Blank Check with Griffin & David - Who Framed Roger Rabbit with Mike Mitchell & Nick Wiger

Episode Date: October 4, 2020

A noir for kids. Disney and Warner Bros characters together for the first and last time. Live action drama with kooky Tex Avery-style animation. There's really no movie quite like Who Framed Roger Rabbit. How long did "bumping the lamp" take? What's a contemporary take on Jessica and Roger Rabbit's relationship dynamics? How does the film's story mirror Hollywood? We invited the Doughboys themselves, Mike Mitchell and Nick Wiger to help us find out! Subscribe to our patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram Merch is available at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com

blank check with griffin and david blank check with griffin and david don't know what to say or to expect all you need to know is that the name of the show is blank check yeah check the podcast why my uncle thumper had a problem with his podcast and he had to take these big pills and drink lots of water not prostate you idiot podcast griffin that's very confusing you were saying podcasts as well i don't even know what that was i can't believe you picked that why don't you pick the piano on the head the bit is that eddiealiant says, check the probate. And then he starts talking about probates.

But the specifics around what he's saying make it clear that he thinks it's a prostate. And then Eddie Valiant says, not prostate, you idiot. Probate. He restates the word. Right. But you were saying, look saying look look let's just move along this movie has several iconic lines but they do not work particularly well within this stupid format that we have landed on over five years i'm not bad i just podcast on his head

yeah i'm saying none of these are real good i think drop the podcast on his head is funny i'd like to drop a podcast on your head what do you see in the guy he makes me podcast that's not anything that's what i'm saying these things don't sound like anything at least the prostate probate thing it's already p words i'm not bad i was just i was just recorded that way you could try and like do a jessica rabbit like a spin on her iconic line that's far too long of a walk i would never take a walk that long for a bit okay having to replace multiple words unbelievable introduce the show griffin it is i i just think i just want to quickly clarify i i am in fact

not bad you are someone who will take a long walk. And I'll take a long walk. Oh, yeah, right. And you are, yes, yeah. Yeah. And that is what I see in Roger Rabbit, is that he makes me podcast. Hello, everybody. My name is Griffin Newman. I'm David Sims. That time you were right on cue. I snapped, I pointed, you said your name. So you're going to call me out for not being on cue,

and then you're going to call me out not being on cue and then you're gonna call me out for being on cue that's how you're gonna kick it off no i was celebrating i was saying man look at the the griffin newman school of picking up cues is working already this is a podcast called blank check with griffin and david it's about filmography as directors who have massive success early on in their careers are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion products they want

and sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they ba-ba-ba-ba-bounce, baby! Very nice. I'm going to run my shitty Roger Rabbit impression into the ground. I think your Roger Rabbit is fine.

I think it's pretty good. I think it's fine. Yeah. I think it's fine. This is a miniseries on the films of Robert Zemeckis. It is not called Who Potted Roger Cast Bit, which a lot of people wanted. No, that was stupid. It's called Podcast Away because he made a movie called Cast Away.

It's clean. It has cast in the title. But today we are talking about who framed roger rabbit uh the movie that we were sort of arguing in our back to the future episode we've covered filmmakers who have one hit that's so big they're kind of gonna get a blank check for the rest of their lives zemeckis is in that category where it's like he did a couple in a row that were so big that it's never getting revoked he has three of the movie we're talking about like you know right back to future roger rabbit and forrest gump but also right the back to back of back to the future and robert roger rabbit is is crazy one

of the only things i could equate it to is inception after after Dark Knight. Right. Where people were like, oh, and now Warner Brothers lets him do whatever fucking thing he wants until he comes back to do another Batman movie. And then when that was a blockbuster on its own, people were like, oh, this guy's never getting the checkbook taken away. I also contend the fact that Back to the Future

2 was a well-regarded sequel just even strengthened that even more. And then he wins a fucking Oscar and just does wild shit for the rest of his career but this one uh this is one of those movies that that just uh is like a miracle it is it is a miracle and also it couldn't happen like five years before or after it came out like Like five years before the tech isn't there, five years after Disney's like, oh, no way, this is too weird. I'm going to pull our guests into the conversation

before introducing them because that's what I like to do. But one of our two guests was saying that often when he has to do things to prepare for podcasts, it feels like homework and how much this was the antithesis of homework. That was me. What? I said that.

I, uh, yeah, I, I, I definitely, you know, anytime for me,

especially my own podcast, but anytime you're guessing on something and it's like, Hey, you gotta listen to this album, read this book, watch this movie, etc. It always is like a little bit of, OK, well, I have to do this obligation, which is fine, whether you enjoy it or not. But here, just like minutes in, I was like, this is fucking great. I had been probably two decades.

How long had it been? Right. Probably 20 years since I'd seen this movie, which I've seen maybe twice before. And just rewatching it, I was like, man, this is unbelievable how dazzling this is to look at and how compelling it is as a story and how great the performances are all around. Just a fucking just like this is fucking great. I'm having the time of my life. like this is fucking great i'm having the time of my life our our other guest had a shocked face at our first guest saying he'd only maybe seen it twice before have you seen this film a lot more often i'm going to drag you into speaking before we introduce you

yes first of all i don't like homework i've homework. Hey, in the words of blink 182 work sucks. I know. So because of that, I consider this homework. I didn't watch it. Uh, it's going to be a rough episode. Oh boy. No,

of course I watched it. I love the movie. I've watched it plenty of times. I, I, I, I actually, the last time I watched it before I watched it for,

for this podcast was only a few weeks back. I think it was either on TV or I just had it. But Nick, like you, I think up just a few years ago, I hadn't seen it for like 10 years or so. It was like a long stretch since I had seen it. And then when I watched it, I was like, this is this is just one of the top to me I mean is this saying too much already like a top 25 movie of all time I love it I mean David you previously said it's your pick for the best film of 1987 David keeps very detailed spreadsheets wow every year yeah oh idiot I'm sorry he keeps very detailed spreadsheets of every year and what

