Blank Check with Griffin & David - Pinocchio (2022) with Podcast: The Ride

Episode Date: September 18, 2022

The King of the Uncanny Valley - our boy Bob Zemeckis - is back with his spin on perhaps the most iconic un-real boy in cinema…it’s Pinocchio, baby! Our friends from Podcast: The Ride - two Disney daddies and one small wooden boy - join us to chat about Disney’s latest live-action remake, and we’re mostly just confused. How many days did Tom Hanks spend on set? Why are so many people in Hollywood eager to make their own Pinocchio adaptations? Did Leslie Zemeckis do mo-cap work for the sexy goldfish? Why does Disney World’s Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster revolve around AEROSMITH of all bands?? We may never know! 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

Starlight, Starbrite, first star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might have the podcast I wish tonight. Now, I was trying to figure out if there was any way to do... I mean, I can do it. It's going to be what I just said, but to make a more elegant version of podcastio, podcastio, holy smokio. The problem is it doesn't rhyme. But the best line in the movie is Pinocchio, Pinocchio, holy smokio.

That might be the default best line? I just thought you put more into that than the movie itself, so I liked it. You know, you had a little oomph in that. I think I put a little verve in it. A little oomph in that. I think I put a little verve in it. A little oomph. This is the question, if you're trying to impersonate parts of this movie, you're like, I mean, should I just, should I do it better? You did it louder. Tom Hanks is extremely quiet.

Yes. So just by that verve, there was more energy, just pure volume-wise. I was truly trying to do the math on this. I know this is a thing we like joke about. Five days of filming maximum, right? For Hanks in this film. That's a good question. What is it?

Is that why Hanks keeps doing these things? Like, it's just, it's like how he was like, the Polar Express was like black box theater. It was a couple of weeks. It was great. We explored the space. He played like eight characters. He's on screen the entire fucking

time. But in this one, he did have to put on some makeup. He does. That's annoying. He does. His section is more live action than anything else, but this movie, I think, is like 95% stage craft. You know, like VR void, Unreal Engine shit. And he's not in

that much of it. He's not. It's five days max. Like this might be one of those cases where- You think maximum? I think two weeks. I'm going to say two weeks. I did a few takes.

Prep rehearsals, whatever. But I do feel like this could have been five days, $10 million. A lot of it, maybe a full day was sleeping. Yes. Maybe that was caked into the contract. As long as I'm not part of Blue Fairy, that should line up, right?

That's like the original, just let me sleep. Maybe that's what they should have done, is Hank should have played every character Polar Express style. Why not? Then I'm doing my bit. Here's Robert Zemeckis, I'm doing my bit. Right. That's something, not nothing.

If Hanks played in this movie, Pinocchio, Geppetto, Jiminy Cricket, Stromboli. Blue Fairy. The Coachman. Blue Fairy's the one I'll say maybe he shouldn't play. Lampwick and fucking Honest John and Gideon. Immediately, this movie probably becomes better, right? Or at least interesting. Would he play Monstro? Yes, of course. Roar. Gideon, immediately this movie probably becomes better, right? Or at least interesting. Would he play Monstro?

Yes, of course. Roar. Gurgle, gurgle. Cachoo. I want to hear Hanks' take on all that. He could play the sexy fish. Yep.

Yep, definitely. Cleo the goldfish. Yes. The cat. He could be the cat. Just have to act like a cat. Just be a cat with no discernible qualities. A cute The cat. He could be the cat. Just have to act like a cat. Just be a cat with no discernible qualities. A little, a cute little cat.

Did anyone, like, keep track? How many minutes of screen time does he have? Like, 20 minutes? Yeah. Maximum, right? I mean, this is one of those things Disney Plus has. Obviously, Disney movies have long credits. And then Disney Plus always has, like, the additional seven bonus minutes of just giving you the credits for all the translations, the dubbings in every country.

Oh, you have no idea. When I was looking at how much was left. Yes. And then it got to directed by Robert Zemeckis. And I remembered, that's right, the Endless Disney. Thank you, Endless Disney, foreign translation. Thank you for jumping in and saving me from there being like 35 more minutes of Pinocchio. They make it look like it's an hour 50 and the end credit hits at 134.

The Zemeckis director credit is one hour 34 minutes. hour, 34 minutes. So if the movie is only in actuality 94 minutes long, 20 minutes of Hanks even feels high. It's 10 at the top and maybe five at the back, right? Is that about it? Yeah. Here's another thing, just to like front load this in terms of the weird nightmarish qualities of this movie. I only clocked at the end. I don't know if it also was the case in the earlier scenes. The final scene at the beach between Pinocchio and Geppetto, every time they do an over-the-shoulder shot on Pinocchio from behind Geppetto, Geppetto is clearly 100% CGI.

It speaks to the level of investment that Robert Zemeckis has on spending time on a set that I swear to I was like, why is this shot weird? Which when you're an hour and 34 minutes into the Zemeckis Pinocchio for a shot to jump out is weird is saying something. And then I noticed like his hair looks odd. There are no pores on the side of his face. And that like one eighth sliver of his profile over the shoulder is like, oh, they like dusted off an old Polar Express model. Right. They couldn't be bothered to shoot over the shoulders with the real people in this film. I was thinking about how it's a I'm sure it landed.

I'm sure they talked about it. I'm sure it landed, I'm sure they talked about it, but for Zemeckis and Hanks, this was a chance to make a lost at sea in a little makeshift raft, but a thousand times easier than the last time they did this together. One of the things that is maddening about this film is that for as much as we felt no excitement

when it was announced that this film was happening, and I believe this film was announced while we were in the middle of doing our Zemeckis miniseries. That sounds right. We were already deep in the Bobby Z days. Yeah, because this was, I feel like this actually came together pretty quickly. Yeah, it was announced like January 2021. Okay. And we were definitely...

I don't fucking remember if we were doing Zemeckis. We were, weren't we? No, it was not announced January 2021 because January 2021 is when they announced that it was going to Disney+. That was the night that we recorded our Witches episode is the night that they announced this is bypassing theaters. I remember that distinctly.

Yeah, it looks like, well, January 2021, they announced, I guess, the whole cast. But yeah, sometime in 2020. Look, I don't know. Yeah, August 2020, there you go. Hanks rejoined the project with Zemeckis. We were doing Zemeckis. The arc of us doing Zemeckis was essentially

we start doing the miniseries, and we know this is his next movie, which does not inspire confidence. And then when we end the miniseries on arguably what was his worst film up until that point in time, we're buttressing it with like, oh, and by the way, his next thing isn't even going to theaters. And now we see this thing, you know, a year and change later, a year and a half later, and you find these moments in the film where you're like, I almost see how Zemeckis could have connected to the material on this.

Here are things that are obsessions of his and his filmography, things he has previously showed interest or skill with. Well, sure, yes. I mean, go ahead, go, well, finish your thought, finish your thought. And all of it just feels dispassionate. Look, we're going to unpack this for the rest of the thing.

This is Blunt Check with Griffin Day. It's a podcast about filmographies. Yeah? You didn't say your name. I'm Griffin. I'm David. Directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks

to make whatever crazy passion projects they want. Sometimes those checks clear, and sometimes you just end up making a fucking Pinocchio remake for no reason. sometimes you just end up making a fucking Pinocchio remake for no reason. What's the thematic Zemeckis-y thing you're seeing in this? I'm not disagreeing with you. I just don't remember anything about this movie already.

Sure, sure. I finished watching it an hour ago, and I barely remember anything that happens in this movie. You watched it like two weeks ago? I watched it last... Yeah, time is a little fungible for me right now, but yeah, like, I guess a couple weeks ago

on a screener and, you know, didn't like it. I thought it was bad. I think this is what I'd say. I think the obvious thing is you could see Zemeckis connecting really hard to Geppetto as a character.

Yes, the craftsman. Yes. And this notion of trying to take fantastical things and bring them to life, you know? The bespoke art into reality, especially when his arc has been going more and more digital, you know, trying so hard to pioneer these advancements in film technology and saying, like, this is what you like. This is what you want movies to look like. And he did make Marwen just a few years ago,

which is also about little puppets. Yes. So that's something. Right. And then to Scott's point, like stuff like, you know, the Maestro sequence, you're just like,

there's a version of this where you're just like, yes, he can flex the muscles he used in Castaway in a different genre with a different toolbox you know it is it's funny that it's thematically it's like pinocchio is a real boy but not quite right like there's a little bit i mean depending on how you want to read what they're saying at the end but basically it's uh a realism to a point like something's off which is that not all of the zemeckis digital material is almost real but not

something is off right if we're talking about 21st century zemeckis and this push and pull of like he just wants to fucking stay with his computers. He doesn't want to use a camera anymore. Loathe to do these fucking grown up movies even though you know it felt like he was teasing us for a while there that he'd finally put the computer down. I don't agree with you that he was teasing. I think he gave it a go. This is my read.

I may be wrong. He gave us a solid decade of four interesting movies I don't you know I don't like all of them But interesting movies With movie stars And you know

On diverse topics And diverse genres And Flight and Allied are both like very much Grown up movies They're like R rated adult You know expensive But not special effects driven movies so flight the walk allied marwin and i think after marwin flops and none of those movies were i mean flight was successful i guess but then you know increasing a lot you know lesser success

pretty much as it goes along i think he's just like i don't know forget it i'll i don't want to bother anymore david no no no i agree with you but also marwin is half zemeckis land it's half mocap valley you know he got his toys back and he's like i'm not giving him up again i have my little toys that's fair he like found material that allowed him to do both. And then you watch The Witches and you're like, oh, like 80% of this movie is CGI mice. Right. In like crazy endless flying camera shots going through like gutters and shit. He's like keeps on pushing back and back little bit, little bit by bit. But this is a movie about a puppet who wants to be a real boy.

And today, long overdue, we got three good boys on the podcast. But beyond that, perhaps most thematically relevant for this episode, our three guests today include two Disney daddies and a wooden boy. A little, little wooden boy. Our little wooden boy. Little, little, little, little wooden boy. A little wooden boy. I also make horrific click-clack sounds when I move about.

Your joints are remarkably similar to Penelope. Unlike him, who's like a brand new endeavor, mine have seen better days. A day of walking with you, Jason, does sometimes feel like oh no!

A catastrophe! And also seagulls fly around and aid you in your journeys as you walk. Yeah, that's true. From Podcast The Ride, Beyond Overdue,

The Good Boys Themselves, Scott Gairdner, Mike Carlson, Jason Sheridan. Hello. Thank you so much, fellas. Thank you for having us. Thank you for being here. Love being, like, getting to, like, swim in the wraparounds of Blank Check

and be present for the business of Blank Check. The business. I love that griffin i've enjoyed rearranging like every possible arrangement of things that you do and things that we do i'd love to to make them yes every combo let's do them all and i'm so thrilled about this one i'm very excited here to uh talk about this and sort of like review and give my thoughts on this piece of audio visual entertainment that's what i'm here for today to talk about this not as a film sure it is a piece of martin scorsese coin term audio visual entertainment i you know i was going to say it's almost hard to argue that the term doesn't apply here but entertainment feels like a little bit of a stretch. It is definitely an audiovisual product.

Right. Sure. Griffin, David, if I could just ask, I've been thinking about this. Yes. If you could just remind me, in terms of blank check canon, what is the,

what do you think the worst piece of audiovisual entertainment you have watched on this show? Yeah. Because I feel like we occasionally discuss this, Griff. I feel like every six months we'll read it again and just try to check in. Yeah. Like, what comes to mind right away? This is in the lower rung, but I have to say, David.

Oh, this is really low for me. You saw this two weeks ago. You texted us. You just said Pinocchio is pitiful. Pitiful. And then you updated your Zemeckis ranking on Letterboxd with this dead last. I have to say, I absolutely prefer this to Christmas Carol. Or I should say rather, I like Christmas Carol less.

And I think it's almost a coin toss for me as to between this and witches. But it doesn't feel like a slam dunk were some X movie for me. It's in the unholy like bottom rung. But I'll say this Christmas Carol. I'm not I'm not here to defend a Christmas Carol. But that at least it's it's almost like i want to hear you at least it's great yeah at least it provoked a reaction in me you know at least at least i looked at it you know in disgust pinocchio i was just sort of looking through the screen i felt

like yeah even though i was sliding off the. I just was looking almost like there was nothing in front of me. I did feel largely numb watching this. I think the witches, like the first 20 or 30 minutes that are Octavia Spencer and the kid before they go to the hotel. Yeah, the witches at least had actors in it. It has actors in it. Yeah. It wasn't good. The mouse stuff in Witches is worse than this movie.

good the mouse stuff in witches is worse than this movie but witches has moments and performances briefly that at least inspire something christmas carol just does nothing for me but what are some other what are some others uh when we when we talk about the bottom like true stinkers you know like oh my god why do we have to watch this like I mean, Alice in Wonderland, this is, Alice in Wonderland. Wow. That's a great, that's a great,

Alice is more unpleasant than this, especially if we're talking live action Disney remakes. We didn't do it as part of a mini series. We did as a one-off, but I prefer this to the Lion King. Yes, me too. It's shorter.

It's shorter. Did Alice in Wonderland cause all of this? I don't remember what began the oh well you gotta really despise it for that because whichever you hate the most or like or tolerate the most like the genre in general yikes it's just it's just a orgy of creative bankruptcy this entire slate of disney live action it's also just wild that you go from like you know the pitch on alice in wonderland is what if tim burton did alice in wonderland right this entire slate of Disney live actions. It's also just wild that you go from like, you know, the pitch on Alice in Wonderland is what if Tim Burton did Alice in Wonderland, right?

It wasn't even really presented as much as it's a remake of the classic Disney film. It was like Tim Burton's twisted reimagining of Alice in Wonderland. Then you go from there to Maleficent, where it's like a revisionist story, version of a story you know. We're telling the story differently

from a different perspective, but we're sticking more to the visual iconography of the Disney film. And then it starts like trending more and more of like, okay, we're doing Jungle Book, but we're not fully committing to it being a musical and we're adding an extra 40 minutes of plots. Then it's like Cinderella.

