Blank Check with Griffin & David - Monkeybone with Justin McElroy

Episode Date: December 11, 2022

Just in time for Brendan Fraser’s big comeback, we’re taking a look back at his misguided collaboration with Henry Selick - 2001’s bizarro flop MONKEYBONE. Justin McElroy (no relation to Bridget Fonda’s Dr. Julie McElroy) returns to the podcast after having watched this film a whopping seven times (!!) to unpack all the madness. Why are there no rules or logic to the film’s “Dark Town” underworld? What was the appeal of Chris Kattan’s “Mango” character on SNL? Was this film the nail in the coffin for the kitschy retro-revival genre of projects that dominated the 1990s? Can we write the money we spent to rent this movie off on our taxes?  Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! Buy some real nerdy merch at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com or at teepublic.com/stores/blank-check

The woman I love is living with a horny little podcast that looks like me. What a lucky girl. She's more swoony when she says it. I don't know. I've only seen this movie once. You're making me. What? I don't.

What? What do you mean what? Like, I don't know. I don't know who I am. When TNT does their annual April 1st 24 hours of monkeybone marathon, you're telling me you don't tune in? I finished Big Watch number seven before coming in, so it's kind of fresh still. You never did the annual Boxing Day watch of Monkeybone with your family? Are we recording or not?

What's going on? This is the episode. Let's go. The episode's happening. David, we're confused that you don't know every scene of Monkeybone backwards and forwards. It's Monkeybone. It's Monkeybone. It's Monkeybone.

Have we begun the episode or not? Yes. Yes. This is the episode. This is the episode. This is so bad. No. What's bad is you don't know Monkeybone.

Griff didn't even say the rest of the line. He didn't say the end of the dialogue. That's the end of the dialogue. Wait, what? What a lucky girl. There's nothing else. That's the joke. Cut to Wait, why did I have to say anything at all then? Your thing was fine. Because it's funny.

It's a punchline. But I don't know. Oh my God. It's a funny punchline. What a lucky podcast doesn't make sense. What's funny isline. I don't know. Oh, my God. It's a funny punchline. What a funny podcast doesn't make sense. What's funny is the girl I love is living with a horny little podcast. You go, what a lucky girl. The reverse is to anyone else. That sounds terrible to Kitty in downtown.

Yeah, sounds lucky. I swear I watched this movie yesterday and I think you I don't know what any of you are talking about. This is the stickiest movie ever made. I can't believe you forgot a frame of it. I'm not like Justin watching it seven times. You're kidding, right? You're kidding. It's a joke.

He's not kidding. Why would he? A couple of those have been more of a watch at kind of let it wash over me. Yeah. It's sort of an ambient watch ambient right yeah yeah yeah yeah every time though I see something new and that's because it's really hard not to

zone out while you're watching it's hard to stay in the like frontal brain with this movie where you're like dialed in and engage with it but if it's ambient it's perfect right because that like that would be like staring at the sun or whatever you would just if you lock

into this movie too hard you will give yourself brain freeze or something you'll just be like ah my teeth hurt I have found Justin I don't know if you feel the same way but I have found in my experience that sometimes you watch monkey bone and sometimes monkey bone watches you I saw monkey bone four times

before I watched monkey bone four times before i i watched monkey bone four times the last three times i saw monkey bone does that make sense that makes sense that i didn't watch monkey bone i sat my ass down and listened to monkey bone you didn't look at my you missed a lot of stuff i'd say it's a pretty visual movie i sat my ass down and listen that's all okay i think some of the weirdest shit happening in this movie arguably is. Is visual? Is it what you say? Although there's some audio.

There's some weird audio. There's some audio. Yeah, there's some great lines. Like, what a lucky girl. Probably my favorite line, if I had to pull a favorite line, is Monkeybone as Brendan Fraser as Stu Miley uh when he announces to a crowd ignore the man with the purple face ignore the naked man with a purple face and then there's a rim shot and then the whole audience laughs it's like what

is it is there a okay yeah Cool. Yeah, the charisma on display here, but he's just really dialed into it. You know what Foley in the purple makeup reminded me of? What? Giamatti in the blue makeup in Big Fat Liar. Big Fat Liar. Similar time, similar

kind of gag, basically. It was that era. Do you know that there was a bigger, fatter liar that was a direct-to-video movie only in the last year or two where Barry Bostwick gets his face all blue, I believe? Barry? Oh,

I'm here to tell you that he actually got white-faced. It's quite alarming. I'm looking at it right now. Okay, let me look it up. If you google it It's distressing 2017

Yeah and it looks like they Initially went with Bigger Fatter Liar But then there was a video Attempt to make it just Big Fat Liar 2 They maybe realized Oh that is horrid He looks like the grudge Are you looking at this box art Are you looking at this box art?

Are you looking at this box art of him in the... Holy God. Right? Doesn't he look like a Japanese ghost of, like, mythic war? It looks like bigger, fatter grudge. But let's also say the proportions of this are odd because he's in the back seat. He's, like, facing out the rear window of a car yeah

and the license plate on the back of the car says game on with an exclamation point yes and the license plate no i'd have to do anything with lies but sure yes no and and the license plate is wider than he is with full outstretched arms. It is the world's longest license. Either he's tiny or the license plate is huge. What's wild is the cover of Big Fat Liar 1 is them in shades looking at the camera with a blue Paul Giamatti. It is a visual reference to a movie that came out 15 years prior. Yes. That wasn't that big of a deal when it was released

yeah and it wasn't really a big thing oh was it Sean Levy did I know that? it was his first movie wow that's how he got started uh you know and yeah I just imagined the meeting where they're like look

we'll call it Bigger Fatter Liar we'll make sure the poster is them peeking over their sunglasses while an older person is is humiliated behind them this thing's gonna make 50 million dollars we're gonna be fine like you know that they're just assuring themselves the poster will be enough oh jesus christ i just looked it up yeah it's rough yeah he looks like a melted ronald reagan mask so it's like halloweeny, it's rough. He looks like a melted Ronald Reagan mask. So it's like Halloween-y. Yeah, it's like, yeah, perfect. You know what I'd say he looks like? He

looks like one of these wacky denizens from downtown. Alright, okay. Good job. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, listen. This is a podcast called Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. It's a podcast called Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who experience massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks.

I'm Rusty. This is the first time recording in a month. Massive success early in their careers. They're given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want. Sometimes those checks clear. Sometimes they bounce, baby. And sometimes they make just a wildly normal film. Yeah, I mean, that is my beef with Monkeybone.

Yeah. It's so generic. You couldn't show up to work, Henry? You just want to cash in the checks? Anybody could have made this flick. Anybody. This is a rote by-the-numbers programmer called Monkey Bone.

It's a mini series we're doing called Ben Hosley's The Podmare Before Casmas. There you go. And today we're talking about Monkey Bone, his only live action film. And by all accounts, I don't think he will ever try to do this ever again. Yeah, I mean, of course, James in the Giant Peach has some live action elements and this has some animated elements, but this is a live action film, a black comedy

fantasy that made, I'm checking here, $480 million at the box office and won four Oscars. Domestic? Is that domestic or worldwide? Domestic. That's opening weekend, Justin. Yeah, right. And sparked, you know, a

multimedia franchise that continues to this day. Yeah. Stop any person on the street and you say monkey bone then they'll of course reply to you with whatever. They'll just shout father. I don't know. Yeah, one of the classic lines. Show me the monkey. What a lucky girl. It's his

world. We just live in it. Hey, Super Yaki made shirts of that. It does feel like four years later, part of the atomic disaster of this movie's theatrical release would have been hearing that Fox like scuttled plans for an open world online community where people could join Dark World. Yeah, right. Like you're joking about it being a multimedia franchise. A couple years later, they would have pinned way too much on this movie. We sunk $20 million into a monkey bone ARG.

Yes. Screwed. My Zoom background is very... DeTurro's been in the booth for a month recording narration. He's so mad at us. My Zoom background is very blurry because you might be surprised here i couldn't find any higher res pictures this was a display from i believe the 2000 international toy

fair where they were really bullish on the idea of monkey bone merchandise would you believe that most of this never hit shelves what i just have to assume and I say this as someone who basically enjoyed watching this movie. They had not seen Monkeybone, right? Like, when they were like, let's go all in on Monkeybone. Great question. I wish, if I could have seen Monkeybone one more time, it would have been the first time that John Turturro saw it, sitting next to John Turturro. Because the amount of faith John Turturro in the booth has these lines that are I mean incomprehensible

he has to sing a song about how Julie has a loose caboose he has to debase himself in all manner of fashion and he had to in his head be like calling his agent like John trust me on this one it's gonna be this guy's a genius once you see it all on the screen it's really gonna gel

wait he's the voice of Monkeybone I didn't look this up Are you fucking serious It may be Talent has been wasted in a more Fantastical fashion I'm sure you guys can come up with some examples

But this one hurts Cause I like John Turturro a lot And this is brutal I know we're going to talk about this you know the development and the failure of this film and the sure the plotting within it but can i just is this the end griffin of that 90s how do we define it the aesthetic it's like rocco's modern life or far side where it's like i'm that weird mix of like i don't know tiki bar and like sort of 50s throwback i'm wearing like a swing culture with

like like a cow print on it you know and i'm wearing like a gas station attendant jacket like you know like you know that is this is the end of that right how do you define that whole 90s vibe yeah you know like fucking the drew carrey show the drew carrey show that oh i mean peewee's playhouse like right wayne white's stuff in there yeah and that peewees and gary larson and all that that's that's when it's like everyone's like more of this We love it is monkey bone like the last Gap right you're like the Southwestern Yeah retro kitsch Pop surrealism Yeah exactly yeah

Slide guitar How do you define that Big ball of wax where it was like Men can dress like This and behave this way And they should not immediately Just be like ostracized for it. Comics with an X. Yes.

Comics with an X. Yes. Thank you. I mean, looking behind you, the black and white check. Yes. You know that,

you know, which is very Burton-y, right? That very throwback, you know, that, that, this is it,

right? After this, they were like, no, we all listen to the propeller heads heads now we're on prescription drugs okay we wear leather and sunglasses i'm gonna put forward a theory but i i do think you're right it's like all of these things it's like swing revival ska 50s diner culture yes yes yes tiki bars the mojave desert

who's the guy from Ellen the big guy with the glasses oh fuck you know who I'm talking about I do yes Ellen she had all her friends she had Jeremy Piven and Air Gross and Maggie Wheeler

or Jolie Fisher David Anthony Higgins her friends right she had jeremy piven and air gross and maggie wheeler with our joley fisher right oh david anthony higgins that guy oh yes yes that guy he was on malcolm in the middle and he was on ellen i love him i got no beef with him he seems like a great guy the human embodiment of what you're talking about yes yes okay here's sorry here's my theory monkey bone much delayed long in the works ends up coming out february 2001 is that correct correct yes uh but i think it was originally supposed to be early 2000 yes starts production in 99 this is basically frazier's immediate Mummy follow-up? Well, the Mummy is 99. You mean, like, in terms of what he made?

Probably, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I would not be surprised if he's wrapped on filming this before Mummy Returns even films, which obviously comes out a couple months after this. Well, Bedazzled is the other one. Yeah.

That's the other one in between Mommy and Mommy Returns Similar vibes to this movie Just more commercial minded And two other ones You're forgetting two other ones Dudley Do-Right and Blast from the Past We don't talk about Dudley Do-Right Blast from the Past is before the Mommy

What about George of the Jungle? That's before the Mommy Do you have a sense of whether or not Brendan Fraser was a Henry Selick pick or it was sort of foisted on him by the studio? Justin, we are going to get into this. Okay, good. I haven't looked up anything outside of the work. I'm just the art. The art and watching it seven times.

Let's say that our guest today is not Dr. Julie McElroy. No. But we didn't even realize how well we booked this guest. I am married to a blonde woman named Dr. McElroy, but I am not Smiley. And your name is Jay McElroy. This is true. Yes, that's true. The connections are all there.

But it's Justin McElroy. Yeah, hey returning to the show yeah Justin McElroy sending the classic hey can I come back on the show text and met with the immediate reply you ever heard a monkey I didn't get a movie last time I got the rare movie so good you had to pair it with another non-movie to have an episode of your podcast those are the two movies that i got you got uh citizens band and last embrace last embrace such a hit film that i was i saw the release on the exclusive uh google drive or where someone kindly uploaded it for me to enjoy that was streaming on on uh google drive form where someone kindly uploaded it for me to enjoy that was streaming on on uh google drive for you on like yes google drive uh so non-movie so i said please you gotta you gotta bring it back with a real movie and i will you can say a lot of things

about monkey bone it is a movie you can watch it it's a it's a fucking movie all right yeah that's for sure it is just your text was truly can i please i love you guys i was grateful to be on i would love to come back can i please come back and do a real movie and dave and i stroke our chins for five seconds turn to each other and go monkey bone it was we didn't give you options it wasn't a question we said this feels like a monkey bone uh nothing feels like a monkey bone um i yeah i so i watched and i had the the i thought it would be funny to watch it multiple times but i didn't really want to follow through on that until i watched it one time and it's like i don't know what it is but it is i kept my brain the brain loves, the brain loves puzzles, the brain loves patterns. Right. And I'm watching it,

trying to reason it into patterns and puzzles that I can like make sense of. And I've watched it seven times now. I can't, it's not there. Like the, the layer below where it's like, it all kind of makes it, there's individual bits that I appreciate more than others,

but like, I still don't, it's not there. It feels like it should mean something, a lot of it, but it's just... It doesn't. Trust me. You're not kidding. You truly have watched this seven times now? Yeah, I watched it seven times.

That's a lot of times. Yeah, I watched it seven times. I wanted to be the person who's seen Monkeybone more than anybody else, right? You're probably there. You might have been somebody at the bounce. I've got to be the person who's seen Monkeybone more than anybody else, right? Because I figured... You're probably there. You might have probably... Somebody at the fountain. I've got to be in the run.

All right? It's got to be up there. Did you buy it on iTunes or whatever? No, Dave. I rent it every time I want to watch it. I'm not a maniac. I just watched Monkeybone seven times. I'm not wasting my cash.

I mean, I made the investment. I'm just worried you're on a watch list or something. It's like someone keeps watching Monkeybone. This is not right. Can we dispatch a drone at the very least? It takes a long time for the Apple TV autocomplete to be like, do you want to watch Monkeybone? Do you really mean Monkeybone?