he would nominate in every category at the detailed spreadsheets of every year and what he would nominate in every category at the Oscars for every year based on what he's seen. So that's not like an off the top of the head. I guess that would be my favorite movie. It's like a sick thing that I do, to be clear. I know that's not like, you know, I know that's aberrant behavior, but I do. And it is my number one of 1988. And I think it's Zemeckis' best film. And I think it a mechis's best film and i think it'll be most people's best film if they made something like this it's just one of those things where you're like this is magic like yeah no yeah you know no one strikes twice on something this sort of

accomplished and ambitious and like just like purely entertaining it's staggering it's so daring and just the achievement alone makes me wonder a little why it it feels maybe this is just my sense as someone who's less of a of a movie i'd say the the least uh movie buff of the four of us it feels like it it kind of fell out of the collective consciousness a little bit am i wrong about that i feel like i don't see who framed roger rabbit referenced as much as maybe some other films of the era i have a i have a couple thoughts in regards to this but now now i feel like i can finally introduce you guys ladies and gentlemen from the doughboys podcast platinum play club level guest nick weiger wow mitch mike mitch mitchell i don't get platinum. I'm just, I'm just a regular.

I said, but guess. We're both. Platinum play club level guess. The two of you. The title applied to both of you. All right. Fair enough. I, you know, we.

Also, you're wrong about Mitch. Well, we, we plan these episodes far in advance. We have miniseries planned out far in advance. We, when we knew we were doing Zemeckis and we knew we were going to be recording from home and thus doing more Skype episodes and long distance guests, we reached out to you guys immediately and said, like, take your pick of any Zemeckis movie on the list. And I feel like both of you came back with Roger Rabbit as a consensus pretty quickly. And I'll say, Mitch, I've been like tempted to watch this movie so many times over the

last six months because so many times it has felt like that would really hit the spot right now. But I've sort of been holding off and edging, waiting for maximum impact. I wanted to make I wanted Roger Rabbit to get me there, if you know what I'm saying. But it is just kind of such a miraculous film. But it is just kind of such a miraculous film. And in the sort of like weeks and months leading up to this, not watching the movie, I was sort of doing a lot of digging around the context of this film because David Nye is kind of a source of context. And I feel like there are a bunch of weird X factors that resulted in this movie turning out as well as it did that could not be replicated as david said five years earlier five years later not just the technology but the circumstances of hollywood at the time the like daring of it yeah now like imagine disney allowing

something like this through the the net now like they never would that's well even even i mean and your time frame was so specific and i think you know correctly so because you know once once a little mermaid and and beauty and the beast are on the scene like the same thing there's no way they're gonna they're gonna go back to this why that's the cornerstone of my argument is that little mermaids the following year and that is the last time like once once they've reestablished that. Yeah. There's no need for them to take this sort of risk ever again. And it's like the 1980s were that period where Disney was like teetering on the edge, maybe going under.

There was that fear of like. Much like the rescuers. Much like the rescuers. They were on the verge of going under. No, thank you. Sorry. Thank you, Nick. I'm sorry, everyone. But I feel like people about that disney wasn't viewed as a legitimate studio their

animation department was like a shell of what it previously was and you know i think there was this thought that like disney might only be uh an experiential company it might just be the theme parks they might not really be an entertainment company anymore. And the thing that's keeping them afloat at this point, just to give you an idea of where Disney is, like its biggest hit in the 80s before this. Splash. So on the family side is what? Like Tron?

Like Fox and the Hound? Like it's really like they had nothing. Right. You're talking their biggest hits are movies that underperformed. Right. And then like on the Touchstonestone side on their grown-up side they had actually had hits they'd had like the color of money and like good morning vietnam like movies you don't realize were disney movies like because they were touchstone right eisner and katzenberg come in they come from paramount and their first thing is sort of like let's make disney capable of making adult

films because that's how well we know how to make and they like signed bet middler to like a four movie deal and they have like a run of bet middler comedies that people forget were very successful he always talks about like middler save disney splash save disney there are these movies they talk about that save disney but they were not really Disney movies. Right. And Splash, I feel like, is the most indicative of that, where it was like it got rejected everywhere else in town. People thought it was low rent, that it was a Disney movie, that it was a sitcom star, that it was directed by a different sitcom star. And then it was this big breakout hit.

But still, like Disney as like a family entertainment brand was not really in a great position it's in a terrible position like as you say next year they have little mermaid they also have honey i shrunk the kids the next year yeah so i feel like those two things are really like putting the disney stakes back but not not in 1988 was dick tracy disney yes but that's 91 or 90 uh dick tracy is it disney yes absolutely disney oh interesting it was oh yeah it was a touchstone yeah 1990 yes yeah because that was a big katzenberg like we're gonna beat batman they had the ride ready to go they had sequels lined up like he was so confident that was going to be their big superhero franchise um i love dick tracy i mean i'm sorry for going on this tangent but i love dick tracy but the as

a kid uh the hardest i ever laughed as a kid maybe in my entire life we were there was a drive-in movie theater we're driving down in lakewood california and the it was it was a showing a double feature of Honey I Shrunk the Kids and Dick Tracy and some mischievous teen had rearranged the marquee. So it said Honey I Shrunk Tracy's Dick. I laughed so hard. Really? That is really good. It was very funny. Wayne Wang, the great uh chinese american filmmaker uh his director of waiting film

was called uh chan is missing what are we talking about uh joy luck club yes chan is missing yes uh and my father has a similar marquee story that is someone rearrange it to say uh wayne chang's wang is missing. That's good. That's the problem with digital marquees. You can't rearrange the letters. No anagram fun to be had. Nightmare for Bart Simpson.