Then Beauty and the Beast is the first one where I feel like they're like, we're just doing the Disney movie. Do the movie, do the movie. Right, we're doing all the songs, we're doing all the numbers. Then Beauty and the Beast is the first one where I feel like they're like, we're just doing the Disney movie. Do the movie. Do the movie. Right. We're doing all the songs. We're doing all the numbers.

It's all the story beats. We add in some unnecessary backstory in places. And it looks like shit. Right. But then the designs are bad. And then they just keep on trending more and more to like, let's just make it look, sound, follow every story point of the original movie to this point where you're just like, why did anyone bother getting out of bed at any day in any position, any part of the pipeline of this film? Because they're like conserved.

These are like the equivalent. These movies are for a corporation or the equivalent of like your grandmother saying you should buy a savings bond. It's like a safe investment for the company because it's so identifiable at this point. It's, it's the weird thing of when Iger took over, he, you know,

there was immediately Bob Iger, uh, you know, former head of Disney, uh, a recurring figure on podcast, the ride, uh,

when he took over, like shut down a lot of the stuff that he felt was like Eisner era, Disney run amok, like all the direct to video sequels and everything back and talked about needing to like make projects that were brand deposits. Do you guys remember this term that he would throw around? It's disturbing. That's like a-

Deposits. Yeah. It's a grim, like if a doctor tells you that, you're not happy. Absolutely. You have brand deposits. They're lining your colon, these brand deposits. No, he was like, the Disney name has been so sort of tarnished. We like oversaturated the market.

We didn't control quality. There are things we need to make that may not be profitable, but they restore a sheen of respectability and quality to Disney. So he would like talk about certain movies being brand deposits. talk about certain movies being brand deposits. And to some degree, it feels like these movies now mostly exist to make people realize how much they like the original film. Like, I feel

like people watch these when they go up on Disney Plus or go see them in theaters, never think about them again, and it just gives them a greater appreciation of the original thing, which they then sell more merchandise for. Can I say something depressing? Please. This is going to be a depressing episode.

I think it's also I don't want to paint with a broad brush about young children today. But I do think they like seeing this. They like this. They like to see the new Pinocchio looking like this.

Maybe they like the old one too. But then it's like, and did you know there's another Pinocchio? like this And maybe they like the old one too But then it's like, and did you know there's another Pinocchio And it looks, you know, it's all glossy CGI And they're like, I want to see that, I think It's this notion of, oh, the original film will be too slow For the children of today, despite our movies now being 40% longer I think it's just the look, though I don't even mean the pacing

I just mean that kids like things looking like this 40% longer. I think it's just the look, though. I don't even mean the pacing. I just mean that kids like things looking like this. I was a dumb kid. I used to care about special effects. I don't know. Maybe that's a thing. Look, I'm pressing the straws here. I think you're right that initially

there was sort of that notion of like, let's try and reinvigorate the brand. And let's say in 2010, it was still a little sexy to bring in Tim Burton to make an Alice in Wonderland movie. Now it kind of feels like they're like i don't know we might as well do them all we might as well fucking take everyone off like when they announced the black cauldron that's when it's official they're like okay we're just gonna do them all but black

cauldron's one of those things where if they were to do black cauldron tomorrow you'd be like wow they found a way to somehow do a sort of fantasy novel adaptation on a large budget. Like it wouldn't even feel like doing a live action Black Cauldron remake. It would be like, oh, they're now just going to do a new version of these books. Maybe. I don't know. I mean, I just always hear these stories about like all the sort of in-house producers at the live action side of Disney who have these development deals basically being like, you can kind of pick one project you can try to push through development that isn't based on one of the original animated classics. And otherwise it's this game of like trying to grab dibs on

three or four titles and hope that yours are the ones. So like, you know, someone like Bruckheimer used to have a production deal was doing all different types of shit for them and now they have producers and overhaul deals who are like my slate is bambi robin hood right sword in the stone it's that old old adage one for them and one for them right right and now they want another one and oh wait uh it looks like i have to do another one for them right and like the the one for me is like i'm really trying to remake the black hole you know it's like i'm trying to remake a lesser disney project that doesn't have that name value

i want to ask scott your son is now nearly three yeah getting there yeah yeah about two and a half did he watch any of this movie with you no no now was that did you shield it from him um i don't you know it's funny um david what you said about i mean well and i have a very little kid but like yeah i think i'm thinking older than your son's age my my daughter who's younger than your son also would not give one shit about this movie. Yeah, yeah. It's more in the realm of why you'd watch the Squeakquel or something.

Sure. But is this compared to a movie that's, I don't know, a Moana, or I'm trying to think what's on all the time, a Moana or Encanto, where it's colorful and mainly smooth? This is what's in my head in all of the

movies my son watches the characters are smooth and soft and they look pleasant when they smile and they're sympathetic when they cry as opposed to like jagged it's in several of our zoom backgrounds this face that they got to on jiminy cricket he's like he's a monster it's why like his face is so sharp and all these odd divot i mean he looks like a uh he looks like a hybrid of a dinosaur of some kind uh he's not i don't know why a two-year-old would ever want to see this as opposed to like uh you know woody who is soft and smooth or even original jiminy cricket who is a round big eyed smiley little cartoon thing yes who's more colorful it's like a it's a brighter sheen of green instead of this like pale sickly like doesn't he look like

a almost in hospice man? Yeah. He looks like... I want to say this is the first thing I thought of when I saw Jiminy Cricket. Bible man. Oh, wow. He has this weird kind of cowl, and it was so jarring to me. I'm sure maybe this is what a cricket

actually looks like if you get down on its level but it looked so strange to me and unnerving weird religious superhero bible man right part of the problem of trying to make like a live action adaptation of disney's pinocchio is you look at a character like jiminy cricket you're like he in no way resembles a cricket as you said he is just a cute round faced green man. And then this is like, how much do we want him to look like a real cricket? You get to these questions like, what is the difference between like Geppetto's cat and Gideon, a cat who wears clothes and walks upright? How realistic are both of them? The second you're doing fur texturing, things become less cute and stylized. And there's this basic principle

of animation, especially Disney animation, which people will mock for being like overly cutesy and round and, you know, all that sort of shit. But like people talk about appeal in design, right? It's a big principle of animation coming up with an appealing design. And I feel like so often when we get these expensive, quote unquote, liveaction movies with CGI characters directed by live-action directors, appeal goes out the window. They just are like, what's an interesting design? And they don't think about, what will I want to watch? What will make a child happy?

Within seconds of Jiminy Cricket appearing on screen, my girlfriend went, what is with his face? What is going on? They're trying to tow this line between like the actual physiology of a cricket and the design from the original movie. And it's an impossible circle to square. That having been said,

thank God he sounds great. There's this Cracker Jack performance. We can all agree, across the board agreement. I only put together after watching it that like joseph gordon-levitt does the same thing in the walk like this sort of like hey i didn't see you there let me take you through the movie you know like that he's literally doing that as jiminy cricket now he's so you want a tail do you well i've got a few here in my coat pocket which makes it all

the more demented that zemeckis must have gone like, man, who did this well in a movie for me before? When everyone agrees that is the most nightmarish element of the walk. That's the part where almost everyone just turns off the movie and doesn't make it past second five. Oh, bonjour. I am on sea. I am on the Statue of Liberty. They get to it even sooner here with the interruption of the disney logo like they they at least had to wait for they they in the walk they got through the production company cards

before doing something bizarre and straight to camera but that was like i was so thrown and borderline offended by seeing this Jiminy enter a logo that I watch all the time. And granted, the Disney castle logo plays before lots of pieces of shit, but it also plays before everything my son likes. And he like imitates the train in it and the fireworks. So I have a lot of fun. And it's the castle of our beloved Magic Kingdom in Florida. There's a lot to like, I think, about that logo. And it's fucking when you wish upon a star. Like, they're finally getting to the movie in the modern Disney era that gives them the song for the fanfare of their logo. Which I kind of forgot. I almost, when it happened, I still was like, wait, why?

Why is he singing that? Oh, that's, oh, yeah, it's when you wish upon. They somehow managed to make it not like, oh, well still felt he sings one line of it this is like the most famous song in the disney catalog as crooned by jiminy cricket and he doesn't do it in that way that for almost all of it is a imitation of that guy it's the guy cliff now i don't remember the actor's name oh yeah did original jiminy cricket but like the one of the most iconic parts of the performances then i won't be able to do it but let me try it like the dreams come true that crazy high true i guess i got it i think i got it i wasn't too you got that cliff cliff edwards yeah but he didn't cliff

edwards okay but he didn't he kind of like stopped, he didn't go for the jugular of the full falsetto, which like lets you, it kind of is right at the top letting you know the movie in general will not strive for the high note. No. It's gonna aim for something it can hit. Right, right. No, they swapped the falsetto for an immediate quip.

Like an immediately, an immediate singer. Also emblematic of what they do in for an immediate quip. Like an immediately, an immediate singer. Also emblematic of what they do in general. More quips. Magic. Oh, isn't that a catchy tune? It is incredible how like, Zemeckis' take on this material

seems to begin and end with, I like the original movie. He is so beholden to the original film, and yet at every opportunity will undercut it and be like that's weird he did all that in a day what am i doing singing why am i talking like every fucking other line is being like this old movie's dumb huh unnecessary um connecting of tissue like i would i never would have thought original pinocchio is full of logic holes and unjustified character motivate never occurred to me.

So now we have all of these odd middle scenes that don't really it just it feels very like nobody. Let's get I mean, let's we should really dig into the meat of this film. OK, now that he's gone, can we talk about... I did audition for this movie. We talked about this at the... Wow. Did we mention this on mic? I think at some point.

Okay. I did audition for Jiminy Cricket. People I also know auditioned for Jiminy Cricket. Paul F. Tompkins. What? Brian Scott Jones. I should have said what for you, because it's you. I wish you would have... But Paul F. Tompkins is What? Rance Scott Jones. I should have said what for you, because it's you. I wish you would have.

But Paul F. Tompkins is a true, like, you're a kid. That was on the table. That was on the table. It was one of these things where I was just like, oh, you're actually just reaching out to comedy people? In our real world's Jiminy Cricket, the closest equivalent. Someone who basically dresses like Jiminy Cricket on a daily basis has the demeanor. Whoa, whoa, but you two might have come in with takes, you know?

Well, so this is the other thing I'll say. When I got the sides, it just said, underlined, please sound as close to 1940s movie as possible. Like, the note from casting was basically, do not put any take on this.

Have no spin whatsoever. I worked so hard to just kind of, like, voice match it, which, look, if they had paid me to do that, I would have done it happily.

I felt like I had a pretty good Jiminy Cricket impression that sounded like the original movie. I have a similar register to that guy. Of course, yes.

Right. It is an interesting skill, an interesting acting exercise, like playing a real person in a biopic, I imagine. Right, right, right. I was like, this is the challenge, is to just study this original movie and sound as close to it as I can. And I felt like I did a pretty good job. While knowing, this feels bizarre because Disney has people in-house who still play jiminy

cricket like they have sound alike on their speed dial who will do it for like kingdom hearts or the theme parks or whatever oh yeah and they and i like that they've done that sometimes like if the well like you know hey james earl jones will still be mufasa or jim cummings will still be poo like why because nobody's seeing these. Did anyone watch it because of Joseph Gordon-Levitt? No, this is my thing. I'm like, if you're reaching out to Paul F. Tompkins, I guess you're like,

we want a little bit more of a name than the guy who currently plays Jiminy Cricket in our stable, who none of us can pull by name right now, right? But then when you cast Joseph Gordon-Levitt, I go like, wow, I guess he must have secretly a great jiminy cricket impression in his back pocket considering how much they were adamant that

this has to sound exactly like the original thing yeah but he's right but he's zemeckis's friend and he's worked with him and he probably came in and was like hey i've got this idea i'm gonna do this and robert zemeckis probably like, that's great! I love that! Do that! And then, you know, whatever. Took a nap. I assume that's what the production of this was like. He might have taken a nap during a couple of these lines. I want to make it very clear

that I am in no way bitter about not being in this film. I, in fact, feel a sense of relief. But I do think it is perplexing to decide to cast a name who we all agree is not going to like actually get any kids to watch this movie

despite being a well-liked star and then not really basically settle for what sound like first takes on every single line do you think though that this was like is there a chance there's a whole scratch track of him doing like the Don John voice in this? Do you think there's a chance

that he tried something radically different and maybe at a screening they said, you know what, we gotta go back to the other? I don't know, but it's like, yeah, I don't know. It makes more sense. It would make more sense for him to do this in his speaking voice. Because while, yeah, then it's him.

Then he's doing something, like, that you would get him to do. He probably would have given a better performance also if he wasn't so caught up. Like, challenge and shackles, maybe, of having to be, like, Cliff Edwards. Because he can't really do this voice but he's like still trying to do the sometimes going into you know and why would you just do it cliff edwards is in it and talks that way because it was the 40s it's not the 40s now and the rest of the movie isn't the 40s i don't think i mean i it's i i assume that pinocchio is set in the 1800s sometimes, but then I don't know because at one point, a cuckoo clock opened up and there was a red cocktail dress

in it. We'll have to talk about this. Geppetto predicting the future of fashion. Yeah, I didn't mean to jump on. There's a lot. No, no, no, no, no, no. We should. Like, why does Geppetto make a clock with a sheriff

coming out of his saloon? Yes, the American West west how does he know about and sort of roughly in the style of howdy doody like like the 50s children's television he doesn't know what television is i'm a worldly guy that's what he would say i don't know i love i love to think about i read billy read a lot of books in 2020s, you're remaking a 1940s Americana version of 1800s Italy, small town Italy. Which leaves everyone grasping for what voice do I do? Everyone has a different answer. How Italian am I?