I got to Monkey and it was giving me like that Rene Russo flick, Buddy. It's like, do you want to watch Buddy? Do you want to watch Monkey Business? Where the little girl has a monkey? Do you want to watch Dunstan Checks? Anything.

Get a Dunstan. Get a Dunstan real quick. Bust out a Dunstan. Don't watch Monkeybone again, J-Man. You were attempting to do multiple rental transactions within the original 48-hour window, and it's like, dude, you don't need to pay us again. You already have it. It starts to subtweet you.

It's like, you know, movies with a three-act structure. You know, it's so goofier. You sure you want monkey boat movies with directors who are proud of it right right you click rent and then like brendan frazier a video of him just appears being like hi uh i'm brendan frazier i'm the star of a lot of good movies school ties you want to see that that's a good one i even i picture it being like an earnest somber address where he's like look first of all i want to thank everyone this groundswell of love and support reclamation of my early career recently has been so touching obviously i know i'm receiving the best reviews of my career i'm oscar tip for the first time

there's an impulse to go back and rewatch the old work. You don't need to rewatch all of it. Yeah. Not all of it. I, I, do you think he has gotten a residual check from, and like,

what is this? Somebody's been buying and watching monkey. It's from like a bank. That's that went under years ago. It's like, what the fuck? ago this this is a cold cash what this is like the rare example of a movie that i think truly never ever went into profit oh no no no no money has been made from my imagine no no and this is like at a dvd boom years where like even when movies flopped, you're like,

but you know what? Five years later, it broke even on DVD. Did you all, before you watched it or had any sense of it, did you, because this was my like,

did it have the vibe of like, maybe this is like a secret cult, like maybe this is great, like on repeated view, like further viewing, like maybe this is like begging for a reclamation project where everybody's like revisits monkey bone yeah no when we ordered this to series the select mini grip yes i mean we gave it a five episode order this is why because like

there's always it's always exciting when there's the director with that project where you're like monkey bone huh no one's seen that it's's not normal bad, that's for sure. It's either really interesting bad or secretly good. Or combo. Often the answer is combo. Combo good, bad, right? This is one of those movies that

it came out when I was 14 years old, right? It starred Brendan Fraser, who I fucking loved at the height of his powers. One of your favorite movie stars at that time, I have to imagine. At that time, exactly. It is directed by Henry Selick, who is a 14-year-old I knew and was interested by, right?

It had an aesthetic and it was rated 12, so I could see it. It's not a grown-ups movie that I did not see this film in theaters as a testimony to either. Well, how badly it was received and how quickly it disappeared. Both, both. I've never seen it because it's like,

you know, it's been hard to even think about monkey bum. David, maybe you can help me with this. Cause I feel like I said a similar thing about another movie on the podcast recently although who knows how recent recent actually is but this is a movie where i was not undeterred i was not deterred by any of the negative press or bad reviews for this movie i made my father take me to see it as a 12 year old yeah on saturday i would imagine that

right right i i think even my brother james he tapped out it was usually you know weekend movie with the boys and james was like i would rather play nintendo 64 um we go to see this and i was like good good i don't know what all the critics are talking about. Good. Yeah, because your brain was probably like a million alarm clocks going off at once. This is what I'm saying. It actually quieted the noise. This is what I'm saying. The lambs stopped screaming for a second. There is some other recent

movie where I said this, where as a child, as a young adult, I watched it and I was like, good and normal. Why don't people like this? Makes sense to me makes sense exactly and then re-watching it now i'm like look i have an affinity for this movie but it is insane that i ever thought this thing was clean it's so tracked from beginning to end that's because that's right i mean yeah like and they're probably worth it yeah what's another

movie you're saying what was another movie there's another one where I was like, why do people not like this? And re-watching it, I realized I completely understand why everyone dislikes this. Well, we can think about it, maybe. Yeah. It was a Raimi? I don't know. But like, I know what you mean in terms of like, the only mind that could completely lock into this movie is the mind of a hyperactive preteen maybe like

maybe they could sit down and watch it and just be like yeah yeah this flows yeah and and i this is how i look at things yeah i was at the exact fulcrum age preteen is key because it's like you need the weird infusion of like fox ribald sex comedy. Yes. I was, yeah, this movie's relationship to sex is not, how should we say, mature. No, you're just like, you understand that there's like, you know, the executive notes are like, this has to function in some way on some fairly-esque level.

Like that's the zone we're playing in in studio comedies at the time, right? Either you're doing like super broad, magical Chris Columbus family comedy, which Columbus is inexplicably a producer on this movie, or you're doing like sort of gross out sex boys will be boys comedy. It's so strange because at the beginning beginning like the very opening sequence is this animated bit that's supposed to be from the monkey bone cartoon series yes and the way it approaches sex is like it makes it feel like one of those like alt comic like we're gonna take sex out we're gonna talk about it we're that we're not a shit you know we're gonna openly discuss how i was

turned on by the my my uh elderly teacher's arm flaps and i couldn't keep my boner under control and it became monkey bone and it just got ordered to six episodes and it then spins the rest of the movie like recoiling from sex in like a like it's terrified of it like it a little bit there is the most disturbing shot of the movie which has many for me is bridget fonda wrapping her robe in an attempt to seduce uh stew wrapping her robe around him in a seduction move no one's ever attempted uh in throughout history i would imagine because it seems so like sort of afraid of of sex it doesn't like revisit that it's yeah it's That whole sequence Is profoundly Profoundly un-erotic

Like if I was on a date With you Griffin And you were like You know what movie Really kind of like Opened me up In terms of like me Coming to terms with

Sexuality as Monkeybone I'd be like I gotta go I gotta I can't spend another minute Here This reminds me of when You Ben and I

Went to see Brewster McCloud At the Metrograph And at like You know I've been friends with you guys for a while you've heard me talk about being my favorite movie you're a big Altman fan and then the movie

the lights come up and you turn to me you go that checks out and I was like what and you were like it just all of it the weird sex stuff yeah I think I was mostly thinking about the sex stuff especially yes yeah that movie's approach to sex that movie's approach to sex tracks with my personality if my

approach to sex was monkey bone it would be the world's biggest red flag i feel like we've talked about this but 1998 is something about mary right which is like a big shift in studio comedy. It has come in it. It has come in it. It's like, you cannot believe they're putting these things on screen. It basically becomes the like, you can do a mainstream comedy

with John Waters qualities. This can play in malls. Like, your mom goes to see it and is embarrassed she's laughing rather than this being a thing that has to play in like a seedy art house theater and then that continues on to like american pie now it's done through like the teen guys you're bringing back the teen comedy becomes hypersexual and all these movies start to have to do this like rube goldberg construction of like what's the craziest visual gag what can end up in the wrong place you know how can someone do this here and be seen by that or whatever it is which

i'd say basically like 40 year old virgin is apatow and corral knowing they can get a movie sold if the premise is sexual and then when when that movie works, the shift goes back to like, oh, it's like a dirty language rom-com rather than it needing to be so visually, sexually explicit. But to what you're talking about, Justin, the biggest thing with that era is so many of those comedies at this time where like sex was so overt in all the biggest films seem a terrified of sex and b seem exclusively written directed and performed by people who have never ever had sex yes there's like a weird balance of like explicit and prudish yeah sex is like terrifying this movie is horrified by by the end so much so that the fact that he would be aroused is treated as like a this is he has to other it as like an other be

although that that's the part of me that is aroused so i've turned it into its own being that i'll attempt to choke throughout the film yes it's it's so it. Yeah, no, you think this thing starts out and you're like, okay, is this guy like Johnny Ryan? Is this guy going to like push the line on everything? Is this whole movie going to live in his fucked up head? And it's like, kind of. I know. You can't really, if you watch any part of this

and think, is the rest of the movie like this? The answer is no. And yes, at the same time. Yeah, that's a good point. There's no point of the movie like this? The answer is no. And yes, at the same time. Yeah, that's a good point. There's no point at the movie where it's like, okay, and now the stakes are laid out and everything is clear. You know what I mean?

Yeah. You're not like half an hour in like, all right, all right, I get it, I get it, now we're here, and the goal is this. That's never the case in Monkeybone. There's also, it's like, it's one of these movies where the fun thing to do is just describe a solitary moment to someone who hasn't seen this. giant hand of a mech suit being piloted by Whoopi Goldberg as death itself in the middle of a city that in and of itself exists in the palm of a hand. She asked him to stick his tush out so she

can flick him so hard on the butt that he flies into the sky where a giant abraham lincoln bus mouth opens up he flies through and back into the body of a gymnast corpse my uh my wife came home from work uh in the middle of viewing seven just before we started or i guess that's when he's going back into his own body sorry i didn't want to correct you but thank you uh i've only seen monkey bone three times. She said, is that Brendan Fraser? Is he singing Brick House? I said, well, sort of. See, that's actually John Turturro's character, Monkeybone, inhabiting the body of Brendan Fraser singing Brick House.

She said, well, where's Brendan Fraser? I said, well, his soul's with Stephen King, but he's about to move into the body Of Chris Kattan And then the two of them are gonna fight Who do you root for? Neither? Both? I don't know Death? You're rooting for death?

I don't mean the character played by Whoopi Goldberg For your own death Yes, the sweet embrace of the abyss And then she looks up and she's like Is Bob Odenkirk trying to steal Chris Kattan's liver? It's like, yes, honey. Come on. You act like you've never watched Monkeybone six times.

Well, yeah, but really, he's just a doctor trying to get, you know, an organ he was promised, okay? So he's not really a villain. I love Monkeybone. He's got to run across a football field and try to chase a liver before a kid catches it. The last third of this movie

is what feels the closest to maybe what it was a movie at some point. Yes. They have enough people. I don't want to get ahead of myself. Anyway. Let's dig into the development because it is fascinating. You guys understand the shorter you leave to recount the events of monkey bone the

more insane every second it takes my eyes like the wilder the compression is gonna have to get like okay so jim carter as you know he's got um really he's a fun hypnos the gods of dreams right he's the god of dreams but he's the brother of death he throws like sex parties yeah with bee ladies Henry Selick who Justin I haven't asked you but I assume you enjoy the other work of Henry Selick to some extent yeah I've seen all of his other films not that's a huge accomplishment

there's not a boatload but yeah he had made A Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach and after Peach he's looking for something to keep his whole stop-motion operation going. That's the big thing,

is that, like, we've talked about this, but so much of the cost and the struggle with animation is, like, you need to really build a studio and have them perpetually in production to build a good rhythm, to build a good team, to get the sort of like everything flowing.

So in Nightmare, he sold them on very quickly. Let me make another movie. Let's keep this team intact. Let's hold on to these sound stages. And then by the end of Peach, Disney was like, we're done. Before it even really comes out and is sort of unceremoniously dumped.

But he moves on to a Disney subcompany known as Miramax, a company where nothing bad ever happened in the 90s. But this pressure is on him where it's like, you need to find someone to start footing the bill immediately. Like, the clock is ticking. You're going to lose people. You're going to lose your stages, your equipment, unless you get someone else to immediately start putting something into development to keep everyone on payroll. So he moves to Miramax and he makes a deal to produce three features with them.

Talks about making an adult film for them. Just a movie for grownups, not a pornographic film. Or maybe a little Columby. Maybe a little Colum-ups, not a pornographic film. Or maybe a Lola Columby. Yeah, who can say? Henry Selleck's a dang-ass freak, and I think his hope, too, is that it's a mini-studio. I will not only make films

myself, but I'm going to start having protégés. I can build this house. That's complete insanity, because Henry Selleck is a maniac, and the idea that he would be a mogul of anything is nonsense. But he is working on an adaptation of the children's novel Toots and the Upside-Down House. I have not read this book.

I don't know if anyone has. Nope. Someone probably has. I mean, someone in the world has. I mean, someone here. I don't know. It sounds kind of cool. You know, girl discovers an upside-down world in't know. It sounds kind of cool. You know,

girl discovers an upside down world in here, her ceiling. It sounds very Henry Selick. Yes. You know, like when you sit me down and you're like, Henry Selick has a new film. Don't,

don't sit, don't stand up because I'm going to knock your socks off with this. It's about a shadowy world behind our world. It's like, yeah, yeah. Okay. Fine.

A young girl still grieving over the death of her mother goes to a fantasy world inside her upside-down home where her dad still won't pay attention to her. All these movies are this! I mean, I love it, to be clear. Where goblins, fairies, and sprites live there while helping the fairies battle an evil Jack Frost. Yes, this is a fucking parody of a Henry Selleck production.

So, Steven Soderbergh is writing the screenplay because he is still deeply embedded with Miramax because he is one of their, like, early 90s indie stars. Yeah. And so... And he's kind of in his fuck-up run

where he's, like... Yeah. He's in the weird wilderness mid-90s where he's making, like, The's in the weird wilderness mid-90s where he's making like the underneath and Schizopolis. I gotta just take jobs and earn goodwill. Yeah. You know, JJ, our researcher,

is a SOTY head. Not that I'm not, but he really is. So he put in like 500 pages into this dossier of him just quoting Soderbergh because he loves Soderbergh. When Soderberg he has those books where he's just like published his diaries from all the early years of his career.

They are worth day to day. Yes. The book is the book that covers this is called getting away with it. And it is an amazing book. And I do recommend it to people. But all of Soderbergh's diary entries on this are basically like that. Henry Selleck is going crazy. That Disney is insane.

Miramax is insane. And I don't know. I think they did like toots. They did like, they were enthusiastic about the draft they were producing, but every meeting with every studio was disastrous. Like initially Miramax is going to do it. They give up,

they kick it around everywhere else. Universal, Fox, all this stuff. It does land at Fox under Bill Mechanic, who I think we talked about. Yes, and Fox is in this period of really trying to beef up their animation department, go toe-to-toe with Disney. They've brought Don Bluth in.

This is when they were bullish. And then it basically falls apart right away I I mean there's just there's a lot of stuff on this but you know it's a different project so we can't talk about it too much it does it does I think the two things to note weirdly surprisingly it does sound like Soderbergh and Selleck got along very well yeah and Selleck got along very well. And Selleck was like, I'm constantly struggling with like a year and a half with 10 writers and we got this to a good place with one writer in four months.

