bowser Jr. That's the one where I was kind of like, well, he's doing something, and this is interesting. Like, most everyone else, I was kind of like, you're kind of doing what you're supposed to do. Charlie Day has more to do in the second one,

and I do, I find him affected. I think he's good. But yeah, the first one spends 90% in a fucking cage. He's in the cage. Who is Charlie's Day? It's a finding Luigi. The first movie is finding Luigi.

He goes missing. All I'll tell you is I told you, I think, before, my daughter was very locked into Luigi both times because she really likes it. He's scared. He's scared. Like, she identifies, exactly. Is your daughter easily scared? I mean, like, I'm not saying this.

Maybe. I just feel like there's not a lot in life right now. I think all children are pretty easily scared. I mean, she's scared of dogs, but that's such a classic little kid thing. I'm trying to think, like, when else she gets scared. I mean, I'm going to say yes, because. Because, like, the Halloween cat in the Disney Plus show, Super Kitty, scared her. And I've seen the Halloween cat, and he ain't scary.

He's mischievous at best. And she's, like, in bed at night being, like, the Halloween cat's going to get me. And I'm like, the Halloween cat steals candy. Like, it doesn't even scare anyone. But mischief can be the scariest thing of all. I think to a kid, it's a little bit, like, the kind of like... And they're, like, sneaking around. Like, you're not supposed to...

I don't know. And that's my candy. The rule of law... Don't take Ben's candy. premised on a lack of mischief. Yeah, she really, she does not like that Halloween. I just always, especially with talking about, like, children's media or things that are designed to play for children at least partially.

Right, I saw some scary shit when I was a kid. Like, because no one was really watching the store. I find it. It's a cartoon, like, won't scare you, right? People can be algorithmic about these things and design these things in a lab, right? And the Mario movies are a perfect example of that. But sometimes you just hit on something where you're like, this speaks to kids. Yes, right, right.

You have developed this character correctly, cast the right person, the right design, and kids see this, and they just go like, that's me. I get it. I'm going to ride with this forever. Dory. Yeah. You have said, David, that you have watched this movie many, many more times than Finding Nemo at this point because your daughter is hyper fixated on baby Dory. Yeah. And I just feel like also just generally, it's like, this movie has more Dory.

Yeah. Dory is the best. Yes. So, thus it's better. And makes Dory the vulnerable character in a way that fascinating. I think kids ended up relating to harder than Nemo, the literal child in the first one. Nemo is fine because Nemo's very confident.

Like, you know, it's sort of like Nemo's gonna be all right. And like Marlin, like, I mean, I like Marlon. Yeah. We all like Marlon. You know, good job, Marlon. But like, my daughter's not... I don't know if I like Marlon. Yeah, right.

Even though I am running around being like, what's up with Marlon, right? Maybe that's why you don't like it. This was the first time... He's holding up a mirror. I watched finding Nemo to prepare. And it was the first. time that I identified with Marlin straight down the mirror and had some hard talks with myself.

It's tough. Yeah. Yeah. And I did also, I did also watch Finding Forrester to complete the drill. Oh, perfect. Thank you. You're the man. And I am not joking.

I did do that. Our guest today is Zach Cherry. It's a cherry pick. Finding Dory, the 2016. It doesn't win Best Animated Film. No. What is? I'll find out.

In 2016, it would have, this is the Zootopia. year, I believe. My question was, is it even get nominated for an Oscar? It does. Does it? Let me let's find it. Let's... Well, on the freaking M&Ms commercial? Hey, well, actually, that sounds pretty, pretty hot. No, no Oscar nom. That's... Wow. They snubed sequels. They don't

like sequels. Yeah. I can tell you, let's find out what the best animated film. Nominees were in, what, this is 2016? I mean, yes. Beavis and Butthead? Hey. Well, we're from... Okay, wait, 2016. Okay, I will say it's a pretty strong field. There's a

reason this did not make it. Okay. So Zootopia wins. Yes, correct. Tell me the distributors at the other four. One of them is Lika. So that would be... Kubo? This is an excellent film. Should have won. Good movie. But Zutopia won rules. Yeah. I mean, these are all... These are good movies. Still kind of a cram that Lika has not won...

Yeah, never has. An Oscar yet. Yeah. It should have won, right? Because Coraline... Is the up year? Yeah. Coraline is the one it's... They should have been handed that one. Yeah. And then Paranorman would have been a fine winner over fucking brave. That's what's embarrassing. Rickett Ralph's in there too. Rick and Ralph going in was the presumed winner and it was sort of shocking. Red Garof was the same year as Finding Dory?

No, it's the same year as Brave. We're jumping all over here. It was shocking, but it was also an indication back then that they were like, I don't know, isn't the Pixar thing the best one? Which is why it's interesting that so quickly they switch to, we're willing to snub Pixar if they're going to do this sequel shit. Jack, you fuck with Ralph? Oh, I love Reggie Ralph.

He's such a great guy. The first one is awesome. Yeah. Because, like, the only... Well, you were angry that he broke the internet because you were trying to use it that day. Yeah. Yeah.

I had to submit my taxes. The only... And it's like, what am I going to do? What the fuck, well? Come on, Ralph. Could you have checked in with me before? Yeah. The only Pixar sequel

that is nominated in between the two toy story sequels, you know, three and four, which they, you know, gave the trouble to do. Incredibles, too. Is Incredibles, too. Yeah. Everything else. they were like, no, thank you.

And that loses to Spider-Rust, right? Yeah, which is fine. Yeah. Okay, so Zootopia, Kubo, another giant Disney animated film. It's a second... Which is, this is also why Finding Dory didn't get in. It's like there's already two big Disney movies.

Was Big Hero the same year? No, come on. 2016. I saw this movie right after Trump was elected. You saw this movie right after Trump? Oh, it's Moana. Moana. Moana.

And then there's two indie movies. Like two small films. Are they both G-K kids? One is G-K kids, I think. One is sort of jeeble-esque, but wasn't, I don't think actually was Ghibli. Hmm. Right. It was a, no, it was.

It was a co-production with Ghibli and some French guys. It's watery, too. It's, it's a watery, jibli. He says it's a French wettish, watery. It's kind of not Ghibli, but it's still, you know, it's kind of like half Ghibli. It's called the Red Turtle. Oh, yeah. It's very pretty.

Yeah. And then. Mac and Rita? Mac and Rita? That was my guess. Oh, the other, oh, no, no. It's not that. The other one is a French stop motion film that is really great.

Oh, my life is a zucchini, which rules. One of the great titles. And my life is a zucchini. And fucking written by... Celine Shama. Mac and Rita's the fucking Netflix show. What's the thing I'm thinking of? Or no, that was it was a Diane Keaton thing.

Oh, God, he's spiraling here. There was that... Well, there's Ernest and Celestine. Yes, that's French, lovely animals. Frankie and Grace is the Netflix show that you're thinking of. But then there is something called Mac and Rita with Diane Keaton. I'm thinking of the one that was kind of sexy. Oh, I know what you're talking about.

find. Where I want to say it was... Chico and Rita. Yeah. It was like this tune. A little Spanish. You might make your hands tight. That was the tagline. They dance pretty close. I do think that in a maybe a slightly less packed year, it might have gotten the nom. But that's a big, you know, there's already these two

giant things in Moana and Zootopia. So they're kind of like, yeah. We don't need Dory. I might nominate Dori. Did I nominate Dory? I like this movie. I like this film a lot. But I've grown. to like it. When I saw it in theaters, when it came out, it's not like I hated it or anything, but I was just sort of like, that's exactly what I thought it was going to be. It was totally fine.

I don't remember it walking out the theater. And also, your daughter's experience I've found is not unique. A lot of our friends, your age, with children, your daughter's age, are like, yeah, my kid watches Dory way more than Nemo. Yeah, Dory rocks. And it was the second highest grossing film of its year domestically. It was beaten only by Rogue One. It made four. $486 million to mass. It made a billion dollars worldwide. It was a hit. A giant hit.

A big hit. And like that's great. But Moana, which was sort of like slightly an underperformer at the time. Yeah. Has like outgained it in legacy by lot. That's a fascinating one where it only seemed like an underperformer because Frozen had been so humongous. And Zootopia. And songs help your legacy a lot.

They do. They do. Because they exist outside of actually watching the film. You can put them in the parks. You can put them on ice. You can put them in the whatever, right? Yeah. Put them on a hit clip.

Really good looking live action versions of these films. You can... That just look the same. David, let me rephrase what you're trying to get at, the idea. You could perfect them. You could finally get them right. Like, what if Disney just was like, just tomorrow, the guy just was like, hey, by the way, we know that looks back.

We're not going to release it. Sorry. It is. Or Flipside, what if they said James Cameron is doing a live action finding Dory? Oh, that'd be great. And he's doing it all for real. Yeah, right. It's all real. He put the computers down. He taught a fish how to act.

Yes. We don't know how he did it. Yelling. Yeah, right? He just keeps yelling at this fish. Now she's... Fucking blue tang. Don't you know who I am? Right. Alienware's Back to School event is the perfect time to score top gaming gear with incredible features

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by saving on sleek Alienware monitors, headsets, and more. The world deserves to know. This limited time sale awaits you now at alienware.com slash deals. That's alienware.com slash deals. Finding Dory. So did you see this film in theaters, Zach? I have no specific memory of it, but I'm positive I did. Because I was all in on Dory.

I love Dory. Dory Roles. June 2016. I assume we're living in New York. I saw this at the now dead Siniopolis Chelsea or whatever was called back then. The bow tie Chelsea, the Clearview Chelsea, you know, that theater, which was the UCB movie theater. It was the high movie theater. It was to go there all the time.

It was great. You could live there. That was one of those places where you're like, no one's kicking me out if I never leave this place. What was also incredible about it was. It was like a ghost town. It was like five floors. There was only one employee. There were never many people there.

And then they did a really expensive restoration. And it was so nice. And still no one was there, but it stayed open for another four years. There was a nice little burger shop underneath it that I like to go to. Yes, there was. I like that place. And there was the last remaining Boston market in the United States directly across the street. It was across the street, right?

Everything was happening on 23rd between 7th and 8th. I'm just also looking at the domestic box office. The top 10. Rogue One comes out in December. Finding Dory June. Captain America's Civil War was notably a spring release. Secret Life of Pets, I think July. Jungle Book, spring release. Deadpool, February.

Zootopia, March or April. Batman versus Superman, March. I can't believe Deadpool didn't make an appearance in Finding Dory. Suicide Squad August, sing, I think November, December. Like, Dory was so far and away the highest grossing film of the summer because every other film in the top 10 basically saved for secret life of pets

came out spring or fall. So what was the summer at 2016? Dory, Dory! Dory! I'm saying, like, Dory! It was nothing else. Dory ran the table so fucking hard. I mean, let me see. It was, Suicide Squad ended it. And I mean, ended it.

X-Men Apocalypse. Neighbors 2. The Angry Birds movie. I'm sorry, Captain America Civil War was the first week of May. Okay, so it was the kickoff. Alice through the looking glass. Ninja Turtles out of the shadows. Oh, man.

Pop Star, which rules but bombed. Conjuring to, now you see me to, Warcraft, Central Intelligence, Independence Day Resurgence. That one's so bad. Like, this is a rough line. The Legend of Tarzan, the BFG. Like, these are kind of historic non-starter franchise movies. Lady Ghostbusters Star Trek Beyond

which is great but bombed are underperformed The final Ice Age The only one that didn't make 100 million domestic I believe Jason Bourne That one's bad too And then the summer ends with

Suicide Squad And fucking Ben Hurl It was also bad Right So Dory was like So far in away The Queen of the Summer So where'd you see it

Big Man That's a good question I'm pretty sure I saw it At AMC Lincoln Square I saw it with my friend Scott Craterman, who's one of my oldest friends, and a regular movie buddy of mine, and I have a very distinct memory of sitting there the first 20 minutes, like, white knuckling the armrest and being like, this is bad.

And I have this experience every time I rewatch it. You were more invested in the Pixar movies being good. Like, I feel like I was kind of at this age where I was kind of like, I don't really care anymore. If they're bad, which I sort of assume, it's like, whatever. I was really... I wanted Incredibles, too, to be good because I like Brad Bird, but, like, generally I would be kind of like, eh.

I felt invested in the inshittification of Pixar. Right. And I was trying to think of an analogy because it wasn't like it went from being, like, great to being terrible. But it was kind of like the expansion of Shake Shack, where you're like, this thing felt really special. And how are they maintaining this quality? And how does it feel different? And then it grew and you're like, it's still better than basically everything else. But what are we losing?

And I'm worried about it falling further. And I think like the first 20 minutes of this movie are pretty aggressively bad and feel a little checklisty. Like, what do we need to do to, like, calm you down? I assume, do you mean, like, post-Baby Dory? Because Baby Dory's just right at the top. And you mean the kind of like, let's reset with like, where do Marlon and Nemo live? We're going to bring Mr. Ray back. And we're going to bring the turtles back.

Like, it feels like speed running the greatest hits from the first movie. Right. And introducing this conflict of like. feel like alts from the first movie. Right. Is every character forgetting or pretending this didn't already happen? And this conflict of like Marlin's like, oh, Dory, she's like, she's kind of a pain. She's kind of like tough to have around, whatever.

Now, when you saw it, had you recently watched finding, like, was finding Nemo in your regular rotation? Yes. Because I don't think it was for me. And so this time when I watched them back to back, you're like, that stuff did put me off. crazy how much kind of like double-b-ed. Yeah, I was like, oh, we're just kind of like running through like, hey, there's the turtles and there's this guy and there's this guy.

It felt like the worst version of what I was fearing this movie would be, which is just like key jangling, can we just do it again and will you guys be happy? But I think when I saw it, I had probably not seen Finding Nemo since it came out. Like, I wasn't rewatching it. So I think I was just like, hey, my friends are back. I think everything from when it gets to the Marine Institute is basically uniformly very good. Like I think the second it gets there, it works. But I have rarely had that experience of sitting there and for like 15 to 20 consecutive minutes being like bad, bad, bad, bad, fuck, I'm spiraling and then feel the movie just kind of like swerve, pull out a victory and stay good.

But then I remember defending it at the time. It did feel like even though it was a bit hit. You're there to defend. It was immediately greeted with this sort of like, what are they? doing here kind of thing. Can we zoom out? Because I know you were asking these questions, Zach, but some of the things going on here. Okay, sure.