How past am I? How current am I? Everyone comes up with something different you know what i like i do like that at least there's a couple original ip cuckoo clocks in this not everything has to be ip you know but geppetto falls prey to that it's like the the balance of the theme parks increasingly yeah did you like the carved toy that Jiminy Cricket doffs his cap to the toy's ass? There's a lot of butt stuff in this movie.

There's a lot of butt stuff. A lot of butt stuff. Compared to the other Disney movies of this genre. A fair amount of tentacles as well. Yeah. Monstro has tentacles and for whatever reason,

the blue fairy wings are like Cthulhu-like, you know? I will say this. A thread we found when we did our Zemeckis miniseries a couple years ago is especially when you get into this last decade or two of his work and more of the CGI mocap stuff, he loves making his wife a fetish object.

There is like a very busty puppet in Polar Express that looks like his wife, a marionette puppet. In Beowulf, there like a very busty puppet in Polar Express that looks like his wife, a marionette puppet. In Beowulf, there's a very busty barmaid who has like giant swinging pendulous breasts in IMAX 3D that is played by and looks like his wife. Similar in Marwen. I'm sure it happens to some degree in Christmas Carol. in Marwen. I'm sure it happens to some degree

in Christmas Carol. When Jiminy ogles the butt in this, I almost was like waiting for the cut to her face to be like, oh, it's Leslie Zemeckis. Which it isn't.

This doesn't look like her. But it's like every one of his animated movies has the moment where you're like, why did this just get so horny for a second? And then you look it up

and the character's either modeled on, played by, or both his wife, Leslie Zemeckis, who's sort of like a modern burlesque woman. It's a director's signature. It's just a signature of a director.

He's a wife guy. Robert Zemeckis, in his twilight years, he's a wife guy. Like the internet, you know? Yeah. I feel like we should step back and talk about the development of this project and also touch upon Mike's background image on Zoom.

But the mid-2010s, what we've been talking about, the gold rush to just mine every piece of Disney classic IP and remake them in some form. This movie is put together for Sam Mendes originally. Yeah, although I want to mention, Griffin, that as you, I'm sure, know, Jim Henson wanted to make a version for Disney in the 80s with Steve Barron. And when that didn't happen, Steve Barron went on to make that movie

The Adventures of Pinocchio in the 90s with Martin Landau. Which Jim Henson Workshop did work on. Right, which had a Henson hand. That movie is a nightmare. It's one of those movies that was like, one of those children films like Return to Oz or whatever, where you're like, this feels designed to traumatize children.

I will say the puppetry in that film is impressive. Like, Pinocchio is kind of just like, oh, this is how you can actually do a Pinocchio in live action. There's something kind of compelling about the fact that he's actually on real sets. Coppola always wanted to do a Pinocchio live action movie. That was sort of one of his great unmade projects. It seems to be a story that fascinates many filmmakers, right? Like, obviously, we have Del Toro's version coming this year.

Roberto Benigni's version, Griffinin as your zoom background there's been many other adaptations and who was who did it again yes roberto benigni directs pinocchio with himself as pinocchio in like 2002 and then it's his life is beautiful follow-up right it's him cashing that check it's his black check cash and then like three years ago he played Geppetto in a new version of Pinocchio from the director Gamora. Right. Matteo Garone. Yes, exactly. Yes.

Garone. Who previously had pretty much all made like crime dramas. Well, look, I mean, has anyone else read the original Carlo Collodi book Pinocchio? Because I was obsessed with it when I was a kid. Has anyone else read Pinocchio? I believe I read it as a child. Yeah. I've read the Wikipedia about what really happens

And how he kills Jiminy Cricket He kills Jiminy Cricket Who does not get a Christian name He's just Cricket And the Cricket shows up and is like Hey, maybe stop being such a jerk And Pinocchio's like, eat hammer, motherfucker And he dies seconds later

Pinocchio's like, I feel kind of bad about that well moving on well you know it's a very obviously it's a very strict and upright moral tale about how like children need rules essentially to follow um and i was i had it as a kid and i would read it over and over again i think because it was so dark and i was just kind of transfixed by it but i don't know if that's what compels filmmakers like the original tale or if it's just sort of the wonder of the original disney movie or just as you say griffin the kind of like you know the craftsman creating life angle if that's what's cool about it like i think it's a bit of all three. I think directors relate to Geppetto, who always is more of a cipher than a character, you know, or at the very least just kind of like plot mechanics for most of your story. And I think there's always been this challenge of like, you want a big actor to play Geppetto. So how do you make that role sort of more interesting to play outside of just being the opening and the end.

I think there's the technological challenge of it, which has always interested people, and relating to the idea of being able to pull off that technical challenge. I think it's a combination of, yeah, it's like one of those stories as a kid that will, like, simultaneously terrify and compel you. And the original Disney movie has that balance. Like, it's one of those Disney films you watch where you're like, this is 60 minutes long. It is terrifying for how much people like to talk about Disney sanitizing these stories

and the fact that he doesn't crush Jiminy and all of that sort of stuff. It is still like a very dark, scary movie. And it's very much a movie about like Pinocchio having to like get his just desserts and learn lessons. The kids transforming into jackasses always frightened me as a kid. But then the more frightening thing I think was smooth Pinocchio at the very end. I never even as a kid, like I'm glad you got your wish.

I'm glad everyone's happy and you're a little weird little family. But I did not like smooth Pinocchio. And it kind of happens in this, but really far away. I was going to say, it's kind of telling that this movie barely does the he becomes a real boy at the end and even kind of shrugs and goes like,

maybe it happened, maybe it didn't. and you don't see him up front like they're like even this feels too upsetting for us to put on screen thank god imagine their take oh they balance it out by making lampwick more it's just worse like just more annoying just more extra like i don't know what like just more annoying, just more extra. Like, I don't know what I, I,

I said watching it, I hope this might be too mean, but it's like lamp wick looks like a Pete Davidson that they took out of the oven too early. You know? But when, when Disney finally gets this set up, it is Mendes and our friend, friend of the podcast,

Chris whites gets brought aboard to sort of write it and produce it. Oh no! Yes. Is everything okay? This is all I'm gonna say. This is all I'm gonna say as a disclaimer. I'm gonna say this one oblique statement. Film development is a very weird, attractive

process and sometimes credits end oddly in terms of who gets credited for what and when. Your name on something might not mean very much at all. Sure. But Mendes is one of these figures that Disney has clearly been trying to get to make one of these movies for them. I feel like he's been attached to a few, came very close to doing Oz the Great and Powerful. But he's one of these guys they want to do one of their big live action films. Hank, similarly, one of the guys in rotation.

They wanted him to play the Michael Keaton part in Dumbo. He sort of seemed like a white whale to get in one of their live-action Disney films. And he is on board for the whatever, this earlier version. And then he drops out at some point. Maybe when Mendes drops out? I believe he gets brought on when the Paul King version happens. And this is Paul King straight off of Paddington 2. So it's one of those moments where people are equal parts like,

why is he doing a Pinocchio movie rather than Paddington 3? But simultaneously kind of having to say like, look, I might have to trust and see what his version is. I don't want to give Paul King benefit of the doubt now. and it did sound like there was a real take there at that point he is the one who sells hanks on doing it paul king drops out uh for family issues um and then hanks leaves the movie uh at some point but what i just read is that Hanks was apparently, as this film is sort of like stuck in development, hell Disney still wants to get Hanks back on board. Hanks is apparently the one who suggests some Maccas.

Hmm. Uh, sure. Well, they know each other. I'll do it. If Bob comes and does it with me. Wow.

That's friendship, I guess. And this is like some Maccas coming off of like three, you know, consecutive bombs. But also a period where you kept on hearing that he was turning down shit like The Flash. That it was like, people keep on throwing Zemeckis these big modern blockbusters. And he's old fashioned. He doesn't care about superhero movies. He doesn't want to do this shit.

And then it was like, he just loves this original movie. He wants to work with his buddy, buddy Tom. He's going to come in here and rewrite the thing and make it as much like the original film as possible.

Strange. And yet not still like, it'd be hard to imagine what, like when he's presenting his take, like, can you flash to what the presentation like what what would he have even said? Here's my take with the plan was my guess is his one hour pitch meeting was screening the entirety of the 1940s Pinocchio and then pointing to the screen at certain times and going, but it'll be real. And the camera will be doing this. The cats are going to have hair. You're going to see, and then the hair will get wet and it'll be wet looking hair. And this fish, this fish is going to be as pretty as my wife.

I wouldn't be surprised if that's where his wife was in there, that she actually did the mocap for the fish. Leslie, flutter for me, could you? Just give me a quick flutter. the mocap for the fish. Leslie, flutter for me, could you? Could you just give me a quick flutter? But just interesting and important to mention that across this, you know, 10-year period of Disney trying to make their Pinocchio,

this entire time, del Toro is desperately trying to make his own Pinocchio, stop motion with Gus Grimley, the illustrator, and his whole thing is like, I want to go back to the book. I want to make it darker.

We have this very specific visual take. We're going to do it in stop motion. He can't get off the ground until the end of perhaps the Netflix blank check days and their push into animation. He finally gets the carte blanche to make this movie, which will come out on a different streaming service in like eight weeks. And I'm looking forward to like, Del Toro stop motion. you got me with that, you know? It does sound interesting. It's true, yeah. Simultaneous with this, Warner Brothers is very much trying to make their own live-action Pinocchio

because Robert Downey Jr. wants to do Pinocchio more than anything. It's in this period where everyone's looking to get him to do another big-budget film. Okay, you got the judge out of your system. You know, it's like what ends up being the energy he devotes to Doolittle. He spends five years on trying to make Pinocchio, in which he would have played both Geppetto and done the mocap for Pinocchio. Yes. And was going through different directors.

Do you remember who the first one was, David? No. Was Ben Stiller in there? Yes. I'm sorry. Ben Stiller was going to write and direct Robert Downey Jr.'s Pinocchio. Then when Stiller drops out, it is right after Downey Jr. had dropped out of Inherent Vice. And he goes like Paul Thomas Anderson.

Right. He brings Paul Thomas Anderson to Warner Brothers. Paul Thomas Anderson's like, look, I'd love to make a movie like this. No one ever lets me do this. I'd love to make a children's film. He goes in, he pitches for it. He's developing it for a while. And then after a couple months, he's just like,

they thought my take was too weird. But his attitude was always, I'm not trying to make Art House Pinocchio. I would like to make a big budget family film. But he's probably just too idiosyncratic of a filmmaker to make something that didn't scare them slightly and then after pta drops out it becomes ron howard who feels very equivalent to zemeckis of just like give us a nice americana baby boomer nostalgia take on this and then at

some point the project just crumbles due to lack of interest and probably the disney version had more momentum at that point do you also think there's a chance getting daily rambling notes from Robert Downey Jr. might influence the filmmakers? I cannot imagine. I mean, once again, it's like anything, his version would have default been more interesting because you imagine he would have done some weird shit as Geppetto and some weird shit as Pinocchio. Even if it was bad,

even if it was Doolittle adjacent, there would have been idiosyncratic choices. Why does anyone, why do any actors ever want to play the child in anything? Like which Semeckis does that happen? Polar Express. Yeah, yeah.

And they had to, like, change it, right? Yeah, they dub him over. And then the same thing happened. Mars Meets Moms, too. Right. Where it was Seth Green up until a month before the movie came out, and then they dubbed it over with a real kid. So is Downey just like, that's because they're lesser actors. It hasn't worked because the greatest actor hasn't done it. Right. So when I get my hands on this fucking

kid part, I'm digging into the movie. What fucking voice was he gonna do was he gonna do yeah but is it like maybe there's still a chance we can get like you know how patrick stewart did the night before christmas and you draw all the roles on the stage yes so is there a chance we can get downey jr on like the west end doing all the roles you know something like that but like just can they instead just do something else what if they did that something else where he played like an interesting character like a journalist maybe trying to solve a serial killer case or something i don't know just be normal why can't you all just be normal is it the act is it the actor's life is it the song that's like kind of spinning in these older actors and directors' head? The Hi Diddley Dee song?

It's just wild that both actors and directors feel inextricably drawn to this property once they get to a certain level of power, clout, and esteem within the industry. Now it's time to do Pinocchio. Right. Which is strange because weird, like, sub-porny Pinocchios, this whole history you're describing,

I feel like eight different Pinocchios you haven't referred to just fell out of a tree. Like, isn't there some weird Pauly Shore one that looks like crap?

Like, there's so, like, why is it, it's viewed as so special and, oh, if I could only touch

the magic orb that is Pinocchio but then it just gets cranked out by weird bizarre foreign animation studios and brand like voiced listlessly by people who aren't paying attention like the mix of special and not special of pinocchio i don't understand david you've seen that the polyshore pinocchio trailer right i have seen it of course uh you are he's like, but dad, right? Like, you know, that's... Dad, I want to be a real boy.

The one element, though, I think has some influence, whether people know it or not, is that this Pinocchio has been in the public domain for a long time. Oh, yeah. Yes.

Like, since 1940, I read. It it's a very very old book it was released in 1883 so yes it is uh it is in the public domain the copyrights that exist on this are essentially only the copyrights that disney has on elements like jiminy cricket or like these specific songs the most confounding element of this movie to me, without fail, is that they cut three songs from the original movie for this. Yeah, no Little Wooden Boy.

Four new songs that don't exist. Like the song that were, like the bonding of Geppetto and Pinocchio. And they put a different song in that's just, I think the song's called Pinocchio, Pinocchio. Correct. That's the Holy Smokio song. Oh, okay, okay.

Which Tom Hanks famously refuses to sing on screen. It's a thing like with Toy Story that he like turned it down three times because he was like, I don't do musicals. And Pixar had to be like, no songs, no songs. Right. Oh, so him singing that little song in two is a big deal. A huge deal. Huge deal. You got a friend. He talks about that, like that two is a big deal that he sings this version of You Got a Friend.