But Soderbergh also seems to say like, I think we did an okay job. I think he could have made a good movie. I don't think we ever totally cracked this story. I think there was like dramatic, inherent dramatic issues with the book

that we never really worked out. The other thing that's sort of the ultimate indignity is when they're maybe setting the film up at Fox,

Fox pitches to him, can we make it Tim Burton's toots in the upside down house? They do say that. And, and so, it has an aneurysm,

basically. And Selick basically says aneurysm, basically. And Selick basically says, like, Tim Burton's not involved with this project. He's like, no, no, I know.

What I'm pitching to you is we will greenlight this if you can call him and convince him to put his name on it. And Selick, I'm seeing here, pulled out his own liver

and painted eldritch runes on the wall in blood. No, and then he threw it at Chris Catan who was hanging on an adjacent rope and Odin. That was his general, uh,

feeling on that. Uh, he can't get out from under the Burton thing. As this is falling apart. However, someone anonymously sends him a copy of Kaya Blackley's comic book, dark town, which I believe Griffin,

there is only one issue of correct. It was like, it was intended as a mini series or whatever. Yeah. And there's only one issue. And I, again, it's just sort of like a person falls into a coma and ends up in another

world. Right. It's very, it's like the, it feels like the, again, it's just sort of like a person falls into a coma and ends up in another world. Right. It's very, it's like the, it feels like the, the, the thing that you would bring out at like a pitch meeting for, for like an ongoing thing. It's very much set up. And I bought a copy on eBay. I reached out to Kaya on Instagram just to see if he wanted to chat about monkey bone. I haven't quite worked out the details of that yet, but, um, he was open to it.

We just never quite you know and the planets never aligned for us to have that conversation look if you ever chat send it along the last month i've thought you were joking about the legwork you've put into this episode i wanted to do a good job i had a a real movie. I wanted to really prove myself. This is just a, we, we give Justin the assignment of one of the least watched blockbusters of all time that everybody hates. And he went this hard on it.

What if we gave him like the leading scholar on anything? I could be, I could do this. Like if I, if I made the niche narrow enough, I can slide right in there and be like, well, if you're talking the bone, you got to have the j man on your episode whatever whatever your

the project is we got to bring in you know in 20 years when they do the reboot we brought in monkey bone historian justin mcelroy to tell us you know he's our he's our lore keeper he sits on set like oh well i guess so yeah anytime it comes up from now on. It is fascinating, though. Monkey Bone does not exist in the comic. There is no sort of like id, ego, sidekick character at all. It's not even like, oh, it's different than Monkey Bone. That dynamic doesn't exist. It's truly just the idea of like,

cartoonist falls into his own subconscious. He's a puppeteer, so he becomes his own puppet right something like but so it's the vague idea but not artist of monkey bone right conscious unconscious creation yes coma world id ego sort of stuff no but no but i guess selick really adds the ego yeah i want to mention vanessa chong who's the the illustrator that, who I think when you look at the art for the book, had, I would imagine, maybe even more of an impact on Monkeybone than the story fragments that are put forth there. Because there's an aesthetic DNA that's like, it's not a long walk from the book to Monkeybone. It looks very cool it looks very 90s but not in a bad way like but the aesthetic is kind of yeah it's it is impressive

it's is it a good issue it's so it's so slight like there's so little that gets like achieved you know what i mean that like it if you're a if you're a boner it's it's it's interesting to you just to go back and like you know blow the dust off the old tune we know this when you're a boner it's you know it's it's an interesting cultural artifact but it's it's so wild because it was mad monkey press which it seems was a publishing company founded by Kaya Blackley, I think. All the stories of the thing being sent to him anonymously, I wonder if that's, you know, I don't know. I don't know.

But the other thing is the comic is serious. It is like not a comedy, right? I think when this movie starts being developed by Selick, they're thinking it's more of almost like a Dark City sort of noir thing. Do y'all think Selick's funny? Do you think Selick's funny?

I think he must... I saw all of you just look up at the sky. Huh. Did I write whether or not Henry Selick is funny on the ceiling? Because that is where I'm going to try to find that answer. It's a tough question. He's got, like, a mordant wit, clearly. Right.

And, like, obviously, there's lots of visual, like, wonderful visual humor in his films. But I don't know if he's, like, a wisecracker. Like, I don't get the vibe that, like, if I was, you know, having dinner with him, that he'd be, like, a cut-up, right? Like, that doesn't seem like the vibe i guess what i'm like i i feel like and i i don't know because you know uh anything about

the production of monkey bone whatsoever yeah uh a lot of it feels like very few people in the involved with the film understood what was funny like what makes something funny and when you get people who are good at funny yeah and later in the movie it starts to gel a little bit like you feel like oh you all know what you all are funny see but you're forgetting that the monkey toy has its thumb and its butt and when you pull it out it f it farts. That's good. That's good. Yeah. That's very funny. Let's also acknowledge,

I sent you guys a photo. I did buy a used DVD of this movie. You did. And it has maybe the best DVD disc art. The actual art on the label. It's the monkey is bending over

and showing us his butt, but then the little, the little peg where you put the disc, the hole, is his butt hole. Is disc the hole is his butt hole is credit to whoever did that by the way because by the time that dvd was printed yes that person knew what monkey bone was right there was not a fucking human being on earth that if this person phoned it in was gonna walk into their office like hey what's up with the monkey bone dvd this doesn't

look like anything but they're like you know what i's up with the Monkeybone DVD? This doesn't look like anything. But they were like, you know what? I'm going to take the time. I'm going to take the time. Yeah. They could have stamped the title in Comic Sans. Yeah. And it would be done. They could have just sold it in a paper sleeve.

No one would have bought it. They could have just scribbled in Sharpie. I will say the humor of Monkeybone is by and large very loud. Would you agree with that? Juvenile. Yeah. And I often will say the louder you're getting, the more I'm convinced you're not that funny.

And instead you're just trying to, you know, compensate by just screaming at me. Yes. So, yeah. Look, Sam Ham is the writer of this film. He obviously is most well-known for writing Batman. But for whatever reason, he collaborates with Selick on this. I don't really know why, Griffin.

I don't either. I mean, Sam Ham spent the 90s developing a lot of stuff. Very little of it actually coming to fruition after writing one of the biggest movies of all time. I guess they're both Burton collaborators. Yeah. I think he had worked a little bit on prior Selick projects, right? So maybe that's where it comes from. Like, maybe he worked on Nightmare?

I don't know. I can't remember. Yeah, but also, if you look at the original comic, it makes sense to hire the guy who wrote the 89 Batman to do that. It becomes surprising that he's the writer on this when you see the final product.

But by Selick's account, it was like we tried writing this as a straight kind of like dark thriller movie. And the more we started digging into the rules of the internal universe, we kept on making jokes about it and having fun riffing on it and then going like, well, let's get back to the serious stuff.

And at some point they just realized, like, why don't we just let this be a comedy? If we're having more fun noodling on the silly possibilities. Well, let me read you some quotes here. Please. Because this this will underline that. Yes. Sam Ham. He says, we bounced around for a long time over what the fantasy world population should look like.

Are they people who can't sleep? Are they monsters? For one stretch, we had the inspiration that they were retired TV commercial pitchmen like Speedy Alka-Seltzer and the Esso Tiger. All these characters floating around in pop culture mythology who've been discarded by their sponsors. Fucking what are you talking about?

What? Like, if you come to me, I'm, you know, in charge of a company that's going to give you $75 million. They're like, Hey,

we're thinking like discarded sixties, uh, pop culture, you know, the SO tiger. I would just be like, you're so fired. You're, I can't emphasize how, you're so fired. I can't

emphasize how fired you are. I don't want to see you. Studios get a bad rap for noting things to death, but this movie could have used a firm hand. I got a note for you. Here's the note. N-O. They realized

that would be a nightmare. That speaks so thoroughly to the sensibility you're talking about where you're like, what if the fifth lead of our movie is the Quisp cereal mascot or whatever? Put your Hawaiian shirt in the closet. We are professionals. We make motion pictures, okay?

Fucking, imagine pitching that to Selznick. He'd shoot you with a shotgun. And he'd cover it up. He'd be like, take care of this. And like, so then, but this is the quote that really boggles my mind. This is the end of this ham quote. Then we realized getting the rights would be a total nightmare. No shit.

So we settled on using mythological characters who are hybrids, part animal and part human. I'm sorry. you settled on that? That's you being like, all right, everyone calm down. Minotaur bartender. What the fuck are you talking about? It's also completely unmoored. It's part of what makes the dark town stuff

or downtown in in the film yeah so like you you don't really know what they're supposed to be right because there's no explanation given for why people look like this they're not people obviously because stew's a person and he's down there and there aren't any other people so like what is that what is it just his private purgatory or it's it's bad yeah i mean you see some of them are obviously representations of his drawings but most of them don't seem to match his art style some of them feel like picasso paintings absolutely like weird cubist creatures yes without explanation to be clear i kind of love it but it is offensive to assume that anyone would be like yep good i get this especially though after listening to the the the

episode y'all did about uh nightmare before christmas where every background player in that film is like engaging in a way yes you get it within a moment of seeing it and you want to know more about it. This just feels like it's more akin to flipping through someone's sketchbook or something where it's like, here's a bunch of different ideas. And it's definitely like there's a creativity there, but they don't have that quality of them being their own sort of encapsulated short story that's captured in just their character design. It feels like sort of off the wall for the sake of being off the wall. But I mean, when I brought up this Toy Fair display I have behind me, you guys said like, I assume they had not seen the movie at the time. You imagine just in 1999, someone like goes to a toy company

and gives them like a physical file of production photos and concept art. And you're like, here are some of the denizens of this town in a Henry Selick movie. By the way, remember how Nightmare Merchandise is still selling five years later of every peripheral character? And I think people were just like, go. All of these, every one of these characters is designed, looks weird. Why couldn't you put that on a lunchbox?

Maybe the merchandising is the thing that makes this whole thing make sense, right? Like the less we interfere, like was that the plan with like, okay, the movie's like whatever, but maybe we're going to make a boatload off the toys. To look at him monkey bone is cute. Not him moving around or talking

to be clear but like a little monkey with a fez who's mischievous like yeah sure what little stinker that's fine yeah he's stinker I get it I just want to call out quickly there's a guy named Mark Ryden who's like a pop surrealist artist

he did the cover for Michael Jackson's Dangerous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very, very Baroque. He's sort of like the big eyes lady crossed with Tim Burton or whatever. Right, yeah. Yes, yes.

And he was cited by Selick as a huge influence visually on all the downtown stuff. Okay, well, yeah. So initially, Selick's like, well well this should be like a horror film that's kind of the vibe of the novel the graphic novel uh and then eventually they move on from that and start to get more quote dr strange lovey with it and decide that the character, the title character, should be a monkey, a cartoony animal sidekick. Here's Selleck.

It wound up being a monkey because monkeys lend themselves best to parodying human behavior. Okay, sure. And monkeys are funny. Monkeybone is a brand new creation. The guy in the comic didn't have a sidekick and our concept was nightmarish at first

because Henry and I thought this would be a great suspenseful horror story. But the more we discussed it to flesh out the plot, the more we cracked each other up, we finally realized we were talking in such goofy terms about death and comas. We should go with the impulse and see what we could get out of it in terms of comedy again. I mean, they did that.

You can't say they didn't do that. They didn't do that. It just doesn't make any sense to me The way they're talking about it So I pictured this horror film And then we were kind of just cutting it up right in the movie And we were like I don't know 75 million dollar comedy let's do it

Right you know like it's just there's not enough Rigor here They scary movied themselves They skipped the actual scary thing The parody of the thing they were going to make originally Yeah And of course their first They skipped the actual scary thing and did the parody of the thing they were going to make originally. Yeah. And of course, their first pick, two-voiced monkey bone Griffin. I'm sure you know this.

Yes. Paul Rubens. Who they were, I believe when this movie was announced, he was announced with it or at least is in talks or whatever i remember for a very long time as a film nerd kid on the internet tracking this movie in ruben's name being attached to it from the stiller days into the fraser days it is wild because the other famous example of this is a movie we've covered where paul rubens was announced as the voice of Roger Rabbit and was in negotiations for a long time. And then at some point, Disney decided they didn't want to pay him. They hire, why am I fucking blanking on his name,

the stand-up who played Roger Rabbit. Fleischer? Charles? Yes, Charles Fleischer. Yes. And Rubens has always said, that's the greatest regret of his career. That's, like, the thing that hurt him the most.

You just imagine him being like, I'm not going to fucking lose this again. I'm not going to miss the chance to play Monkeybone. This is once in a generation animation and live action is combined. You get to play the title character.

Selick, this guy's bulletproof. He's making hit after hit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And then, like, in my memory fairly late suddenly there's this quiet announcement paul rubin's out john taturo in and you're like wait a second what like even as a child who has not seen a still image of this movie there is no trailer the racist pizza guy the jew everyone hates in quiz show. That's who your Paul Reubens substitute is? In what universe are these two guys interchangeable?

They don't really. Apart from both kind of cutting the same physical, you know, they're both kind of like reedy, you know, Jewish guys. Apart from that, they're very different energies. Totoro's Italian. He is Italian, yes, yes. He played many Jews, but he is Italian. And he Italian. Yes. Yes. He played many Jews,

but he is Italian and he's like actually tall and wiry. And I think Paul Rubens is built more like me. Yeah. Paul Rubens. I can't imagine is a tall man, right? He's small. No,

I think if you zoom, like it is impossible to Monday morning quarterback this film and be like, they just changed one thing. Yes. That is not possible. But I will say that on repeat watchings, I think the number one thing that keeps this from palatability is that commercial palatability.

Listen, my palate's been refined now by several sips from the bone. But I feel like the fact that they have no relationship at all. There is no charisma. There's no chemistry. There's no nothing. Monkey Bone and Stu. Between Monkey Bone and Stu, there's no... It's not funny at any second for a moment,

these two interacting with each other. And I think if you had had that, where it's at least funny to watch these two play off of each other, a lot of the other stuff would have been, that could have been a little bit of a chocolate on the raisin, you know, like would have helped get it down a little bit easier. But that is,

it is grading from the, like the first like showpiece of monkey bone where he's in a cabaret, like a Marilyn Monroe thing, 0% funny. And then I'm sorry, not just a Marilyn Monroe thing. He pulls funny, and then... I'm sorry, not just a Marilyn Monroe thing. He pulls off his ears, inflates them like balloons,

wears them as boobs. And then sings a song about his girlfriend having a loose caboose. Do you know who's funny and unpredictable? Bugs Bunny. Yeah. Monkey Boat isn't funny. He sucks.