Absolute nightmare. I just watched On the Waterfront for the first time and I was surprised. I was surprised by how much the bad guys look like Dick Tracy villains. They all look like like so many of those guys are like they are so monstrous looking they look like like flat top or like whatever no face they look like these they look like the fucked up monster creations in the dick tracy movies which i loved i i i feel like there was some sort of i i feel like it could

have been a big it could have been a big superhero hit because i feel like kids did but then it was like weirdly adult that movie right wasn't there like an issue with like it's too grown up that movie it was it was a hit like it did well yeah i guess it didn't do well enough to and also there's a whole weird thing where like warren baity owns it and right is is very very fussy about it but like you guys know about the dick tracy tv special do you know about this match not as well but i think i've heard of it but please do do do do tell me very quickly for our listeners warren baity like had the rights to dick tracy personally not disney baity is the one who controlled them. And there was some sort of stipulation

that the rights would revert back to whoever the publisher is if he stopped being in development on further Dick Tracy movies. So Warren Beatty has spent the last 30 years claiming that he's months away from

making a Dick Tracy 2. He always claims, I'm about to do it. And he keeps on getting called into court and they keep on trying to argue and he'll hold up drawings and be like, look, I wrote Dick Tracy 2 on a napkin. I'm making it. And it finally hit some point where they were like,

you have to pull the trigger on something. So he made a TV special that aired one time at like 3 a.m. unannounced on turner classic movies that was leonard malton interviewing warren baity in character as dick tracy about the history of dick tracy but in order to hide the fact that he's now 30 years older than he already was too old to play the character of the original movie he's in shadows the entire time yeah so it's just you cannot see his face it's warren baity in complete shadows in a yellow trench coat now you can see his face

but they are it was also shot by chivo griff yes it's shot by emmanuel lubezki it's like the most award-winning right yes a cinematographer i've i've seen this special and i believe you sent the special to me most likely if i had to guess it's so wild it's demented it ends with dick tracy receiving a phone call from the police on his like dick tracy watch and being like i gotta go and letter malton being like oh and then he leaves dear god really weird do you know what's here's what's crazy to me that so dick tracy and little mermaid both to me feel much older than who framed roger rabbit roger who framed interesting feels like a newer i mean like there's so much to say about it just even in the opening cartoon how amazingly cool the opening short is of with uh with roger what's the what's the baby's name baby uh

baby sherman is it herman herman sorry sorry sorry him watching that like the that cartoon looks fantastic it looks it looks amazing and it looks to me it looks better than like any of the animation a little mermaid i'm I'm sorry. No, absolutely. Absolutely. That's true. The Little Mermaid, I love the Little Mermaid, but it looks really chintzy compared to like even Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast or whatever,

because like they didn't have the money and it wasn't like a guaranteed thing when they were making it. I'll dig into the opening with some context, but the shortest version of it is the book comes out in 1981 the book is incredibly weird uh it's called who censored who censored roger rabbit right and it's it's a lot more meta in like a deadpool kind of way than this is sort of knowing and playing with the tropes.

Like, is it more of like a gumshoe novel? Like it's written like a sort of like from the perspective of like, you know, I don't know. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. But I think it's also less of a sort of like noir pastiche. It's a little more like harder edged. It's more violent.

It's more sexual. I know there's a thing in the book where like the characters the cartoon characters when they speak they have thought bubbles speech bubbles above their head and then they use the speech bubbles as weapons yeah they're not because they're not cartoon carry they're like comic characters right in the book right and and i and then and there's also i like roger rabbit gets the the inciting incident is roger rabbit himself gets murdered at least from what I read about it. So it's just, it's got some, it's one of those things where they made some huge changes in the adaptation.

This is a very loose adaptation, undoubtedly for the better. Yeah, it feels like very much a thing where Disney just kind of went like, oh, fuck, that's a good idea. We should pay this guy for this idea and then write an original movie based on this idea. You said it's more Deadpool-like? I think, yeah. I mean, I think it's a little more like sort of like edgelord-y kind of shock factor. Yeah. So Roger's like, Eddie, my balls.

My balls are itchy. I don't know there's a scene where eddie pegs roger and then people write think pieces saying like is is this progressive or are they just going for shock like is this woke or um but the book also like wasn't very i think popular or successful it really was one of those things like galaxy quest is one of these things where like someone wrote the script that is like actor ends up on a spaceship and dreamworks got senate and they were like this script is terrible but this idea is so good we will pay this person 250 000 to fuck off and then they just hired new writers and said like don't even read it here's

the premise write a movie based on this premise and roger rabbit feels like it was that but it was the previous head of warner brothers in 1981 who buys it right after the publication because they're in such weird a weird transitional state this is disney not warner brothers disney i'm sorry and they're looking for like what could be a new blockbuster what could be a new blockbuster? What could be a big franchise? Animation's faltering. Live action's faltering. This could be both in one hit. Zemeckis wants to do this project as early as 1982.

But they go, like, you're a flop master. No way we're letting you near this. You're, like, three strikes in a row. I want to hold your hand. Right. He made two bombs. They would count 1941 against him because they were like you wrote the only unsuccessful spielberg movie everything you touch turns to shit right so he makes romancing the

stone in order to prove that he can make a hit his first movie that he doesn't write then off of that he finally gets to make his passion project back to the future and then he goes back and is like come on come on but you know he was the second choice right who's the first choice terry gilliam wow wow which which is makes sense because he was the monty python guy combined with like he can do comedy he can do like animation right like i get why they thought about him and time bandits was like a straight up mainstream hit right i don't think i don't i don't think i would like the terry gilliam roger i mean do not either i'm glad we got the zemeckis one a big foot would

kill judge doom or something that's more to gilliam's filmography than monty python shores i know there is oh i can't make the damn joke well i can't make a big foot joke i liked it i enjoyed the big foot joke the thing about gilliam was uh not only does he turn it down he turned he said he turned it down because he thought it would just be too hard yeah like and he later said like i was just being lazy like i never should have turned that movie down it does feel i mean watching it it feels extremely hard even the even the animated short which we touched on it's just like it uses so much for for a traditional hand-drawn cell animated short like there's so much like shifts of perspective and you know 3D rotation shit that I'm just like, God, the amount of craft to be able to execute this and make this look as good as it is.