We'll get into the door specific. You go right ahead. This is all you, baby. So, a thing we're restating in all of these episodes. There is a one movie contract for Pixar to produce Toy Story which Disney will distribute and retain the rights of the characters

forever. That movie is such a hit that Disney swings back around and says we want to make a five picture deal. You are an autonomous studio. You are producing films for us. We will own those characters in perpetuity. They agree to five original films. They also demand, can you please do Toy Story 2? They said, we're a small company. We only have the energy to do one movie. We're trying to scale up to two at a time. So they establish a B team of younger guys to take on Toy Story 2, which is meant to be direct to video. Because that's the return of Jafar model. You didn't put

animated sequels in theaters. They devalued the brand. There was this really, belief in the sanctity of that theatrical Disney movies need to mean something and the sequels being on video help kind of keep them feeling clean of the legacy of the originals. Toy Story 2

is not working. Lasseter Stanton, the A team, when they're done with a bug's life, come on and say will you let us take this over and fix it? We don't think this is up to our standards. We don't want it being released and if you let us take it on and push it back, we will make it

enough to put in theaters. They do that. It's a massive hit. It wins Best Picture, musical or comedy at the Golden Globes, an institution whose awards mean a lot. And they go, great, that was our third film on the contract. And Eisner goes, nut, no, no, nah, nah. That was not the deal.

The deal was five original movies. Toy Story 2 didn't count. You still owe me three more. This starts the bad blood between Pixar and Disney. They do Monsters Inc. Finding Nemo, Incredibles, Car. And by the time Cars is coming out, relationships are beyond freight. And they are self-producing, Ratatoui, Wally, and Up, completely self-financed, and they will

just sell them to the highest bidder of whoever they go to. Every studio in town is bidding on them. All of this stuff's super relevant to how this movie comes about. Katzenberg gets pushed out. Iger comes in. Iger's first move is, whatever it takes get Pixar. He gets them. They commit to releasing those three films, but then he also,

cracks his knuckles and goes, but guys, can we start talking about sequels? So Disney has now spent like $6 billion to buy Pixar. Stanton has been placed as the VP of Creative. He doesn't want to have to be a businessman, you know, or an administrative guy, but they're basically like, you're the king of story here.

You oversee all of this. Lots of Huggin John Lasseter, the founder of Pixar animation, at least, is suddenly placed into three positions simultaneously. He is the head of Pixar. He is the head of Disney feature animation. And he is the head of imaginary. So now Lassiter is wearing three hats, three offices, three times as many opportunities to hug people.

Two more hats than I've ever worn. It's impressive. His priority starts to become Disney animation is really bad. I have to fix this. And what were they putting out at the time? So they had been putting out like Chicken Little. Okay. He comes on halfway through production on Meet the Rural.

Robinsons and tries to sort of course correct that, tries to course correct Bolt. The first one that's sort of like this worked, he was able to kind of help oversee rebuilding it from the beginning was Tangled. Bolt made me cry. Tangled's a big hit. And then it starts the run of like tangled,

Frozen, Moana, Chitopia, Reckett Ralph. All these things we're saying were suddenly it's like, is Disney the Rising Studio? Right. Is Disney better than Pixar these days? He's putting more of his energy and attention there, because they had been the problem place, and Pixar seemed to have it all figured out.

But the other part of it is, they're saying to Pixar, guys, we just spent a lot of fucking money. And we know that the sequels were a non-starter conversation because of the bad blood over the Toy Story 2 thing for so long. But now there's so much fucking money on the table if we bring any of these characters back. And there's always this kind of polite, like, we leave it to you, the storytellers.

we won't do it and we won't force it until you tell us you have an idea, but we'd really like you to try to come up with an idea. And so that energy is like behind them. Toy Story 3, they were ready to do. They had wanted to do, and it was being held up by the bad blood. But with that in motion, then they're sort of like, can we revisit the Monsters' Conversation? Can we revisit the Incredibles conversation?

Can we revisit the Dori conversation? I feel like this is where you get to the sort of creative incubation. of the idea. Sure. When it came out, Stanton was like, no. Right, right. We're not a sequel studio.

That's not what we believe. They're always going on about that. They're liars. They weren't for a while. Well, their third movie was the sequel. But I just explained this whole thing. I mean, this is all the... Yeah, I understand.

But, you know, they've always had a little bit of sequel. The toy stories feel different to me as well. They feel like a whole separate thing. They do. And that's because, right, because the third... Pixar movie was Toy Story 2. Like, it does kind of set it apart. Yeah. So, Stanton said

he was always no sequel, like basically always. And puts it that he says he had to get on board from a VP standpoint, not a director standpoint. Exactly. Right. Isn't this good for the company? Right. Don't we want to keep Pixar afloat? I mean, this is the classic kind of inshittification thing of you're the most successful movie studio in history.

You get bought for a tremendous amount of money. And immediately they're like, but don't you have to think about what's good for business? And you're like, what they've been doing has been good for business. But they start getting in their ear with this logic of, well, if you make the sequels,

that helps pay for the originals. Now, the script for Finding Nemo 2, which was written back when Disney was like, yes. Fuck you, we'll just make it. They started a company called Circle 7. Circle 7.

And it's like, we will make Toy Story 3. Monsters Inc. 2 Lost in Scaradice. Yes. Love to know more. And finding Nemo 2, we're going to make them cheaper than Pixar makes one. This was a Katzenberg negotiation move. He said, they're so protective of their legacy that I will develop my own animation studio to the side.

To the ones we're allowed to sequelize. And make them. And the only way they can stop me is if they decide to make them themselves. And this created so much bad blood. But obviously, the second Iger takes over, he says, shut them fucking. down. But I want to tell you about this script, which is written by Lori Craig, the writer of Ella Enchanted. Okay. Now, is someone sitting down? Yeah. Okay. Marlon's lost. Hold on. How old is he?

The hackery of them not even landing on Dory should get lost first. Truly, I mean, it is so funny that, like, it's just like, okay, Nemo and Marlin are living together. They're feeling that everything is good. Huh, why don't we switch it up? Marlon's lost. It's called finding Marlin, basically. Nemo's got to find Marlin. Dory gets her memory back by hitting her head.

Nemo is given a long-lost brother? Great. I guess so there can be some sort of tension of like, oh, you're my brother. All of these Circle 7 movies sounded horrendous. There's some dolphins. Uh-huh. Some polar bears. That sounds good.

Zach, do you think? My guess is they'd be voiced by, you know, somebody, with Kevin Chiggins. Quina. Quite a... Oh, sure, sure. You know? Absolutely.

It is funny how this time they're like, the fucking nature preserves in California. We're not doing Australia again. No. There's a magical tunnel that whips you all the way to California. It's just different sitcom actors.

Yeah, right. So, yes, as you say, Iger comes aboard and immediately is like, no more of this circle, seven nonsense. Like, I'm shutting all of that down. And this is part of,

is he comes in, shuts them down, says to Steve Jobs, you name your price. I'm not negotiating here with you. I want to make you guys feel so protected that I'm doing everything I can to respect the sanctity of your characters. I'm not going to push you to do these things. I'm going to shut down any crass exploitation. I'm going to overpay you, but can you please try to organically come up with sequel ideas that you like. And the way Andrew Stanton puts it, and I think we mentioned this on a prior episode, is when the Finding Nemo 3D re-release comes out in 2010,

which he obviously works on to get ready. He's watching it. And yes, he is kind of like, I mean, Dory basically is lost when the movie begins. I mean, they do find her being like, where are my family? I was looking for my family, at least I think I was. He's like, fuck, I did put it in there. So he's like, I do stop.

I couldn't stop thinking about it. I will admit. Now, could he also not stop thinking about big bucks? I don't know. Like, you know, dollar signs? The other thing is he's now sort of got a foot outside of Pixar focusing on John Carter and wanting to make this John Carter-sized leap to live action. So what he says is, hey, I got a good idea.

Because he jumps big. He jumps so far. He jumps so big so far, so high. That guy can really hop on March. This guy hops. That's what they should have. They should call that movie Hoppers. Exactly.

Did you see Hoppers? I did. I liked Hoppers. Hoppers very enjoyed. Moynihan fucking roll. Moynihan. Moynihan right now kind of pole position Best Voice performance of the year.

Moynihan very good in Hobbers. He is. King George. King George having a big year at the box office. Oh yeah? That's his biggest hit he's had so far. So far. Yeah.

Plenty months left. A lot of words. King George. Hamilton. Oh, sure. That's that if they do that. Still on Broadway. Still on Broadway. Still on Broadway.

Yeah, who's playing King George right now on Broadway? Interesting. I'm seeing it's King George from Hoppers. They got the beaver. They render him in real time. Originally, Stanton's like, well, I'm too busy on the John Carter thing. And John Carter is obviously going to be a trilogy that I have mapped out. And each of these movies is going to take two to three years. But here's an idea I like for finding Dory. And I bless the development of this as a script.

Right. It doesn't originate with him. It's a hired writer first. Also, of course, then, John Carter bombs. It does. And he says he went into kind of a lost weekend

to purge himself. Only one weekend? Yeah, he might need a fucking... That's pretty good. Yeah. It takes me about a week and a half to recover from a bad improv show.

And this guy had a historic bomb and he was like, just give me 48. That's impressive. It is... Yeah, I mean, it is, yeah, to make a movie like John Carter where people are like, can you get that Guinness Book of World Records off the shelf and like, is this the biggest one yet? Like, are we going, like, you know.

He also, he did an interview that just came out at the time we're recording. Or it was part of a larger entertainment weekly piece about Toy Story 5. And he's, he had, you know, he's a very self-deprecating guy. Sure. But he had a joke about like, if you know me by name, I'm concerned. Oh, yeah. I saw that. Like, I understand, like, Pixar as a name brand is a name.

known thing, but like only, you know, dang-ass freaks, no answer stand by name. Is this podcast maybe fucking up that effort, possibly. But I think there must be something kind of weird to having a failure that big that's also kind of anonymized. Like, there's not even the personal sort of like, look at how hard a fucking Francis Ford Coppola fell on his face with Megalopolis. And it's reckoned with within the, like, the story of a man's career. it's just everyone kind of being like,

the fuck is this shit. Yeah, John Carter was the failure, not him. At least in terms of the public. Like, I didn't know who, I had no idea he directed that. No, you knew simply that, you know, Tim Riggins went to Mars and it didn't work out for him.

Right. And he hopped. And again, I did like that movie. It's got its charms. It's got its charms. So Bob Weiger calls, standing on the phone, apparently gives him a quote about

from Teddy Roosevelt, about being the lonely man in the ring that has the guts to actually do it versus talking about doing it. I don't know. He kind of peps him up. Stanton works on Zootopia. His college roommate is Richmore,

who's the director of Zootopia. So he, like, helps out with that movie. He's got a creative consultant. Because that's the other thing was at this time, they were like, Pixar's got it figured out so much

that should the Pixar brain trust weigh in on everything. Can they give notes on Tron Legacy? Right. And then he goes to lots of Huggin'Lasseter. And he says, like, I think I have a story for finding Nemo, too.

Pitch is that. They write up a treatment and then he's like, all right, I'm going to call Ellen. Because I guess it's a different thing to call Ellen now. Yeah. She's busy. Now, Ellen had for years maintain this running bit of why aren't they calling me to make a sequel. She would publicly do this. You know, Hanks would be on to promote Toy Story 3 and she'd be like, must be nice.

Right. Must be nice. I don't have any money at all. Yeah. I'm only selling hundreds of millions of dollars of throw pillows a year. JJ found a very 2013 sentence, too, if you want to hear it. Dory is Disney's most liked character on Facebook. Had 24 million likes.

People just were like, I want to like. Thumbs up. Give a thumbs up to the character, Dory. Right. And that's as important as where I went to college. How can you not? It has to be one of the five things people see about me immediately. Ellen's statement on the announcement,

I have waited for this day for a long, long, long, long, long time. I'm not mad it took this long. I know the people of Pixar are busy creating Toy Story 16, but the time they took was worth that the script's fantastic. You also just know, and I don't know if it's ever been reported, but I imagine she got much more love for this film. Are you kidding? I thought that she kind of just did everything for the law of the game.

I got to stop bragging on Ellen. Ellen has become an incredibly savvy business person at this point in time, and Pixar and Disney notoriously, you know, pay and exposure the first time, Right, right. And then the second time, and the residuals. That's the big thing. Right. I think I've shared this anecdote before, but I met,

or I've met her a couple times, but Kristen Schall said, she did Toy Story 3. They pay you what is scale. She's the fucking 17th character in that movie. And it's like there is a scale numbered, despite you being in a Pixar movie, it's the lowest amount they could pay you to be in an animated feature film. And she was like, I bought a house with the first year

of residuals, theme park, video games, whatever, you know? Hold on, I need to talk to some people. But then if you're, if there's a sequel and you're the central character or you're the breakout character, suddenly you're holding a lot of leverage. Except maybe not so much anymore, right? Because Inside Out too, didn't they not? It was a weird thing. But also they paid, I think Amy Pollard got $10 million.

And then they were like, Bill Hader, here's a sandwich. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So the film is co-written by Victoria Strauss. Really had no credits. She'd worked on an ABC TV show called October Road.

But they wanted a female screenwriter. It is a fascinating. She had a spec script they liked. Pixar thing, I was going to say, where a lot of the writers once, you know, they ramp up production, right? And this was also a big part of, I think, them conceding to the sequel push was it's been a big effort to get to a steadiness to be able to put out one film every year, wouldn't it be great if we could do two a year? And they were like, if it's two a year and the staff is doubling and all of this,

then maybe if it helps if every other film is a sequel or a safer bet, but it also means they have to start reaching outside of their, like, core brain trust and building a bigger talent pool. And so often these writers you see who end up being the co-writers with whoever the director is, or the Pixar person is on these movies, you're like, how'd they get this job? And it's like they were obsessively reading spec scripts. They were like checking the blacklist.

They were going to plays. They were seeing independent films at Sundance. It's this fascinating thing, and I think Stanton was kind of important in sort of spearheading this of, let's not look at animation writers. Let's just look and see good writing and find young people

because also it's a multi-year process. It's like if you sign onto a Pixar movie, you're moving to like Emoryville for three or four years to keep doing iterative work on it. So it's better to get someone who's ready to like be an employee rather than just take on a project. Ben. Dory? Mm-hmm. Currently? Currently.

20 mill. Huge. Well, she's lost. Wait down. Went down. Well, I deleted my account. So that's one. That is maybe a sign of Facebook's.

Yeah. It was, was it 40 or 50 before? 24. Wait, what is it now? 20 mil. Lower. Oh, but surely lost four? Losing seems bad to me.

I just think with the general Facebook thing. I guess you're right. Also, some weird follows. Oh, yeah? Dory's been liking some kind of interesting pictures on the internet. Dohery's a huge Huberman gal. So the big issue Strauss found is it's tough to write a main character who can't remember things and has short-term memory loss.

She pretty quickly comes up with Hank because she's like, she needs a foil and she needs someone who can move her places. It is... Hence, octopus. The smartest thing this movie does is, like, how, without cheating, do we...

Like, have someone who's her memory and her mobile kind of operator. Can we get these characters a little more latitude so it's not just a complete retread of the first movie of they're in the ocean and they got to swim really far? Yeah, and like, Hank has a little more... Marlin DNA in that he's like gruff and not warm.