He's like a bad version of Bugs Bunny. He's like a guy at a party where you're like, oh God, that guy saw me. He's going to come over and talk to me. Oh, he's going to do all his weird fucking bits. I hate that guy. He's fucking, who's the comedian Seinfeld hates in Seinfeld? Oh, Gary.

What's it, Banta? Yeah, you know, where you're like, ah, shit, he saw me. Fuck, Monkeybone. Oh, he's going to have a whole song he wants to do soup's not a meal no and and it feels like it makes you value roger rabbit even more where you're like this is such a hard job to like establish in a movie this character is right it does not previously exist yeah right and like in roger rabbit you have to stack him directly up against bugs bunny and daffy duck who are you know in the same movie along with mickey mouse and donald and everybody like he's got exists on the spectrum and

you're like this character did not exist prior to this movie and i buy him i find him funny i find him amusing as a character i'm ready to go monkey bone you're, I don't understand why this show got picked up to series. Griffin, you don't think that the opening of this film in which Monkeybone is presented as the character's adolescent erection is enough to cement him in our hearts and minds for the rest of the film? I'm sorry. Okay.

What's funny is I like this animated opening. I think it's fun. It's kind of funny funny it's not like the funniest thing i've ever seen but like you're like okay yeah you know i get the energy and as you said justin it does feel like this movie is tapped into the weirdness of in the 90s post simpsons suddenly like underground cartoonists being looked at as like potential oil wells the ren and stimpy thing yeah right like you know hey you're weird brain man whatever's going on in there yeah right but these things that used to be seen as subversive or outro or whatever it's like between

ren and stimpy simpsons and ninja turtles you're like these things have become so mainstream and profitable that you like put duck man on national television, you know? This is the first, this sequence though is the first warning sign because after the short bit from the cartoon, you see Dave Foley get up in front of everybody. He's like Stu's manager. Yeah. And he gets up in front of everybody and he's like, and I have great news. We have been ordered to make six episodes. And the entire place goes nuts,

right? They're cheering. And this is the first warning bell for me. I'm in a very specific position here as, one, the person who's watched Monkey by the Mose, and two, a person who's made a six-episode TV show. Let me tell you. This is the thing. They don't make toys of six-episode TV shows, guys. Absolutely not. They do not come to you

begging down the door, begging you to license. Yes. I'll just say they made that many toys of Monkeybone. They didn't though, David. In the 90s, people were stupid. You're right, you're right,

you're right, you're right. They didn't. Most of them never made it to shelf. No, but that is like my fucking endless battles with like the licensing team at Sony and Amazon for the tick

was they were like, we don't lift a finger until season three. And that's what 10 episode seasons. They're like, unless the thing explodes out of the gate, we need three seasons to prove that thing is stable enough that we can start putting merch into production.

It's a really weird, like it really sticks in my head. And not just because I've seen the film seven times, but like, you know what a success, like, you know what a successful TV order would be. Why not? Shoot for the, he's going to's gonna be you're gonna have him hounded by press

leader pick a high break doesn't make any sense anyway tell me it's season two already i don't give a shit right tell me they picked it up for three seasons at the three seasons that's something yeah they gave it to drew carrey they gave it to drew carrey they gave it a comedy channel they they gave them the order that they deserved. A six-episode order. But it is so funny. I watch this opening cartoon, and I'm just like,

when it is just sort of like a memory, awkward boy dealing with sexuality and his own head and whatever, I'm like, this cartoon seems kind of fun. And the second Monkeybone pops out of his pants,

I'm like, this show immediately seems great. Right. The second Monkeybone shows up, you're like, okay, fine. Jesus. I don't need Monkeybone in this show. Yeah. But they're just like, everyone's seeing dollar signs at this fucking monkey.

This project, Monkeybone, ends up at Fox under Bill Mechanic. As you say, this is during the Bill Mechanic era, when he's bringing in Don Bluth blue and he's making all kinds of stuff some of the stuff bill mechanic green lit titanic heard of it success there's something about mary he came on his ear what a relatable mix up yes uh x-men that was kind of a

big one but then he would also greenlight shit like Fight Club or Monkey Bone. Like he was one of those guys who's like, I want to do weird shit. Like I'm from an independent background. Like I think it's good to take these big swings, blah, blah, blah. David, do you think anyone has ever lumped together Fight Club and Monkey Bone as two examples of a thing that you're supposed to derive meaning from? You know, stuff like Monkeybone or Fight Club, you know, that sort of thing that we're talking about.

Fight Club was a bomb, as, you know, as people forget. Like, it wasn't just that it didn't do that well. It was that it cost a fortune, even though the pitch of the movie is, I don't know, hot men beat each other up because, you know, of capitalism. I don't, I mean, what is the pitch for Fight Club? I mean, that though the pitch of the movie is, I don't know, hot men beat each other up because, you know, of capitalism. I don't, I mean, what is

the pitch for Fight Club? I mean, that was the problem they had. They didn't know how to pitch it. I think he also gets a fair amount of credit for finally pulling Malick out of retirement and getting Thin Red Line made, and he ends up being, after he's left Fox, he is the producer

on The New World. It's one of the only films he produced independently along with Coraline. Fairly cool. However, Bill Mechanic departs Fox after Fox Animation Studios goes under because Titan AE is such a disaster. So while this movie is spooling up, I think Selick's protector is gone.

So that's part of the problem. And I think the neither fish nor fowl quality of this movie, where it's like this was developed as an animated movie predominantly with live action elements. I think they thought more of it would take place in downtown. Maybe he's the main live action element. I think as Mechanic leaves, the thing gets pushed more into

this is perhaps predominantly live action comedy with animated segments. So Ben Stiller, original person for this movie, makes total sense, obviously. He's right in that pocket in the year 2000, right?

And like 90s Gen X alternative, like he fits into yes. Selick says he well, the reason for him leaving was supposedly scheduled conflict with mystery men. Selick says many years later that Stiller had a team

of writers who wanted to work on the movie and Stiller, Sel Selick says, I chose to be loyal to the writer that was on it. It actually would have been better to go with Ben and his writers. There's a lot of variables looking back. What ifs?

He's not wrong. I imagine that Ben Stiller's crack team of writers might have taken a gander at the old Monkeybone screenplay and been like, guys, what were you thinking here added a few ingredients to the bone broth yeah and there no wouldn't be bring back the eso tiger that's what we are missing i think it would be uh i'm tearing this into pieces don't worry we're gonna fix this

i mean justin to to circle back to your looming question is hen Henry Selick funny? I'm running it over my head, and I do find all of his films funny, but it is telling that all of his other films have, like, a key comedic voice he is in some way working with, right?

Where, like, in Nightmare, you have Tim Burton and Danny Elfman who have, like, honed comedic sensibilities james and the giant peach he's working off of a raw doll book you know coralline uh neil gaiman like has a good handle on comedy when he wants to do it and you have they might be giants writing songs for you wendell and wild is jle. You know, he's always got someone he can sort of like help balance out that stuff. This movie doesn't have a Stiller.

And Stiller would have made sense in that mold. Yeah. Yeah, I think part of it could also be that the difference between like directing live actors versus something where you're able to microscopically alter facial expressions. You see people come in with takes in this movie, and they're coming really hard. They're coming really hard. And you can get the sense of the desperation in them.

Like, I don't know what this is, but I'm'm gonna try to do something that will make it seem bridget fonda comes in when in the moment she's supposed to be sad this one looks devastated it's so upsetting bridget fonda this movie has is like the the picture of grief and it's like oh that's not i don't think that's the tone that's really genuinely uh upsetting um and i think that that is a pervasive uh issue with a lot of the live actors in the film. Maybe she's playing it so incredibly straight and is styled throughout the movie as like a Hitchcock blonde.

Like she is like so immaculately lit and shot. Yeah. And then everyone around her is like goofballs, banana McGillicuddy. I mean, this is essentially her last film Kiss of the Dragon The Jet Li action film she made

Came out after it And then something called The Whole Shebang Which doesn't exist But that's it This is Bridget Fonda being like Sayonara Hollywood She does a TV like Ice Queen movie

The Snow Queen. Snow Queen. I think that's her like final, final thing. But those, yeah, those are her last theatrical feature films. Yeah. And obviously she ends up married to Danny Elfman. Danny Elfman. Exactly.

Look, the thing about Brendan Fraser is Selick actually is quite praiseworthy of, you know, has a lot of praise for him, but the way he describes him is kind of the way that Brendan Fraser seems to be, which is like, he's a pretty serious actor.

Who's pretty lost in thought about how to do everything. Like he is not what you're talking about, Griffin, which they might've benefited from a Ben Stiller, like big creative comedy mind who's going to have a lot of thoughts about how to do it. Brendan Fraser is just sitting there

thinking about, like, so I'm Monkeybone in this scene. Like, how will I physically represent that? But yes, he's not a creative collaborator in that kind of sense. I think Fraser is a guy who likes being able to execute someone else's vision and works very hard internally to figure out how to realize that. I mean, I sent you, David, a couple weeks ago, Brendan Fraser's timeline of my career, one of his famous roles, whatever it was, which is incredible. you and said or texted you and said he's winning the oscar so fucking hard i have rarely seen an

actor speak this well about the craft of acting clearly and unpretentiously he is a guy who is i think because especially now as this like career reclamation is happening there's this attitude of like we took him for granted because he was in silly films he was doing sort of light entertainment a lot of his work was cartoonish and perhaps we didn't give credit to how skillful and precise what he was doing was and how difficult it was how few people can pull that off and he did on a pretty consistent basis across a couple different genres while also you know occasionally sprinkling in things like gods and monsters and quiet american and like you, really kind of yeoman's work supporting performances in the unshowy roles, but doing incredible work against like some of the best screen actors alive. But it does feel like, you know, he's a guy who is really.

Tuned into the pitch of a movie, the style of a director, the tone of the thing, matching the level of what the film's supposed to be. He is, you know, unbelievably good. Arguably one of the best in history at acting against nothing. Like, he is so remarkably good at that. And the fact that he and Monkeybone have no chemistry is absolutely not his failing. No.

On that one level, you're like, he's a pretty perfect choice for this movie because, A, he's going to be willing to play the different sides of this character, go as huge as he needs to go, act off of a lot of complicated mechanics and stop motion Xs and all this sort of shit. But on the other hand, you need someone who's actually coming up with jokes in this role. You might need that. It's also a little bit hard, I think, to buy him as like the introverted artist that they want to play him off as early in the movie. Like he hadn't had a bit of good luck until he met Bridget Fonda.

And then he says like, I'm looking at you, bud. And I actually don't believe that. I think you did pretty good right off the bat in the old genetic lottery. I think you did alright. Kind of look like a demigod, but yeah, I bet you don't like

parties. Go off, bud. I bet you don't. It's so tired. People throwing themselves at you, tossing drugs in your pocket, electing you king of the party, which isn't a thing but they just keep electing me to it because I'm so incredibly beautiful and charming

I don't know if you agree with me Griffin but he does a better job of a similar thing in Bedazzled where he's also playing the kind of nice guy loser he's such a funny looking person even at the absolute height of his like ripped bod like it's

just like his big old noggin i guess yeah that he can do dopey if needed like he's got these expressive wide set eyes and everything i mean that was always the weird thing with him where it's like this guy is so conventionally handsome but in a way that's kind of funny yes uh and it's it is funny because bedazzled is also a similar thing in that he play he keeps you know he changes roles right he keeps reading and so it's like monkey bone kind of does that he's playing multiple roles within monkey bone yeah but uh but he doesn't feel like he has any real grip on any of them it's also hard because someone else in this film is tasked with doing that sort of like impersonation

inhabiting the body, the soul inhabiting the body. We won't get to him right now, but they do it incredibly effectively. I don't think he's got a lot to work with when Monkeybone is inhabiting his body, which happens for a good third of them. But I also, I think it's

like this movie weirdly never, beyond the fact that we all agree that Monkeybone kind of doesn't work as a character, right? He's annoying. Fuck him. It's like they barely set him up. Selick has said like,

there was a cut of this movie that was 15 minutes longer and it was so much better. It just like had a little more room to breathe. He never claims there was a masterpiece cut of this movie, but he's just like, they got scared. I didn't totally nail it.

They whittled this thing down to the bone. I know that the cut of this movie that breathes a little more works a lot better. It does feel like- At the same time, an additional 15 minutes is an additional hour and 45 minutes out of my life when you do the math. So I'm actually relieved.

That's like a couple Fargos. That's an extra monkey bone. Yeah, yeah, right. The strangest thing to me, though, is it feels like the place where this movie has been cut down the most is in getting him through Darktown and Monkeybone into his body. getting him through Darktown and Monkeybone into his body. Like, it feels like Stu and Monkeybone have eight minutes together on screen at most before that swap happens. Which, as you said, it's like we barely understand Monkeybone's vibe enough to understand what it's going to be like when he's in Stu's body. They don't have any banter set up. You know? It's like all the most expensive shit

in this movie is what feels like it was cut down. They also hate each other's guts immediately, which is wild because it didn't... It's just his penis cartoon come to life. You'd think there'd be a few minutes where you're like, oh, this is so wild. This is so wild that my penis cartoon came to life. They just despise

each other from the beginning. I mean, if my dick came to life and talked to me, I'd probably immediately be like, ugh, I hate your vibe. You suck. Roger Rabbit, like Valiant, hates Roger, but Roger is so guileless and sweet and sincere. It helps to have one or the other, you know?

Yes, it's good to have some sincere energy It's also the performance feels a little bit embarrassed Right? Like you can sense Like when he's singing When he's singing that Julie has a loose caboose Which honestly It's really rough It's a rough watch

You can feel a little bit of embarrassment On Zatara's part Like listen, I have faith that this will come together, but I don't exactly know what we're going for here. It's also just wild because it feels like it's just Totoro speaking as Totoro pitched up to the high heavens. Like, it doesn't feel like he's committing to a voice as much as he's just giving high energy to Totoro

and then they're just adjusting it in post. Here's some other quotes. Selleck, uh, has, um, unintentionally revealing quotes about himself. Uh,

quote, I can be too controlling because that's how I needed to be as an animation director. So I've had to back off and open up to what the actors can contribute. Brendan shows incredible range. It's pretty shocking how much this guy can do. If he just stopped making those Hugh Wilson films.