He talks about that, like that it was a huge deal. And he actually, despite being like, I can't sing, does basically give it like the old college try in Toy Story 2. Whereas this, it feels like Alan Silvestri and Glenn Ballard presented him songs and he was like, no, I'm going to talk this. I'm not even going to talk this rhythmically. The last thing I want to do is get into territory that I seek to avoid on our podcast, which if you don't listen to our show, it's about theme parks in theory,

but we end up talking about a lot of other bullshit. Pop culture ephemera, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I feel like I have to reveal that Glenn Ballard, who you mentioned, who's worked with Sylvester and other things, I forget what. Did all the Polar Express songs as well with Sylvester and Zanuckis. Oh, wow. Oh, my God.

Hot Chocolate was the same team. We got it. Hot Chocolate. We got it. They also together wrote all the original songs for the Back to the Future musical. Oh, weird. Oh, I don't know much about that. It's transferring to

New York next year, most likely. It will be with us. We'll be there opening night. It has both Huey Lewis songs, Earth Angel, Johnny B. Goode, and then like 20 new Silvestri Ballard songs. Which, if this is any indication,

I'm a little nervous but the uh i mean his name jumped out at me from the from the pop career and i was looking at like what are his things jagged little pill alanis morris that was him he's the writer producer of wilson phillips hold on but relevant to us and one of uh the pagas reg specifically. He is the co-writer and producer of Aerosmith's Pink. Oh, boy. Wrote these original songs. Pink when I turn out the lights or whatever. I remember that one.

Honestly, a great song. Bad Boys in Boston. Playing in Disney World right now outside loudly. They never played on the ride. It's not one of the ones in rotation. Not on the ride,

but outside in the common, like the area, children are just listening to the song Pink by Aeros pink by children are hearing it as they walk to the adjacent lightning mcqueen racing academy david do you know that there's an aerosmith roller coaster at disney no i did not know that and it's like you're why why well well mike would you like to feel this i'm not even asking in a mad way i'm just i don't understand uh there were they were they went to a couple different bands there's different rumors and it's hard to tell exactly which ones are true of which band like they may have gone

to the rolling stones i forget did they go to kiss is that a weird rumor i remember but it was also it came out of this era where now director breck eisner was taken to the disney parks with his father michael eisner as like a cynical teen i don't know if breck has something to do with roll a rock and roller coaster i'm not giving breck credit but i feel like it's the long tail effect of that sort of attitude of we need things my son would think is cool and the idea of like let's have a really fast roller coaster with a cool band yeah and i and then of course it was like in their 50s aerosmith and then that was the coolest band disney knew about at the time who you find david in the line like you go to an exclusive recording

studio session with aerosmith where they are recording Walk This Way again. Is that just the Paris one? I forget. No, no, they're recording Walk This Way, yeah. And Ken Marino is their engineer and Ileana Douglas is their manager. Yes. And she's like, you guys forgot

that you have to go to an award show in five minutes. Is it a concert? It's a concert, yeah. So the premise of the ride is you have to go to an award show in five minutes. Is it a concert? It's a concert, yeah. So the premise of the ride is you have to take their super fast car. It's a super stretch limo, of course. And they hook you up because you know how we feel about our fans.

Our fans gotta go. We love our fans. We love a constant stream of our fans coming into our recording studio when we are recording one of our biggest hits again. 20 years after the fact. This pre-ride video, David, there's a moment where Steven Tyler is like, oh, no, I forgot about it. And he puts his hand over his forehead like this, but he does the shocker. And no one noticed for many years. Not the shocker. You're doing the devil horns. He did the shocker and no one noticed no no no many years not the shock you're doing the devil horns

he did the shocker as in he did yes he does sex yeah two in the pink one in the sting yes no one knows for 20 years and then disney digitally added fingers to make him have a flat hand like a year with all uh you know apologies to pinocchio that is my favorite disney cgi moment steven tyler's digital censored hand scott you are uh uh you're not thinking about i can't wait to share a beer with my son when he turns 21 you're like i can't wait till my son's older and i can explain this ride to him. Hopefully it'll still be there. Oh, yeah.

I just want to tweet about this or post this on the Reddit. But just the like, what are some of your favorite examples of clear last minute studio notes? And it's the scene where Lampwick and Pinocchio are on the ride. They're boarding the ride. Campwick and Pinocchio are on the ride. They're boarding the ride. And there are, if you watch it with closed captions, seven different boys saying different lines, reestablishing that it is root beer that they're drinking.

It says like, boy one, hey, that root beer looks good. Boy two, give me that root beer. Boy three, can't have enough of this root beer. They just like had added so many lines to underline because in the original i think they are drinking beer right they yes i think it's pleasure island for god's sake smoking cigars how else do you know that they're being bad i mean the smashing is bad and look contempt corner i can't imagine a darker thing in this it seemed like contempt corner maybe their comment on social media is that what they're trying to tell us everybody

getting in a camera and give me i hate you you stink contempt corner was also where i was watching this movie from at that point in the movie they did i I do feel bad for the kid playing Lampwick because that hair and the makeup and whatever drab clothes, they did him so dirty to go like, and this kid's a little rat. Like, this kid's a bad little fucker. I mean, they literally did him dirty.

They just fucking rolled him around and soot. Let me say this. I like all the Contempt Corner stuff, and I like the Pleasure Island. I like being in Pleasure Island And I will say this I believe I like the most pieces of this movie of all of us There are things that I liked

As audiovisual entertainment What did you like? The kids smashing the clocks I liked I liked the kids looting a store I thought that was really funny I liked all of this nonsense here And in addition I liked Them on the, but I did like all the kids being bad.

They found some funny ways for them to be G rated bad. Well, this was before when we were on the way to recording this, the trailer dropped and we all texted about it. And Mike, you were the one who said, I think it might be good. You threw that out there based on some based on somehow thing materials in the trailer cleo's fuck me eyes there was the the attractive there was an attractive fish in there that did not play into my my thought that maybe the movie would be better or or not bad i'm not saying the movie's not bad don't get like i'm

not i was curious where you landed because you came in thinking and we were wondering will this be an episode a kind of thing that happens a lot on podcast the ride where you become a staunch defender something that strikes everyone a little odd and I was like but I'm watching it and like this isn't even this won't get Mike fully I know you're not

gonna Glenn Ballard or no Glenn Ballard and I don't want to overtake the whole conversation here but but if I'm just gonna lay out my cards on the table for the first 10 minutes with tom hanks and geppetto i was liking the movie look i was saying the house is fun it's inviting it's tom hanks he's doing this one of his voices that he's just you know does the drop of a hat uh i liked all that stuff i liked honest john and gideon a lot i really like them i like looking at the snout the snoot of honest john and his teeth i don't understand this what you said that in the trailer your your reason for why you liked the trailer was i like

this shot and it was like a bulgy lens yeah honest john John going down into Pinocchio's POV, which I'm glad you like that in the trailer because in the film it happened 130 times. That is 100 years. In every shot of Honest John, he bent into frame like that. There's the thing Zemeckis always talks about when he did his Polar Express Beowulf Christmas Carol run where he'd just be like, and we can do anything with the camera now. There's nothing you can write that we can't film. And it feels like he's still

in that mode of like, I want to show you all the stuff we can do at a point where none of this feels exciting or novel. But with this movie in particular, it still feels like he has shots like Honest John putting his snout

right into the non-existent lens or like Pinocchio's like lying nose stretching right towards the audience where it's like you're still composing this as if it was an IMAX 3D movie where people have not seen an effect like this ever and we're going to just be wowed by the new tools at your disposal

when we're like 20 years into this shit and also your movie is going straight to disney plus like yeah that that decision is made before they shoot a moment of non-film i am wondering if uh that was also part of his impetus for shooting uh three different perspectives on a giant mound of shit that Pinocchio is. Pinocchio hovers around for a while, drops his apple next to it and picks it. He's like, oh, it didn't get touched. It didn't touch the shit. I think it's still good.

I'm not. I want to say I'm not a huge fan of the shit stuff. Yeah. It's one of those moments where a filmmaker provides the entire review critique of the movie in one image for you to just throw back in his face. Actually, three images because you had a head on and then you had a side and then you had a different head on. Yes. Yes. I should have made that my background here.

I'm going to do it now. Yeah. Find the shit up there. Griffin, what you're saying about we got to showcase the tools of the medium, that seemed to me like the entire reason for Sophia the seagull. Like when Jiminy is saying, like, I need a ride. I got to find Pinocchio. He might as well be saying, I want to go on a madcap journey through the sky where you go inside of rooms and then right outside and then right along the roof.

But you don't miss anything. And the camera is not tethered to a crane or nothing. All right. Well, I could do that. There we go. There's the shit. Sophia, the seagull, also a perfect example of one of these like Disney remakes where they're like, well, finally, we'll fix these narrative problems with the original film

that are not problems anyone ever had. Like, filling in these plot holes that no one is bothered by where they're like, well, how does Geppetto find out where Pinocchio is? We need a character who flies,

who can be there in that location, clock it, and report back to Geppetto. We need a character who can say both he has had to sell all his clocks and then earlier.

That was my takeaway. They made Lorraine Bracco get in a booth and go. Men will men will make rooms and rooms of cuckoo clocks before going to freaking therapy. It is such a weird narrative element. This movie tries to play of like this almost Finding Nemo thing of Pinocchio being like, my dad hates me. He likes clocks more. That he needs to be told that his father loves him. Mike, I almost want to agree with you in certain places where, I mean, this is like,

you know, faint praise award, But I was expecting for this to be one of the bad movies we cover that makes me, like, cosmically depressed. Whereas in reality, this movie mostly just made me tired. Well, speaking of tired, look, I have a one-month-old baby, and I watched this movie.

Congratulations. I watched this movie. Thank you. I watched this movie starting at 8 a.m. today with the baby on my lap for two hours. Yup. And the baby is very gassy and has been keeping us up a lot at night. So basically, any time I would perk up, the movie was really doing something.

So the scenes I mentioned pushed through like three hours of sleep to make me go okay all right pretty good because i also thought maybe because of all the word like that i would be like oh my god this thing that's that's what i felt like like i don't want to say it was benefiting from lowered expectations and i can't isolate like sustained scenes that I enjoyed, but there would be isolated fleeting moments where I would at least feel marginally compelled by what was happening on screen. Yeah. When I say like Honest John, I like him. The movie almost nothing to do. It's almost as if I like saw an interview on the news with somebody and I go, oh, it seems like a guy I'd like to hang out with.

You just want to hang with Honest John. Honest John is a compelling character. He is the one element of this movie that I almost feel like Zemeckis leans into the nightmarish quality of. Whereas a lot of the Pleasure Island stuff feels very sanitized to me. And it's like that's pretty much the only reason to make a live-action Pinocchio is to go full nightmare on Pleasure Island. A hundred percent. Can I show you can I show everyone this? I didn't I just remembered this that I

this is something I found on Twitter and whoever I know who made this because they posted it, but I found this a fan cam of Honest John from Pinocchio. Voiced of course by Keegan-Michael Key. I don't know how they got him. I mean it's just like that guy hates working. doing the rarest hates doing voice performance yeah you gotta drag him into a

vo booth but i yes but uh uh i found this is a quick clip but this makes me just like honest john even more here we go oh my god this is the thing that watching this like i love this guy i love this guy he at least has expressive physicality yes look at that snout it's so realistic he's i had a little i did not like this i have things to say i did not like that at all david has things to say that's sorry real quick twitter user uh kaiser niko n-e-O, is who posted that, and I assume made it. Okay, a few things. One, Mike, I apologize for bringing you on this podcast when you have a one-month-old baby

to talk about Robert Zemeckis' Pinocchio. That is horrible. You need sleep. Yeah, I do need sleep. That's true. But no, this is how I like to live my life. I enjoy this. Because I feel great shame for having done this um this isn't as bad but you

interrupted kubrick to do this stanley be quiet right a month old babe a month old father's being punished and you guys have you have some of the greatest films ever made we truly had to postpone our episode on Dr. Strange love in order to get Pinocchio in there first. Two, I don't, a couple of points. What I think the CGI in this film is technically quite proficient,

which is not that surprising for a Zemeckis movie. There's stuff that feels janky, but like things like honest John, you're like, this is not like a lazy job. You know, this is done with care. And from a design perspective, they execute Honest John better than Jiminy Cricket.

Like they lean into what's weird about him. Yeah, 100%. The design of Jiminy Cricket is disaster. That I'm not going to defend. And I also think the Pinocchio design is quite bad. It's so weird. There's something off about it. I don't know why they decided to do those there's something off about it i don't know why they

decided to do those little tweaks you know i don't know anyway but the other point is just like it is directed by robert zemeckis the movie is not incompetently made or anything like that like i sort of know what you mean about like you could watch like a scene and be like well that was fine you know nobody looked at the camera. Like, obviously he knows how to make a movie. He knows where to put the camera, basically his virtual fake camera, you know,

but there's just something like, it's like he took what I liked about Pinocchio or whatever, like, you know, what I think about Pinocchio. And then he removed even that, like even the sort of sanded off, nice Disney 1940s Pinocchio, which he removed even that like even the sort of sanded off nice Disney 1940s Pinocchio which as you guys have all said is still atmospheric and creepy and interesting

and now it's just about like an idiot like it's not even about a mischievous kid it's just about like this like perfectly guileless one day old creature that's just sort of like what should I do with myself and like a fox is like I should be an actor and he's like okay i guess i'll do that you know like there's no character they they find a way to absolve him of any agency for anything that happens in this movie until he unleashes his motorboat legs and proves to everyone that he's great because only a hero would do that he's inspected pinocchio turns into Inspector Gadget a few times in this movie. A number of times.

Yeah. But oddly late. Like, that's a pretty, that's a take. Now, that's something, but it doesn't happen to, like, an hour ten in. And then it happens a bunch.