But like it's a different enough, I would say. Because he's not anxious. He's just kind of like cynical or over it. It's an interesting kind of combination of Gil and Marlin from the first one. But it feels like he's a little more stir crazy. Wait, who is Gil? Gil is the Defoe. Oh, yes, yes. Because he's got a little bit of the like, you know, I guess he's also a little kind of one flew over the cuckoo's nest.

Sure. I just got to get out of here. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He just wants to go live in peace. Yes. I get it. We see him briefly in this movie, right?

Like, they're all credited. Oh, they're the end credits. Post credits. Yeah. They're still in the bags. Right. They initially did want the parents to also have short-term memory loss to complete the joke of it runs in my family. At least I think it does.

When you were watching, when you walked into the studio today, I was, I had the Blu-ray. You were watching deleted, quote-unquote deleted scenes. It has 50 minutes of deleted scenes, which is, quote, Quite a lot. And even when movies cut that much material, they rarely make it public. And I would say of the 50, 20 minutes were four different strikes at the opening. And they all have Stanton intros where he's explaining the iterative process of what kept changing. And you do realize, like, they back themselves into a couple corners here. They're like, first of all, we want to make the Dory movie. But how do you give Dory the character agency to go out on her own journey? and grow and change and learn if she can't fucking remember anything. How does she do things of her own volition? So there's all this shit that you see them try

where they're like, there's a muscle memory thing where her fins start like, she's sleep swimming. In her sleep, she starts swimming directions and then they lose her, but she doesn't know what's driving her there. It's the muscle memory, not a short-term memory.

And then he's like, but then the first 30 minutes of the movie, she's not making any choices. It's like she's like fucking, you know, weekend of Bernie. these two. Right. And then there are multiple stabs at, well, the reason she got lost is

because her parents also have short-term memory. So that helps why they haven't found her, but then also like every scene, and they have like scenes. Some of these are animated. Some of them are roughly animated. Some of them are just storyboarded. Most of them have the real voice actors. And you're hearing Eugene Levy

and Diane Keaton do the short-term thing, which is incredibly funny. Sure. But then you're also just like all of these scenes get caught in a cul-de-sac. Yes. Stanton said essentially, like, they just they realized it would make everyone crazy. You cannot have any emotional catharsis. Right.

When I watched the, when I watched Finding Nemo, I was operating under the assumption that her entire species had this. I thought it was like a goldfish thing. That was their starting point. Right. Yeah. And so then I was, I had forgotten that, oh, no, this is just Dory. Like, Dory just has this issue.

So they all, they ran into some complaints over the fact that it is set at a, you know, Marine Park, like a preserve. Because it was closed blackfish. Right. And so they consciously were like, all of the fish characters

will be allowed to leave if they want in our story. Because we don't want to suggest that, like, they belong there or have to be there or anything like that. Pixar's usually, like, pretty secretive

about their movies until the last possible moment they have to volunteer information because their brand is so strong. Right. And that was a case where in my memory, like, a year before release, we're like, we are making changes

to our story. They preempted a potential controversy. They added that third R of release. Yeah. Right, right, exactly. So, you know, like, those are the big things they kind of come across. I think that was a story present

because if it had been to, it could have run the risk of just being a bigger version of the fish tank in the dentist office. It helps that the problem isn't there being kept here as much as it is, like this is just an entirely different kind of space.

And I think what they do smartly, and it gets back to, I was saying in the Nemo episode, that Nemo is weirdly, feels very Indiana Jones coded. In the way he constructs the sequences of what is the challenge and how do they get out of this, it does feel like the biggest gift they gave themselves in this film is just to be like, what if there is environment that is hospitable to fish, but also is largely above ground, surrounded by people? people, tanks are separated, and how do you cross these physical divides? Nemo and Marlin don't have to be on the opposite side of the ocean from Dory, but if they're in a gift shop and she's in a tank, it's actually a harder puzzle to solve. Yeah, which keeps it from feeling like just a copy of the first movie. There was a lot more destiny and Bailey. They say both those characters are great, the whale shark and the beluga whale.

And essentially, they just kind of like had to cut stuff, but like that they all had like, you know, tons of material because they were fun to write. There's an entire storyline where Marlon and Nemo gets separated from Dory early when the squid chases them and then they go into the tank gang and they meet, you know, like

Gill and all those guys. And it was funny, but they just sort of like kept being like it is a Dory movie. This is just distracting from that. So they don't use that. It is the thing, especially after watching all these like failed alternate openings and everything

you're saying, I've come to peace with the first 20 minutes that also just feel like they never totally cracked it, but they were like, you know what, we just have to get there. The movie doesn't really start until she's at the Marine Institute. Right. They should be there with her. You know? At the start.

Right. And can we just kind of like jangle some keys for the first 15 or 20 minutes? Are we going to have to ban that phrase? We're using it too much. We're using it too much. Yeah. It's become a totemic phrase. You're jangling keys with it, sort of. I kind of am. For casting, though,

they would be like, what about Ty Borel? Google, Ellen DeGeneres Tiberl. She's interviewed him like five times. They could just listen to them talking. Eugene Levy? Oh, that's smart. Diane Keaton, they can listen to that.

Right, because Pixar will famously, now I feel like they do more of a traditional casting process, but they would locate an actor and then do a test animation to their dialogue from something else. Diane? Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Right, yeah, yeah.

Dyington had never done animation before, ever. When was Modern Family? Did that, had that already started, 2008 or 09? Okay, yeah. Right? When is that? Or maybe 2010? We talked about this and it's funny in John Carter that you're like,

you can tell which TV show Stanton was watching when he cast that movie? Do you like, were you ever on Modern Family? We've ever 11 years. And I, you know, I honestly never watched it, but I was, you know, when Ty Beryl popped up and Ed O'Neill, I was like, oh, this is very much. Okay, this was dominating this guy were big. He was watching always sunny.

And they were reliable. Yeah, right. And honestly, Dory, Marlon and Nima are a bit of a modern family themselves. That's their found family. Sort of a nice, this, wink at that. You got two people from the wire.

You got Idriselba and... Dominic West is the other... That's pretty funny. Did you ever watch Modern Family? I never did. Like, you've never seen Modern Family. I've seen a few episodes here and there, but I never like committed to it.

Yes, same. I watched that for like two seasons before I was kind of like, I think I get it. It is funny that in my memory, like you thinking this movie came out like a year after finding Nemo, I'm like, oh, right, this was like right after Modern Family popped and this is one of the first kind of like postmodern family glow sort of jobs for the cast reaching out. And I'm like, oh, this is closer to the end of that show than it was the beginning. It had been on the air for seven years. It would be off the air four years later. Alexander Gould, the voice of Nemo and finding Nemo.

Was a grownup? Was a grownup? He remembers the moment because he would do the voice for the toys. Yeah. Like the moment, like a couple years later where they were like, you can't do it. Your voice is getting too deep. That must suck.

What she said was devastating. To have that fucking Kristen Shawl. I know. I heard a story about someone cutting a house recently. But to just be told like there's a ticking clock. Yeah. Sorry, buddy. You don't sound like Nemo no more. We will always need someone to voice Nemo.

it is not going to be you. Once they catch on to my pitch for old Marlin, he'll be back in business. Oh, sure. Is that kind of like a sort of Logan-esque sort of legacy sequel? Right, okay. Marlin, honestly, that would be perfect. Because Marlin, if he is so brutal at times in these movies,

if he starts to lose it so even his amount of politeness is gone, you could have some real savage Marlin moments. I'll say this. Marlon just cutting loose. Brooks also sounds a lot older in this one. He does. And you're like... He has aged.

He's still funny in this, but he does feel harder-edged in this. Just from the nature of him sounding more like a grumpy old man than a nebishy guy. Yeah, but they really... Like, when he tells Dory, go sit over there and forget that's the best... That's what you're best at. That's like one of the most brutal...

That's what I'm saying. Yeah. And this is also post-drive Brooks. Hmm. Sigourney Weaver, they just thought that was funny. And it is. She's the voice of the blue planet in America. The American version of Blue Planet. And she's also the voice of the ship in Wally, obviously.

She's the voice that. He actually doesn't mention that. But yeah, that's true. I'm going to mention that. It's rare. She's the voice of the planetarium at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. She's totally one of those people. She knows her way around water. She can just play herself. We know.

They didn't ask her until near the end. Yeah. They just had a scratch voice. And they were like, I hope she says yes. and she did. I also just think every time they do the joke. She probably wanted a house.

She was actually weirdly without one. She had never found one. She was living in a box. Yeah. Every time they do the joke of someone invoking Sigourty Weaver

by her full name, it gets me. Yeah, it was fun. Ed O'Neill, there's an incredibly long quote that JJ put in. He realizes this quote is too long. So I'm going to try and just, he was like, this is newsletter fodder,

but I'm just going to try and tell you that I'm going to boil this down. He gets a call. He wants to do finding you know, he gets his agents, like, finding you. He's like, I've never seen animation. They're just cartoons. It's not my thing, but my kids like it, whatever. He is in Met Reckett, Ralph. He's Mr.

Litwack. He is. He's the guy who... And so he assumes, they're like, look, you're playing an octopus called Hank. You're being paid by the session. And he assumes, like, great. Is it like Mr. Litwack? Like, I did that in, like, one day. Right? He shows up, and he's like, it was, like, really intense. Like, the work is grueling.

The character is going through a lot of, like, you know, motion and stuff. So it's like a lot of like, watch out and, you know, yelling and stuff. And after three hours, he was like, all right. And they were like, you're going to have to come back. You know, like, we're not like done. You're going to keep coming back. And then after a while, he's like, is this like not a cameo? And they're like, no, this is like one of the lead role. That's so funny. He is so good in this. They have said. And he didn't know Ty Borel was in it. Like, like, he's like, he's castmate. Like they never talk about it. And then they watch a preview. And he's like, what's the octopus? doing. And they're like, oh, he's a mimic octopus. He can like, you know, blend with things. He's like, oh, that's cool. I didn't know that either.

You know, like, so that I feel like can be the experience of being in one of these movies. If you are not plugged into the Pixar world but are famous. Yes. And you get the call of like, hey, offer. You know, we don't have to audition. You want to be this octopus? And you're just like, sure, you don't know what

you're in for. That's just fun. It's also because it is such an iterative, evolving story process, you like, do choose your own adventure versions. of the movie. You know, you go in and you do like 15 pages and then a year later they call you and show you something new and you're like, how does that track? And they're like, well, that previous thing is gone. We've made him this and we took this out. They've said it was the most difficult character they ever had to animate. That it was just... I mean, that makes sense.

A nightmare? It's so crazy. It feels like, you know, we've talked about how Stanton likes these kind of self-imposed animation challenges. A big thing he said for the first movie, Zach, is that he was like, I don't want to anthropomorphize the fish. I don't want to give them movements that are like a human. Let's just push 10% beyond what a fish could do, but try to get everything we can out of just fins and face and whatever.

And it feels like, well, now you have a character who's hyper-mobile, and instead of there being a limitation, it's the challenge of do as much with him as possible. And the choice to make him just, like, constantly in Mission Impossible mode, is really good. Also, he has no mouth,

which is such, that's like a Stanton thing of like, oh, their mouth is at the bottom. Anyone else would be like, well, you can't have a character without a mouth, we got to cheat.

And you can tell that he's like, I kind of like the idea of just the eyes. And it's like the eyes and then sort of like a nose bump. But it's basically, it's like Gromit. Love Gromit, too.

We all love Gromit. He's a great movie star. Angus McLean, who goes on direct Wally. I mean, sorry. Lightyear, unfortunately. Yeah. Is the co-director. So, you know, he's doing a lot of work. The film does, you know, the film does have a lesbian couple, as we know. This was the original disgusting light year kiss. We see two women pushing a stroller together for two seconds. Truly. And even

Trump was elected months later. Obviously, all of that was sorted out. Fuxters did genuinely get very upset about this and was the most annoying shit in the oral. But they were kind of a conservative couple because they were horrified by the octopus baby. That is true. They can't accept that someone might have an octopus for a baby. They're sort of like, ugh. It's funny though. Right. You know what? Actually, we've all got our, you know, our kind of

boundaries and we have to confront them sometimes. Yeah. It is funny how much that was blown up. It also is funny to rewatch it and be like, I mean, I read it as two moms, but also. One of them's got like a short haircut or whatever. I get what they're going for. There aren't like a lot of context clues. You could be like these are two moms who brought

their kids out separately. Obviously, it is no big deal. Yeah. It would only have been annoying if they had done the beauty and the beast thing of like, we promise you, gay representation is in this movie. And then that's what it is. Or the Avengers thing. What do you mean?

The guy says something and Captain America nods. He's like, mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm so sad that my dead gay boyfriend is dead, but still gay and I'm still gay, even though he's dead. One of the funniest things in the world is for a movie like that to pat it's on the back for finally presenting a gay character and the director to cast himself as the gay character.

A straight man and be like, pretty impressive, huh? David? Yes. Ah! Oh, God. This is life throwing another thing at me. Oh, no! Did you catch it?

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and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash check. The film begins with this. It does. It does. This feels like something designed in a lab to make money and make people cry. This is another fascinating thing.

It's just one of those things. About the alternate openings, right? Where they're like, her eyes are the same size and everything else is tiny. The alternate openings, some of them I thought, worked better than the actual. actual opening of the movie. But the first half of them

are sort of, there's one I really like where you feel like are we just watching Finding Nemo again? It's Marlon running into Dory in their first conversation and then they run into the sharks and it's a little bit of bridge but they're literally reusing the same animation

and then Marlon starts beating the shit out of the sharks and you realize this is how Marlin tells the story to everyone now. That is kind of funny. And it's a sort of like visiting parent day at the school. We get a little whiff of that.

He makes it four sharks instead of three. So he's telling the story. You get to see it acted out. It's really funny. And then Dory's there. And the kids are like, what about you, Dory? So you're like, Nemo's mom?

And she's like, no. And they're like, are you her aunt? They start asking questions about the family structure in a way that makes sense the kids would do. But I honestly do like that we don't ever get into that. No. I like that it's just like. They're just a family.

We don't need to decide what it is. Yes. They're not hitting, right? We don't think. I don't think. I don't think yet. I also think this movie... Old Marlon?

This movie suggests you what happened. I'm seeing it. I'm seeing it. This movie suggests to me that Dory is much younger than Ellen DeGeneres is. Well, I mean, fish age less than humans. Yeah. So... But in the first movie, I'm like, oh, this is like 2.40-something.

fish. No, I think she's probably in her late 20s in Finding Dory. Right. Okay. Yeah. How long do you think a blue tank can live? Is it really depressing? 12 years. They can live more than 30 years

in the wild. So they can live for a long time. It says 8 to 30, which is kind of a big range, but commonly they live between 15 and 30 years. So she could be, you know, like 10, fish years making her sort of like early middle age or whatever.