A little dig there at the end. An incredible quote. Yes. A very good quote. And then the other thing he says that I think is interesting is like my experience with Brendan is 90% of the time he's just right

where I wanted to push him a few times. I was generally wrong. He knew the character better than I did. So after a few weeks, I learned to trust him. A few weeks is doing a lot of work there what are we talking three seven like how long was the shoot henry yeah uh but anyway uh chris katan he says on the other hand will do anything he'll do a million takes he's like a puppy that's wiggling and jiggling and going crazy he was the one I had to focus like an errant

missile. They're two totally different styles. Brendan's more precise and planned and thoughtful, and then he explodes into action. He's always quiet between takes. So that's interesting, the way he's talking about actors. I do think Selick is somewhat

admitting to the fact that he's probably like a gigantic control freak who's terrible with actors. Hates having to speak to people. Yes. And, you know, but like then everything you read about the making of this movie, you know,

it sounds incredibly stressful because of the insane visual elements required. Right. They had to build a Brendan Fraser motion control robot? Yes. And they would match to the live action of his body? On top of that, they animated the monkey? Like, what? What is that?

Why would that be an approach? I can try to explain some of this in dumb terms. But, you know, he wanted to do James and the Giant Peach this way, right? We talked about this in that terms. But, you know, he wanted to do James and the Giant Peach this way, right? We talked about this in that episode, but his original intent was that James stay

live action the entire time. And Disney was basically like, this is going to be a fucking nightmare trying to combine the two and have them match. Have the peach stuff be stop motion.

Have the live action stuff be live action. We can get away with a couple of shots of the bugs in New York City at the end. But let's not drive ourselves insane here. But that remained like this thing that Selick wanted to get at, which I think was so inspired by Ray Harryhausen, where he's just like, when you can combine these two and the otherworldly quality of stop motion existing in a live action space, that's the sort of dream I want to get to.

The thing with the Harryhausen sequences is he didn't direct the whole movie. They bring in the specialist to only focus on a couple key sequences that he can put all of his energy into. And those sequences are usually pretty fucking static and clamped down. When you see the classic Harryhausen shots

of Jason the Argonauts fighting the skeletons and everything, it's like big, wide master shots that hold for a really long time. Because basically, you can just shoot this open plate, and then hand it over to Harryhausen, give him a lot of time to animate on top of it, rear project it, what have you, right?

But Selick wanted to do camera movements and stuff. He's like, we want to integrate this character like he's a real character. So that involves not just having like a motion controlled camera that you know can replicate the same camera moves in stop motion frame by frame that you're going to

have to do, that you already did on the live action set, but you also need to make sure if he's interacting with Brendan Fraser that Brendan Fraser's body is perfectly matching it. So they had like a robot. It didn't look like Brendan Fraser, but like, you know, probably like a mannequin dummy

that was mechanized to shift one frame at a time its movements relative to whatever was going on with Brendan Fraser's shoulders. And Monkeybone was also animated at like full scale, so the puppet's like three feet tall. None of this makes sense this is I'm getting so mad I can't believe that

anyone wasted their time on this yeah that's a lot of earth minutes that just flush down the toity man that's brutal well so how did your marriage break up well I spent a lot of hours on monkey bone they had to do it had to make my frazier bot had to make my

frazier bot for Monkeybone, hun I'm sorry But it was all worth it It's all worth it, man It's all there I mean, the movie looks good It does Right?

I think so It's very distinctive looking It looks like a lot I don't think it looks cogent But there's a lot I feel like the design is very much like, some of it feels like a distraction from the fact that the other elements are maybe not as well thought through.

It feels a little like overcompensating maybe visually. It's amazing to see though. And there are things in this movie that are among the most horrific images that I have ever seen. The shot of him when he is having, whose dream is it? It's her nightmare. It's Julie's nightmare

where she's thinking about him coming, yeah, the cord being cut and he melts and it's ghastly. It is horrifying. It is incredible, this image. How they accomplished that, I don't know. When he deflates a balloon, it's very cool.

The Fraser kind of skin suit left on the floor. If I'm a 10-year-old seeing this movie because I wanted to see the fun movie about the cartoon monkey, I'm probably screaming in horror, but whatever. But that's the other thing. It fundamentally does not feel like this movie was ever intended for children. It's like, it fundamentally does not feel like this movie was ever intended for children.

It feels like they thought this movie was for teenagers and 20 somethings. Right. I mean, that's kind of the Rocco's modern life thing where you're like, yeah, wait, who is,

but at least kids could sort of like Rocco's modern, but you know, like, were you like, this is so like disaffected and strange. Like who's supposed to relate to this it's like i don't know stone college students it's like those people don't have any money wait a second what are you talking about yeah um another thing weirdly inverse of what i was just saying is that like

selick wanted fraser to not look human when he enters downtown so they like built a full body silicone fraser they thought about making a stop motion fraser so they're sort of a james and the giant peach thing and fox was like we're paying brendan fraser his full quote he is on screen the whole time right you are never putting a fraser facsimile on screen but that makes it more complicated To shoot yes that is true But by and large Bill Mechanic seems To have been an umbrella Protecting them from studio Notes and then Bill Mechanic was

Gone and on post production Apparently studio executives Saw what Selick had made And were horrified As Selick puts it, after the film was already here, the adults showed up,

but it was too late. These guys are smart people. They're very clever, but it's just outside their vision. They know how to make standard films in five or six areas, and this is so far away from that. Their first reaction was,

can we turn this into one of our movies? And they tried. The battered corpse was then thrown back at me and I resuscitated it. So I guess they took the movie away from him, re-edited it, and it was so unworkable, the re-edit,

that he kind of got to release his movie. They handed it to Chris Columbus, who was the producer, or one of the producers on this movie, and said, like, you are incredibly commercial. You have populist instincts. Can you make this normal?

Chris, can you make this? Nobody can make things boring like you can, Chris. Please. Please bring some of that magic, that Chris Columbus anti-sparkle to this turn. Just make this hella normal.

And they screened it and it was one of those fascinating cases where the audiences hated that cut even more. And Fox throws their hands up. more and fox i would love to see their hands up me too i would love to see the chris columbus normal edit of monkey but it also feels like it sounds like this movie is somewhere in between like selleck's version being 15 minutes longer and columbus's version probably attempting to be 20% more normal than this. Yes. Rose McGowan, who

you know, will pop off from time to time, said on Instagram that Selick had literally been fired during production. But it seems like that's not true. And she probably was just sort of conflating what actually happened. The end of it was taken away from him, but

then kind of given back to him uh and then fox decided that their 75 million dollar movie should just be pooped out with no fanfare in the middle of february and never spoken of again like that was really it was just like forget it it was one of those movies where they were like it's coming out on halloween never mind fourth of july mind. January. Like, they kept on pulling it forwards and backwards in time. And then it was like suddenly like, never mind. It comes out a month. Just, yeah, just dumped. Yes.

And, you know, we'll talk about that later. But, you know, I think by a month after its release, it's gone. And that's in the early 2000s. Yes. Can we attempt to talk through some of the plot of this movie? We can attempt. We can attempt. Yeah, absolutely.

It's easy. It's clear. It's clear. It's obvious. Not a long one. It's a tight 90 with credits. We've gotten you up to... Yeah.

There's the premiere, right? And then there's... He gets into a car full of monkey bone merchandise. Well, he tells Dave Foley that he's going to pop the question that night. To Bridget Fonda, Dr. Julie McElroy, his love interest. There's sort of a big exposition dump of backstory rather than giving us any time invested in their relationship. Where he's like, you don't understand.

She saved my life. She's the one good thing. None of this matters. I don't believe in the commercialization of monkey bone. The merchandise stresses me out. This is what matters. Then they load like 18 pallets of monkey bone stuff into his car, including a giant inflatable monkey bone in the back seat,

which then goes off, causes him to crash the car into a telephone pole, knocks him into a coma. One of the cats I noticed on Watch 5, I think, one of the cats loading the toys into his car was the pizza delivery boy from Home Alone. Remember that guy?

Yeah, he's in there. Uncredited, sadly, but he's in there. I recommend immediate medical assistance for just i saw harry i saw harry knowles in this one oh oh yeah he's there he got his own coverage what an evil specter that is anyway is that you you are like i can't believe he's held in the background of this shot for so long and then they cut to his close-up they had to set up a different angle for him uh just everything we just explained happens in

under five minutes it is wild how fucking like this is where i buy into selick saying 15 minutes could have helped this movie because it is like breathless with how much it is asking you to buy into so fucking quickly he's in like he's in downtown in under 10 minutes and not established as like a person you don't get any sense of him before it's all in retrospect there's a wild like conversation between julie and and her friend later on where she's like yeah he has having terrible nightmares and then he came to me and i taught him how to draw with his left hand and that made monkey bone it's like what why what did you tell z this earlier why are we also what's your job what do you do you're a dream scientist what what do you do and then you and then you started dating apparently the thing where he draws this left hand that's a selic thing he's

like i would draw with my left hand so no selic was left-handed and then he injured his hand as a child so he trained himself to draw with his offhand they had a concept designer a character designer on nightmare for christmas whoever their right hand was their dominant hand and everything they were doing they just kind of dizzy and everything was too clean and cute. And he said, just bear with me for a second. When I was a kid, I switched hands and it changed my art style.

Can you try switching to your left hand? And he was like, immediately it was Edward Gorey, Charles Adams. And I was interested in this idea that your whole psychology could change from hand to hand. It's a cool idea. Uh,

but I, I like many ideas in monkey bone. It is introduced in a strange way and then not maybe quickly discarded space it's just it is wild to me that it's like the two relationships this movie needs to work as any sort of engaging narrative are stew and monkey bone and stew and julie and both of them are basically like, you get five minutes of those dynamics existing before the movie is putting weight on.

Remember what they were like, what their whole deal was? And Julie is all like retroactive backfill explaining the relationship you didn't get to see. And Monkeybone, you spend more time with him by like many times over in the human body than you ever see even with the cartoon footage any sense of who he is as a character when he goes into a coma he enters downtown uh which is essentially limbo if limbo was that video game Grim Fandango.

Where I guess, so the concept, Griffin, is it's like there's mythical beings here, but there's also like imagined things. Yes. Like if Monkeybone is out of your imagination, well, he's here. Right. Because like your dreams are here and your nightmares are here, right? Is that the idea yes i mean look good good good i'm glad that cleared that up great okay the yeti is in your background right now who is played by doug jones right yes uh there he is yep yep uh but there's

also like a ganesha type uh piano player. This is the thing. It's a little confusing. But then it's like the rules of downtown are. Also in this background is the Joe Camel surrogate who feels like a vestige of their rejected mascot idea where he's introduced like desperately begging for cigarettes, trying to get him to smoke. Then you have this like. There's this fella. Who, Ben, I have for cigarettes, trying to get him to smoke. Then you have this, like, right. There's this fella. Who, Ben, I have to imagine this is your favorite guy. Yeah.

He fucking is really effective in that he's so discouraging to look at. Right. Giant horned cyclops head with tiny body walking around on his muscly arms. Everyone, all of this looks cool. Would you agree? Yeah, I mean, these like conjoined triplet devil lounge singers. It's very trippy.

It's very psychedelic, like very acid trip, like freaking out, kind of. Classic Celic imagery, like beautiful, is him like going going I think the shot of stew sinking down into the bed right I love very cool yeah and then you have him

in the roller coaster like rickety wooden roller coaster approaching this hand that opens up there's a city there he gets off illuminated sign stews emotional baggage he

opens it up it's all his childhood drawings the things that scared him as a child. And then we're immediately introduced to the roadkill trio. Right. And it's like, oh, this is one of those things he drew as a kid. I get it. He's going to be in a world of all the things he came up with.

And then, as you said, immediately he takes one further step in and you're like, oh, no, this town is everything. This town is there's no rules to it which maybe is why i'm mad about it because i'd love some logic yeah and and it look it feels pretty fucking fertile to be like artist ends up in world with all of their creations versus a lot of these characters he seems to be like what's your fucking deal who are you and once you see humans you're like oh we're not in his head this isn't his reality this is a state a realm or some kind of pre-existing system like right because steven king edgar allen poe and lizzie borden here three of the greatest artists we'll get to it no we'll get to it. Let's not even get into that. No, we'll get to it.

As a boner, I got to speak up for the rest of the community. It is established that everyone in this limbo is a fan of Stu's Nightmares. They love it. So it could be in tribute. Like, we are shifting the aesthetics of this place because we're such big boners ourselves. The vibe, I guess, is you are so fucked up that we've enjoyed your subconscious showing up here but i mean this is all too staggering to if anyone's subconscious

can appear how is it you know how is there any room to walk around it would be crazy but also david you saying the like that this movie represents the end of this aesthetic that's then replaced with the 2000s like take a riddle in and chill out vibe it feels like that's what this movie should almost like plot wise be coming up against is like everyone has chilled out there's no like unbridled artistic chaos nobody wants to be hostage right lectured by a bipolar video store clerk anymore right no one wants to be a tortured artist anymore. Everyone wants to sell out. You know, like,

that almost feels like the stance this movie should be taking. With Stiller, this makes more sense. Perfect sense. The death of that Gen X nonsense. Yeah. Yeah.

Because that's what Stiller's career is. Right. Okay. But instead, Hypnos is like, I'm just personally such a big fan.

Like, he's like fucking Kim Jong-un in the interview. Let's talk about Hypnos, played by Giancarlo Esposito. I would say a pretty good performance. The god of sleep and death's brother. Very locked. Unsurprisingly for him, he's a really committed actor.

Very locked in. He's in the pocket. Yeah, he's good. He's in the pocket is exactly how to put it. And he knows he's at the exact right pitch with this movie he looks incredible he's got devil horns and a goatee and red skin much like satan furry little goat legs he's got yes he's in this contraption that was a nightmare i think can you read this quote please yeah i Yeah, I will. I mean, it just, I really feel for him. How do you, can you describe it, Griffin? Because I'm sure not every listener will see Monkeybone.

Like, he, like, what, like, what he looks like. Yeah, well, he, he looks, I guess he's sort of supposed to be like a satyr, right? S-A-T-Y-R. Yes, so it's like this fat little body. He's got, you know, Giancarlo's head. Right. Sort of a constructed body and then these tiny little hoof feet. He looks like Phil, the Danny DeVito character from Hercules, except he's wearing like a little ska blazer.