It's just staggering. That's what I want to get into because there's kind of a mini blank check within this blank check of a movie, which is just that opening. Because you have the other main author of this movie is richard williams who was the animation director got it and has his own sort of weird uh filmography but um uh eisenberg uh i'm sorry eisner and katzenberg have taken over zemeckis comes back being a newly minted like hot director wants to do it and in retrospect it's like yeah it feels like there are few people who would have had the exact right combination of skill sets to pull this off it is so complicated that like i don't blame gilliam for saying he's too lazy to do it because

few people would be capable of taking keeping mindful of the math of this movie on a technical level while also keeping your eye on the story and the performances. Like you have to have this weird kind of Zemeckis like Rube Goldberg brain, which clearly exists in his storytelling style. But also as the years go on, it becomes more and more obsessed with like technical wizardry. You need to be someone who is excited enough about that, that you can keep track of that because every one of these sequences, it's this thing that Zemeckis does, which is like do the effect that's four times more difficult. Yes. And call as little attention to itself as possible so that it just sells to

people the reality of well this is so natural it must be real yeah it's it's you know like there there's a version of this with a bunch of locked off shots and uh you know and and where it's just like oh okay this is it's kind of easy to see how they executed this and then in in contrast the way they pulled this off it's just like the camera's in motion so much there's so much action overlapping uh you know layered between the the the live action and the animation it's just every every shot looks like a challenge it's long takes it's complicated blocking it's like he does not compromise his shooting style at all he's still having this like constantly moving camera and as you said there's this constant like passing back

and forth of objects animated characters interacting with live action live action interacting with animation like several times back and forth within any scene yeah a live action character holding an animated uh tool or weapon and vice versa i mean that that happens a lot and it's just it's just the degree of difficulty all this it's it's really something how many movies from the 80s are you like i don't know how they did this or like yeah like you're still yeah that transition of the of the fridge when the fridge oh falls Roger Rabbit and they open the fridge and then baby Herman walks off set. And that to me, I mean like that opening sequence,

like I said, the cartoon is amazing, but then when they segue into the live action stuff, it just is, it's mind blowing. It's so good. It's like a Wizard of Oz moment. It's still one of those things where it's like people still believe erroneously that Wizard of Oz was the first movie in color because it lands that transition so impactfully that it feels like this must have been the first time anyone did it, right? Because it feels like a revolution.

And people had done animation live action mashups before. It's gone on back to like Gertie the Dinosaur. Like the first animated character ever, Windsor McKay would like screen things where he interacted with Gertie. Wags, you were at the premiere for that, weren't you, Wagger? All right. Two years older than you.

The same generation. Kind of Gertie the Dinosaur lunchbox. You worked on the Gertie the dinosaur video game right it was sopranos gertie the dinosaur hand cranked video games yeah calico vision what's an early video is calico vision early enough why yeah calico is a pretty good pull i mean television same sort of generation it was all that that atari that pre-nintendo era it's all kind of the same same era yeah i thought it was on a a nickelodeon rpg system where you had to as david said crank in different directions based on which way you want the character to move when eisner and katzenberg come on they're like well first of all our animation department is

almost insolvent and they knew they wanted to bring disney animation back to its like former luster but that was going to take many years a little mermaid was in development for so long there's so many pieces animation just takes so long they are at this point doing the great mouse detective right which is sort of like the first effort at bringing things back. But that one doesn't totally hit. No, no. This was like first and foremost for them. They were like, this is a movie that allows us to keep our animation studio open.

We need to give them something to work on. We want to take some more time to figure out what our next big animated movie is going to be. But we can start this like now. And it gives a reason to keep paying the rent, to keep the lights on on these studios, to keep these people under our employment. I think it also was like for Katzenberg and Eisner a way to sort of like re-establish the disney brand it was something so tied into like the history of animation and legacy and also gives them like a new character like roger rabbit was sort of the first successful new character disney had had in a long time do kids like roger rabbit they should weird i mean he rules to be the movie or

the character the character like do our kids into the character of roger rabbit who's kind of like i don't know how to describe roger rabbit i mean he's funny he's he's annoying he's kind of annoying right like that which i sort of appreciate about him but i think as a kid i was like why does anyone put up with this guy yeah i mean i think that's that's kind of the the greatness of the character in the context of this narrative which is that you get why bob hoskins character is so fucking annoyed with this rabbit like you completely relate to him and it's not like hey that's there's a version of this movie where where bob hoskins feels like the the the adult who can't have any fun yeah and it's just which he is at some level but yeah exactly no but you're right you're right i have i have a take on what bob

hoskins character is supposed to be in this and i don't know if i should save it for later if you want to hear it now no no let's do it now yeah yeah my take on bob hoskins character is that he is a person who is who is rejected by hollywood so he is so his so i mean that's that's not that deep right a lot of people probably think this but no no no but i i get where you're going with this right if if this is a movie about the industry which it is right yeah it's a movie about the industry this this is a guy who doesn't like to laugh anymore so he's like a jaded person who works in the industry and then at the end of the movie he basically learns how to like laugh again he does the big performance that saves the day and he kisses roger on the lips and that's basically him like not giving up

on that town not giving up on that dream basically it's kind of the way i see it perfect yes i totally agree nailed it it's the thing that happens to people who want to go in the entertainment giving up on that dream basically is kind of the way I see it. Perfect. Yes, I totally agree. Nailed it. It's the thing that happens to people who want to go in the entertainment industry is either you want to do that because you're a monster who is looking for power or because you love stuff. Like you're like, I love movies and TV shows and performing. I'd love to do that.

To be clear, the three of you are monsters looking for power, right? That's okay. Right. Power hungry monsters. Weiger and I definitely have a Roger power, right? That's okay. Okay. Right. Power hungry monsters. Weiger. Weiger and I definitely have a Roger Rabbit,

Eddie Valiant relationship. We're, we're at once both grumpy and annoying. I remember I came over and you hid me in your sink one time. I'm like, you songs, Benny, the cab.