Because what I think about is also sort of like how long, because they say it's been years. They do say when she finally makes it to the fish who'd like know her parents, that was years ago. And we get three voice iterations. You do. We do. There's a teenage team, which I do think they nailed the casting on. They did. The child is especially good.

But the teen is the perfect bridge between the child and Ellen. Yeah, I was, I was truly, like, once or twice. Like two scenes, yeah. It's just interesting to watch all these openings that are all like, haven't caught find it. How do you reset the board so quickly and also start to drive that? Why Dory is suddenly activated by the lack of her parents and all this sort of stuff. And he was like, you know, the classic Stanton thing of like,

I want it to be a series of flashbacks that reveal themselves gradually, or is it one flashback that comes later? Or is it the movie open with the flashback and that's a dream and it all comes later? And there was one that I thought was really stylistic. interesting that was like, well, what would your memory be like as a child? And then on top of that, she's got short-term memory loss. So she's getting glimpses, but they're abstracted. And it's not a literal scene playing out. And then it just feels like in the evolution, at some point, someone drew up a storyboard where the opening shot is Baby Dory. And everyone was like,

well, you've lost the argument. Unfortunately, you have just found gold. And the movie now starts with that no matter what. He's not saying this, but it definitely felt like suddenly they're all well, as long as that's the first shot, you can do whatever you want after that. Look, I saw this film in theaters. I did nothing for me. I rewatched

it with my daughter and I liked it. And then just I remember after my twins were born when I was a very fragile person, I watched this with my daughter put this on, my wife and I watch it. We were like sobbing and holding each other at the end of the movie. My daughter, to be clear, was just like but like my wife and I

like, Jesus Christ, like, you're just so, like, traumatized by the idea of, like, a child losing their parents, by the idea of, like, the parents waiting for years. Is it manipulative? I might accuse it of being a smidge manipulative. I'm going to rip the bandit off on this. With the little, little baby, don't worry with her big old eyes. I think this movie is, it's obviously not as strong as the first one. It's not as tight as the first one. I feel some of it's sort of like searching. construction, and I think this is part of the Pixar sequel shift thing, is once they get them to agree to do sequels, these things get dates, those dates are announced years in advance, shareholders are promised we will have a movie that will make a billion dollars in this quarter, and stickers are put on bananas with the characters, and bathing suits are made, and those movies become immovable, right? Basically, maybe if something's really going poorly, you can push it back six months, but also if an original film is struggling,

they'd rather push that back and go, sorry, bad news, Dory needs to come out four months later. And I think this is the kind of like shake-shackification of Pixar a little bit is the movie starts sometimes feeling a little bit good enough in spots versus the classic Pixar thing being like,

we will beat this like a drum until we get it as tight as it could possibly be. And I don't think everything in this movie, works, but a thing I think it does incredibly well, which is the greatest justification for making this movie and making it distinct from the first one, is it, it's like basically a movie about being a caretaker for a special needs adult. Right. Right. Yes. That it is a special needs child who is lost and a found family and this notion of like the responsibility of having to care for someone and the fear of them not being able to care for themselves and it not being

the Finding Nemo thing of, well, he's little. He's still young. he's not ready yet versus Dory Beel and like, will she ever be able to do any of this stuff on her own? I do also think it's about finding, it's about like figuring out how to care for yourself as someone who, you know, my reading of the film is that Dory's a bit neurodivergent. She is.

And it's something I watched finding Nemo with my wife when we were talking about the Dory character. My wife has ADHD and she related so, so hard to Dory in terms of just like this experience of kind of not always knowing like what you were just doing

and like blah blah blah. So I think it's a lot of that too where it is about the family but it's also specifically about Dory like learning to be confident in herself. It's doing all three sides of it really well. The parents with the concern of a child. Can we also, can we just shout out?

The design of the Eugene Levy fish with the sort of male pattern as you put it receding hairlines. So funny. Yes. And the casting also, when they announced like, it's Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton playing Dory's parents. You're like, yeah, that math works out. That makes sense. But I think their perspective of being parents looking at a young child and feeling the concern of will she ever be able to do this on their own, then the chosen family going like, we know what we've inherited, right? this is part of the burden of our life.

We love her. We want her here. But this is now an added thing on our plate. We always have to be concerned about her. And Dory figuring out how to do things on her own. I think all three are dramatically really well done and are tricky, kind of land-minded things. And I also commend this movie for as much as it was pushing its politics on our throat with that lesbian couple. It wasn't really doing buzzwordy representation matters shit.

Well, no. I mean, they are all fish. Yeah. But this is... It's not like we're going to have like a fish in a wheelchair or something. Maybe we could. I mean, look, yeah, I guess it could be a little more on the nose. 2016 is where everything starts to just break in society, right? Well, because you're talking about Ghostbusters. I feel like that's the most prime example of like... They're like, we're doing a girl Ghostbusters and it became like a fight or like a, you know, an internet kind of touchpoint in a way.

that I think a lot of people like me were just kind of like, why, who cares if there's a girl, what does it matter if there's a girl ghost, why are you all activated by this? Why are you angry? What's happening? The beginning of the culture war as a defined thing. And then in retrospect, I'm like, not that I'm like, there shouldn't be girl Ghostbusters, but I'm like, I guess

some of this stuff started to feel a little try hard of like, you know, you've all waited for Girl Ghostbusters and I'm, I have the same indifference where I'm like, I haven't, honestly. I'm not against it. I'm fine with it. But I also think, yes. You don't need to go, like, take a victory lap about this, like, per se. That's the thing.

And I think especially as it's like, Trump is elected, everything becomes more divisive. Donald, J. Trump was actually in 2016, elected presidents of the United States of America. I remember that. I don't know. Disney starts to do the preemptive back padding, you know? A little bit. Like, Joe Russo starts to be like, I'm so fucking gay in this Avengers movie. In Avengers' game, it's crazy.

Gaston's going to have. have an exclusively gay moment. Which means he dances with a boy. Right. And then becomes this feedback loop of these movies are annoying. They're shoving it down their throat. They're doing it disingenuously or whatever. I just feel like this movie gets there very honestly and doesn't try to weaponize it in any

manipulative way. As you're saying, it's more manipulative in the just basic losing a child thing. Yeah, the kind of family peril stuff. But she's lost. They just took the character of Dory seriously. They did a smart kind of like, let's do the math on this. Here's the character we built. What actually makes sense if you kind of like spread the pieces out?

And I know you've complained a little bit about how much this movie does the, we're going to explain every single random bit of Dory from the first movie. Who's a bit slumdog millionaire? Why can she speak? That is a good comparison point. It's like every one of these things, which in the first movie just felt like a miracle. Where did this come from? It just felt like Ellen had a good idea every time.

I think most of them were that. Or a lot of them certainly. Yeah. Yeah. And then they're like, no, no, no. You don't understand. She does speak whale. She had a whale friend. Where's the pipe? Okay. She can read because she's surrounded by plaques, but also audio, narrating the plaques. Right. Right. Yeah. Which is fine. It's fine. It's fine.

But I do like the movie because I think it's very, visually inventive with in the, you know, zoo, aquariums. Yeah, there's some awesome. Yeah. All of the kind of Pixar thinking of like, right, how do we get X to Y? How do we, you know, move characters through rooms and situations on, you know, the coffee pots, the octopies, you know, the floppy. I love the

Nemo and Marlin using the fountain to travel. Like, all that stuff. I'm like, you guys are just kind of, if nothing else at the top of that game right now. Yes. You know, even if things are getting a little lazy with your sequels or whatever, like, you're so, visually adept. I think Stanton is also particularly good at is the, and is credited for this within even the larger Pixar films

that he's not ostensibly the main writer, main director on, that he was sort of the guy who could lock in on the like, okay, if you're Mr. Potato Head, how do you feel? You know, if you're Mr. Potato Head, that means your pieces are falling out all the time,

which means you're probably angry, is it Don Rickles? And I feel like Bugs' life, which he's very involved in, has that same sort of logic of like, what would the inner emotional struggles and psychological hangups of each bug be based on

the ladybug's got a chip on his shoulder. What kind of is a lady? But this movie does similarly, after doing so much of that in the first one, where you're like, what is there left to do in the sort of like inferiority complex of fishes? Do you like my impression of

Dennis Lernery as the ladybug? I really did. I really did. Hey, just I just want coffee. Okay, just plain black coffee. Why's it going to have to have fucking crunching it? Whatever. Remember that? He was so good at that. That was, what's that from? It's from like Leary's so like Leary's first special, you know, Nercure for Cancer. Yes. You know, which is all his stuff that he's not famous yet and he's, you know, I tried watching that recently. It was tough. It's of its time. I grew up a Leary then. It's tough to watch that. It's of its time. Not even like, oh, this hasn't aged well, like culturally,

offensively. It's just not that offensive. What are we going through? It's more just that. Exactly. But then lock and load His second special is the one where he's now kind of famous and as kids and like And so it's more him being like I go to fucking Dunkin' Donuts

They got maple coffee What's going on? You know, that kind of thing Wait, did he ever do commercials With that as the premise? A hundred percent Of like whatever happened To do commercials?

Yes. Yes. But I feel like there was a commercial One of him being like Whatever happened to this? That was his whole thing. He's pretty good at it. I mean, the best thing in lock and load is when he rants about the Catholic Church

because you're like, oh, he really hates the Catholic Church. You know, and like, that's a little more motivated by like childhood and family. It was still a little pretty touchy thing to do at that point in time. Right, it's a little more hot, low, you know, right. But the, right, the stuff I really loved when I was a kid, I was like, coffee. Yeah, Dennis, tell him. Yeah, give it to coffee. Me, the, like, 12-year-old person who's never had coffee in his life.

It's like, you know, you used to just get a black coffee at the diner or whatever. And then you just stopped doing comedy and just voiced ladybugs and Sabretoot Tigers and I guess did a claimless TV shows. Yeah. Which were good. I mean, I love Rescue Me in a lot of ways. Like, that's another show where you watch it now and you're like,

oh, they'd go to jail. Oh, right to jail. All this jail. I'm going to have to watch that. Yeah. Yeah, it's got some good stuff. Yeah. He's not in this movie.

No. Although, if they made it in the 90s, he probably would be the fucking octopus. I mean, right? Like, you open with the sort of core trauma. they end up, you know, after him trying to outthink himself doing a version of what he ended up having to do in the first movie of just like, show the thing. Here's Dory. She can't remember shit.

Her parents are worried all the time. They're trying to teach her things, just keep swimming in the shells that she can trace as like a Hansel and Gretel bread crumb trail back to them. But she gets caught in the overtide, the undertide? under undercurrent no undertoe is a different thing it's the undercurrent I think they say but she's in the display

that's what I was confused that's what you find out later why would it have a current that pushes the fish into the it's the vent right it's the vent that's what it is I think ultimately it's the vent it's like a filtering system they're sort of misdirecting you at the beginning

to not think that they're not in a natural environment. Which maybe they, because the fish all seem to know that they will get released. So they may, maybe they're just training her for her eventual. Sure. Life in the true ocean. Right. When she's little.

Like, I buy that. Yeah. But then you basically run to, right, the section of the movie that feels like a Beatles cover band or something to me. Or it's like, waking up for school going Mr. Ray. Yes. Now, sure, it's not like the most original stuff. It still has bits that work. It does.

It's like when you have Ellen doing Dory, I'm happy. Do you know what I'm saying, though, about how the bits all just feel like alt from the first movie because they're not doing the sequel thing of, oh, we flipped this character's dynamic or they're in a slightly different way. I'm like, every line that the turtles say feels like something that could have been cut from the first movie.

Well, yeah, the turtles. They're just going to see the turtles. for like 22 seconds. It's so... Yeah. They're barely part of it. But yes. But for me, I was still having fun with Dory.

Dory rolls. Ellen's line readings in this movie, almost every line. I'm just like, yep, that's the good stuff. I agree. I would agree. I will agree that when Ellen speak, that is the good stuff. Yes. And like, I guess there is a world where you could say, like, you know what?

Ellen has been not doing movies. She's been doing a chat show for 10. 10 plus years at this point, this movie, she could phone this in. I do not feel that she phones this in. No, no, not at all. Yes. Like, I feel like she gets this character very well still.

Like, even in that early sequence that, you know, is kind of playing the hits, that just that bit where he's like, don't go too close to the edge, and then she pushes them so far away from the edge. And then she's like, no, no, no, that's too far and brings him back. Like, just, I could watch Ellen do that endlessly. Yeah.

And, you know, the first movie, that character's clearly meant to be more of, like, a dilemma and just comic relief. And the whole surprise was that she brought as much emotional grounding and well-roundedness to it, that you're like, you could make her the center of the movie. This will work. Putting the story weight on her won't stop her from being funny. There's a universe in which there's a concern of a Dr. Ian Malcolm problem. Uh-huh. If he's not the guy to the side and he's the guy who has to stare, the story does he not? It's very interesting.

Goldblum is the best, because it's not just Malcolm even. It's also Dr. Ian Malcolm in Independence Day. I forget what it is. David, doctor, scientist, Mr. I just rewatched Independence Day and forgot that he says must go faster in it. Literally that they're just like, can you just say it again? Yeah.

Say the thing you said in dress work. What if you just said it again? But can't we just make the whole movie out of this guy? Right. And then, right, when he's, Goldman is kind of the lead of resurgence, you're like, you know, he needs to be in the mix. Like, yeah, right. obviously Jurassic Park

Dominion Fixed it Oh, fixed it He was so good in that I don't even remember what he did in that honestly. It's the live action

Moanao of Jurassic movies Wait, what does he do in that one? Is he on Locust patrol in that one? Yeah. Is he? Yeah. Because I remember Neil and Dern are.

But he's in there too? She brings them together to get locust to specifically get the locust and Sam Neal spends like a 70-year-old Sam Neal spends the entire movie being like,

I don't know. how to tell her that I have a crush on her. And I'm like, weren't you fucking in the first movie? The whole thing is that like in three they established that she married some other guy and had kids, right? That they broke up or whatever. And in this one,

Goldblum's like, you know, she's divorced now. And Sam Neal's like, oh, I wouldn't even know how to tell it how I feel. We're going to get to this in Old Marlin as well. Were you a Jurassic Park Dominion fan? I don't remember that one. I've seen

seen every Jurassic Park movie. That's the one about the locust that barely has dinosaurs in it, which is a really good formula at all. So they basically realized that the company that Wayne Knight smuggled the shaving cream can too in the first movie had been the one, we never, we never followed up on that. So they're a rival company that's been doing their own genetic fuckery. Is this the second world? This is the third world.

Yeah. Yeah. And the second world is the one that has like a haunted house movie inside of it. Right. It becomes an auction. at a manner in the countryside. I don't remember any of this. But I will see all of them in theaters.