He's like made out like the Danny Elfman devil from Forbidden Zone. Sure. Yeah. He's got this sort of expressionistic makeup and then like a furry little belly, feet and tush. You say not everybody will have seen this flick, but like, how do you listen to this episode

and not go fire this up? I mean, how do you at least watch the clips? How do you resist the siren song of having to like, I watched it seven. You can crank out one, bud. Come on.

There are times we talk about a movie on this podcast and we go, look, our listeners don't need to watch this. Maybe this episode serves as a substitute for spending the time watching this movie. I implore everyone to watch this film. I truly do. I think this is a film that needs to be seen. Whether you like it or not,

I don't think you will regret having spent the time putting it in your brain. You can rent it. You don't need to buy it. Although it's a clean 10 bucks on iTunes. I did buy it. I personally bought it. You bought it?

David? It's a write-off. I'll loan money. I almost tried to get the out-of-print Blu-ray, which goes for $75 on eBay. That's insane. That would actually be a cry for help

if you bought that. Okay. Giancarlo Esposito says, I put on a green jumpsuit so the effects people have an exact outline for removing my real legs. Next, I put on a 25-pound rig that creates a stomach and breast.

I had to pitch my own body forward to allow the body I'm carrying to hang straight down. Then I got into knee pads because I was walking on the very tips of my knees to get my upper body to project forward I've never had to integrate the kind of physicality into a body that's not mine it was exhausting so I needed a lot of rest between shots

but hey he got to make monkey bone and be in it at the end of it monkey bones you can't argue with it this is one of those movies where you just, and it's not necessarily a good thing, although it does make it more impressive as an object. You can feel the effort

in every millisecond, every inch of this movie. Like, nothing in this film feels easy. You know? And I feel like a lot of stuff like this, like you hear about the Muppets and they're like, well, we the puppeteers

put ourselves in really difficult positions to make these things feel natural and casual so that when you watch Kermit riding a bike, you don't even think about it. You accept it.

And this, you're like, Jesus fucking Christ, this must have hurt so much. You can't stop thinking about the strain and the toil of all of it.

I think that that's a key differentiator when you're looking at, again, to call it Nightmare Before Christmas, where all those things are in support of an effect to an extent where you don't necessarily start pulling at the seams when you're watching it. It's like this incredible

wash because it's all serving this one thing that's like working together. And I feel like you can feel that effort from every aspect of this film because it's not congealing. Right. There's no sort of cohesive thread.

And even when you get to the sequences that are purely live action without any Selicky stuff, as you said, the performances are all so loud. Like it's just everyone is going so big and doing so much uh other than bridget of course yeah well yeah actually other than actually but okay all right so all right so hypnos is in charge of downtown right right that's his

realm he invites them to his swanky nightmare party they have a sort of yes merovingian-esque party right um and uh he explains that to get out of his coma before he dies he's gonna need to steal an exit pass from death herself yes right played of course by whoopi goldberg who i i remembered being uncredited in this film, of course, by Whoopi Goldberg. I remembered being uncredited in this film. Does, in fact, get and Whoopi Goldberg in the opening credits was completely absent from all marketing on this movie. I

wonder if that was a contractual demand because it feels weird. I've seen the cut and be like, please don't mention that I'm in this. I think she's pretty good at it. I do, too. I do, too. I think she is similarly locked in. It's kind of a, yeah, but it's not that

funny a performance, even. No. She's just kind of like doing it. She feels comfortable. She feels comfortable in a way that the other people aren't, right? Whoopi at least feels like a professional that can, is, I have this. It's okay. I'm not going to try as hard as everybody else. It's like a welcoming presence.

It's the the cool guest room at the party that nobody is in where you just sit and breathe for a second. Real steady hand. You're right. She's maybe the only performance that doesn't feel like

it's taking a tremendous amount of effort. You feel like she just showed up, reported to set in this outfit, felt at home in the set, you know? But it just remains so odd to me where you're like, this movie is so hard to sell.

Fox is so terrified of this thing. I cannot believe they had the restraint to not put Whoopi Goldberg on the fucking poster and in the trailer unless she was like, I will fucking sue you if anyone who doesn't pay to see this movie knows that I'm in it. Anyway, what happens next

they attempt to steal the guest the exit pass sorry yeah but when they do this monkey bone is the one who gets uses it to enter Stu's body and it is later revealed that this was

all some sort of like complicated con that Hypnos was in on. Right. I don't remember why. He wants Stu down there. Stu to be down there to like, you know, come up with cool nightmare ideas.

And it's revealed that Stephen King is another person who has fallen prey to this scheme and his dog is actually in his body or whatever. Yeah. Basically they set up that like all the what's the fucking animal thing in the golden compass and dark materials daemon yeah yeah it's like basically all these great creative minds have a daemon who is their like unconscious like unbridled id who have been swapping out with these guys so like edgar allen poe's down there the edgar allen poe that we knew was actually a raven in his body stephen king is now actually

kujo writing these novels while he's stuck down in hypno's lair and then some of the other people are not artists they are like attila the hun and lizzie borden and jack the ripper yeah it doesn't make any fucking sense it's also so distracting that all those people are dead except for stephen king yes like why did you even why did you pick him no sense it's the wildest it's it may be the wildest edition in a film that is like all wild editions. It is baffling to me. He's played by a guy called John Bruno, who's just kind of made up to look like Stephen King. He's

got like glasses and long hair. He comes on. He looks like Stephen King. He's doing a weird impression. He introduces himself as Steve. You're like, oh, is that like a funny little in joke? And then they underline it so hard. He's like, yes, I'm Stephen King, the writer. Cujo is in my body.

He writes the books now. In the real world, though, it bears mentioning that at the same time concurrent with this, he's in a coma. His sister, Kimmy, Megan Mullally, wants to pull the plug because it's so sweaty. Like, their dad had a long, drawn-out battle before dying, so they promised each other that they would, I guess,

pull the plug on each other. But she gives him three months to come back. Yeah. It also feels like she wants monkey bone residuals, but that's never been explicit. Like, she sort of has... I wonder if in that extended cut, this is like yeah

it's hard to tell right what her motivations are because the dad thing feels like kind of excuse and there's something so craven about her where you're like there has to be some gain to her pulling the plug but during this period of time bridget fonda and her friend discover discover the uh proposal he had set up at the home that he was going to give her the family heirloom ring uh she refuses to give up on him she explains the whole thing of how she met him and the nightmare dream the switching hands and all that sort of shit um his nightmare the art style is really cool it's really cool i don't even know how to really describe it it's like uh very different from anything else in the movie yeah look i'm i'm in the recording this episode in rochester new york where the local delicacy here is the garbage plate

it's true which basically came out of, like, greasy spoon diners and, you know, bar food places just dumping every extra leftover bit they had in a plate. And it's truly just, like, ground beef and, like, chopped up chicken fingers and, like, cheese and gravy

and mozzarella. It's, like, it's truly that. And the visual aesthetic of this movie is very garbage plate. It's a lot of stuff. I like all of these things separately. Have you had a good garbage plate yet? I've been waiting because I have to be on camera.

I'm wrapping on Monday and I'm going to eat five garbage plates. But it does feel like, yeah, everything in this movie I like the look of. And sometimes when those things are next to each other it makes your brain short circuit whereas the nightmare sequences are cohesive for those

15 seconds there's like a singular sensibility so they're gonna pull the plug and Julie McElroy comes up with this great plan she's like listen I know he's gonna come right now but we we got to try something because

this is going to pull a plug. Here's how I propose. Why don't we jack him full of nightmares? No, wait, I need a clean take on that, please. You're right. Why don't we jack him full of nightmare juice? I know about this nightmare juice, and I know he's trapped in a prison of his own thought,

but what I'm saying is maybe we chuck him full of nightmare juice. And someone's like, will that bring him back? She's like, eh, I don't know. I mean, you gotta hope. But I'm going to get a bunch of nightmare juice into this dude. Yes, I believe she's like, yeah, like half a CC is what I've done. She's like, great, let's do five.

And then just goes like, you know. It's also this odd point in the movie, though, where you're like momentarily wondering, am I supposed to be taking downtown literally at all? Is this just, like, sort of a depiction of his internal life while he's in this coma, what he's imagining, versus it being a real place with these real rules?

The more she jacks him full of nightmare juice, the more the world sort of, like, shakes around him, and then Monkeybone escapes, and then you're like, no, I think I'm literally supposed to believe the more she jacks him full of nightmare juice the more the world sort of like shakes around him and then monkey bone escapes and you're like no i think i'm literally supposed to believe that this is monkey bone in his body not that this like broke something in his brain you know yeah so there's two threads obviously after this happens and one is up in the real world monkey bone has become stew and turns into a little soul patch motherfucker who causes trouble yeah right and it's like green lighting bad merch there's the whole pig anus thing with the

fast food but what is his deal like what is like i don't know i couldn't tell you what he's going for and what no like what this performance is trying to telegraph. It makes no sense. Even just the sort of putting the Kool-Aid in the farting monkey bone plushes and trying to spray them in people's faces, not having seen this movie in

close to 20 years, I remember there being some sort of reason for that. Like, oh, he's trying to, like, dose people with something to trick them into doing something. He's feeling that he wants... Okay, so...

He was... He gets to... Justin took in a lot of breath just now. Okay, just real quick. Yeah. So what happens is Monkeybone goes to the upper world and he takes over the Brendan Fraser's body and he's enjoying the fruits of his labor, right?

Right. He's enjoying the money and the fame and the popularity and all that stuff. And Hypnos pulls him into a nightmare and he's like, hey, idiot, you're up here to make nightmares. Get the nightmare juice. Yes, yes.

And so they get the nightmare juice and he puts it in the toys. He's trying to create nightmares toys He's trying to create nightmares He's trying to create nightmares He's going to spray a bunch of socialites with nightmare juice I watched this this morning The toys fart They fart

Like a chemical out anyway So it's going to be that The toy's got the thumb up it's plastic Butthole and when you take it out It sprays in your face yes which Dave Foley demonstrates this is how they fully get sprayed by it he just blasts his face with the monkey fart just to

see what happens this literally all the thought this guy but to do is like let's see what's up with this this is the line let's see what's up with this chemical particulate he blasts himself in the face it's not an accident it's not he's what's up with this chemical particulate? And he blasts himself in the face. It's not an accident. He's leaning against a wall and blasts himself.

Also, I love future drugs. I think this is how people should do drugs in a movie. Is to get farted from a toy monkey. Out of monkey bones, specifically. It is funny that in the context of this movie, I think this toy, the farting Monkeybone plush, is positioned as if everyone believes

it's going to be Tickle Me Elmo. Yeah. Like they take it out of a case. It glows like the briefcase from Pulp Fiction. The codename is Jack Horner because he puts his thumb up his own butthole. Right. But they're like, this is the moneymaker.

This is the thing that's going to transform the world and then he views it as the vehicle to fill the world with nightmares the thing i forgot even though i finished watching this movie an hour and a half ago um anyway so so up upstairs in the real world uh monkey stew is being bad and then down in uh the underworld uh stew is trying to escape and he gets the help of miss kitty a cat girl played by uh rose mcgowan and he's trying to i guess confront an outwit death played by whoopi goldberg i also want to shout out thomas hayden church who is uncredited as her assistant but is quite funny and is in kind of cool makeup like kabuki makeup but i guess it's just like like major wilderness years for thomas hayden church right like i guess it's probably post wings right i mean oh it's way post wings yeah

free sideways post-wings. Well, because he's the villain in George of the Jungle, and this feels like three short years later, him begging Fraser, like, do you have anything in your new movie? Yeah, you got anything you want to do, right? We talked about this in our Spider-Man 3 episode. He is the only actor who returned for George of the Jungle 2.

The only one. Direct-to-video, and that's the same year that Sideways comes out. Well, that's tough, but you know what? He's in one of the most successful films ever made, so I'm glad he's bouncing back. Yeah, Monkey Bottom. I'm referring to Monkey Bottom, of course.

So what can... It's very tough to describe what the fuck is going on in downtown. They also just... they cut back to downtown pretty rarely like once again it feels like they removed all the most expensive selicky stuff from this movie or at least whittled it down to as little as they do cut down there i don't know what's going on but i'm at least like super engaged by yes like that's how i feel about it all i don't really understand how he ends up in Chris Kattan, but I'm also just kind of like,

whatever, man. Like, I just like looking at this. Death gives him a shot because she's a fan of the comic. So he goes up there and they're stretching him out. He's like, she's like, actually, I love your shit.

Get out there. You get one chance. She's also, she loves love. She's a big softie. Yeah. He makes his plea about Dr. Julie. He tells her that she's got a loose caboose.

And death, death gives him a flyer. Yeah. So he gets to go back in the body of Chris Kattan. Chris Kattan, who is an organ donor, who's on the poster.

What were you, what do you want to say, Griff? No, Ben, just set the clock. We're going to devote 30 minutes to Catan talk here because this is maybe the best comedic performance

of the 2000s. I refuse to do that. I'm going to give you five. I'll say this. I will say this. He is fucking up the curve. It may not be the best, but in terms of like you're watching a peak

rise over the rest, it's like he's definitely doing a lot of work there. He's earning his paycheck. Can I read your text, Justin? Sure. You said, I just never get tired of watching Chris Kattan load an entire movie onto his shoulders

like Jesus hauling his own cross to Golgotha and dragging it against its will to watchability. He's not the thermostat performance. He's the solar-powered space heater FEMA issued you after the tornado that's how i feel when you see there's also a little bit of i'm also conflating the experience of seeing chris get the experience of almost being done with the movie so like i mean at that point it's like i'm coasting into home here's my thing i say this with I think he's really funny in this

I think like he's he's making have I ever really liked Chris Kattan in anything else were you a fan of Kattan during the SNL days no no I was not rude I'm sorry

I'm sorry some cookies I don't think I've ever but you know what Griffin you doing that voice yeah is a great reminder of how when Chris Kattan would be doing something I would usually be like oh I don't like this

his vocal mannerisms are all in this movie meant to emulate Brendan Fraser yeah and it's not like an overt, like, impression. He just, it kind of seems like Brendan Fraser is in his body a little bit. It's a little bit uncanny. It's pretty fucking impressive. At moments, I was asking myself, did Fraser dub over his dialogue?

And then you realize, like, no, it's Catan doing a straight man Fraser impression. Yeah. Like, doing just his sort of most neutral state, who's not a guy you could think to impersonate. It is, this is what I find fascinating about this performance. I loved Catan on SNL at the time. You loved Catan. I did. So you loved, what, Mango?