I mean, new song's benny the cab i mean roger is just defined by like the the handcuffed gag his best gag right where he's like you could have done that any time and roger's like no only when it was funny and they're like the best line it's the best line it gets me so so, so every single time, like I'm like that, that kind of like perfect screenwriting that gives you a little flutter where you're like, Oh, that's, that's, that's the character. Like I,

I, I get everything that's charming and annoying about this. Well, I think the other interesting thing about Roger is that he's the dilemma. Like in this movie, he is positioned as he is the conflict. His existence is the conflict. His proximity to Eddie in as he is the conflict. His existence is the conflict. His proximity to Eddie in all scenes is the conflict. So the character has to be annoying in a way that like

these classical kind of animated comedy characters like Mickey and Donald and Goofy and Bugs and Daffy and Porky, whoever, aren't. Where it's like, you have these archetypes of like, the cool, calm, collected, in charge, like, you know, run circles around everyone, kind of like Mickey Bugs thing. You have the put upon, like, irascible, low status, fighting for respect, Daffy Donald thing. And then Goofy and Porky fall into that thing of like, well-intentioned, but always kind of like struggling to stay one step ahead and roger's actually like an impediment to most people around him like he makes things worse is he also like and i feel bad saying this but is he a cuck like is he into that like i feel like that it kind of

is brushing up against that with the whole jess Jessica rabbit thing where like he wants the photos and he's upset, but then he's making, you know, is there like a whole other layer? Like the Roger Jessica dynamic is very, I hadn't thought about it that way until this rewatch. Um, I'll let,

I'll let Nick answer this. All right. He, I mean, he is like you know i i don't think he revels in being humiliated which i which to me like it seems like he it seems like he is he is genuinely you know distraught by the the allegations of infidelity um so i i yeah i don't know, but maybe that's what's going on there. It's just he kind of gives her a break, and you're like, well, he's forgiving. He loves her. He trusts her.

And that's the bright read on it. They just have, their dynamic is slightly underexplored in the movie, and I was thinking about it more this time around. But also, Jessica always talks about him as if he's an alpha. I mean, I know that's one of the running jokes of the movie, but she always makes it seem like, A, like you will not believe how much of a man he is.

And B, like he's kind of an innocent, I have to get involved in these things to keep him clean. You know? Yeah, I agree with that. It is that sort of thing of the to me he is just that sort of guy who is respected for how good he is you know what i mean when betty boop is like she's so lucky to be with roger you know that kind of joke that this we just seen this beautiful woman and and well this beautiful cartoon woman and uh and she's she's lucky to be with roger and

and i think that's i think it's going on like that sort of show business aspect of like someone who is like a like a bob hoskins or something like a guy who right who uh who's who who you would be really attracted to just because of their talent or something but also especially in comedy like how many wildly successful people in comedy do we know who like don't know how to tie their shoes sure you know who can't make pasta that's what i always say right david's go-to is is comedy boys who can't make pasta right yeah um i legitimately worked with someone uh a very well-known very extremely talented comic who i watched them backstage uh have their manager assist them putting their belt on right like it was it's and it's kind of like you know it is just let everybody know it was me

so yeah that archetype definitely exists um yeah and And I guess Roger Rabbit kind of is that he does seem like someone who is like, well, how can you function? Really? All you know how to do is perform. And we even when he's allowed to just sort of like be himself. Yeah. Like in that bar scene, he's still just like on. He's still performing. There's no distance between him, his onscreen persona and who he is in the reality of this world and he's kind of a savant i mean he has no strategy he has no impulse control i mean it's one of my favorite bits in the entire movie is the uh shave and a haircut two bits thing where it's just like he is so beholden to comedy and that he literally was like created to do comedy that it's the only impulse he has at all times one one of my favorite moments in the movie is when he's when he's watching goofy and he's like goofy he does it better i don't know the exact line but he takes a hit better than anyone or whatever oh my god i love that scene i love him watching goofy and admiration and all he has a reverence for which it's i mean

that's so cool and it is such a thing that you see or whatever like uh you know like real comedians love other comedians and and and admire them and and and that part just that those little aspects of the movie are so every i mean all the little details in the movie are are so amazing and and it's and i mean and's also, we haven't touched on it, but it's kind of an allegory for race in America. And the tunes basically are, are non-white represent non-white people. There's a lot of stuff like that. It's a ghetto. There's a second class citizen thing.

And also the movie is so overtly about like capitalism and like capitalism, you know, leading to the decline of like public trusts and services within america what we sacrificed the whole red car thing is what happened i mean yeah the movie's plot is basically like chinatown yes and like right that that's all real like that the auto companies and the tire companies like bought la's red car company and put it out of business like they like that's a real thing that happened in the 30s and 40s and it really was there was a point you know because it's a joke in the movie where eddie's like it's like why who needs a car in la we get the freeway you take yeah right you get the best public transit system in the world and it's like there was there was true at some point they were like la had a renowned public transit system and trolley system that was completely dismantled um and uh and and

they also reference when they're talking about building the freeway which i was on this rewatch i was i didn't realize that the freeway reveal was like his villain monologue at the end of the film um i i thought that came earlier on but i was was like, oh, this doesn't happen until the last 10 minutes where we get his true motivation. But so much of what he says is a grim reflection of what reality ended up being, which is like no one will even remember that neighborhood when they're driving through it at 65 miles per hour or whatever that line is right it's the destruction of like los angeles as a town in exchange for we'll be able to build so many shops you'll be able to get anywhere within 15 minutes it's it's crazy that the the this movie filled with car like with mickey and and daffy and donald and all these cartoon characters has like such a heavy message like that like chinatown has but this one even hits closer to home because I think it is like the number one problem with LA is,

is, is the transportation system and, and, and, and how, how much traffic there is. So it's just so crazy that there's this heavy thing at this, this it's basically just like this plot device,

but it's, it's real. And, and, and, and also there's a thing with Betty Boop. I was just thinking of this when she's, when she's the,

uh, in the movie and it's a, yeah, it's, it's when she's when she's the waitress in the movie and it's a yeah it's it's that's it's the equivalent of of silent movie stars basically right yes and that's i mean it's so fantastic uh that scene moves me to tears i was uh choked up watching it last night as i have been before and it's's not just that I like Betty Boop and like the, and the implications that you're talking about, but like it's that she's the only tune that Eddie is nice to like, Eddie is so hostile,

especially in the first half of the movie. And he's really sweet to her in a way that almost suggests like, did they have something going on? Like, you know, there's this kind of like, this kind of like old flame thing. And like, it's such a touching little moment it is his line delivery on you still got it betty is just like unreal i mean we have to talk about hoskins i

mean it's one of my favorite performances yes yes he's fantastic you're really you're really trying to figure out the dna of this movie in in especially when it comes to the all the fucking i know i'm sorry that i've now brought it up twice i i don't know if it but you know what i mean right like there's it's not a flirtatious energy exactly but there's like a warm sort of relationship there but also watching it last night like this was one of my most rented movies as a child i feel like this was one of my default if i'm at the video store my parents are like hurry up and i couldn't pick something i would Like, this was one of my most rented movies as a child. I feel like this was one of my default. If I'm at the video store, my parents are like, hurry up, and I couldn't pick something.