You put dynos on a big screen. I'm there. So that movie has Goldblum in it, but he just has a cameo speaking in front of Congress, being like, we should stop the dinosaurs. And then at the end, he says, Welcome to Jurassic World.

Ooh. And the premise is that the little clone girl has freed all the dinosaurs. Oh, right. That are now on mainland America. Yeah. And so we have to live amongst the dinosaurs. But then at the beginning of the next movie, they're all dying.

Correct. Right. And they're like, they mostly just like hang out in the woods. They don't bother us. So what's this movie about? The rival genetics company used the shaving cream DNA to do other fuckery but never try to do dinosaur shit. No, they did locus. And one of their things was that they also do like Monsanto style food fuckery, like artificially grown.

Yeah, GM food, whatever. And they were trying to defeat one of their. competitors by creating super locusts that would attack their competitors' crops. Right. But the locust got too big and now they're eating all the food and we will all starve interstellar style to death unless all of our main characters from both trilogies. Right. To stop the locust.

I think the reason I don't. Sometimes a dinosaur shows up for a minute. I don't remember the details of this one because I think I've been confusing you with the news. Oh. I'm giving you profoundly snaps. You know, there's this moment in one of those. I think it's the one you said where he says, Welcome to Jurassic World.

Did you notice this moment where, like, the character is handed like this kind of retangular piece of paper? Then he goes... Has a president face on it. Right. No, no, it's... And he goes to, like, a bank of America, and he, like, has a little conversation with someone

and they, like, put it into a slot. Yeah. And then he goes, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. That was the uncrediting. Right. I didn't know what that was going on in that. Yeah. I don't know what that is.

Yeah. Dominion ends with Laura Dern and she's got the Chase Banking app open and she keeps scrolling it down to refresh. And then she sees the $5 million go up. It was a great after credit. Look, someone should just do that in like a sequel. Chris Pratt's like, we need your help and just has like an envelope of money. He's like, this is for you, by the way.

I will say, actually, I will be disappointed if the baseball sequel doesn't do that. That feels like the perfect movie. I mean, that happens a... That happens a little bit in the newest Jurassic. In the Scarjo. Yeah. They kind of have to be like, all right, everyone, we're going to pay you a lot.

Right. Like, do you want to see dinosaurs? I'm like, no. Like, Scarje's like, no, I've seen them. What do you mean? There's so many of these movies. He's like, I'll give you a $20 million. She's like, all right, fine, whatever.

You got a gun? Openly cynical that movie is about like the only reason you would ever do this again is if they were paying you, fuck you money. No one's heart is in it. Except for Jonathan Bailey, who they all mock. Yeah, he's like, I kind of like dinosaurs. Like, whatever. You fucking pussy.

Call me Jonathan Bailey, because I'm still a dinosaur boy. Well, I'm excited for the, what's it, the house on the end of the street with the dinosaur movie? I've seen this trailer, Zach. It's from the director of it follows and under the Silver Lake. And it's a suburban family, Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor. It has a kind of annoying title. House at the end of Oak Street? The end of Oak Street.

Anne Hathway, Ewan McGregor, and their kids. And their house. Oh, it's just called the. end of Oak Street. Okay, there we go. There's like some sort of time dilation. They get transported to dinosaurs. Don't really know anything more than that. This one suburban street gets transported to prehistoric times. It looks awesome. I'm really into it. Me into it, me into it too. I'm also really just into the idea of can someone please break the Jurassic franchise's monopoly on dinosaur movies? Right. Can others do dinosaurs? Well, we have the Kong verse.

Yeah. That's true. And they do have dinosaurs. They're dinosaur-ish. I feel like as they've gone on, they've swung further away from dinosaurs and more to can we create our own creatures. And I miss the straight-up dinnersaur-they are. Adjacent. But I always like King Kong just fucking punching a T-Rex.

What if you have a glove? Beast. If he had a glove, it would be. He gets a glove in a big thing. It would be as good as it was when he had a glove. Did he get glove first, then X, or other way around? Other way around. Axe first, then glove?

Right. Right, because he builds... The axe is made out of like a Godzilla spine or something. Yes, one scale that he puts inside a big log. And then the second one, he's got the beast glove. And I'm hoping that in the next one, he gets shoes. I think he needs a hat. A little fadora?

A little... A jaunty little... The Kong gets a little pretentious. I mean, I was thinking more of a helmet, but I'd like him in a little federation. Sure. Helmut makes me think of, like, can we put him in, like, a cannon? Can we start shooting him out? Kong canning. That's fun. Like, Godzilla shows up and it's like, one second. And then, like, rolls out a big cannon and it's like, get in.

Right. There's a big wick. He has to light it. Oh, that sounds like. With his atomic breath. Yeah. And then he puts his fingers in his ears. His fingers have to go in his ears. I mean, now it sounds like we're just workshopping a Donkey Kong movie. Like, I feel like we're moving away from King Kong and towards Donkey Kong. I did like that Super Mario Galaxy did put in the weirdly realistic T-Rex from Odyssey. Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. Right, the little baby Mario and Luigi.

The baby's fuck with a hyper-realistic, yeah. Hyper-realistic T-Rex. Right. I just think maybe the greatest moment in the history of movies is in the Peter Jackson King Kong when he fights the T-Rex. And he, like, breaks his jaw from the inside. and then before he throws him off a cliff, he just plays with it a little bit like a fucking puppet. We've got to get that back into movies.

That's what woke took from us. Kong rips some whatever the Skull Island guys are. He does that to them a little bit. Skull crawlers. Yeah, he ripped some skull crawlers open. He didn't play with it as much. The playing with it. Yeah.

Sort of like an animal, right, which is an animal. What do we want to say about funny? 20 minutes, yada, yada, yada. The jewel of Moro Bay. Right. She's like, I got to get to California. The whole first movie is how hard it is to get anywhere. And they're just like, let's just fucking use the turtles.

It feels like such a like, guys, come on, I'm sorry. They insisted we put the turtles in for merch reasons. We're going to use the turtles as a shortcut. They basically make them like hyper speed. And then the second they get off the turtle current, I'm like, the movie's good and stays good. Yeah, it does stay good. It moves along in the right way. Yes.

Yes. I think the turtles are sort of the writers of Rohan in my, in the, if we're sort of. I thought the same thing. I was like, this is as kind of like, what, an eagle can just fucking show up

and take them there? Yeah, but that works for me. But I think Hank immediately hits. I do like how sneaky he is. Yes, it's,

I think, is he the first person we've seen try to sort of use Dory's condition against her? Yeah. I feel like everyone

else is kind of just like, oh, hey, yeah. Right, it's kind of like, he tries to memento her a little bit. There's a little moral, dubiousness.

Yeah, right. Yeah, right. And it's another smart kind of like Pixar logic thing of like, oh, does that tag, is there a power in that kind of tag? He wants to get back out or he wants to stay in. He wants to go to Cleveland so he can live in peace. Yes, right. He wants to stop being bothered. Which I can deeply relate to.

But yes, right. Throw me in a box. He's untrustworthy. He's sneaky. I love the way he moves. Yes. The way he moves is really fun to watch. And I love how frazzled he is.

Sure. He's kind of me. He has kind of... Where he's just like, Jesus Christ. Yeah. The big bags under the eyes. He's like, okay. His character is 90% under eye bags. Yeah, which is good design. In terms of facial animation.

Right. He's a septipus, of course. I like how touchy he is about that. Right. And he helps her find Bailey and Destiny. Is the moment where she jumps in with the dead fish how she gets to them, right? Because I like that too, because that is... it's just dark enough.

Like, that's the amount of Pixar dark I want where she's like, just play dead, I get it. You know, where you're like, let's, yeah, we can acknowledge this. She sees the bucked it with destiny written on it and she jumps in. It's also this good line they maintain of like Dory can't be too

dumb, right? Like, Dory misunderstanding things is funny. You're right. But especially in a movie, thank you, where... I think. I think. I appreciate your poem. Because I was thinking that undertow is a beach thing. Yeah. But there is a real thing that they address,

where it's like all the fish moving around does create like a kind of bottom of the sea current that humans don't think about. Right. That like moves shit around. Yeah. But that's what they call. The ocean is scary.

Yeah. Very scary. Yeah. I love it though. Get me in there. Yeah. I don't like to go down there. Do you ever do any sort of like scuba?

Yeah. Almost. No, that never. But like a snorkeling. I barely go in a pool. I love to go in a pool. See, I feel like you're like, like me where we like traveling.

It's like the greatest luxury of like work. Sure. It's going well that you get to go places. It is nice to get to do it by accident, essentially. Right. But I feel like you and I are the same where what we like doing is being a city explorer. Yeah. Like I don't want to necessarily go to the tour shit and I don't want to like fucking swim in some fucking thing.

Wait, in the severance episode where you guys went upstate. I mean, you went to, you know, the, the Keer Park or whatever. did you swim? Because there was a lot of water stuff. No, I never go in the water. You didn't get drowned. I'm just in the snow. You're just in the snow.

Yeah. Yeah. I remember. Which snow I can handle. Sure. I know it's water, but it's less scary. Yeah. So, come on.

Yeah, you can walk on it. It's easy. It's no big deal. You can eat it. It's not better. It's fine. Avalanche, though. It's a lot of snow.

Yeah. I wouldn't like that one thing. It's always bad. Interesting. I mean, finding Dory would argue otherwise. I suppose so. I mean, okay, so...

Just that it gives you way more Dory than the first time, and it still works. So, Destiny's deal is that she's near-sighted and is always bonging into things. Right, which is another good reverse logic characterization thing. Bailey is embarrassed about his nose, noggin, the Luga kind of thing.

I love everything about how strange... I like his weird design. I like that they almost always keep him in profile where it feels like he's a 2D character weirdly in a 3D move. And I really like Ty Borell's performance. But the logic of he now thinks he's lost his echo sonar because he bumped his head. And that's why his head looks like that.

And he's self-conscious about it, even though that's just the species he is, is really funny to me. Yeah. And it is fun that because they're at this sort of like rehab facility, Yeah. Everyone is a bit of a misfit. Yes. So it's like, it is really nice the way they all support each other and basically like hype each other up and be like, you can do this. It's the other thing that post Blackfish stops it from feeling like a they are stuck here.

They're being held prisoners is the unifying thing is that all of these creatures are kind of like, I don't want to be out there. They're misfit toys. Right. That's scary. They'll struggle in the wild. And I'm not ready. Right. I like snot fish.

That's a funny bit. Fish sneezes. Yeah. Do they sneeze? You know what? I'm going to go to Google. I'm going to find out. Do fish.

My favorite, like, little... No. They don't have lungs. So they don't... And they don't really have noses. I know, obviously, in Nemo, they have these things. Yeah, one sneezes. Right.

But, yeah, so they don't really have the ability to do that. Fair enough. Yep. Sorry. My favorite little one... seen guy is the overly personable clam.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I think is so good. Oh, when right, when Marlon and Nemo get they get stuck with him, right? Yes. He was originally supposed to be their next door neighbor in the opening in one of these fake openings or unused openings.

I like that he's like a muppet. Yeah, right. That he doesn't have eyes or anything else, that he's just a clam that opens up and is just like, this guy's not it's not a bad guy, but I just really don't want to be stuck talking to him. I got to just, I got to move on. He's like a guy at the table next to you at a restaurant who won't stop being like, that looks good. Yeah, and you try to use your sort of body language cues to slowly, you know,

rotate to like decrease the interaction slowly over time, which is not really picking up on it. And it's so funny to do that with a character that doesn't have a face. Yeah, that is a great little. Do you know what the, but yes, they wrote this bid in with him. And then even when they cut that opening, they were like, this guy's too good. We have to figure out another way they get stuck with him. Do you know the scientific term for the bulbous part of a toothed whales head that contains a teco location center?

You know, the sort of big thing. What's it? A melon. A melon? They literally just call it a melon. That's fun. Yeah. That's fun.

David? Yeah. Quick question and be honest. I saw him and swear. I will tell the truth and nothing about it. Thank you. When did you last actually think about how much fiber you're eating? I can't say, I can't say anything about it enough.

Actually think about it. I don't know. Not recently enough. I'm not talking protein. I'm not talking calories. Fiber. It's important. Fiber.

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New customers only. Thank you to Huell for partnering and supporting our show. You got the two seals who are sort of the high status we know every year. thing. Yeah. But are assholes, too, Gerald. Who you want to defend? No, well, I just,

or do you want to interrogate the movie's positioning of Gerald? I think Gerald slightly undercuts the message of the film. Because the film, the film is all about, like, owning your differences and, and, like, it's okay to have something up with you, essentially. Yes. And you can do things. And you should be sort of accepted and a friend. And then Gerald shows up and they're like, you fucking freak.

Get the fuck out of here. What's wrong with your fucking eyebrows? Don't touch our rocks. Is Gerald a radio is the other thing? I don't know what's going on with Gerald. Yes. By radio, you refer to the Cuba Gooding Jr. movie, of course, not the device for listening to audio transmission.

No, I am aware of the fact that he is not an electronic device. They don't treat him very well. They don't. They don't. And I think you're right. The characters and honestly the film itself. But it's a one. You know, it's whatever.

I mean, it feels like them trying to find a new version of the Seagull joke, right? The Seagulls is basically like, doesn't it kind of sound like seagulls are saying mine? And so, like, with the sea lions, the way they barking. It's trying to do that again. They need to be an asshole to someone. Yes. Right. I guess.

This is the stuff that feels similar to Neem. You know, it's like, we should have like these sort of side characters that we lay information that are, yeah, kind of like a big, jokey thing. It's a little like, right, because you're combining some of the, um, Nigel, the sort of idea of the creature that can exist in both, but is the observer and the know it all and the go between for information. Nigel's the Jeffrey Rush Pelican characters. So it's like combining that with like they sit on the rock and they see everything with also them being the seagulls.

I think the performances are really funny. I like them being two blokes. Sure. You know? Yeah, I have no issues with them. I guess the argument is. couldn't he have been like a Donnie in the Big Lebowski trio? Could they still be an asshole to him while he is a character who can speak

and isn't coded as perhaps developmentally disabled? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think probably. But I think Becky they do a much better job with because Becky, Becky is very much like a microcosm of Dory's story almost where like Marlon is like, you can't do anything. And then they learn, oh, just trust her. And she'll figure it out.

Becky is a loon, a bird literally named for being crazy, essentially. Interesting. Do we never hear her do the loon call? I guess kind of. They are crazy. It is like I've like vacationed on lakes of loons, and it does sound crazy when they're just doing that at night. It's another thing that I think helps with Becky is that the loons are all crazy, are all nonverbal, and Becky's just a little weirder. And she's hot.

Someone finally says it. I mean, we had to get here eventually. I assume Becky would have a really big part in old Marlon. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, they have chemistry. She comes walking through that door again. They have chemistry.