Yeah, all of that. I mean, what? Yeah, Mr. Pe i'm watching the whole bit right i'm like i'm two years younger than you so i'm watching him like nine well yeah so like night at the roxbury he's he's mostly doing like fucking physical jerry lewis like that that shit is funny insane shit but i don't think of that as even him really it's just the two of them and i think i don't know for some like those are funny those are funny but he was like very much kind of the guy on snl at that moment in time like i i think there was a lot of excitement around him

there's the whole monologue and nope that's about sort of like how much people just can't believe katan the energy the fucking physical shit he did mr peeper's eating the apple like that kind of shit but he was one of those guys seth myers i saw some interview with him where he was talking about like why do you think some people succeed in snl and and don't succeed afterwards in their career and he was like katan is an example for me of a guy who just like absolutely crushed it on that show. But his skill set is so perfectly suited to that show that it's hard to transfer it to anything else. And they do the Night at the Roxbury movie where he's ostensibly the straight man. Like Will Ferrell is the big dummy in that movie. Right.

And Catan is kind of playing the normal romantic lead of the film. I think he's kind of good in it. I'm a Roxbury defender. That movie's fun. I mean, whatever. But Corky Romano is one of those movies where you're like, you cannot build a movie around him. You cannot do this.

His persona does not sustain for an hour and a half on its own. You cannot have Manic Catan for this long. Monkeybone feels like the perfect way to apply Chris Catan in a movie where you're like, just give him 15 minutes and go as hard as he fucking can with his body. He's a special effect, right? Absolutely, yes. And I think that that's what is...

I think his performance makes the rest of it harder to swallow because you see him using a skill set to the goal of calm. Like, this is someone who knows how to get a laugh, and he's bringing the full force of that to getting a laugh. The rest of it is other people using the full force of their talents, but they don't know how to get to where they're going. So it feels a little bit more desperate. Whereas he, I think it's a very

egoless performance, right? It's not, he's not trying to throw it on himself. He's like, I am the VFX known as Chris Kattan, and I'm going to bring all of that energy for the time I have been given. The most impressive thing to me is that in those moments where he's trying to appeal to Julie,

doing a Brandon Fraser impression, he plays it pretty fucking straight. Like, he understands that Bridget Fonda is taking this movie way too seriously. And after all his goofy running, when he shows up to her face-to-face, he has to speak to her like a real human being. And he actually does, for a couple of

minutes, make a pretty good go at being, like, a stand-in for a romantic leading man. He's got a better chemistry with Bridget Fonda than Brendan Fraser does. It's wild. Tan's coming in so hot in this movie that you're like, but it's gonna fall apart when he has to

make the emotional plea. And then he nails the emotional plea. He's just, he's on fire in this thing he is very good maybe it is that he's like almost like acting with three hands behind his back right like that that maybe that's exactly how you unlock him yeah i don't know or maybe it's just like you say that it's just the kind of like, look, you got 10 minutes here, Chris, like, you know, the physical comedy too. He feels more like monkey bones energy. Yes. Like, like,

like Brendan, I don't know. It's like, he's, I don't know. There's just something about the overtop nature of it that I'm like, Oh, he actually is kind of selling this in a way that I'm like,

Ben's close. Ben's close to the truth. It was revealed to me on Watch No. 4. This movie should star Chris Kattan with Chris Kattan as Monkeybone. I mean, if you put Chris Kattan in the lead role, you got Chris Kattan as Monkeybone, have John Turturro as the corpse,

then you got a film going. This is my argument. Yeah, because once Kattan nails the Julie plea, I'm like, he could have done the whole thing. Look, here's whole thing. Look, here's the thing. If Chris Catan is in this movie instead of Brendan Fraser, the budget is probably half the size at most.

Yes. That's good for it. Smaller budget, better for this movie. Yeah. Second thing, I mean, no disrespect to Brendan Fraser.

I think we all basically think that guy can be really an incredible performer. Yeah. I do agree that yes, he's sort of, it's no, it's too rude to call him the problem because that again acts like monkey bone is something where like, ah, just one extra sprocket here. You know, it's not, but yes,

there's a world where that movie makes more sense. Now, would it have made any American american cash dollars at the multiplex no no no yeah but guess what this version didn't either no of course not yeah right right yeah katan was a lot more heavily promoted than than whoopee was i mean katan was on a lot of the posters well it's the main poster was like fraser with downtown behind him and all the creatures coming out as sort of like menagerie of just all the Selicky imagery. And then they like pivot late and the poster becomes what is now the DVD cover of just Fraser, Fonda, Catan. And like Catan is sort of the thing they're trying to spotlight.

Which I get it. No monkey bone on the poster. Or I guess he's in the corner, maybe? But it makes it look like an SNL movie. And I mean that in a bad way. I remember some interview with Mulaney a million years ago. I'm just thinking about Catan now. Where Mulaney's like, you know, people tell you,

oh, you know, comedy, it's all about, like, you know, you want to write to the biggest audience. And he's like, but then again, the hottest character on snl when i was a teenager was a male exotic dancer who tries to steal people's you know partners essentially like mango is the strangest it's like it's inspired by like marlena dietrich or whatever, it doesn't make any sense that that was a big deal. But it was. It was, like, the hottest thing. You can't have the mango, right?

I was misremembering this. So what it was, the poster was, at one point, there's the original poster I described, then there's, like, a foreign poster that's Fraser in monkey bone, sort of, like, big lapel, shiny jacket mode. And then Rose McGowan in sexy kitty mode. And monkey bones standing between them holding two bananas, one in each hand like they're guns.

And then that was replaced for the DVD with Catan filling in. So it's Fraser Fonda Catan above the title. No Fonda on poster. Catan holding himself up. That's the shit for me. Just the opening Catan chunk of him waking up on the bed and figuring out how to move,

like taping himself together, finding the big like ruler that he can tape to his neck to keep his head upright. That shit is unbelievable. So good. Fantastic. I'm just going to read the Wikipedia summary of the end of this film.

I'm just going to read it aloud. I'm sorry. It's like four sentences. I'm sorry. David, David, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I want you to do this, but Justin just shared a file in the zoom. I need you to open it and describe what it is. People love this segment. David tries to describe a poster, and this is a really good one. No, this isn't real. This can't be real.

What is this? It looks like the French cover. It's from cinematerial.com. Yeah, that website. This is, yeah, okay. So it says, Brendan Fraser, Bridget Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg. Uh-huh.

You know, and then you've got the elephant creature, the sort of Ganesh character. Yes. Right? Is that how you describe it? Uh-huh. Who's being like sort of you know

There's like multiple images of Looks like they're in a kaleidoscope or whatever There's like a yeah Uh in a sort of Nightmarish lynchian collage It looks very Lost highway Yes behind brendan

Fraser who's entirely washed out very Lynchian in general. Like, yes. Yeah. And then it says, Monkeybone, bienvenue chez les toons. So, welcome to cartoon house. Yes.

Yes. And filmed to Henry Selick. Yeah, it looks like a lynch movie in this poster. Yes. It's a very nice poster. Much better than whatever Rose McGowan and, you know, Monkeybone. We should get that poster framed for our offices.

Yeah, no, we're not going to do that. Here's the description of the final act of the film. Stu makes it to the banquet while Monkeybone is about to propose to Julie, while Herb, that's Dave Foley, is exposed to the one Eerix in the monkey bone doll

And sees his clothes coming to life in a mirror Causing him to strip naked and flee in panic Stu finally confesses his love Of course, when we say Stu We mean Chris Kattan Possessed by Stu And regrets to Julie His love and regrets to Julie for never getting a chance to propose to her

Stu manages to use monkey bone's origin characteristics What? Cause him to panic, which culminates in the two of them battling one another on a giant Monkeybone balloon, which is shot down by a police officer, causing the duo to fall from the sky back to downtown, where the citizens cheer on Stu and Monkeybone's fight as they descend from the sky

before being caught by a giant robot controlled by death. Monkeybone is then placed back in Stu's mind by death, claiming it is where he belongs before she sends Stu back to his proper body. What? But also he's a little vanilla without the monkey. She has to smush Monkeybone back into his brain. In there, right. Once Stu is back in his body, he and Julie

were knight in Cherikis as the still infected herb emerges from a nearby fountain telling everyone to remove their clothes. So, you're welcome. Nothing is learned. That is the important thing. That is a good point. Nothing is learned. And you know what?

It wasn't his fault. No. Yeah, it's his fault. Brandon Fraser doesn't make peace with this side of himself. He doesn't, like, learn to accept it. The two don't connect. There's no relationship between him and his You know the ego and the id It's like

It is I mean Ham-fisted In the sense that death Squishes them back together And says I don't know I thought we had a point But I guess we don't

Back to Earth Review Go on No the plot of this movie is just like He gets in a car accident And some fucked up shit happens to him That's it There's no Yeah He didn't

do anything wrong from bridget fonda's perspective this is the film i realized this on watch three she gets in a car with his boyfriend her boyfriend's in a coma she chalks him so full of nightmare juice that it makes him insane okay that's what happens from her perspective she doesn't know about monkey bone in the body it makes him into. Okay? That's what happens from her perspective. She doesn't know about monkey bone in the body. It makes him into like a pickup artist. Right. She jacks him so full of nightmare juice that it makes him insane.

Later, a corpse comes to her and helps her realize... Later, a corpse comes to her, which she didn't put any nightmare juice into, so that's kind of confusing to her. And then she falls in love with the corpse, but luckily, the corpse fights her old boyfriend, hanging from ropes, tossing organs at each other.

They both die. And that fixes the... Everything. That fixes everything. That's her movie. That's her journey. My wife said, as she watched 30 seconds of it between her fingers, like,

does the character have... Does Julie McIntyroy have any characteristics like no she can't have a character because think about the absolutely insane experience that she's been having like this is this has been a really weird few months for her whoever she was before this she's never gonna be that person again yeah

that person is gone there is no more that Dr. McElroy is behind her man monkey bone my man monkey bone monkey bone was released on february 23rd 2001 it grossed 2.6 million dollars domestically on its opening weekend uh and then it legged that out to 5.4 million total so really you know they yeah they really got they got less than a black hat less than a black hat I don't think it even had a two multiplier

with its two million dollar opening no maybe I think it maybe just legged out past two x multiplier it's one of Hollywood's most notorious flops of the 21st century Fox apparently only ran a single print advertisement for the film

during the week before its opening. Wow. So basically, yes, as you said, Griffin, it was like October, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Martin Luther King Day. And then eventually they were like, I don't fucking know. Just drop it. I guess they did run ads for it on Comedy, on Cartoon Network. Because apparently parents complaining about the ads that they were running on cartoon network

is what led them to create Adult Swim. They could have an evening block. Really? This is what I've read online, but I don't know how reliable the IMDb trivia page is. That is wild. Is this the biggest bomb you guys

have ever covered? Bomb is such a relative term, like in terms of like gross for a Major studio movie Is anything lower It might It's up there I mean that's why we always Cite Black Hat because Black Hat's like 90 million dollar budget

7 million dollar gross but this is This is close to that But yeah no that's a good question. Like, what are the... I'm sure... You know what? Fans, figure it out. Yeah.

I'm sure there's a few that are kind of in that realm. Be a good Reddit, Fred. A.O. Scott called it the best comedy of 2001, although he was pointing out that the year was only eight weeks old and the only competition was Head Over Heels and Saving Silverman.

But he still kind of liked it better to say that it's a welcome antidote to the epidemic of weightless frenetic secondhand low comedies that nod or brains like antibody resistant what is this word spirochets antibody spirochets yeah he said if you feel numbed and dumbed by the onslaught of overblown scattershot mediocrities like Saving Silverman, Little Mickey, and Scary Movie, think of Monkeybone

as a homeopathic cure. Coherence is not amongst its virtues, but its overstuffed look and lurching rhythm result from an effort by Mr. Selleck and the screenwriter Sam Hamm to make room for too many good ideas

rather than struggling to compensate, as is too often the case, for having none at all. It's quite a review. Fair. It's a fun review. This is another incredible line. He goes,

imagine if Louis Bonnewell had returned from the grave and hooked up with the Fairley brothers with access to $50 million worth of foam rubber and modeling clay. That is describing the vibe of Monkeybone in a way. Yes. I'm not sure it describes what would happen if that happened. No.

You know what I mean? But I like the thinking. Yeah, mostly bad reviews. No money. Should we play the box office game? I think we should. Yes. Ben wants out.

Okay. Well, it opened outside of the top 10. I'm sorry to say. It opened at number 11. Insane. In February. In February 23rd. No competition.

It really didn't. The only other film, there's only other one new movie this week, and we're going to talk about it And it's a famous bomb Number one at the box office, Griffin Is a horror sequel A massive hit

It's in its third week It's made 128 million dollars It's Hannibal? It's Ridley Scott's Hannibal Which was a surprising... Released less than a year after Gladiator. A truly insane achievement. Yeah, he hasn't even

won his best picture yet. Exactly. And it came out and it made a ton of money. Right, because Silence of the Lambs was released in January. It's like, at this point in time, no one's releasing big movies in February. That was odd to release it then. Uh,

it was, and yet it opened three weeks ago to $58 million in 2000. That would be a healthy opening now. Yes. So Hannibal crushing competition at number one. It, uh, will be knocked off its perch next week by Gore Verbinski's the Mexican.

Hmm. Good movie. A good movie, yeah. Number two at the box office is a comedy remake. Comedy remake, 2001, February. This is not the new release. This has been out for a little bit already. It's been out for two weeks. This is its second week.

It's made $33 million on its way to 64 hint this film was directed by a frequent guest of the well-known but little liked film podcast blank check with griffin and david this is the well described this is a movie that I believe I saw two times in theaters I've somehow never talked about this with Chris but I was a very big fan of Chris Rock's Down to Earth this is a fun movie it is Chris Rock's Down to Earth

yes a remake of Heaven Can Wait Chris Rock is a movie star give him some movies I've just been watching him in Fargo. It's great. I never saw that season of Fargo. Oh, it's good.

I just, I'm very late to start. Well, I've been watching a lot of Fargo. I would have finished Fargo by now, David, had I not watched Monkey Bun seven times. Yeah. You asked me, did you finish,

did you watch Andor? I didn't watch Andor. I watched Monkey Bun seven times. It's a shame you have to watch it three more times after this episode ends, too. Yeah. Why didn't you guys tell me?