It's such a weird balance of, for a lot of this movie, for most of this movie, you're thinking, like, Robert Zemeckis, do less challenge, right? Like, as david said he is such a technically proficient filmmaker that even when he is clearly not super invested in the material he just knows how to construct a movie right there is like a certain like smooth musicality to what he does but then when you get to his thing of just like the fucking polar express thing of like every moment feeling like it needs to be a roller coaster

right like every moment suddenly needing to be shot like a crazy action sequence with a swooping god's eye camera and all this sort of shit you're like if you scaled this back the movie immediately becomes 25 better not good but like less infuriating and then there are other things where you're just like well then why aren't you doing more here narratively if you're gonna have pinocchio occasionally have these like special powers that i almost wish you just went all the fucking way yeah he should have yeah shoot, like, wood out of his eyes or something. He should, there should be some. Little, like, splinters that, like, get in on his John's eyes.

Ah, ah, and then he can escape. Use the nose to pole vault, you know? Tell a bunch of lies and then use it to get over a fence or something. He gets set on fire three times, three or four times in the movie. And, like, yeah, let's, let's ramp that up seven, eight, boy, wooden boy on fire,

scaring people. Like, right. Like if you're going to make this an action movie, actually make an action movie. Whereas it's this weird Zemeckis thing of just like shooting mundane things as if they are an action film as if they are like spectacle. Yeah.

Right. Can I say, uh, things as if they are an action film, as if they are like spectacle. Yeah, right. Can I say there was a gag that I legitimately liked and I thought was pretty funny. And it comes so, so close to the end of the movie when they're in Monstro and Geppetto throws Pinocchio like a rope with a plank of wood on it and just like beams him, like just nails his ass. That I thought was very funny. But then immediately like deflated by Hanks being like, I threw a piece of wood at the boy made out of wood. And I'm like, that's not a joke. What did you guys think of you did all of that in one day?

That's sort of his big joke at the end there. You know what? I weirdly... I didn't hate that. I don't like the meta nature of it or the commentary nature of it, but you know what I liked about it is that finally Tom Hanks feels like

he's doing a Tom Hanks thing. He's even sitting, watching him be in this weird character box for a whole movie, and then that felt like him being kind of funny and flustered. That was like 80s Tom Hanks. So i liked it for that actually yeah uh conversely uh a moment i let out an auditory like oh was when the guy the guy who was taking them to pleasure island starts hopping around on

top of everyone going like play play it's time to play. And I'm like, oh, no, not this. That and the moment where Jiminy Cricket is listening to the Blue Fairy talk. There's like a moment where he's holding his umbrella and I forget what they were trying to convey, but it looked like he knocked over his umbrella because he got a boner and I had to keep rewinding it. And I think it's solely like

he just gets startled by something, but his hands go in front of his crotch. Zemeckis is weirdly horny. We talked about this a lot when we were deep in it. It does, it comes up a lot, yeah. There is that joke in this movie where someone asked Jiminy about he made a boy out of wood,

and it's like, well, I guess there's another way to do it but gebetto doesn't get out much something for the parents though now i appreciate stuff like months ago you would have hated that joke but now now i get a little it's a little wink toward me and what i what's happened in my life mike how did you how did you feel about Joseph Gordon-Levitt constantly, constantly referring to him as Pinoc? Well, he does that in the original movie, doesn't he? He does. He does.

That's a Jiminy Cricket-ism. I'll say this too, because I watched the original movie, whatever it was, like two years ago. I watched it a couple of times when I was trying to work on my self-tape for this. And from my memory, and then I checked to like verify this in the original film,

it does seem to be pretty clearly established that it is multiple days. So like, yeah, the, the sort of making the joke about you did all of that in one day, isn't even a, we're making fun of how weird it is the original movie takes place over one day. They're making fun of themselves for making a change to the story.

But the thing that does seem to be one day in the original film is the time Geppetto spends with Pinocchio. Like essentially he creates him at night. The next morning he sends him off to school. Pinocchio is lost. He has like a combined 12 hours with Pinocchio before Pinocchio goes missing. And this film, especially when we're talking about this thing of like, the biggest human role in a Pinocchio movie is Geppetto. And the problem is, if you want to stunt cast that, there's no reason for him to be in most of the film. There is nothing for him to do for most of the running time.

Even if you're going to send him out with a little lantern searching for Pinocchio, it's kind of a thankless role outside of the beginning and the end. In this, Jiminy Cricket just fucking talks over a montage that lasts for 10 seconds where he was like, and then they had a good family unit and they spent months and months together being very happy until the one day he decided to send him off to school. And I'm like, you're just breezing over the stuff you could have had Hanks do do and it seems very cold that all of a sudden i think you need to go to school and what did he do why is he mad at him why you didn't show us right it's this thing of just like it seems like a weird family but they got along pretty well until one day and then it's this

attitude of like geppetto seems to resent pinocchio. Pinocchio's aware of the fact that his father doesn't love him enough because he's not real. And, you know, the whole thing with Pinocchio is obviously always this thing of like, Pinocchio has to learn his lessons in order to become a good boy, a real human boy as a reward. And this

movie ends on this note of like, you've shown your character so much that you're more real than most boys who aren't made out of wood. You shouldn't want to be a real boy. You're better than real boys because you have motor legs. So fuck every other boy then? Every other boy is bad. And then you see half a second of him turning real and Cricket talks to the camera and he's like, I don't know.

Some people say he turned real. I don't know if I believe that. See you later, folks. I was mad at that and annoyed by that, but then I remembered that because of that rushed ending, I got to stop watching the movie. Right. I was very thankful for it, ultimately.

Yeah, yeah, I love it. Perfect ending. A friend of the podcast, Ray Tintori, I was hanging out with him when you texted me about how bad this film was, David. And Ray was just like, how is it possible that it's that bad? Like, the original film is so weird. If you rewatch the original Disney film, it's weird and dark enough that if you're actually doing just a very straight remake of that, it should be more compelling than a lot of these Disney remakes.

And beyond that, he was just like, there's the one slam dunk moment. There is no possible way Zemeckis fucks up, which is when they first start turning into the donkeys. And then you watch this and it's like, he botches it beyond belief. He really screws it up. And I was having that feeling

as I was watching this movie and not really enjoying it and feeling like, why is everything so bright and kind of cheerful and just sort of one note. And then I was like, well, but the pleasure Island stuff turning into the donkeys, that's so intense. It has to click for 10 minutes,

right? It feels like an inconvenience in this movie at best, like that they're turning into donkey. It barely feels like partly because nothing in this movie feels real, guess so like turning into donkey i'm like just like well one unreal thing is turning into another unreal thing oh as opposed to i mean obviously the first one didn't feel real because it was animated but it was like the best looking cartoon like a shocking level of visual improvement of anything anybody had ever seen So there was that visceral feeling any viewers got in 1940. But now, like, who hasn't seen hundreds of movies that roughly look like this?

A bizarre decision also to make it that, like, oh, for Pinocchio, he'll start turning into a donkey puppet. Right. Yes. Don't like that. Like, in the Disney film, he gets organic animal donkey ears and tail. And in this, he's like, why is my wooden tail now gray? Also right before is one of the craziest

line reads I've ever heard, which is Lampwick. Pinocchio is kind of complaining about you shouldn't yell when somebody's taken a pool shot. And the kid says, it's something like uh why not psyching out your opponents is a great strategy you put the emphasis on g and what x where are you from and are you a 20s boy are you because then there's other times where he does a little asides that

are just he passes by contempt corner and he goes like i like those guys yeah those guys are good i don't know what bizarre strategy have you ptr guys seen uh the walk i watched only because of blank check i watched just the beginning and oh my god what a what a gift you gave. I recommend that. Just the beginning is not what you should watch. Oh, I loved it. But I almost think that this, that is the film that this is most similar to in his career, where it's like, there is already an excellent movie version of this story.

You are now retelling it with a bizarre heightened tone, this constant feeling of like weird CGI artificiality, this like totally tone deaf Joseph Gordon-Levitt performance with a shaky voice narrating this entire film to you as if you're charmed. But I'm watching this movie much like David, where I'm just like, well, much like The Walk, where in the middle of this movie that is not really connecting, you get this 10 minute bravura sequence. Like, the walk itself in the walk is phenomenal.

It's like Zemeckis at the top of his powers. And I'm like, when they get to Pleasure Island, he's going to start just fucking hitting homers. We're just going to get 10 minutes of weird fucking Zemeckis nightmare fuel. And you're right, David. It feels like an obligation. Yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Right. There's not a lot of joy for this material in general it feels like there's a little bit of joy for the character designs but like they don't even really fully commit to the original songs they basically don't let them play out in full no they seem disturbed by the original songs or whatever they yeah they think they're not cool or something i don't know They cut three of them. Mike, you pointed out that there's some, quote unquote, original IP in Geppetto's cuckoo clock wall.

That 90% of them are restagings of Disney films, but there are a few original ones. I believe almost all the ones that are not based on Disney movies are from the original Disney film. But a couple of them, I know there's the one where there's the mother spanking her child or a nun spanking a child, and then there's a policeman

behind them with like a billy club waiting to arrest the nun is a cuckoo clock from the original film, but they add the policeman to say, we obviously don't condone child abuse like this modern Disney event the solution was, we obviously don't condone child abuse. Like this modern Disney bent. The solution

was, we don't like child, so a police officer will come in and make everything bent. We'll stop the... Don't worry, kids. Don't worry. The carceral state is here. Don't put that fucking cuckoo clock in the film then. No one's making

you put this on screen, let alone put it on and go like, but we want to show where our moral stance is on this cuckoo clock. This is the stuff Disney's worried about is the cuckoo clock being right and being moral. And they want to make sure Krusty the Clown's Super 7 toy doesn't have a cigarette. Mike, you and I could spend 15 minutes ranting about this. It's a big problem. This is what they're worried about. They got rid of the alternate cigarette hand. They got rid of the alternate smoking head they got rid of mr teeny cigar this is a 55 adult collectible correct this is going direct to consumer it's not going to sell at retail no and that's what they yeah they've had to put in answering this for who are you

censoring this for is the answer it's not censored is the answer. It's not censored on Disney+. It's not. Should we talk about the other primary original character in this film, which is Pinocchio's love interest, a woman who wants to, I don't know, abolish the UCB and build a more sustainable model for reformers who communicates with Pinocchio with Pinocchio through a puppet

who he's in love with. Like a more like a more equitable Mitzi Shore. Like what are we thinking that runs a theater of some kind or a club.

This other version of the fucking Disney remake thing where it's like we have to make these films a little more progressive. You know we have to update them to modern times and the

things we didn't know back then so you're talking about um fabiana and sabina yes yes right the it's not quite the you know girl who loves stem character but it's sort of that equivalent right like i want to create a more moral uh ethical entertainment industry where we can kick abusers out. And it's just like, yeah, no one likes Stromboli. What the fuck are you talking about? He's not a great manager. We don't need you to say, like, we need to build a better

industry without Stromboli figures, where the artists have a stake in their own material. I'm going to be honest with you. I saw this movie. I'm going to say I saw this movie days before I went to Toronto So I'm gonna say like 10 or 11 days ago I think it was exactly like two weeks ago Might be two weeks

The minute you mentioned it I remembered But I completely forgot about this That this happens in this movie That there's this character And all of this going on She comes back I have just spaced on this Because you just went and watched

Like you watched How many movies have you watched since you watched Pinocchio? Like 22 movies. Oh, my God. David, you're also likely fatigued because you spent so many hours standing up and clapping. Of course. This is what we've learned.

19 minutes. 19 minutes. Start the stopwatch. They're going. They're going. We're what we've learned. 19 minutes. 19 minutes. Start the stopwatch. They're going. They're going. We're going to the record. Start the stopwatch. White noise deserves more.

That's the shame is, David, you were at TIFF for what? Like five days? Yeah, five, six days. And a full three of those days were just spent in standing ovations. You could have seen so many more films. I need to sleep. I was screaming as I keep going. Let me out of here.

I got to do it. I got to do it for the Fablemans. The security guards are like wedging a chair underneath the doorknob outside. You can't leave the theater until the standing O is done. And spikes shoot up from the seats. You're not allowed to sit back down. Tears your butt up. Sam Mendes, like,

slow walking to the stage being like, keep it going! Like, I'm not taking the stage until we hit ten minutes at the very least. Ironically, this movie, one movie,

has more tragedy packed into it than all of the films you saw at that film festival. Well, like, this fucking Fabiana character is just like so overloaded with like, okay, a pressed performer, right? Right. And an unjust system who also was a ballerina who cannot dance anymore because of some unclear debilitating injury or illness that affect her leg. So now she's able to only dance through the puppet. injury or illness that affect her leg so now she's able to only dance through the puppet is this a a disease from childhood or did she sprain her leg a month right right is it a forrest

gump thing or is it like right a temporary injury uh and then right has this weird relationship with pinocchio where he's in love with her puppet, seemingly not kind of understanding that the puppet isn't real. He like understands that she's his friend, but the puppet he has the hots for. It's so confusing because the end of the movie, the message is like, you're a boy. If you act like a boy, you're a boy. That's the message.

So it's like, why would he be in love with a puppet who is not sentient? Yeah. Yeah, I also feel like the original film has more of this element of like Honest John being like the snake in the garden of evil. And once you give in to him, you're on like a doom ride, right? And it's like Honest John gives him over to Stromboli. He also gives him over to the fucking Coachman.

Like everything bad that happens to Pinocchio is some way orchestrated by Honest John. Whereas like he has a much smaller role in this film. He feels just like a shitty talent agent who you work with at the beginning of your career. And then his hands are like. That agent thing that's like, oh my God, stop it. Stop it. These jokes started in, were there agent jokes with the Marx Brothers? Like what?

This is the most ancient thing to do. And the influencer comment. Yeah. Oh, influencer. But then it's sort of like the coachman thing, he sort of just stumbles backwards into Stromboli, who is played by just a good Italian actor. One of these things where you're just like,

yeah, because you're just like, they cast a guy. Giuseppe Battista. He's got like 18 David DiNotello awards to his name. This is a guy who doesn't have to fucking balance

his own movie star persona with the demands of this role. They can just put a big fake beard on him. He can speak in his real accent and just play an evil man. Like, it's what you need out of these roles.