They have sort of a, like, Marlon almost enjoys the fact that she doesn't listen. Like, it's almost like a, they're developing a sub-dom type thing. Is it like a Burton and Taylor, like the fighting is the juice? Yeah. They're headed towards Phantom Thread, basically, of, they have this. sort of dynamic that, you know, he likes being like, Becky, you do this thing? And she's kind of like, ooh, I'm not going to do it. You know.

It's also, I think, just like a smart refinement for them of Dory isn't lost. They're close enough to Dory. Their versions of the movie they clearly ran through where Dory swims off. They know where she is, but there's a parallel narrative of Marlon and Nemo needing to get there. Versus what we're saying of like, it's a very different type of environment. it's harder to traverse, but they're never that far from her. It's more of the puzzle.

Yes. And then I also think it helps create this thing where the tension isn't, how do we find Dory? It's what you're saying, the testing of like, you're applying your Marlon logic to this and it's not going to work.

Marlon has to accept her line of thinking, Becky's line of thinking. Yeah, sure. Totally. I mean, and there's this sort of mystery element to the whole narrative

of like she needs to remember like why the shells means something to her why that, right? And it's very satisfying to sort of... I feel like there are too many flashbacks like there's too many filling in the piece and underlining that.

And then I remember that like your daughter has seen this movie 20 times. Maybe that this narrative is not digestible for a five-year-old. old if you don't do that. It really, shocker. It really changes your perspective on children's entertainment when you watch the movie with the children

that entertainment is intended for. And you're like, right, of course, like, it's on her wavelength. It's not on my wavelength. Because I've been like a 37-year-old man seeing animated films alone and being like, do I detect a plot hole? Like, you know, it's like, excuse me, you don't need to spoon feed this to us. And I'm like literally sitting next to a baby

being spoon-fed. It's like, you know, I was spoon-feeding. that girl her food more recently than, you know, whatever. Like, you know, she was eating it. That was my experience watching Goat, though, where I saw a goat. And I was like, okay, someone was a little overstated. And I looked next to it and there was like a woman feeding

a baby mush in the chair next to me in the theater. I was like, maybe I YouTube shut the fuck up. When Goat was available for purchase for 30 whole dollars on iTunes, I was like, purchase. You didn't wait for the steel? No, I don't

buy children's films on steel. Like the whole... It's all digital quick access. It needs to be on the iPad. Yeah. It needs to be like, she's like, I want goat. And I'm like, got you go. It's ready.

Watch. There it is. You get that free digital code. Are you going to buy the goat steel? No, I'm not. I don't like goat. Okay. Huh, come on.

That's never stopped you before. Did you see goat? Uh, I didn't. Goat's good. I'm, I'm... You like basketball? Yeah. I mean, technically the game is called Roarball.

Yeah, I was going to say, we might want to take a little dip into the logic. It's a little different from basketball. Yeah. Rule one, animals can play it. Yeah, the ball is very different. It looks exactly like a basketball, except it has a million holes inside of it. So that any type of animal appendage could hold it.

If you have like claws or paws or whatever. And the way it's like you kind of need like a giraffe on your team to like, you know, protect the rim or whatever. Right. And that's the basketball. Right, exactly. Yeah, the giraffe's like the center. There's an ostrich character who's kind of a wing.

Okay, yeah. You know, like... It's all tracks. Yeah, she's good. So has your daughter transferred her love of Roarball to basketball at all yet? No, because I'm so intently trying to brainwash her into liking baseball. Ah, okay. So she mostly...

You're working on baseball first. Yes. But you know... But I am going to try and get her into the WMBA eventually. I was going to say, I don't know if you've ever met Sims' wife, Zach. I don't think I have. She is similarly very tall. She's tall.

She played volleyball. David's daughter is almost definitely destined to be... Oh, she's... My daughter is in the 99th percent of basketball. She's very, very tall. Yes, no, this could all have, I mean, or softball or any athletics. The only issue is she, she's got those David Sims jeans, you know, moving around inside of her. And they may limit her athletic ability.

It just might be a hampering. My wife did play volleyball through college. So, like, she, you know, she could have. Yeah. But at Roarball also, yes, the home team, which might be, say, like, a team with, like, a jungle environment or an ice environment, right? Is allowed to change the court. Oh.

By like kind of like erupting a volcano. That's more like baseball. Yeah, exactly. The home game advantage is that you're allowed to kind of like press a button basically and go like volcano mode. Right. Your stadium mirrors your natural habitat, even though all the teams have multiple different species. That's very baseball. And the environment can be unbelievably high field wall in a little bit.

That is kind of the, it's like an Arctic team and their court is made of ice. so if you slam down too hard on it, it shatters, and then it's just like, too fucking bad. You can't walk on that part anymore. It's good. I'll be watching.

I'm going to get the Steelbook. Yeah, I think you should get the Steel. I think also a very funny Nick Crowell performances. He's very good. I own movies I don't like on Steelbook, but they are out of a specific sense of completism.

They are something like Fast X where it's like, I own all of them. I hate this one. So if they make like five more goats, then you'll, I would need to opt in wholly on goat at some point for them to eventually get me to buy one I didn't like, if that makes sense. This is much like, yes, me owning several Ghostbusters sequels I don't like.

Okay, touchpool. That's fun. We like that sequence. Very funny. It is a fun sequence. It is the one where Dory's logic made the least sense to me of just keep swimming and then they, it didn't matter which part of the touchpool they made it to, you know? They sort of just like end up what they call it like poke. What is the part they reach at the end? Oh, yeah. Something or pro. Sure, poking problem.

But it didn't, it didn't matter. But it is a fun sequence. And I like the hands thing. Y'all ever done a touch pool recently? I've done that a lot because I've been to the aquarium a lot. Recently, no, but in my past. David goes to the aquarium like six times a day. I do go all.

I mean, my daughter loves it. I don't go by myself. It's fun to go to an aquarium. It's really fun. Look at all the fish. Vibed the fish, but they do have touch pools and they are kind of like, you know, they're very specific. It is not like in Finding Dory. Sure.

They're like one animal at a time and we're being gentle with the animals. That's good. It is funny. That's progress. I don't think anything nefarious was going on. SeaWorld, obviously, arrival of Disney's. It would be in their interest to take SeaWorld down. That's true.

But after the first movie, there were all these stories of like pet fish sales went way up. but then kids would beg their parents for a fish and then flush it down the toilet because they'd say like all drains lead to the ocean I'm trying to free them. This movie kind of absolves you of the guilt of being a child going to an aquarium.

Yeah, sure. It's like they need that. They need the help. This is good. I've never been to see it. Have you guys ever been to see world? Wait, but the children are scary monsters. That's true.

I wonder if kids grapple with that. That's a good point. I mean, my daughter's never really thought. Because it made me feel like I can't ever do a touch pooling it. It is interesting that, Right. It's like this is actually a pretty good setup for them, save the kids. If the kids weren't here, they'd have it made. They like it here. Yeah. The kids are the problem. Yeah, the kids are scary. Yeah. So adults should go to aquariums alone and keep their hands themselves. That I can agree with. Good. Since I happen to SeaWorld a handful of times, because I would visit with my grandparents in Florida. They lived outside of Orlando. Gatorland was obviously your preference. For sure. Love Gaterland. Gatorland. Gatorland is. this shitty local park near where my grandparents lived that was just so trashy but great.

Probably also problematic. Location of the final third act action set piece in Bad Boys, Ride or Die? Yes. The fourth bad boys ends at Gator. Oh, yeah. It does a lot of fun. But, um, with the Mega Gator. Yeah.

Fun. I mean, the, the whale show is cool. They splash you. If you're in the splash zone. Right. Like that. It is so funny that in the 90s, one whale just became a major celebrity.

Shammu. Like a household name. Yeah. And every SeaWorld location was like, yeah, yeah, this is the one. Yeah, we got Shammu too. We got Shammu, he's Shammu. This is that guy from the commercials

and the movies and everything. Is Shammu alive? No. Well, which one? I think Shammu might have. Yeah, she died in August 1971. Whoa. So even before I was Like Shamu died 25 years before

Free Willy. But then how did I hear so much about Shamu? Exactly. It's a very common name in the whale community. Can we tip? Wait, should I do an impression of the whale? Oh, oh, yes. Oh, I do. I've never seen it. I've never seen it. I always try to get a picture and I can't get it fast enough. Did you get it? Come on.

I think so. My angle's not. great. Damn it. It's the microphone arm. Ben, can you move the microphone arm before he... Oh,

oh, fuck. David pushed it on himself, but now he's smiling. He's lost it. Damn it. I think I got one. I think I got one. The effort of moving the arm

took him out of it. It did. This is the problem. The whole thing with about it about me doing my whale impression, my impression of Brennan Frazier, the poster for the movie, the whale,

is you really have to like let your mind go blank. Yeah. That's what he looks like on the poster. Zach, you're a tremendous actor. Thank you. And you just saw David transform in front of you. I did. But he's not classically trained.

No. So it's a very, it's a precarious process. It's very delicate. The trance can be broken very easily. You see him drop into it so quickly. Yeah. Have you seen Brendan Fraser the whale? I have not.

I've heard it described in detail on 70 episodes of dough boys. I was about to say. 70 almost seems low. Basically syndicated on dough boys at this point. But no, I have not watched. Like, doughboys, you could just sort of like piece together the entire movie through all of the various times. You know what's funny? The movie I was probably never going to watch.

Yeah. But when I heard he floats at the end, that was really what sold me on. I won't be. I did out loud go, go, get the fuck out. You're like, when that happened, I was like, wait a second. I was not like, I'm sure I've shared this anecdote before, but that happened. And I went. Yep.

And then I heard a sound behind me and I looked. and the man sitting directly behind me was like sobbing and convulsing. I can't. I am interested in developing a live action version of the whale. Yeah. That implies it's a cartoon? No, we'll just do it without prosthetics. Oh, sure.

So we'll just sort of, you know, live action it up. Yeah. But I'm, that's, we're in talks for that. We're in talks. Right, right, right. It is funny, the way the doughboys talk about the whale, you could go, well, they're reducing it to like five things. the jerking off, the meatball sub, the essay.

That's all I know. That's kind of a fucking movie. You'd imagine like, well, they're being really kind of mean to it. If you watch it, those things are... Also, like the A plots. Like the meatball subs and the whole fucking thing is this? They read the essay like 10 times. They keep going back to that damn essay.

It's the movie he's called the whale because the essay's about movie dick. That is why it's called that. Yeah, David, the title does not refer to him in his body. It refers to the essay. And if you thought it referred to him, you're the judgmental one and maybe look in a mirror. Shame on you, Zach. What do you make of the fact that

when Dory, I'm bringing us back to the end to this movie, to the final act, this movie does have whales in it, sort of learns that her parents did, you know, escape to search for her and never came back, leading Dory to think that they are dead. And Dory kind of,

it's not like she tries to kill herself, but she just kind of like throw herself. I guess it's like... She's despondent. She's despondent and it's like, like what like it's like the Hank scoops her up and then I guess he drops her she doesn't it's not like she throws herself out of the coffee pot or whatever right but there is that kind of quite shocking or not I mean but like exciting moment where you're like sort of dory eye view of like crashing

out of the pot and like rolling down the drain I don't know it's effective yeah I mean this is another like sort of this movie like it has like two kind of darkish moments before it's finally like, they're alive and everything's fine and they found her and everyone's going to be okay. I'm rewatching it. The octopus scoops of Dori then gets caught and drops. Yeah, that's what it is. Right. Because he's like, where are the others? And she's like, I don't know. My parents are dead. And then right. Yeah, yeah. When they were supposed to be affected with the same level of memory loss, she was going to find them like halfway through. Because finding them wouldn't solve stuff because they all keep forgetting each other. And now it's like, how do we save all three of them? Right. Really annoying.

But then I think they end up in this position where they're like, well, fuck. Then what is the explanation for why they haven't found her? They land on a good thing of they were trusting she would make it back to them. Yeah, I think it makes sense that they're like, we'll just wait here. Right. And we'll just keep building a map. I don't know if that was the healthiest choice, but it was effective. I mean, it's a little bleak if you think about it too hard.

Because they're, they're completely isolated. They're not near any other living creatures. Nope. they, it seems to be they're living in the dark. You might want to build a support network of other people who can spread the word. Well, it's also, it is another

fish family with one child. Yes. You know what I mean? After like, finding Nemo goes to pains to be like, look, the rest of the eggs got eaten, this is an unusual situation. Because it is true that like fish generally have like clutches of eggs.

I also think that it works largely because this is where they really get their fucking money. worth out of Diane Keaton. Sure. Their sag scale, but buy a house with the residuals a year later,

money out of Diane Keaton, where she, I think, really dramatically sells the, like, we just trusted you would find us and you did. To make it a moment of triumph, of like,

look at you, you did it. I assume that's where you and your wife start sobbing. It is very effective shit. It's just, you know, like the fundamental thing that I think is very affecting

to watch as a parent is when you see Dory as a child suffering from memory loss, it feels much more like profoundly awful, which is, of course, the drama of the flashbacks and all that. But young Dory is much more self-conscious about it and worried about it. Yeah, it's just sad and you're anxious about it and all that. Right, right, right, right. And then, yeah, no, just the catharsis.

Yeah. Just like, dude, like all the, you know, TikTok's always serving to me, like, watch, you know, the child see his soldier, dad, returning from the air. airport. And it's just within one second, I am just like on the edge of two. You know, like, it'll always get me. You watch that now, and after two seconds, the child like lifts up the dad and throws

him through a wall and you're like, this is AI. This is AI. Wolford Brimley starts like puking oatmeal. Have you seen these? There's some account I keep seeing where I'm just like, this is another Wolford Brimley interview from Larry King. I'd love to watch this. And then after three seconds,

he starts like projectile vomiting, Quakerote. I can't even search for that because I don't want the algorithm. It's like when... You watch one of those, you're cooked. Emma Stefanski, friend of the show, it was like, do you know about Hot Hagrid?

And I'm like, what are you talking about? She's like, Hot Hagrid. And I googled it. And it was like, there was a whole TikTok sub-tulture people were like horny for Hagrid. But then, of course, immediately my phone was like, oh, you like that? You want...

As much of that as we can give you. This might be the only opportunity I ever have to tell this story. It's related to Hot Haggriard. Okay, go on. Which is, I, I don't remember how it came up, but I do remember that during shooting season one of Severance, I did tell John Jutro that people want to fuck Shrek. And it was fairly early in the season.

And I remember him sort of being like, okay. And that was just like the end of the conversation. My impression of making the show, especially the way, like, I guess he would do the COVID, But it's like, you guys are in that set for like forever. Yes, yes. Like for so long, it's just you're at these consoles. Yeah, and we ultimately did get quite close.