I would always just reach for this and be like, I'll still enjoy Roger Rabbit for the 12th time. But I don't think I'd seen it maybe five or six years. And just watching it closely last night, I was surprised by how frequently it is overtly sexual. It's very horny. It's horny as shit. The booby trap. There are things like that.

Those are things where Disney would never allow that now. Is that a rabbit in your pocket? Are you happy to see me? Which I remember laughing at as a kid, not realizing it was a boner joke. Right. Well, because that's like a joke you hear as a kid and you don't get. Yeah. You just know it like a joke you hear as a kid and you don't get no yeah you just you just like no it's a joke yeah there's like jessica says like you're the

best i've i ever had even better than goofy right damn goofy's fucking right like there's we know goofy fucks he has a kid he's the one right like he? What's his kid called? Is Goofy's kid from Jessica Rabbit? Maybe. I mean, Max, he's a handsome guy, right? He does have huge tits. Wait a second. Max is Jessica Rabbit's son. What a reveal that would be.

But there's just so much shit like that. And Joanna Cassidy, when she catches him with Jessica and his pants are down, there's this whole sort of like, and like uh joanna cassidy when she catches him with jessica and his pants are down yeah there's this whole sort of like you can't keep it in your pants but it ties back into that whole like oh this is like unseemly it's disgusting that you would fuck a tune right there's so much fucking in this but not impossible right like it's more just like oh come on right yeah well because jessica rabbit's review is for it's it's for uh it's a tune review for humans like and and it's full of a bunch of just horned up human men who wanted to look at the forbidden fruit of this uh this sexy animated

woman it's a cotton club thing it's like all the performers are black and the entire customer base is white it's like it is a forbidden fruit thing. It really hammers home that the the the the tuned like standing in it for a different race, basically. Right. And the industry is all white people, obviously, right in there. And, you know, all the money is going as anyway. I mean, what you're saying, though, Mitch, about like, you know, Eddie Valiant being this guy who's been like broken down by the industry and forgets why he even wanted to be part of it before and roger i guess being sort of like a savant who doesn't even understand what he's doing and has been able to sort of just like coast through it blithely like he's gotten the sort of lucky path oh yeah solely off of talent two sides of the coin

for sure right but it's also like this movie barely even traffics in metaphor, like down to the fact that the red car thing is just literally a thing that happened. It's more just sort of like using this sandbox to comment on actual power dynamics that happen and not just in America, but also specifically, I think the weirdness of show business. And I think this film is really keyed into the unsavory side of Hollywood that always exists, running counter to the idea of it being this dream factory that just gives joy to people all over the world. And there's no greater distillation of that than this point in time when Hollywood is sort of just like popcorn. It's just like movies are miracles and everything's wonderful and it's people singing and dancing.

And then you would hear all these terrible stories about like the horrible things that were happening to people and children on, you know, performance enhancing drugs and sexual assault and like Eddie Mannix, who Bob Hoskins later played these like fixers, you know, who are like cleaning up movie stars crimes. Like it's so keyed into that push and pull and the tunes are just representing like the brightest sort of happiest output of it. But the way that humans talk about tunes throughout the movie not just like eddie having his contempt but that scene when the first scene with uh maroon when he calls eddie into his office and dumbo flies up to the

window and he like makes his crack about like yeah i got him on loan for disney they work for peanuts like he's so dismissive of them you know they're like circus freaks to him yeah and that which is also you also just and it's a great example of just like these little jokes that they just work in that are that are like little pun jokes that work great but are treated in that the character treats it like it's a real it's a real thing there's no winkiness going on or whatever you know yeah so it's a mecha singale have this like comedy principle that in watching all these interviews and listening to commentary tracks for these episodes i've heard and gail didn't write this movie but you know zemeckis's storytelling sensibility is very much tied into

his development with gail they're like our ethos for comedy is we don't really have jokes like everything that everyone says they believe 100 and we encourage our actors to play it as truthfully and as like honestly as possible i said the same word two times but the the joke comes out of the circumstances being treated that way and this is like the ultimate version of it's one of the reasons why he's so right for this project is you have things like what happened to that guy a tune killed his brother dropped a piano on his head where when it's first introduced you're like this is just an incredible joke because you're just a great joke right and then it ends up being a major plays the drama absolutely right well and joanna gleason

like right you have the two scenes where they explain it, where it's played so dramatically as if it were the tragic backstory in any noir film. But the comedy only comes out of the fact that it's like, oh, I guess people would actually die if you dropped a piano on their head. Yeah. Well, I mean, we give it up for Jessica Rabbit. I mean, everyone always talks about how Jessica Rabbit's rabbit's a very sexy character etc etc but uh dolores she doesn't she rules she doesn't get enough she's cool yeah good character love joanna cassidy in general blade runner she's got a lot of like great poppins you know great like supporting roles in the 80s we never hit bob hoskins when you wanted to give him love because he is he's great well we got to talk about hoskins first i want to right i want to run through griff and i'm sure you'll have some

too some of the people that they wanted for this role because obviously yes hoskins is not the first choice like which is it's the magic of this movie because like back to the future is a case where the movie is a miracle because they so nearly made all of the wrong decisions and everything got saved at the last time. Other than the Hoskins decision, Roger Rabbit's a miracle because you can't believe they approved all these first draft ideas. It feels like everything should have been noted to death, but it speaks to the level of desperation that Disney was at, that they felt like this gives us a reason to keep the animation studio going. It makes us a place with a little more edge, so high-profile filmmakers want to work with us they got spielberg on board because they knew he would be

able to manage all of the rights and they knew he was such a classic cartoon fan and that got zemeckis back in the fold once they finally you know were ready to go with this movie disney's thought was well of course you have to hire one of the 10 biggest leading men in hollywood all right griff i want to run it down. I want to do it. You can chime in if there are ones I'm missing. But Harrison Ford is their first ask. That's who Spielberg wants.