It was nice when he was on screen doing, he like did a monologue and just a human actor carried the film for 30 seconds. Like we got to take a break from cuts and seagulls going in and out a window. Like, wow, the power of a man talking. A lens had to be affixed to a camera. He had to memorize that chunk of dialogue. I think Luke Evans is having a slight amount of fun.

I think he is the only thing that makes the Pleasure Island sequence feel a little bit menacing. Yeah, my issue, not enough of him. He just kind of pops in, yeah. But it's also like

in the original film, it does feel like, as we've said, Pinocchio makes these choices driven by bad impulses he needs to understand like learn a sort of moral compass whereas in this everyone's like pinocchio you should be famous and he's like i don't know i guess so like he never feels like he wants any of the things that are being hoisted upon him it's this thing we're talking about where it just makes Pinocchio like an idiot, right? This guileless idiot who just stumbles into things.

And that he never fully, he's never fully in love with Pleasure Island. He never has the temptation. Yeah, yeah, like he's fully on board. And drinking and smoking. I think that was maybe, like, he gave in to, like, greed and this shady career, and now he has a problem, and then he gets punished for it. It reads a little better than he's never, he doesn't really want to do any of it.

This is the problem with modern Disney and the rules is you can't do that stuff. Even though there's telling little boys not to smoke cigars, Disney doesn't want to portray a cool little boy like Pinocchio smoking a cigar. Even if it's saying it's bad. You can't show Wolverine can't smoke a cigar. Krusty the Clown's toy can't smoke a cigarette. Even though Krusty is not a role model. I never said I was a role model. That's just my impression of Krusty saying he's a role model.

For how much Disney seems obsessed with conforming these films to these very standard sort of screenwriting narratives. These sort of save the cat. Here's how you set up a character. Here's how they grow. Here's how they learn and change. Pinocchio does not grow, learn, or change at all in this film. The onus is entirely on Geppetto

to learn how to love him, basically, right? Pinocchio is just sort of like this weird, like impartial guy getting like, you know, kicked around from one plot point to another. And I saw they screened Sleeping Beauty in 70 millimeter at the Museum of Moving Image here in New York City, which is just like rarely for a studio that used to be famous for re-releasing their movies in theaters every year. It is so hard to ever see like a film print of a Disney animated film scream now. You watch Sleeping Beauty, which is this like incredible, bizarre work of art. And there's something to that movie, which I also think exists in the original Pinocchio, most of the first like

20 or 30 years of Disney animation, where those movies like don't have credited screenwriters. They were written through storyboard, basically with a team of animators looking at whatever original material they were adapting and then going like, okay, so what should the big sequences be? And then they work out the big sequences. And so you get these things where like

big narrative beats are sort of brushed over, but you'll have like a 15 minute sequence of the three fairy godmothers in sleeping beauty trying to figure out how to build a cake because the animators are like well this is fun and interesting and visually compelling or whatever but now they go backwards and these sequences are kind of slavishly recreated and but then with a bunch of we got to get all that bunch of, we got to get all that screenwriter-y stuff in there now. We got to put all the screenwriter-y bullshit on top of it. Right. Which, like, sucks the joy out of the things

that, as, like, a child, you'd be eerily fascinated by, where you're like, this sequence is just weird movement and emotions and, like, physical comedy for 10 minutes with no plot drive. Yeah, nothing, I mean, nothing, nothing is made a I mean, nothing,

nothing is made a meal of like the donkey stuff. It's like, as a child, that'll haunt you forever. And no kid is ever going to remember the donkeys. Like they're not going to be haunted by the donkey stuff that the nothing is, nothing is going to haunt them from this movie. They might like it. It's so fast.

And so many of them get dumped in trap doors with smoke monsters, and it's dark and smeary. Can someone remind me, too, because we mentioned Honest John and Pinocchio earlier. Does Pinocchio, in the original movie,

Pinocchio sings an actor's life for me for a bit, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. He doesn't in this movie, though. Oh, right.

Does he? That's weird. Yeah. I don't think... Yeah. And I always thought that... I have always thought, like... I'm wondering if this is what Walt Disney really believed at actors, that they're suckers

and they're very slight people and they're like mostly children being fooled into this like exploitative industry which he helped run but I just thought that was very strange because in this movie it's just like a fun little number that

Honest John gets to do while like hopping down the street. Well and that they give Wish Upon a Star mostly to the fairy godmother, the blue fairy rather than Jiminy Cricket. I mean, taking that song away from Pinocchio feels like them saying, well, he doesn't enjoy acting. It's not like he's like falling into the allure of fame. People just pushed him to do it.

He's like an unwilling child actor. Doesn't he have to? Yeah. It's so weird. I think in the original cartoon, he was mostly just mimicking. Like, he's, like, just trying out, like, well, this is what this guy told me to do,

and he seems nice. Right. But then he, like, has to get the bug a little bit. You know? Yeah. He has to be lured into temptation. I could tell that he was sitting still in that phone call because there wasn't a loud chirp with each movement that he made. That seems to be a lot of like Robert Zemeckis' excitement over being able to do a modern Pinocchio is like, oh, we'll add in noises of clanking every time Pinocchio does anything.

Oh, we'll add in noises of clanking every time Pinocchio does anything. We'll try to more realistically realize how annoying it would be for someone made out of wood to move a lot. Where are we going to get all of these cricket sounds? Like, how are we going to be able to have enough variety? Well, what if we tell a joke about Chris Pine and then just record what any audience does after we play it? Fucking Christ. This odd, like, I want it to just be exactly like the 1940s movie, but also put as many meta modern day references. And sort of just like self-knowing, like, we're stepping out to comment on the movie from a modern perspective. The Pine thing is beyond the pic it's all california adventure aladdin it's all like it like it's too

it has to make a topical reverence genius but then more of it i think it stands i think it's strange that there's one and that it's not something honest john is doing a lot it makes it a weird influencer is sort of a new, like, there's a few more. That's, Pine is the most egregious one. People did not like that. That was hitting Twitter. I saw that. People griping about Influencer. Yeah, I hate that. If I can just

contribute my opinion. Oh, yo, that's your take? Uh, I gotta say, I don't really like looking at Pinocchio. No! He's got a cartoon face. He's got a cartoon face he's got a cartoon he's cartoon face they decided not to go anything that looked like the rest of the characters and he has a painted on cartoon face from the original movie yeah uh i it's a real sense of unease comes over me if i look at him too long that said if he had hit the dab i would have liked that i would 100 were you

screaming that at the screen dab come on you're getting us you're getting applause you're getting standing applause like you're at a film festival from this crowd hit the dab they'll go crazy i saw i mean it's much like the the lion king remake on an opposite end where it's like, if you make these lions look completely realistic, you cannot make them expressive in the way that actually gives you the value of this film being animated. There's the opposite problem with this movie where it's like he is too directly based off the original Disney design in a way that does not actually translate to quote unquote live action. And I saw some animators I follow pointing out, and it's a subtle thing, but it is a big thing that fucks up his expressiveness. Because I'm just looking here, like in our Zoom grid, Mike's Zoom background is a photo of Paul Thomas Anderson next to a photoshopped image of original Disney hand-drawn Pinocchio

with sunglasses and a goatee added to look like Robert Downey Jr. Thomas Anderson next to a photoshopped image of original Disney hand-drawn Pinocchio with sunglasses and a goatee added to look like Robert Downey Jr. from the announcement of the time that Paul Thomas Anderson was going to make that movie. I'm glad you said that because I was like, why does Pinocchio have Godard glasses on? It's RDJ Pinocchio. And then below him, David has his Zoom background as Pinocchio now looking at a couple turds. So you're like looking at basically hand-drawn Pinocchio and then CGI Pinocchio right on top of each other from my vision. And a big thing that fucks up the Pinocchio design in this movie is that his eyes do not have circles around them. That they are not outlined.

Where it's like, well, well yes because that's like an animation thing he's got outlines around every part of his body to differentiate where those things are and they're almost like well you wouldn't need to outline it because you could just paint white on those spots of the wood but it does make his face kind of just like slide off there's also something where if you know what I'm talking about, like the way his cheeks, his cheeks have this unnatural kind of fuzzy line. That's like, if you're trying to make a gradient in Photoshop or a similar program and you don't do it exactly smoothly. So there's kind of this, this jagged, uh, I wouldn't, I wouldn't know how to put it in proper design terms, but his face looks like a badly done gradient

that's fuzzing out. Also, when they close up on his face and you see their approximation of wood grain, the texture on his body and his skin, his non-skin, as it were, I'm like, it looks like the fucking wooden floors in the first Toy Story. It truly looks like they just took, like, a medium-res wallpaper from, like, Windows 95 and just mapped it over this model.

Yeah, it's, when they, he has a single, he brings Geppetto back to life with a single tear at the end of the movie. That close-up. And the close-up on that is so weird too close and then geppetto spits up he gets out the rid of the water that was blocking his pipe and the spit has magic in it he tom hanks spits magic spit and then at the beginning there's a weird before i think it's before the blue fairy actually appears in the room. The way Pinocchio comes to life is that she from afar sprays a hose of magic onto a photo of a dead child. Right.

Banks like a trick shot off of the dead child. Weird. That's how he comes. Instead of like a glow the way the first one did it. The magic in this movie is like an MCU energy beam. And then also she has to like

use the photo as a reflective surface to like channel the magic energy into the right spot. And fuse a little bit. And God knows we need more movies with blue sky beams. There have not been enough

movies over the last decade with blue magic shooting up into or coming down from the sky. And having weird like sparks flying off of it. Children love it. They love the sky beams. Children love the digital photo process. Notice HDR. They're going wild for it. That's how these live action remakes keep getting remade. But it's also one of these things, when you talk about this movie being in such a hurry that it doesn't actually enjoy any of the beats it feels contractually obligated to go through from the

original film, it's this inexplicable thing about all these fucking remakes where you're like, it's 30 minutes longer and yet feels rushed. The things they are adding largely, outside of things like Puppet Lady, feel like, where is this fat? I can feel it.

But it's not like they're tangibly adding any extra material. You scan through it. The moment Pinocchio comes to life in this movie is minute 19. Ooh. I believe he- And isn't all of that, isn't everything,

until, you know, Jiminy probably gets in the house at minute, from minute one to two or something. Right. Everything else is just in that house. You're in the house. You're at Geppetto's workshop for so long. And I guess part of it is just like we need to give Hank something to do. There has

to be something. The second Pinocchio's born, his character immediately becomes less important. But the original movie, I want to scrub through here, but I believe he meets Honest John at minute 10. The original movie is

probably only like 80 minutes, right? It's pretty short. Oddly short, yeah. You know what? I'm proven incredibly wrong here, and this is wild, and it defies logic. He's making Pinocchio like minute two pinocchio

comes to life minute 16 in the original film because he's around the puppet boy is around for a while right that's the thing there's more of like geppetto playing with the puppet and talking to him and connecting with him as the son he doesn't have rather than adding this sort of dead wife and dead child that has never gotten over. That is a good, that is a good, um, what they did in this version is they made your pedal less of the saddest maniac they could,

which is what I like about Geppetto. I mean, I like Geppetto. I understand why I would love to play Geppetto. The more we talk about this, I do realize that I do want to play Geppetto i mean i like geppetto i understand why i would love to play geppetto the more we talk about this i do realize that i do want to play geppetto because he's out of his mind it's a sad character but like oh like doing the voice doing the like all of that nonsense is fun and i do think they took something away from tom angst who could have been able to portray a man at the edge at the edge of sanity oh yeah he's not teetering even in his despair he has it together too much you need that like oh he's losing his mind whenever he talks griffin you've

seen griffin and david have you seen this clip scott unearthed this clip years ago now on our podcast oh i was i was gonna plug it at the end i was gonna be my plug no no by all means let's talk about it now yeah there's this like because if you're talking about uh pinocchio material you prefer i might feel free to explain it but it's great i mean it's the great actor avery schreiber uh doing uh uh and a disney special yes uh uh a A version of Japan that is so out of his mind. And he's talking to himself and talking to every other object and telling these odd stories about, Oh,

Pinocchio, when I give you a bath, you warp. And when I gave you a spanking, Oh, it gave me so many blisters. And then he sings this bizarre song while making himself a new friend because pinocchio isn't coming home for the holidays and then at the end the reveal is that he's made

himself a new geppetto himself who he kisses on the mouth i think this is fantastic it's fantastic we won't repost it after but check this clip i love the every shri Every Shriver's top Geppetto to me. Yeah, but they took that away from Tom to be able to play into a little bit more of his damage and how he's being able to work it out, work out his issues. And then it also feels like, I mean, they cut back to him a couple times being bereft and searching for Pinocchio,

fighting against the elements of the weather and whatever but none of it feels very active and then there is just this thing of like geppetto gets swallowed by the whale pinocchio has this moment where he has to decide to save him pinocchio becomes a superhero at the last moment and then he's dead he's floating in a puddle right the classic classic image to convey one being tired after a day's work on twitter.com. Right. The dead floating Pinocchio corpse. People like, oh, FML.

Right, right. I direct this question to David because I know Jason, Mike and Scott know this exists and have talked about it before. David, are you at all familiar with the existence of Geppetto, the 2000 TV movie? No, I am not.

What is that? There was a live-action Disney Pinocchio movie done for the wonderful world of Disney. I'm vaguely aware of this because I think I knew that Julia Louis-Dreyfus had played the Blue Fairy.