And I bet if I told him about it now, the conversation would go differently. I don't know more. But this was, it was probably in the first two weeks of shooting. I mean, it may see knew about Shrek. I guess Shrek's everywhere. I guess all are kind of elder statesmen Italians of the screen and stage are learning about Shrek later in life. Right. Of course, Pacino is now.

The phone case. That's right. Tuduro knows that people want to give it to him. Yeah, he knows now. Yeah. How, I mean, how many voices is Tarturo done? Well, of course, he's Francesco Bernoulli and Cars 2. Ah. I think I like to mention a lot.

Is he in any of the hotel Transylvania? Never. And that's actually a shame, especially considering how close he is in the Happy Madison. He was in Dol Toro's Pinocchio. Whody voice? Datorre. I don't know. Okay.

I saw it one time. Yeah. But yeah, I think he needs to do a little bit more. Cars 2 sucks and is for losers and babies and even babies should be embarrassed that they like it. It is one of the most insane movies ever made. I tried to give it another watch. I did watch it through,

but I was like, well, I have any perverse appreciation for just how insane it is now. And it still is more annoying than interesting to me, even with all of its weirdness. Terturo's very good in it. He's like a Formula One car or whatever. He's a Formula One car who's really like haughty.

I got to, and trash talking like Queen all over. That's a slam dunk for him. Yeah. Yeah. I do want to say one more thing about finding Dory. Yeah. My favorite part of the movie, which we maybe briefly touched on or whatever, it's sort of happening at this part of the film, is the moment where it starts with Nemo and Marlin when they're stuck in the fountain.

And yes, in the gift shop. And they start saying, what would Dory do? And then they reunite with her and they tell her that. And then for the rest of the movie, Dory starts saying, what would I do? And I found that quite affecting and very like, because I do think it's something, I think people who have a variety of issues, it's really hard to have confidence in yourself when you're like dealing with that kind of stuff. And so I think this idea of just like trusting in yourself and almost like making yourself a, a like heroic figure to look up to, I thought was really kind of. Beautiful, honestly. I also, I think...

I know. I think what it expresses very well is that Marlin is willingly bringing Dory into his family and taking on responsibility for her, but is clearly burdening him with a tremendous amount of stress. And more than being, like, neurotic around Nemo, he's clearly just like, fuck, I'm, like, on the clock at all times, making sure Dory doesn't kill herself. And what Nemo, like, teaches him in that moment of, like, oh, right, she is self-sufficient. And she helped you fucking find me. Right.

My, you're lame ass. Not that he doesn't want to still help her. Yeah, no, I know, I know. I think. Because there's that scene where he's, like, yelling at her that is genuinely affected. It is. He's being an asshole and he's not being an asshole in the way he is in the first movie of you're being annoying. No, it's in line with his role view.

Because it feels like his weight. Right. Yeah. Right. And it's, it's appropriate. Marlon is no fun in this movie, but, you know. It all lines up with the characterization. Hey, it's also nice when Dory's parents point out that Dory was able to eventually find.

Exactly. That's what I said. Yeah. It's like a really nice win for Dory. No, I was texting with JJ, our researcher about this last night. Sure. And... What's his status?

I don't know. He took a long time to tell us that like a roof guy was coming to his house and I was not happy. I really wanted to know that kind of information right away. texted him something. He, like, he thumbs up so text hours later, like that I had said. And then said, like, sorry, I thought I had thumbsed up that earlier, but my roof guy was here to look at the roof. And I said, thank you so much for filling us in, JJ, was really worried. Yeah, I was like, you really, you got to be keeping me more updated. This is the first time hearing of it. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy that he didn't even know at all about it. Right. That's actually yet to mention.

He, I mean, we might have to fire him over that. I feel like every time it hails in Wisconsin, JJ's up my asking like more hail and I'm like, all right. And yet I don't even hear what's happened to the roof. He sent us a series of texts about going to the local university library, take out a bunch of books on Martin Scorsese to start researching for our next mini-series and was texting us about how difficult it was for him to bike home in the rain with all the books. And we just necked him so fucking hard where you're like, huh, JJ, those books look pretty fucking dry to me. He sent a picture of a stack.

And I was like, I don't look wet. I don't see a single droplet. Now we sound like assholes. What I was going to say is that JJ, while prepping this dossier, text me and said, are you more pro on Dory than Sims? And I was, I think we're both pretty pro.

And he was saying, like, good, I just want to make sure it's a positive episode. And I said, yeah, I think the first 15, 20 minutes suck, basically everything from when they get to the Marine Institute on rules. And he said, yeah, that's right. And it like rules, rules IMO.

And then I think perhaps, the most dead on profound point that JJ has ever made in his years of working for this show. Better be done on the roof stuff. There's an octopus driving a truck. What the hell else do you want? Yeah. That part rules. It is the moment where I was like,

Stanton still got the fucking magic and the chaos in him of just the audacity of being like, you know what I'm going to try to do? I'm going to try to construct an actual proper action sequence that can be driven by the fish that is affecting the human world that is pushing further than like you know, the strain of the first movie is if the fish swim down will turn over the boat, right?

Yeah, sure. I mean, it reminds me a toy story. That's what I love. It's kind of just like, what if these guys were in our world? What's the craziest thing that they might be able to achieve, you know, like, could these toys drive a car? And it's a, you know, it's a push, it's heightened, but it feels

similarly affected by a logic of the fucking once a year. We'll hear some insane story of a thing like this that happens if not this crazy, you know? I saw a video recently of a dog hunking a horn over and over. This is the thing. There's always some story

of like... It's basically the same thing that happened. Right. A bear walked into a 7-Eleven and worked a shift and you're like what? And then you watch the video and you're like, this rules. There he goes. I feel good about the world for one hour. I just think this sequence is excellent and it feels like he keeps heightening how far

you think it could possibly go. in straining credibility. And it's silly, but there is a really good worked out internal logic of, like you said, in a Toy Story way, like, how much can they actually affect things? And we've already seen them sort of do a dress rehearsal with the stroller. Yes. So it's like you kind of are just bought in to like, this octopus can move. He knows what he's doing, you know.

And then weaponizing the otters is great. I feel like you want to talk about the otters, Ben. Who doesn't love an otter? I mean, I was just trying to move this along. but yeah, who doesn't love at Otter? They're cute. I'm with you, man.

Let's wrap up Finding Dory. I don't remember what else happens anyway. What's the song when the truck is like slow motion is a good thing?

I can't remember. I don't know. Yeah, the uncredit song in this is unforgettable, which is clever after the first one has beyond the city, of course. There's the closing little moment

with Marlon and Dory looking out over the beautiful landscape. Right. coral neighborhood. Yep, totally. But just, yeah, the serenity of that moment of them all sort of the peace and the comfort in their family.

It's what a wonderful world. It's Louis Armstrong. Yeah. I see the song. On my way over here, I was singing the song, Can you find me, Doree. So that, of course. You could have used that. That would have been.

That is creeds. take me higher. That's right. Yes. Okay. But first, it's, I just was, I couldn't stop doing it. Ken, now I'm going to be doing that. Now I'm going to be doing it. It's beautiful. Now, can we throw down the gauntlet for the Can You Find Me Dory

challenge? So you were doing this walking over here. Yeah. Listeners, send us a video of you walking in public singing Can you find me Dory? Can you? But you have to do it in public while commuting. Do we want a third Dory, Nemo?

You know, they, they, doctor recently kind of said, like, hey, it's a big ocean. Like, he kind of hinted at it of like, we're thinking of ideas, like, blah, blah. And as you say, Ellen went from, I've retired from public life to, I guess I'm making a short film in which I star is Dory. Right. So, like, she's cracking the door open. It feels like something is. Albert Brooks is old. He is old.

But he was recently in a film. Perfect world, Marlon. I do, I think it's such a rich world where, like, it doesn't have to be. about even these characters. Like, yeah. They do such great world building with each, like, the turtles and the sharks and the stingrays and the, like, I just would watch any, any more ocean life.

It do be looking good if we're under the sea. Yes, I will say, and this is just like a personal preference thing. The technology, the leap between the first film and the second film is obviously huge, not to mention, now they basically have unlimited budgets. these movies are so profitable, these characters are so valuable. The sequels, right, can kind of do whatever. That they're truly like,

just send us the bill when it's done. It doesn't matter how much it costs. It helps us as a company to have Dory back out there. I was talking a lot in the episode of the first film about all the cheats in that movie of how they pull off the depth and the texture and the elements

of the ocean and how a lot of it is kind of like the CGI version of old stagecraft where that movie feels a little bit more like an archer's film and it's sort of representational way of capturing that. And this, you're just like, they have all the money and they have all the technology and they could just render everything perfectly. It does look beautiful, but I miss the sort of, I don't know, the movie magic of the first one.

Maybe we do a wicked style reclaiming of Gerald. Okay. Gerald for good. Yeah. We kind of learned that, in fact, Gerald was right all along. He was a genius. Yeah. Yeah.

Stanton, and that earned him weekly. article had this quote that has, I've seen the internet immediately run with misinterpreting as Toy Story 5 director announces Toy Story 6 and 7. Okay. Everyone's been running this as a headline.

What he said basically was... He said 6-7 and he did his hands like this. Right. And everyone laughed and Disney started like doing projections. Right. No, he was talking about how they came to him and said,

do you have any ideas for five? and he started noodling on it. He wasn't playing to direct it. And then he really liked the idea. He said, we'll start writing it, start directing it, whatever. And he said, you know, it's this whole thing of, we had always been so concerned was three, the definitive ending. And then when we opened ourselves up to, that's Andy's story, there are other things you can do.

We keep thinking the series is ending. And he said something to the, like, sort of effect of, you sit down for two hours and start doing the mental exercise about other toys and what their lives would be. And immediately, you'd just come up with it. with ideas for two more movies. Right. He was basically like... Oh, sure, right.

And everyone just took that as... They have an idea for two more movies that will exist. Right. And he was just sort of saying, and I think this is his superpower that, you know, Toy Story Four was notoriously a disaster forever that they couldn't crack. It was the one movie they kept pushing back, even though they had all these big money deals because they were like, we don't have it. And then they finally went to him post-finding door and said, do you have anything?

And he was like, what about this? And they were like, fuck, that's good. And then he took over kind of co-writing the movie. I think he's the guy who's really smart about locating something that feels kind of organic that is just sitting there in the world that you've developed and what the human story is there, the emotional story that you can, like, explode out of that. I dread the notion of them announcing something literally like finding Marlin or Nemo's now grown up and his child goes missing. But I'm like, if they could come up with an idea that's just,

sit down and think about other things that could happen in the ocean with fish, even if it is led by these characters, I just think you can't do since this movie is the flip, flipping it again. I agree. I don't think it needs to be finding anyone. Right. Do you know who does flip?

Flipper. Bring him in. Crosliver. Flipper hasn't worked in a while. Yeah, well, again, there's some problematic lines. He was on the shitty men a media list. This film was supposed to come out Thanksgiving 2015. They instead decided to give that to the good dinosaur.

I had a great meal that year. 2015 Thanksgiving? Yeah. This is why nobody beats the Zach? No, what he does. It would have been good. It would have been good. The only way that meal could have been better.

The only thing missing is instead you had to pair with the good dinosaur. Yeah. Good dinosaur obviously didn't do very well. That was notably one of the first. And he was the first Pixar movie to lose money. I think that was the first Pixar movie to ever confuse me. It sucks. It's really confusing.

I remember watching. I watched the whole thing as an adult. And I was just like, I don't know what is happening. It's also, it's the first one where you're like, you guys never cracked this. Yeah,

you guys have released this film because you had to, but you did not know what it was. Cars too sucks, but it is like poorly conceived. And then it is a successfully executed version of their stupid idea. Good dinosaur, you're like,

where did this start? What did you think you were making? Can any of you, take pride in what you've released now. I was going to say, though, that was the first year that they released two. In 2015? I think it was Inside Out and Good Dinosaur in the same year. So it was sort of like Inside Out covered the Good Dinosaur's losses.

Yeah, right. And that did so well, right, exactly. And I think they flipped finding Dory and Good Dinosaur because they were like, Dory is a guaranteed hit. Good Dinosaur is a guaranteed flop. Can we sandwich it with the flop in between success? Right. So Dory comes out June 2016. It opens $135 million at the domestic

box office, which is an animated movie record at the time beating Shrek the third, which had held the record for a decade. Jack just gave me a very funny look. Jack just gave John Tissuro a look. Yeah. Hopefully that much. His majesty. Hey, sex sells.

It makes close to $500 million domestic. It makes a billion dollars worldwide. Only the second Pixar movie to do that after Toy Story 3. It was not by the Academy Awards, as I pointed out. And Stanton does not go on to make another animated movie until Toy Story 5, right?

Yes, we'll talk about it in the next episode, but he very much was like... He moves to TV. Well, he was like, the John Carter thing wasn't a one-off. I want to be directing live action. And what follows is like eight years of... of him signing on for a bunch of things, attaching himself to blacklist scripts, movies set up at various points in time that don't happen,

and directing a tremendous amount of TV. He did a fair amount of TV. He directs two episodes of Stranger Things, an episode of Better Call Saul, an episode of Legion, an episode of Tales from the Loop. Remember that one? Four episodes of the excellent show for all mankind,

including one of its best ever episodes, in my opinion. His Better Call Saul episodes also really excellent, I will say. Sure. And one episode of the well-remembered Netflix show, Third Body Problem. And also, he's a consulting producer on that. Sure. And he was a consulting producer. There's more of that coming.

There is by obligation. They're going to find a fourth body. I mean, look, those books are, I've read them all. I love them so much. They're the greatest books. They're the greatest books ever. And you read them and you're like, anyone who thinks that they could adapt this is a fool. Like, this is the most unadaptable shit in the world.

It has like 400 characters, most of whom are Chinese. And so you just have to immediately start, like, messing with it, which is what the show did. Over a massive time scale. Millennia. Yeah. And like, you read the first book, you're like, wow, that's hard. You read the third book. You're like, that makes the first book look like fucking We're Spot.

Like, that makes the first book look like a cardboard book for children. Anyway, they're so good. I've never watched the show. Also a consulting producer and writer on Obi-Wan. I've recently watched and think is quite terrible. Not very good. But felt like very much... I would imagine...

Obi-1 was just a swing and miss in the dirt. Like, the ball is nowhere near them. And they're like, no, we can get it. And it's just not even close. I just find it interesting. He didn't direct any episodes of it. It's not like he was the main creator. I have to imagine that was a play.

At that moment when suddenly it was like Star Wars production was ramping way up. They're going to make a bunch of shows. Yeah. Is this a way to sort of get my foot in? Yeah, my foot in there. Maybe I do a different Star Wars thing. I don't know. Debra Chow was the director of that entire season.

She did it all. But instead, he does not make another live action film until 2026 when of course he released in the blink of an eye. Zach, do you know that Andrew Stant released a live action movie on Hulu months ago? No. And months from now. I haven't heard of it. Kate McKinnon is the star of it. Rashida Jones, David Diggs.