Which you can see, because he could do the sort of deadpan, you know, serious thing against all the comedy. He's the only one who could possibly work from the list. Right, he costs too much then chevy chase which makes sense for the time like chevy chase still a big comedy star he would play it too he would he would play it too goofy he would just be too smarmy probably right like he's too in on the joke i think he's too modern and he's too winky um you got bill murray who doesn't get it because

bill murray is impossible to like offer roles too but i guess i could see that but again he would be too smart me i feel like and too modern they they both have the cynical sort of like uh you know a post vietnam edge to them and i think they both would be embarrassed to be in that movie like the the magic of ghostbusters is that bill murray keeps on selling out the fact that he's in that movie. Like the magic of Ghostbusters is that Bill Murray keeps on selling out the fact that he's in the movie Ghostbusters, which works for Ghostbusters but wouldn't work for this. Agreed.

Griff, you nailed it. That's perfect. Eddie Murphy, who turns it down because he doesn't get the concept and says he regrets turning it down. He says it's like the only role he regrets turning down. Interesting. I mean, he, I feel like in the 80s regrets turning down interesting i i mean he i feel like in the 80s like if eddie murphy and really always like if eddie murphy's in your movie it just kind

of becomes an eddie murphy movie like i don't know if he could like kind of just like be seamlessly apart i mean i'd watch it i like eddie murphy's one of those things where especially in the 80s it's kind of intrinsic like you know like it would be interesting to see that i like him better than like chevy chase and bill murray but right the thing with eddie murphy is that like i never eddie murphy to me is such a is always such a likable character in my mind and yeah and not just not to say that not not to say hoskins isn't likable because he is but like but he has to be prickly you're I know he's prickly and yeah and I don't know if if Eddie would have been as good

with with that sort of sort of thing I also remember reading that he what like if he took the role he was insisting on being in Norbit prosthetics yeah which might have been a distraction he's always brings those he brings them to every yeah i believe he's playing a chinese character in norbit i don't know why i'm correcting you on that yeah i'm sorry for not remembering norbit vividly like which racism he's doing in norbit why would you be shocked if i revealed that i've been in norbit prosthetics this whole time. And all the time you know me, I'm a very thin man. I would be surprised because that's an incredible level of effort. I would not expect it from you.

It's also like we talk a lot, David, about like movies using movie stars well versus misunderstanding them and how if you're casting a movie star, you want to be weaponizing something in their persona and in the audience's relationship that they already have to that person. And Eddie Murphy's persona at that point in time was closer to being Roger Rabbit. Like Bill Murray and Chevy Chase, even though they were comedy stars, they were mostly reactors. Like they run circles around people and they clown on other people around them, right? Harrison Ford is obviously much more of a straight man. But Eddie Murphy's the dilemma in his movies.

Like, you know, 48 Hours and Trading Places and Beverly Hills Cop, all three of those characters are the dilemma. The only movie he's made up until this point where he's kind of playing the straight man is coming to America. But in that one, he's also the innocent. I was watching nutty professor last night and it's, it's, it's crazy to me that Eddie Murphy at the same time plays like this heavyset guy,

so emotional and like so real. And you really feel for this character. You really feel, you really feel for Sherman. That's a Sherman. Right. And then, and we got Sherman and Herman. So he's, he's like, he plays that very real. this character you really feel you really feel for sherman that's the sherman right and then um

and we got sherman and herman so he he's he's like he plays that very real but then at the same time he's making like the movie is making like extremely mean jokes about fat people yes but but at the same time he's really making you feel for the character it's such a crazy it's that movie is that movie is great his performance in that movie is outstanding i think that is like maybe i don't know i mean best performances may be strong because he's has a lot but like it's it's up there he like won critics awards for that movie like fairly deservedly i'd say because of what you're saying mitch like he weirdly taps into like the pathos of german Klump.

And I think that there is some realness there with Eddie Murphy that I think that he is like kind of a misunderstood guy in a lot of ways. And I think that he could do it. But again, I still know one that beats Hoskins in my mind so far from this list. It might be as simple with Murphy as he as he, as he was just too, he just would have been too funny. I mean, I think that's a big part of it.

I have a whole, a whole theory. Do you have other people on your list, David? I mean, the rest of this list is one of, it's one of those like casting articles, not the ones I just read,

but then there's a, a whole list where I'm like, get out of here. Like some of them make sense. Like, Oh, Robin Williams, Jack Nicholson,

Robert Redford. Yeah. That's interesting make sense. Like, oh, Robin Williams, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford. Clint Eastwood. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. The one on this list that kind of popped for me was Wallace Shawn. I don't know if they seriously considered Wallace Shawn, but that's interesting. He's of a similar profile.

Here's my whole thing with Hoskins. It's the blessing in disguise of all A-list actors turning it down because i think they probably above all else this movie seemed very risky to them like this seemed like a movie where if this doesn't work this is embarrassing you will look silly talking to a rabbit for 90 minutes if the technology doesn't work, if the tone isn't lined up, all of that. But I also feel like the star of this movie is the premise. Like the movie cannot handle the weight of someone bringing their movie star reputation into it and you filtering it through what this person does best and what we're used to seeing them do in films and even things like Eddiedie murphy being too young you know or like beyond all of that the fundamental breakthrough i had watching it last night is knowing how difficult this movie

was to make none of those guys would have put up with this shit like yeah you think about how menial making this film was just take after take of lining up the geometry of maintaining the eyelines and where you have to grab what when and shit like the scene, which I feel like is quietly the most technically complicated, when the weasels come into his's like he's got this fake handcuff on that's rigged to make it look like it's being pulled by Roger. They have like a pipe underneath the sink that will spring up to spit water in his face. They have like dishes being thrown. The weasels are picking up different objects. They're also holding physical guns like all this shit. Can you just imagine Harrison Ford being willing to do like that many rehearsals, that many takes, like being given that many notes?