I had to. What's clear is that we did. Griff just sent a bunch of Monkey Bone toys. These were the only toys that were actually produced, but when we finish the box office game, I just want to call them out quickly. Okay, fine. Number three at the box office is a new release this week. It is a

famous flop. Razzie winner, or at least not. Okay. Just a nominee. Nominated for five Razzies. Big star vehicle for a major star who's maybe in a little trouble around now. Is this Gek Carter?

No. That is a good guess, though. Okay. Sly Stallone, of course, and this is not a Stallone picture. This is a serious a-list star Oscar winner was not Costner it is Kevin huh huh okay 2001 Costner flop it's not message in a bottle no it's not dragonfly I think

that's 2002. It might be. It's 2001. It's not 500 miles to Graceland? Well, you better add another 2,500 miles, my friend, because it was 3,000 miles to Graceland. Wow. Kevin Costner,

Kurt Russell, they're Elvis impersonators who robbed someone in Vegas or something? Correct. They robbed Elvis impersonators who rob someone in Vegas or something. They rob an Elvis convention. David Arquette and Courtney Cox Arquette. Correct. Christian Slater, Kevin Pollack. I've never seen it. Sounds good. I mean, it sounds

really, there's no way it's as good as it sounds. That sounds good. It does sound good. It does sound like a fun idea. I also believe it's like a first time director who then never directed a movie ever again. It's someone with like not a Wikipedia page. Yes.

That's how anonymous the director writer and director is. Okay. Number four at the box office. Griffin is a cartoon. Huh? Is it a Disney? Yes, but it's an adaptation of a TV show right is it uh uh recess schools out that's right that is the correct title right yes you nailed it what a great thank you uh recess

schools out what do you what do you think the final total on recess schools out was i'm gonna guess three monkey bones uh did way better than three monkey five 36 million dollars so that's like you know fucking i don't you know six and a half monkey bones or something seven yeah uh yeah uh never seen it griff did you care about that i don't know what that is i remember if still in the movie it was kind of overblown but the series is good i feel like our buddy alan seppemwall is a big defender of recess. Okay. Fair enough.

Good show. Sure. Number five at the box office in its 12th week is a pure golden liquid masterpiece. We have covered it on this podcast. It is one of the most incredible achievements in modern cinema. It is an action film. It is an action film. It's an action film. It's a period action film that came out when?

How long has it been in theaters, you said? It came out in December 2000. Okay, so it's a 2000 holdover. It's liquid cinema. That's right. It is on its way to $128 million. It's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon The film is called Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

Amazing movie Yeah, and one of the wildest box office runs I had to drive to Columbus to see that movie I had to drive three hours away from my house It wasn't showing anywhere in Huntington I had to drive to Columbus to see it That rules though, Was it worth it?

That rules. Absolutely. They had big chairs. Movies should be more difficult to see. This is my new stance. Didn't remember the film, but these chairs. My God. Great drive. Drive. Good chairs. Some other films in the top

10. Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. So Soderbergh jumps off the Selleck train and gets on to A bit of a A bit more of a high speed train Okay number 7 Sweet November Sweet November now that I always Confused with the other one

Autumn in New York Two movies about romance ending in Death Sweet November is Keanu Charlize and Autumn in New York is Gear Winona. That's right. You nailed it on both. Great. Never seen Sweet November. Probably one of the rare Keanu's

I've never seen. Yeah. Number eight, Chocolat. You will believe that a town eats chocolate. Mm-hmm. I don't know. One of the craziest movies ever made. a nice lady moves to a french town and makes chocolate and they act like she has brought drugs to their streets their fucking mind uh alfred molina makes his uh performance from the previous year as

literal snidely whiplash look muted and sensitive? Yes, a crazy millennial performance. As the town's chocolate-hating mayor or burgermeister or whatever the fuck he is. It's Flash Chance with Chocolate. It is an insane movie. It was nominated for Best Picture. Number 9 at the box office, The Wedding Planner

with McConaughey and Lopez. Bad movie. I hate to say it. I love those two, but it's not a good movie Number 10, Cast Away Just a good movie And then Behind all of that Is Monkeybone

Wow, bring it up the rear It's me Bring it up that big old rear Yeah The loose caboose on that train is Monkeybone. Incredibly loose. I mean, you say you've seen everything in theaters and like, it's like, all right, well, let's do this week.

You had to choose between 3000 miles to Graceland and Monkeybone. Yeah. Those were your picks. There's nothing else. Yeah. Look, and this is still that period where you're like, you got three Best Picture nominees in the top ten in February. Like, these movies would linger.

Seeing this in a theater would have been too much, I feel like. I feel like that would have started to get pretty upsetting if you didn't have, like, an outside to look at every once in a while to ground yourself. I don't know. I think it chilled me out. I think, as David said, it

quieted the alarm clocks. Right. Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, that's what I've been thinking about. What we just watched. That's what's been on my mind. I sent you guys, this is the one line of monkey bone toys that actually made it. These

are not bobbleheads, although they look like it. They are bobblehead-y. They have the proportions. They're sort of Funko Pops. Yeah, yeah. Right, but they're realistically sculpted. They're not stylized other than

their heads being the same size as the rest of their body, taking up 50% of their height. And they're, like, small. They're, like, two or three inches. But the line is of course stew miley gotta include him monkey bone hypnos of course miss kitty why not and then the other two characters they included which shows i think what we're talking about that they hope this would have like

nightmare-esque every background character is interesting potential there's's, of course, BBQ Pig, who is the pig who yells at Stu trying to get him to buy a pig to eat. I want to get that toy for Ben, the pig. BBQ Pig? Yeah. I mean, I do like the pig, yeah.

And then Betty Bovine is like a cow who tries to fuck him for a second, right? I believe so, yes. Basically, like, flirts with him when he first walks into downtown.

So I'm gonna buy this. And there's a wolf that wants to help him with his luggage. Yes. You're buying a BBQ pig for Ben? The likeness of Brendan Fraser in this, by the way, who is, they have his

picture on the box, but the likeness looks like Crispin Glover having an allergic reaction. Absolutely. It is a wild toy. It is awful. I wanted to say that. It's just straight up awful. I got the Fraser and Hypnos and Monkeybone. I ordered them off of eBay. I felt the need.

You did. You just did. You did that already. I did that already. I got it. They've arrived. Okay. Well, I don't like that, but I understand. I look forward to bringing them over to our office soon. They will sit proudly on my desk. God. I do like Ben's reaction there. You don't need it. Yeah, that's true.

Anyone who needs those, what's going on? Well, I need it. Redefine on Well I need There's no world Oh yeah you do need that Justin as I don't even hate this movie I don't hate this movie I think it's kind of fun and interesting Yeah

But I also I can't defend it And I would never tell anyone to watch No but once again I would tell everyone to watch it, and I wouldn't say watch it in a so-bad-it's-good kind of a gog way. I just think it is a unique thing. It is a unique object. It is.

I will say, though, I think we have a skewed perspective. I've thought about this. I think we have a skewed perspective because it is a very exciting movie to watch and generate ideas to talk about. Like, there's a lot that you'll want to go out and share. You'll watch this movie and want to talk about it with somebody. Watch it. Don't watch it alone.

That's what I'm saying. Or you're going to have a lot of bottled up monkey bone thoughts to get out in the world. It should be a social activity. You know, we're all trying to reconnect. Yeah. Get offline and engage with other people in the real world. Find a thing to do

and maybe the thing to do is pop open your DVD case of Monkey Bone, stick your finger in his butthole and watch that baby play. Good for the ride of your life. Justin, as the man who has watched Monkey Bone seven times in the span of, what amount of time

are we looking at here since the first play? I don't know. It's been a couple months, right? Yeah. Whenever you guys ask me. Are there any final sort of thoughts, any stray realizations that hit you on any of the repeat viewings that you want to throw in here?

Oh, man. I feel like I've covered so much. I got Harry Knowles. I got the pizza delivery guy from Mulan. Harry Knowles, non-speaking cameo, but a lot of screen time. Megan Mullally is in there giving her all. No, it's... The odds against this movie existing are so high.

That is what I feel like... I'm shocked that it exists in the state that it is in. It is well worth watching. It is a... Don't watch it seven times. I feel a little bit of sadness because this is a chapter in my life. I'm putting,

I'm never going to watch this movie again, I'll say. Probably never talk about it. I'm a little worried that having watched it so many times, it will become a little bit of a part of my personal brand. That's terrifying to me.

Yeah, you're a boner. Yeah, I don't want to get t-shirts in the mail. You've self-identified as such. No, it's fine. It's a very interesting movie. I'm happy to have watched it. But I'm putting that part of my life away now. There's no more Monkeybone for me.

I'm moving on. I'm ready to talk about our next film. What's up next? How did someone let this guy make a movie again? It took a long time. It took a while. Yeah, he went to jail.

A very bizarre set of circumstances. I just want to read one other part of our text conversation. You text two days ago, Justin, everybody should see Monkeybone. It's so unlikely that Monkeybone exists. Why hasn't everybody watched Monkeybone? I said,

that's our job with this episode to make the world know david says to ask this question and then david you this morning clearly having just watched it or watched it last night text man dot dot dot monkey bone rare that something lives up to the expectation of being insane justin says monkey bone delivers all caps I'm treating myself to watch number six this morning David says number six Justin says like a fine wine you really appreciate it after six of them David says or

alternate theory you're drunk yeah I did a double header today I had six and seven both today you watched it twice today I watched it twice today. I watched it when I was talking to you guys and I felt like I missed some stuff, so I went back and gave it another watch. I think you're

probably seeing things at this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of great jokes is what I'm seeing. You understand you're not really making the case for us ever inviting you on to talk about a canonically beloved movie. But that's fine.

You got a lot of people for that. Get your Alex Ross Perry in here. Get your good guests in here for that. But you may need me. Put me back up on a shelf. You know what? This isn't going to be the longest Blank Chip episode, but I bet it's the longest one that could have been made about Monkeybone. I'll say that.

A lot of other people would have talked about Monkeybone this long This has to be the longest Podcast ever devoted to Monkeybone Ben just walked out of the room And I Appreciate that energy Right now I'll say I'm with him And I understand him

By the man of BBQ Pig Justin thank you so much for coming back on Thank you for taking the assignment seriously. Come back soon, Justin. You're the best. Your gentleman, a scholar, and monkey bone of course is an inextricable part of your personality now. Do you want to plug

any of your 18 podcasts? When is this going live? This is going live December 15th. Is that right? Oh, perfect. We're doing Candle Nights. It's our live streaming show that you can watch. All the money goes to charity. And it has lots of great guests.

I know, Connor. It goes up to December 11th. Perfect. Yeah, December 17th. Perfect. It's happening at 9 p.m., but it's on VOD for a couple weeks afterwards. If you go to bit.ly forward slash Candle Nights 2022,

it's just a big holiday special with lots of guests and fun Iskand skits. The tickets are five bucks and you can get more and all the money goes to charity. So check it totally out. Let's also say,

because this happened in between the last time you were on the show and now, when we did our first George Lucas talk show live stream at like chaos point in the pandemic, trying to raise money for the former UCB staff who were out of jobs when the theater shut down. And we were like struggling to make it to our goal. You swooped in at the last second, like Han Solo in the Millennium Falcon, and made a very, very generous donation

that went a really long way. And more importantly, allowed us to stop the live stream, which we could not end until we hit that number. Yeah, it was an act of mercy. And I mean, you don't even need to say anything because you thanked me

in the most profound way you could by getting me to watch and talk about Monkeybone. Yeah. I was laughing. A doom man's laugh. I will say this because we've had this problem in the past. I don't need to say it. Listeners will fill in with whatever answer they want.

But there are times in the past that a guest has picked a movie, we get to the record, and we find out the guest hates the movie. Yeah. And we're either surprised, taken aback by the fact- I'll throw a director at him, they'll be like,

this movie, please. And we just assume- Oh, you must love it. You answered so quickly and so passionately, and then we find out either they had never seen the movie before or saw it and disliked it. And that was never expressed to us.

And we get on the episode and the person just wants to bag on the movie. And it's it's it can be a rough go sometimes. So we said, Justin, it feels like Monkey Bone would be a good fit.

But the one thing I beg of you, I know this is a big ask. Can you please just watch Monkey Bone one time far out in advance of when we do the episode to just make sure that you like it and you multiplied that by seven?

Well, I want it. Or make sure that you have anything productive or positive to say about it. You don't have to like it. I wanted to make sure that I liked it. I thought that I could make myself like it and I wasn't wrong. I developed an affinity for it by watching it

enough times that it started to feel comforting. And that, so that worked. My plan worked, okay? My plan worked. Monkeybone is like a Pavlovian thing for you now? Yeah. I mean, not in the sense that I'll ever watch it again, but like, yeah. Other than that. If you do watch it again, text

us. Yeah, oh, absolutely. I'll text you before, during, and after. Yeah. Good, good, good. Very good. Thank you, Justin. And thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe. Thank you to Marie Barty for our social media

and helping to produce this show. Thank you to Joe Bowen and Pat Reynolds for our artwork. Truly, truly cursed Selick artwork. At the time we recorded the other Selick episodes, Pat Reynolds' artwork our artwork. Truly, truly cursed Selick artwork. At the time we recorded the other Selick episodes, Bowens, Pat Reynolds' artwork had not come in. And every time

Pat sends us new miniseries artwork, there's an email that's like, I don't know, guys. I really struggled with this one. I don't know if this is good enough. No hard feelings if you tell me that I need to start over from scratch. And then I feel like my first response is almost always, Jesus, Pat.

And he says, that bad? And I go, no, we're using it, obviously. But incredible job on that. Agent McKeon, Alex Barron, for our editing, Leigh Montgomery, the great American novel, for our theme song, J.J. Birch, for our research.

Monkeybone does not feel like the easiest film to research, and he went very deep on this one. As he said, he could find no cast interviews from the time this movie was coming out. They did not let anyone talk about this movie when it was coming out. You can go to blankcheckpod.com for some real nerdy shit, including our Patreon, Blank Check Special Features, where we go through franchises. We're doing the National Treasure movies in December. And of course, Talkin' the Walk with our buddy, our mutual friend J.D. Amato. Tune in next week for Avatar the Way of Water.

Monkeybone, of course. The Prelude 2. Avatar the Way of Water. I see it in two days. I'm so fucking jealous. I have to wait an additional nine days, but Ben and I have already bought our tickets to see it high frame rate 3D. It's going to rip.

And as always, Julie's got to lose her post.