And very soon, Toy Story 5 will be. released with him as the director. That one's going to do pretty well. It's going to do pretty well. He has once again replicated the same post-John Carter thing of, you guys forgot I have another get-out-of-jail-free card. By the time this is out, Toy Story 5 has come out.

So one assumes, unless it tried to, like, assassinate the president at a dinner or something, it did great. Like, I don't know what might happen in the meantime to derail Toy Story 5. It seems like it's on a good time. I have a, I have a, a Woody email dump that I've been sitting on.

Woody might have gone to an island. He might have flown on a certain express. The Pizza Planet logs. Yeah, Pizza Planet actually used to be called Comet Pizza. Let's talk about it. It is, is there anything that could happen that would prevent that movie from making like a billion dollars?

I don't know. I mean, I remember everyone felt that way about Toy Story 4. Yes. And then it's slightly under-delivered box office wise, although in the end of the day, it made a ton of money. I was wrong when we were trying to talk about the box office and whatever episode it was. It basically ended up at the exact same number as three. Right. Just many years later.

But it was also post the sort of Finding Nemo, Finding Doorhead such a big jump. And Incredibles 2. Incredibles 2 had such a big jump. The Despicable Me movies were like rising on each one. people assumed, well, three was so big, four will be even bigger. And the answer is that, like, three is about as big as a movie can get. Ditto four. The ceiling might have been established, but it's also incredibly high.

Now, speaking of box office, June 17, 2016. Oh, sure. Here we go. Yep. Finding Dory's opening number one. Number two is an action comedy. So is this central intelligence? Yeah.

I fucked it up by looking at the rest of the summer lineup a little bit, but I don't know what specific. So the Rock, he big. Yes. Heaven Heart, not so big. What if they were in a movie again? You're smiling. What are your thoughts? Of course I love that movie. Now, I remember, I saw that film at the Pavilion, which is now the Nighthawk

Prospect Park, but it was in the dying days of the pavilion. I had to see it to review it. And I like missed whatever screen. They were like, the screening is, you just missed it. You know, like one of those things. And I watched it and like, you know, probably like a freezing cold theater with like a garbage bag for a blanket or whatever. And I remember when the rock was young, he was like, he's kind of like a nerd. He was like a chubby nerd. He's very overweight. The CGI him on.

His face onto like a CGI body. It's terrible looking. And I'm going to do a live action remake of that as well. Good. I love what you say? Live action remake of a movie that is largely live action. Yeah, I'm just doing it. But does do it.

But does do this. Oh, natural. Right. Right. God. Yeah. And there's a lot of it. Don't remember much else about that movie. I'm just a huge.

I'm a Kevin Hart, Mark. Like, anything he makes... Back then, especially. I laughed. I laughed. He could make it laugh. He's funny. I think the Rock is funny in that as well.

Yeah, I don't like that movie, but they're both good in it. They're locked in. The plot is whatever. It was just one of those things where they were like, Rock, Big, Heart Small, make a poster. We'll write the script later. Do you know what the tagline was for the film? Yes, I do because it was the...

It was what my review was about. It's so bizarre because the poster does not have their names above the title. Sure. Instead, the tagline is, saving the world takes a little heart and a big Johnson. It's rare that there's a tagline that's a joke about the actors' names.

It's not bad. It's not bad. But that movie sold itself. That's the start of their partnership. That's the first one. And then what was the one they did right after that? Jamongi. Then they start also, like,

they legally cannot make a movie without the other one cameoing. Yeah, right. And then they're also doing fucking commercials. Continental intelligence was a hit. It was a big hit. Made 127. Number three of the box of is a horror sequel.

You did mention it already, but... Conjuring 2? Conjuring 2. Excellent film. Very good. Of the Conjuring. I'll always like the first one best, but I do like it. And I love the scene where Patrick Wilson Singh, is obviously.

Him playing Elvis. By the Camp Fire. Seen Conjuring 2? I've only seen the first conjuring. I will eventually make my way through the conjuring. The devil will make you do it. Yes. But I've only seen the first conjuring.

Last Rites is one of those movies that I are. already have forgotten if I watched it. I think I did. Right. Like I waited. Like no one liked it. So I think I waited for HBO. And I'm pretty sure I watched it, but it is not in there.

With you. I don't know if I ever saw it or not. I think I did. But I can't be certain. This is why I have letterbox. Because, you know, I'm 40 years old. Parenting's breaking the old brain. I felt sure I hadn't seen it.

I watched it. But now I can't say. One and a half stars. Oh, right. Haunted mirror. I might have seen some of the spin-offs. Well, there's a lot. lot of them.

La Jorona. Annabelle. La Jornna. I think I watched Annabelle. Yes. You see they're doing a La Euronia

sequel like eight years later? Sure. Why not? Apparently that thing has just become like the most watched movie in the history of movies. I think that one

did have a long like Netflix tale. One tail. Number four at the box office is another sequel. It's a two. It's a movie that got a three many years later,

more very much more recently. And is it a three that finally landed on the right title. That is correct. This is now you see me numeral two. one of the most offensive movie titles of all time. At the very least, it should have been

Now You See Me, Comma, T-O-O. I agree. I agree, but it should have been called Now You See Me Now You Don't, which they eventually did do. And then they made the bad boys mistake where by not using that title for the second one, they couldn't call the third one now you three me, which is what it should have been. I guess so.

Instead, the third one is Now You See Me Now You Don't. I've never seen any of them. And the fourth won't be called, Now You See Me, Now You Revolution, Legacy. I've always heard that they are fine. They seem like silly. Insane movies. Number five of the box office is a huge flop based on a video game.

Warcraft. That did make $400 million in like China alone essentially. And like $5 in America. But like no money here. Yeah. That was it true. Also, I like went to the Regal Court Street just to see it like opening weekend with like four other people and watch it was kind of like, is it so good? I'm smoking an imaginary cigarette.

That's also not something I do. It's such a spigate. I was going to call it out. A very funny, specific moment where Hollywood was like, huh, maybe we just make movies for China. Right, right. There was half a second where they were like, it made so much money in China that maybe we make American blockbusters just for them.

And then China was just like, no, we'll just make our own. Go away. Have you seen Warcraft? I don't think so. Have you played Warcraft? I'm more of a StarCraft guy. I had a deep world of Warcraft era. I never did that.

In college. That's the MMR, you know, right. I went to see it with Juan Nicolaan, the great comedian. Yeah. Former UCB teammate of mine. And he's a big Warcraft fan. And at the end of the movie, I think the Toby Kebill orc has a baby. And he turned to me and went, so, like, that baby is kind of the most important character in Warcraft law.

And I'm like, this is what everyone's fucking up. Why is the movie ending? Yeah, start with the baby. What are you talking about? What the fuck have I been watching then? Like if Superman was born at the end of the movie. Yeah. End of the movie was called Superman, but the whole movie was about Jor Al.

Yeah, yeah. And you're like, that baby's Superman. This is true. I'm no little Warcraft expert, but I do know that they did it. Number six is X-Men Apocalypse, as you mentioned. Terrible movie. The original Gentleman Six, which is embarrassing to admit now. It's crazy that, yeah, you were like, hey, it's a six.

And I was like, I don't know. And then I called it a Gentleman's Six. and now once a month for the rest of our lives, someone on the Reddit starts a thread. Can you explain to me what a gentleman six means? And it's just people trying to parse my definition. Number seven is Teenage Mutantin' Ninja Turtles out of the shadows, which we've covered on our Patreon, which is fun.

That's the one that's good. That's the Bebop Baroque steady one. Right, the better live action one. Dave Green, director of Cody v. Acme. Right. The live action, I mean like CGI.G. The Bay, the Platinum Dunes. Is there any fat guys in that movie? Bebob and Rocksted.

Bebob and Rockstead. I'm going to be doing a live action. It's prime for a live action remake. You got two big guys. You could play both. Yeah. You could clump it. I'm going to do a clump.

Clump Bop. I mean, you should also do a live action clumps. I would love to do that. Number eight is Alice through the looking glass, which is terrible. Yeah. Number nine is me before you. That's the Amelia Clark. Sam Claflin.

Yeah, sure. Oh, yeah. That's like based on a book. She's in a... One of them's a tier jersey, a wheelchair or something. Yeah, exactly. Okay.

Who wants to do assisted suicide. Right. Right, right, right. Number 10 is Captain America Civil War, which obviously is a big hit. Yeah. The thing I love to call out about, Alice through the looking glass,

it's the rare reverse spy who shag me, where the movie in total made less than the first movie made in its opening weekend. Is that like, a horror, a horror, Alice? No, it's just the second Tim Burton, but without Tim Burton

and everyone else. It's Depp and on the bottom Carter and Ann Hathaway. And Sasha Baron Cohen plays time. Yes, he does. He pays the concept of time. And a performance. It's not that bad. That I feel like you've always stumped him. I'm like, he's actually doing something in that one.

Yeah. Zach is like, it looks intrigued. Yeah, I kind of want to toss it out. You check out. The plot of that. movie is that the mad hatter is bummed out. Okay. And they have to figure out why he's bummed out. It's sort of like he's lost his

mojo thing. Yeah. Right. It's the matter. He's in a grumpy mood. Was the tagline. And so she has to use the time guy to go back in time to figure out that like the Mad Hatter's dad was made to him or something. I think I'm remembering the trailers. Yeah. Please the Hatter's dad. I don't fuck. Oh, Jesus. Now I've got to look it up. Like Keith Richards or something. No, that's, but pirates did that. I know. But I'm like, can't do that twice. Who would Depp have cast to play Dad Hatter? I don't know.

Risa fans. Of course. Reesifans does it. That makes so much sense. Anyway, but this film, Tori's a good time. That's a good time. She's not changing the world this movie, but like, it's a good time. One thing we didn't talk about yet, and this is a good time for it, because it was sort of

in the credits, I fucking loved the sort of tabloes. with Hank where you, you like, don't know where he's going to be and then he pops up. I could have watched that for a full hour. I love when he goes into the fishbowl and makes himself look like a plant. Yeah, it's awesome. That was great. Yeah. They should do that for the sphere.

Yeah. You put a feature length just finding Hank's slideshow at the sphere. Well, you know, the Finding Nemo DVD, which is the best selling, physical media release of all time still, or certainly movie, had Aquarium mode, was its big feature, was you could press a button and it would just play an endless loop of like a Yule log equivalent of Pixar animation. Your TV screen is an aquarium. So you would love just a four-hour loop of a screensaver, I guess, is what I'm asking. A room and he's sneaking into different spots. Yeah, and you just don't know where he's going to be at first. And then it's like, oh, there you are you. he is and then he hides again. Hank's a really good guy. Zach, do you have anything you want to plug?

When does this come out? It comes out July 12th. Okay, I believe there's one more rat scraps. Oh, yeah, rat scraps is ending. I believe there will be one more show. New York Improv Show. New York Improv Show at Caviatt Theater. I believe our final show is in August sometime.

So check it out. Ellen doing monologues? Hey, we don't know yet, but I'll certainly reach out. But yeah, it's an improv show I do or have done where we're ending our run after five years, I think. Yeah, so I believe the final show is in August. Caviot.com, Google it, you'll figure it out. Come to the last show. Come to the last show.

You are in, I'm just looking at your Wikipedia page now. You're in Jane's new movie. That's right. I'm very excited for that. That's out, I think, in August. teenage sex and death at camp miasma. We got some, I got a busy year on the, you got a good slate coming up.

Right, you're in, breadwinner. You're in the breadwinner, which is out at this point. The, the, the Nate Bargazzi movie. That's right. Right.

You're in Resident Evil. Of course. Of course. Zach Gregor's Resident Evil. Ken confirm. Of course. Ken confer. You can.

Very exciting. You're in a Kevin Hart movie called 72 hours. I am. Wait, what? That's a Netflix or Ridge. I got to work with my guy. Stun to learn the. Kevin is making a Netflix original.

Saving the world's gonna take a little heart and a little cherry. Yeah. I tried to push that. They said I'm not really a main character. They said I'm more of sort of minor supportive. Interesting. It's a little rude. Yeah.

You're in Lauren Miller-Rogan's new movie. Although I don't know when that's coming out, but that seems like that's a great cast. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Yeah. We've got some fun stuff. You got lots of fun stuff. And there's several son. Apple and fallout on Prime Video and I don't know what else is out there. Yeah, you start filming Severance in a couple months,

which means it will premiere next decade, right? No comment. There you go. No talking about Severance. Great show. I love it. You're the best. Best show on TV. And you're the best.

Best guest on podcast. Always good to be here. It's very nice to have you. And whenever that 1517 to Paris comes into the station, like Clants. I mean, look, I know we're about to do nine months of Marty. Yeah.

So, like, one year of Clint isn't exactly like the best follow-up. Yeah. But, like, someday. You know,

if you want to give me the green light for a year, a Clint. But the Clint won't take that long because we can do each episode in one take. That's true.

We should actually, like, commit with the Clint's to being like, we need to be done in 80 minutes and break for lunch or whatever, right? Yeah. We have to honor him somehow.

Yeah. Love that idea. That would actually be fun. The Clint bit is 10-minute episodes. Yeah, I mean, seriously. Let's not make a big deal out of it. It's good. Thank you all for listening.

Please remember to rate review and subscribe. Next week we are going straight into In the Blink of an Eye. Yeah, I think so. Just making sure there's no new release stuff with all the summer. Oh, wait, shit. It is the Odyssey. It's the Odyssey. Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey.

This is why I asked. Yes. Yeah, yeah, there you go. So the next two weeks, we will be covering the two biggest films of 2026. I'm hyped for that. The Odyssey and in the blink of an eye. Mm-hmm. How do we think Odyssey is going to be?

I'm so excited for it. Consider me seated. Yeah. I'm so seated. I'm seated in a horse. And I love, I'm excited for Bernthal in the Odyssey. I'm really excited for that stuff. Hey, can I fucking talk to you about something?

Just like the idea of like, and Hathaway's like, when will my husband go and he's like, hey, I don't fucking know you want to hang out. Your husband's on some sort of odyssey or something. Okay, good cousin, come on a long time. Cousin, he needs to open your own restaurant. A series of small trials. He can't stop playing. Man. Yes.

Anyway, tune in next week for that. And as always, Disney, make the call. Zach Cherry is ready and tech avail to develop Old Marlin. I'd love a house. A show about Marlin getting some strange. Even just let me do a little voice in it. Do a little voice in Old Marlin. I could be like, what's a sea creature they haven't done yet?

Start. No, Star. Tadpole Snail So I'm a little snail That's pretty good Wait a second What's your deal?

Blank check owns that, okay? You come through us I have some type of trauma as well Okay We could tease this out after a couple seasons Yeah Dory I accept and love you Oh

Story's boyfriend Yeah That's my pitch It's a good pitch.