True Carrie plays Geppetto. It was original songs written by Stephen Schwartz. It was a wholly original musical that was not obsessively beholden to the original Disney film. It was designed to be a Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews reunion,

with Julie Andrews playing the Blue Fairy and Dick Van Dyke as Geppetto. That was the whole existence of this project. And it got far along. Julie Andrews had her throat surgery, couldn't perform, and they, like, decided to do it

with sitcom stars instead. It is not a great movie. How do you get to that? What a strange leap. Yes, it's bizarre. But it's, like, a full musical, and it does feel like

that one sort of is, like, we're going to focus more on Geppetto. We're going to make Geppetto an active character. The hunt for Pinocchio, this father's quest, like, Finding Nemo style, where we can sort of, like, we're going to focus more on Geppetto. We're going to make Geppetto an active character. The hunt for Pinocchio, this father's quest, like Finding Nemo style, where we can sort of like bifurcate the narrative

and show both of them going on these journeys until they reunite at the end. I kind of auditioned some of the 2022 Pinocchio to see if my wife wanted to watch more of it. She bailed at five minutes, Understandably, I did it solo. But we, at that decision point, we were like, oh, we got to put on. We got to do Drew Carey, right? We like dove for the song Since I Gave My Heart Away,

a ballad belted out by Drew Carey. This is the other thing. I think it's a better song. I agree. Yes. That movie is better. Even as a child, like a 10-year-old,

11-year-old, whatever, who was obsessed with the Drew Carey show, I thought that movie was not very good when it premiered. It is inarguably better than this. It weirdly feels like Drew Carey had more of a take on Geppetto in that he didn't go for the lunacy

of what you're talking about, Mike. He didn't go full Avery Schreiber. Right, right, right. He actually was like, I'm going to play this like a real guy. I'm going to play the emotional honesty of this man being bereft at the thought of his child being out in the world in danger. And like Drew Carey can't really sing. He put a lot more energy into those songs than hanks who's just like i fundamentally

refuse to even attempt to hit any notes on any of these your songs will be spoken staccato he you it means so much to drew carrey you can tell and it's really it's sweet as he tries to like my heart away yes cannot get there but the song is heartfelt and you know he loves to. Here's full declaration. Better songs in that, since I gave my heart away. The Geppetto, he sings this weird song today that I think is better than anything in this one. And then there's this weird Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night non-Disney filmation cartoon from 87. Yes.

Where Ricky Lee Jones sings a bizarre creepy song that is also better than anything. There's been a lot of actually solid Pinocchio songs in Not the One We Know. The Stephen Schwartz songs in Geppetto are pretty good. Other castings in Geppetto by the way, David,

Brent Spiner plays Tromboli. Cool. That sounds good. He's good I guess Yeah Usher Raymond plays like The ringmaster of Pleasure Island Of course He still does to this day

Honestly If you think of you know Just the entertainment world As Pleasure Island I want to tell you that Scott Grimes was the voice of Pinocchio In that 1987 version And James Earl Jones was the emperor of the night.

Just look that up. Wow. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Scott Grimes again. Who's Scott Grimes? He's, he was in like party of five and ER.

He's like a guy. I don't know. He must've just been child Scott Grimes. Are there any final thoughts on this movie from any of us? Well, you know, I, I knew i knew uh from my memory as a child that this would be a little unnerving and i know scott's not the biggest fan of pinocchio so i wanted to try to make it a little more palatable so i fed a prompt into an ai bot uh to see what would happen this is all the rage now these ai bots you can tell them to make art and um it didn't it didn't exactly uh go as planned uh my prompt was peter pan and pinocchio eating ice cream sundaes in a Fry's Electronics parking lot. So something for me, ice cream, something for Scott, Fry's Electronics.

Very obsessed with this. And another thing for Scott, Pinocchio, his favorite character in all of fiction. Well, Pinocchio and Pan. Yeah. So this is what I got. Oh, these faces. The eyes. Ah, the eye flyer.

What's wrong with the eyes? No. Those, okay. They're all melting. What's wrong with these boys? It's the AI thing. They always look like they're melting.

I don't know why. Jason, please text us something so we can post it on our social media when this comes out. I absolutely will. Yeah. These are modern

freak boy children. They're likely the background actors in the Pleasure Island sequence. But why does that, the black and white one, why does one kind of look like John Mulaney? That's a good question.

We didn't even mention our badges either. I forgot, Griffin. Well, of course, this movie was the premiere S ticket, E ticket, Disney Plus Day debut, right?

Of course, the national holiday of Disney Plus Day. This was the big original film. And Jason went through the trouble of mailing David and I Disney Plus Day pins, which he said he had lying around. He texted me to say, can i please

get this from you uh i'm not gonna send them to scott and mike and we can do a bit about them feeling left out check out this swag sure is this the bit are we doing the bit now i scott and mike i i i gave you these badges at the end of November 2021 when I was freshly back from Disney World, and I just assumed you would have been wearing them in excitement of celebrating this year's Disney. Plus, Mike, you just moved and had a baby. Surely you know where this button is. You turned over the calendar.

Disney Plus Day is circled in blue. Oh, yeah. The button that I ended up with five or six of them because my family went like do you want these i don't want to take this back on a i don't want to fit this in my luggage hey freak this is something you'd like yeah and then i saw pictures from this year's disney plus day and sure enough they were giving out the very same buttons with the new date on it. Right.

This one just says November 12th, 2021. So now it's a, it's a historical artifact. I just want to point out, you know, I appreciate you taking the time and energy to send it. It was absolutely worth the bit. Included in the envelope was also a note handwritten on personalized Jason Sheridan stationary. I do a stationery, yes. What? I want a letter. I'm going to show this at the screen,

but the note just says, there was, you know, the card with the pin attached to it, and then this note card, which just, a very formal Jason Sheridan, and a very elegant font at the top of the card, and then it just says, Griffin, cherish this. Signed, Jason Sheridan.

Now, I have to be honest, I might lose this button. The card I will cherish. I will cherish this. David, Griffin explained that you were freshly back from Toronto and I probably over-explained on the card I sent to you. I probably over-explained over explained like i should have just said put this button on when we were it's it's fine it's fine it was it made it seem more sincere though which was funny like you were just like uh explaining the entire thing to me in no

form you should have just written cherish this i would have i would have uh been more because i opened it minutes after coming home from toronto and i drove home from toronto so it's kind of in a daze and i was like what is this um but i had a feeling that would be your mental state it was great it was great you would get home kiss your child good night and then crack open an envelope from me with a promotional Disney Plus button. Yep. Dated to November 12, 2021, of course. Disney Plus. This is amazing. And I think that, you know,

if we feel like this movie loses magic and luster because of a lack of physical tangibility, it's so lost in the digital realm. And I love that Jason created a moment of magic by using the physical mail. That's right. Using going back to something that they, you know,

would have used to make Pinocchio in the 1940s, mailing out contracts and such. I should have mentioned this during the stamps.com ad read. I know, I know, I know. Would have been smart. Would have been smart.

Thank you, Jason and Louis DeJoy. Now, David, we're in a slightly weird position because this movie obviously did not get a theatrical release and the box office weekend for when it came out is literally just the weekend we just experienced. It's the most recent weekend. We're recording this on a quicker turnaround than most episodes.

Well, because of, you know, that's how it goes. It's a new release, but here's the thing. So I will, we're going to do the box office game for this weekend because I challenge you to name the top five movies of the box office this weekend. You probably can, but it's a little tough. And then I will quiz you on

the most recent Nielsen data on streaming, which unfortunately is from mid-August. This is my suggestion, but it basically takes a month to tabulate these things. So it'll take a month before we find out how many...

They always do the weird tabulation of like 500 million hours of Pinocchio we're watching. Right, right, exactly. Yes, yeah, yeah. They don't measure number of viewers, they measure number of hours. So movies are always

at a disadvantage versus series because they'll be like you know 800 hours of stranger things were watched and it's like right across four seasons now whatever um 20.6 billion hours of viewing the gray man right don't don't knock the metric that clearly also sells ads on this podcast god damn it millions of hours of blank check. Of course. Over seven years or whatever. Anyway. Box office.

Number one at the box office is Barbarian. Yeah, that's right. I want to see it. I'm going to see it tomorrow maybe. I'm very interested. Have any of you guys seen Barbarian? I haven't fit it in yet. Yeah, I've heard very good things.

I've heard good things. I've heard I'm not supposed to know anything about it. Yeah. Now, this is the only thing I want to say about things. I've heard good things. I've heard I'm not supposed to know anything about it. Yeah. Now, this is the only thing I want to say about it. It's not about the movie. It's about that phenomenon, right? I find it very interesting. I saw successive days, Monday and Tuesday or whatever, Sunday, Monday of this week.

I saw The Invitation and I saw Barbarian. I complained in our last episode, David, that the Invitation trailer ruins every single plot beat of the movie, including what I guessed was going to be the last shot of the film. It basically is the last shot of the film, except there's like a end coda that was clearly shot

three weeks before the movie came out as some sort of studio note that doesn't really add anything to it but that's a movie where they like didn't know how to market it outside of telling you every single thing that happens in the movie because that movie is a real slow burn where if they had found any creative way to market it it would be kind of fun watching it not knowing where it's going uh i i do think the movie kind of falls apart when it gets to its twists but i think the slow burn of that movie is actually pretty fucking good in contrast barbarian was like everyone assumed probably going to hulu because it was like a fox you know pick up disney they're bumping all these films to hulu it's screened very

well at like fantastic fest i, some horror film festivals. And they just went like, you know what? Fuck it. Let's put it in theaters. This seems to have good word of mouth. They really only started advertising it like three weeks ago. And their entire advertising campaign was pretty much don't know anything about this movie. Find out as little as possible.

Everything was as oblique as possible. All the messaging was don't even watch the trailer. No nothing. It opened bigger than The Invitation. Now, it's like one of the worst box office weekends of the year. We're dealing with a sort of depleted marketplace right now for theaters. But it opened at $10 million for a marketing campaign that was basically, we're not going to tell you anything. Don't even know the setup of this movie.

Does it have a big realistic pile of shit in it? It does. That is the big twist. Yeah. How scary is it? How scary if I was to go see this? It's fairly scary. It's one of those horror films

that I would argue is more upsetting than scary, if that makes sense. Sure. But especially the phenomenon of not knowing where it's going does add an incredible amount of unease because it's not a movie where you can really predict it.

And so in all of its buildup, which it does take its time with, you're just sort of on edge by like, I have no idea what they're setting up here. I might stick to see how they run or confess flesh. No, fletch. How do you say it?

Confess fletch? Confess, comma, fletch. It's not flesh, no. Confess. It wouldn or confess flesh. No, fletch? How do you say it? Confess fletch? Confess, comma, fletch. It's not flesh, no. It wouldn't be flesh. Confess flesh seems like the tagline of the invitation from what I've seen of the trailer. Yeah, a little bit. David, number two at the box office?

Number two is a new release. It is, I believe, an Indian film. You probably don't know the name of it Exactly but you probably heard of it Yes it's an Indian language fantasy Action adventure film called Brahmastra Part 1 Shiva Which looks pretty cool

Am I wrong in thinking that Disney Released this as well Yes you are correct it was distributed by Walt Disney in America. So like theaters. That's cool. Yeah. Like first weekend of September, Disney having the one and two movie for like very un-Disney properties.

Things that were considered niche. It's all in tickets. So yeah, Barbarian, number one. Bramastra, part one. Number two. Number three, Griffin. Top Gun Maverick? I still haven't ridden it. No,ian, number one. Brahmastra, part one, number two. Number three, Griffin. Top Gun Maverick? I still haven't ridden it. No, that's number four. Oh, Bullet Train.

Bullet Train is number three. I need to ride the train. It's a perfectly entertaining movie. It is really benefiting from the fact that so few things are getting released now where it just keeps on hanging on. It's inching to a hundo. And of course, Top Gun Maverick

has made $700 million. And then number five is The Invitation, which you just mentioned. It's a pretty boring list. And that's what's out. Pinocchio, if Disney had put out Pinocchio,

probably would have made an easy 40 mil, right? But whatever. Yeah. I don't know. The first hour of Invitation, I was like, why isn't anyone talking

about this movie being good? In the last half hour, I understood why no one talks about the movie. It's not disastrous, but it just sort of loses all momentum. But you do have to think that Pinocchio would have made some money. You would have done fine. Look,

I don't know. I don't get it. Me, I don't get it. But listen, the streaming list from August 14th, 2022. Yes. The number one show

is... The top five, they're all Netflix. I'm just going to spoil that for you right away. The number one is Netflix's big show of the summer. Very expensive show based on a very popular series. Stranger Things or Sandman? Stranger Things is number three. Sandman is

number one. So you'd think Netflix would be happy with that. I haven't heard about Sandman season two yet, but if it was number one. A perfect indication of our current entertainment industry dystopia is Neil Gaiman will not stop tweeting pleas for people to watch Sandman and leave positive reviews

because they still haven't gotten a season two pickup. And it's just like, you have one of the most beloved comic book series of all time. You have like one of the most famous living authors who is using his massive social media platform to still like grassroots advertise a giant budget production of a series on the most popular streaming service, or I guess maybe it just got supplanted by Disney+. It's the most popular.

It is the number one show in the globe. It has pretty much held onto that position for a month, and he's just like, they still won't give us a green light for season two. You're like, what is the metric for success now? I don't know. I don't know. Isn't it nice, fellow podcasters,

that when there's a new episode of your podcast we all get to say hey check out the new episode of the podcast as opposed to if we're involved in a television project it's like please please dear god for my future and my life and my family please it's like your eyes but they, but they won't do it. I made this joke to you guys recently that don't you feel grateful that we all got into podcasting at a good moment and have found some success with our shows so that that stable career can support our hobby

of working in film and television? Yeah. It's truly what it feels like. It's like... It is what it is.'s like it is what it is yeah it's what it is yeah it's it's it's what it is our plan were definitely uh carefully constructed and not an accidental plan worked right yeah and the now the now like i need to get something going. Should I get a new reel or new headshots or make a short film? Now you're just sitting there like with a paper and pencil going, should I do another podcast? Yep.

Absolutely. Yep. Should I triple down on this? Okay. All right. All right. So number one, Salmon. Number three is Stranger Things.

Number two is a film from February that debuted on netflix and it's still in there it was it's new on netflix this week and one billion people watched it or whatever sorry sorry okay it was a theatrically released film that is now exploding on netflix it's from february can you tell me the genre? Action adventure. It was a hit. It's not The Lost City. Oh, it's Uncharted. No, it's Uncharted. I saw this. Uncharted 4, please. Blowing up on Netflix. Not only did that movie surprisingly

overperform in theaters, but people are hungry for it on Netflix as well. At TIFF, I was told by someone who knows what he's talking about, that the Northman, which of course was sort of a slightly disappointing box office, right? It made like $30 million. Yeah.

I was told that that thing was such a sensation on VOD that everyone is basically ripping champagne bottles with joy over the Northman. So you don't know how these things are going to play like later. It is this thing as studios are backing off on the idea of making expensive movies only for streaming, where it is like, if you just go through the motions of giving these things a proper theatrical release, whether it is a hit or a failure, it almost always makes the movie more desirable once it lands on the

stream. It's true. Right. Yeah. It just makes it more real. Yeah. Legitimate. Like Uncharted is running circles around gray man.

Right. Uh, number four is a Netflix original film. Purple heart. An Oscar winning actor. No, uh, I have not seen it.

I think it's an action comedy. It's got sort of a supernatural element. If you don't know what this is, I'll tell you. Is the actor Jamie Foxx? He sure is. It is. But then I don't know what it is beyond that. It's Day Shift.

It's Day Shift. It's from one of the John Wick stunt protege guys. And it's Jamie Foxx and Dave Franco hunting vampires. That all sounds right. I have not seen it. Number five is... I have to look it up because I don't know what it is. Okay, it's a romantic drama streaming series.

It has four seasons. It's from the noble country that I just left, Canada. Oh, boy. Great country. Lovely people. Canadian romantic streaming drama, four seasons. A place where there was a heat wave in Toronto, and I was told this because the Canadians kept saying,

oh, it's 20 degrees all the time. I looked that up, and it means 72 degrees, and that was the heat wave. But no, this is set in a small town Huh It's Canadian who's in it Avril Lavigne You're not gonna

You're not gonna have heard of this It's called Virgin River Yeah absolutely not never heard of it I mean this is the shit I'm talking about Where I'm just like Purple Hearts seems to have outperformed Gray Man, right? Yeah, no, Gray Man not on this list. Yeah, I don't know.

What's doing better, Purple Hearts, Gray Man, or Red Notice? Right. Which color is dominant? Not an inexpensive movie, but probably cost one-fifth, one-four fourth of what Gray Man cost right and then you're telling me that like Virgin Island is still in the top five Virgin River god damn it

I couldn't even remember what it's called I'm gonna give you the rest of the top ten and then we should be done but you've also from Netflix you also have Lock and Key you have the cursed child you know hypnotizer. Cocoa Melon. Oh, of course.

I'm avoiding putting in front of mine. Avoid it. Avoid it. Yes, I'm avoiding it too. And you also, straight up on Netflix, number eight, NCIS. Just fucking NCIS. People watching that. Is Lightyear on the list? There are two Disney Plus properties

One at number 7 is Bluey Which is the best kids TV show Around and is wonderful And just dropped a third season So that's probably why it's on the list And then at number 10 In it's first week of release probably Is fucking Lightyear stinking up the joint

Still had 700 million minutes viewed or whatever. But that's the thing. It's like, for Lightyear as one film to chart that high even, like it comes out the middle of August, right? Means that that thing is clearly doing much better on Disney Plus than it did in theaters.

Yeah. I mean, you know. It's a movie that actually feels designed for Disney Plus but maybe but Pinocchio even with everything we've said does it still kind of feel like Pinocchio should have been

I guess I remain confused by the Disney Plus the only things that seem like I looked up AMC showtimes like last night for early this week and there's like hardly any. And it seems like the stuff that is keeping the lights on

are Bollywood releases and Dragon Ball Z superhero. Yes. Yeah. Like the Dragon Ball movie quietly opening to over $20 million. I mean, this is another day. It's like, you know, we're going through the every 18 months, everyone rethinks the entire entertainment industry and announces

that they figured it out and that they've now perfected the model. But like, that Disney Investor Day conference the beginning of 2021, where they announced Lightyear's existence

and then in one fell swoop, a very clear thing that confused nobody. But then in that same press conference that live-streamed hours- same press conference that live streamed hours long press conference they announced pinocchio peter pan and wendy uh hocus pocus 2 and disenchanted are all going to disney plus and it was this moment of just like maybe the theaters don't come back

maybe we got to put more things on disney plus and the model is increasingly feeling a little uh foolhardy. I don't know. I want someone to sit me down and tell me off the record how this all fucking works. But I just don't know why you wouldn't do the Encanto thing of just like,

look, make your money for six weeks. Make whatever free money you can make and then put it on your streaming service. Right. But who cares?

I don't know. It's also just like with DCPs and shit, you're not having to like strike up physical prints. And basically, they've compressed the release window enough that the thing they always used to complain about, which is like having to promote the movie twice. Having to advertise it in theaters and then advertise it again six to eight months later when you put it on digital or DVD or whatever. It's like, no, you promote it once.

You promote it once. You put it in theaters for like fucking six weeks and it's on your streaming service and you just do a new update on social media should we release this episode into theaters we should

we will solidarity with the chains that we care about if we talk to the manager at the local Burbank AMC I feel like maybe

we could get it done all of this having been said also this is the first episode where I can acknowledge I'm the voice of Pip the chipmunk in Disenchanted coming to Disney Plus Thanksgiving this is the first episode where I can acknowledge I'm the voice of Pip the Chipmunk in Disenchanted coming to Disney Plus Thanksgiving.

This is the first host, Pip. Disney employee right here. For now, until they hear the rest of this episode. Yeah, seriously. Look, every other announcement that happened at D23 I thought was great, and I have nothing mocking to say. I love my corporate

wish at Disney, and I hope to be playing Pip the Chipmunk for years to say. I love my corporate landlord at Disney, and I hope to be playing Pip the Chipmunk for years to come. No, but I think that film's very fun, and I feel no regrets about not playing

Jiminy Cricket in this film. As much as I was excited at the idea of playing the wisecracking animal sidekick in a Disney film, I feel like I got a better one. A new one,

a different, with less, like the shoes to fill weren't as weighty, and the, what if Pip showed up for a minute, what do you think Pip would say if he saw a wooden boy walking around? A jumping jelly sticks, his famous catchphrase. It registered with me, I was like, wow, he's got a, I like that. Jumping jelly sticks. Yeah.

You know, it's a gift. As an actor, you see jumping jelly sticks on a page and it's truly a gift. There's no way to mess that line up. Jason, Scott, Mike. So long overdue. Thank you for being here. Such an honor. Next time, it won't be a piece of shit, I promise.

I can't promise that. Maybe it will be. It's so nice to have you guys. You guys have both been great on the show. If anyone's listening who doesn't know our show, it's about theme parks and rides that we love. David was great on it a couple years ago. It's nice of you to say.

I'm no Griffin Newman when it comes to Podcast the Ride. I did my best. Griffin does have this elevated title of accidental PTR legend It's nice of you to say I'm no Griffin Newman when it comes to podcasts. All right. I did my best with my. Well, he does. Griffin does have this elevated title of accidental PTR legend because a video played at the wrong time at a chaotic live show. And thus we just gave you a title. And now I'm gunning to be the first PTR legend to become a Disney legend in that order. Oh, you do have the fodder to potentially. Wow.

Wow. It's a long term plan plan crossover yeah yeah i gotta fully i gotta go full gab but i'm working on it one's at least one's probably like 10-15 years off at minimum unless it's just like it pops it pops we open but what i was thinking how it's funny that you've been on the show many times we've had you want to talk about some of the greatest rides that have ever, some of the greatest accomplishments of man. Terminator 2, 3D, and Toy Story, Mania. Muppet Vision 3D. Muppet Vision 3D, yeah, yeah. My favorite movie.

Some of the best topics that exist in the world of our podcast. And you had us on to talk about Pinocchio 2020. Now, I want to address this for one moment just, I want to address this for one moment. I just want to address this for one moment. We're ending this episode, but it must be addressed, okay? We're very long overdue in having you guys on the show. To the point where a lot of listeners of both of our shows were going like, what the fuck is the deal here?

They've had Griffin on so many times. They're clearly friends with him. Even David's been on podcast the right at this point. Why hasn't it happened? In our dumb, overly organized sort of like spreadsheet mind, for so long we were like, we should save them

for when we do Gore Verbinski because getting them on Pirates, either one for each of the trilogy or all three together, one felt like, oh, that's like a perfect one. For many reasons, we probably are not going to do

the Pirates of the Caribbean movies any time. Indeed. Any time in the foreseeable future. No to do the Pirates of the Caribbean movies anytime. Indeed. Anytime in the foreseeable future. No, it's not happening. It's not happening. People should kind of accept that, I think. Absolutely. It's sad, but true. Well, but you're going to do Lone Ranger, right? Well, that's not obvious. You gotta. You gotta.

It's going to be a Ben's choice. But I threw out to you guys at the beginning of this year, I said, promise I'm getting you on before the end of the year. And I, like, outlined a couple different options to you guys at Margaritaville

in Times Square. Oh, yes. Earlier this year. You came with business to handle, yeah. Yes. And I said, like, here are options.

You guys can split up and pick individual movies you want across, like, the miniseries we have planned. Right? Or all three of you on Avatar 2 or all three of you on avatar 2 all three of you on pinocchio and so we play we did land that's all i want to say avatar was potential no you're absolutely right i don't want to make it sound like i forced you guys to take

the shit stick it was like you guys have talked a lot you scott in particular about how creepy you find pinocchio as a concept, as a character. It felt like a way to comment on the state of Disney movies. Of course, both of you being daddies now, Jason's aforementioned status as a wooden boy. But yes, we will have you on again

either together or separately or whatever form, and hopefully you get a better movie next time. We also felt like, at least I felt like, the mantle of Avatar 2, of Blank Check Avatar 2. I mean, you guys probably feel it. Are you wondering, are you thinking you maybe shouldn't even attempt

your own bar? I want to stake you out for how, you should be stressed about covering Avatar 2. I keep on seeing people saying it's been five years since the Blank Check Avatar episode. No one even remembers it anymore. It was a big hit at the time, but that episode has been totally forgotten. No one wants to hear an episode on Avatar 2.

That episode's going to bomb. Who even remembers the names of these hosts? No one remembers them. Can you even produce the name Griffin Newman? Like nobody knows that. Nobody knows that. I don't look it up. Nobody knows that.

That episode just released in China and became a hit all over again. This is my argument. I think when people see what we have hooked up for that episode, I think they forget how much it was an experience at, you know, the original episode launch. And I think it's going to be replicated again with this one. People cried after that one and they wanted to go back to the episode. Yeah. People like wanted to live there forever. wanted to go back to the episode. Yeah, people like wanted to live there forever. They wanted to live in the episode.

And there was concern there would be too much of our nonsense if we did have a, just every five minutes, Civaco, this podcast is a fat fortress. Mighty Akron, copyright by Carlson. Mighty Akron, yeah. Everyone should listen to Podcast The Ride.

My favorite podcast. We're only friends because I was such a big fan of your guys' show and I harangued you into having me on and then over years we've become actual friends. I'm so happy about that and beyond the friendship too because this was a great example

of like, wow, he was so, Griffin was so great on the show. I should check out what he does. What is this blank check about? And oh my god. Guys so great on the show. I should check out what he does. What is this blank check about? And oh my God, guys, I love the show. I'm so thrilled to have, who have been on the show. What a wonderful gift, even just being a fan and then getting to be on it and all the hanging out. And yeah.

And if you're looking to try Podcast the Rise, we said the episodes Dave and I have been on can be entry points. But also, as you mentioned before, if you feel like I'm not a theme park person, this show feels, you know, unexplainable to me. You guys do just end up going into a lot of corners

of pop culture marginalia that I think our listeners are the types to be interested in as well. It became clear pretty early on with the podcast that, like, theme park-y vibes, like, have permeated a lot of other pop culture and, like, a lot of other stuff we like, you know, is copacetic.

Like, McGruff the Crime Dog's movies. Movies, according to Martin Scorsese. Yes. McGruff the Crime Dog's albums. Music career. Yeah. Right. The Ninja Trolls Coming Out of Your Shell Tour,

things like that. The Rebirth Cafe. Yes. Everyone should listen and sign up for the second gate and Club 3. Oh, hey, the Club 3 shout. Oh, thank you so much. And Google the phrase Mighty Akron.

Google image it, and you will learn that that is an avatar related phrase that Mike Carlson is 100% responsible for. If they say it in the movie? Oh man. Oh man. I know I said this. I've said this before already that this is not. Yeah this is me

not them. Next week tune in for The Woman King. Yeah which is good. The new Gina Prince Bythew is good which you like a lot I mean I imagine I will love it I love her movies

I feel like the critics I usually agree with including yourself think it rips I'm excited to see it probably tomorrow night I will go see it

yeah at the time we're recording this tune in for that next week and then week after that we're back on the Kubrick train with Dr. Strangelove. Thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe.

Thank you to Marie Barty for our social media. Pat Reynolds, Joe Bowen for our artwork. Lane Montgomery and the Great American all for our theme song. We always thank AJ McKee and Alex Barron for our editing. But today, I also just want to shout out

that AJ has ably jumped in to produce this episode because Ben was out of town this week and AJ has just been silently and respectfully keeping the train running this whole time, sending me ad copy. Nice job, AJ. So yeah, double thank you to AJ. This week, you can go to patreon.com

slash blank check for blank check special features. Do all sorts of bonus stuff, including the aforementioned Confess Fletch this week. You can go to patreon.com slash blankcheck for blankcheck special features. We do all sorts of bonus stuff, including the aforementioned Confess Fletch this month. Is that how you say it? You sure that's how you say it? Confess to the Fletch. Confess Fletch sounds like a Hellraiser

sequel subtitle. It's a cool title. It's Candyman. It's Farewell to the Fletch. We're doing that. We're doing Roger Moore Bond movies. You can go to Blank Check Pod for links to all sorts of other nerdy shit. And as always, holy smoky-o.