Like the story I've heard about Eddie Murphy is post Nutty Professor, once he realized, oh, I was able to do these scenes where I was the only person in them. And I was just sitting there with other stand-ins for eye lines that he rarely does most of his footage in his movies now like he has stand-ins who do anything other than a direct shot and actors who have worked with Eddie Murphy are like I barely met him and he just comes in and does his coverage and like no one else would put up with this other than someone like bob hoskins who a mitch fits better into what you're saying is like you believe this guy is broken has like given up he's got such a coiled rage inside of him which you really need um but also it's like

you need someone who is grateful enough for this opportunity to be the lead of an american blockbuster that they will put this amount of backbreaking work into making the movie work when so often you're acting against nothing nothing yeah it needs to be someone who's hungry it's also weird back then right like yes like now i feel like with these avengers movies and you know where it's like so commonplace to be acting alongside tennis balls, but like in the eighties, that's like bizarre to be doing. Right.

Like that's not something that people would be used to. Kind of having to like develop techniques for the first time for how to approach as an actor while the movie around him is developing techniques for how to make the film around him. It's, it's like impossible work. the film around him. It's, it's like impossible work. And there's also the fact that he just doesn't look like he should be in a movie, you know, like Bob Hoskins is such an unlikely movie star that the whole time you're just like, not only can I not believe that Disney put their

most expensive production ever on this guy's furry potato-shaped shoulders, but that any Hollywood studio was willing to put him as the leading man in the center of the poster. We also have to give up for the fact that he is canonically Super Mario. It's true. He remains the man to have played that character until someone else finally takes the role right i mean this is captain lou albano erasure but that's fair that's true i i forgot i didn't forget about lou albano but you know so but there's yeah i i have a lot of respect for for his his work as super mario even though he doesn't he did not personally for sure yeah it's

and that's what i mean he that that speaks to what it were his star was after this movie right right right you could put him as the lead i mean he's not even italian they just sort of cast him where they're like that well he looks like the little guy like you know that's enough can i quickly say that david also had some charles martinette uh erasure there too which uh wow very rude all right all right i was digging into hoskins last night and i found a quote that said he didn't know that mario was based on a video game until halfway through filming when his son asked him a question about it fuck better rules that's great that movie is it's just that i've read about like the production mean, I'm sure you know all about it,

but that movie seems like an insane clusterfuck. Can you just imagine Bob Hoskins reading that script thinking it's like a spec, that it's an original idea based on nothing? I don't know. It's some fucking plumbers in a dinosaur tube movie. The story I know, apart from all the many stories where he's just like i hated it like was amo and i would just get drunk all the time like it was awful he's like there were some crew members who would smoke weed on the beach or something like

at night and one night he like walked by and he was like are you guys smoking reefer like i want some of that and like joined in with them and they were every Hoskins story. And in Britain, especially he is such a Uber legend is that he was like, kind of like a genuine man of the people, working class guy. Dad was a truck driver type, you know,

like beloved on sets, you know, professional type act, you know, everyone loves Bob. And he's one of those guys where he literally just kind of like stumbled into it like he right like you read like his life before the age of like 27 was like he was a plumber he worked at a zoo like just like all these odd jobs he was literally a plumber i think the zoo one i made up but he was a plumber he was

a window cleaner he's very paddington-esque in fact right and then i think it was a thing where he was like he stumbled into an acting class and then he never thought he was going to pursue it professionally and then he took a friend to an audition and they thought he was in line so they said you next and then he got cast in a shakespeare in the park and it was just sort of like british shakespeare but yeah yeah yes that is literally the story someone just handed him a script and was like get on stage you're all right wow you you hear stories like that and i'm always just like man that friend must have been like god damn it like my friend unprepared but he just was like a natural and you also kind of can't teach that level of personality you know it's just like this is a guy who's clearly like

lived you know has like experienced things and then right he does like pennies from heaven which leads to his like 80s crime movie run where he does uh uh what's what's long good friday oscar nomination right for that that's why he's that's why he's at the level where they can offer him this right he makes this british crime drama that's sort of like a breakout like an art house breakout and he wins every best actor award other than the oscar like he wins the golden globe he wins the bafta he wins everything he wins most critics awards like he was very much in line to be some odd British character actor who somehow won a one-off academy award you know who he lost the Oscar to right it was one of those makeup awards right yeah and he's always been like like look

yeah it was honor to be nominated but like I had the better performance that year mate like he like no no disrespect to paul newman but come on uh but but that's so good in mona lisa it puts him in that position where it's like he's just been this guy who almost won an oscar at the moment where every other a-list actor has turned this movie down and they were like i don't know hoskins and the fact that he looks like a guy who's actually in a noir movie, that he's not bringing any movie star baggage to it, that he's coming out of this gritty crime patina that he had been in, and that he's just at service of the film, and also fully committed to figuring out the difficulties of the technology. difficulties of the technology it's it's like it couldn't have worked with anyone else or even someone even him under different circumstances wouldn't have worked the same way well well david talked about his cry moment and my i have a cry moment and my cry moment is when when hoskins turn when he when he decides to make try to make everyone, like he's got to be silly and save the day.

Oh, yeah. When he turns on the carnival or the, what's it called? The merry-go-round and starts singing and dancing. That, to me, that's my cry moment. It's my favorite part of the entire movie when he's making the weasels laugh themselves to death. Is that seated at all beyond that shot? That's why I love that.

Because on the desk, you see the one shot of him in the still photograph with his brother, his late brother, as circus performers, and then that's basically it. That's all that hints that he has us in it. There's a picture above that of his family in the circus. Oh, that's right. You see his dad, I forgot. It's like it's all family that's right you see his dad

i forgot it's like the exact same moves zemeckis does in back to the future where all of the background are given on doc brown is photos on the wall in the opening credit sequence and he does the same thing here where it's like the only eddie valiant backstory you get pretty much is photographs right um but it's so well done i also mitch get worked up with i agree that that scene is great because because he's so sincere about it as he is in everything in he does in this movie it's such a sincere performance and it wouldn't work the movie doesn't work without it the one that really gets me is the the scene when he gets the camera from joanna gleason has to develop the photo roll which is from the vacation he went on camera from Joanna Gleeson to develop the photo roll,

which is from the vacation he went on with her and his brother. Oh, yeah. And he's looking at the photos while drinking, which is what then turns into the big Zemeckis camera move where you get all the backstory

from the photos. But his turn from the looking at the photos, you're seeing him smile for the first time in the entire movie, and then he just becomes overcome with grief at the loss of his brother. That's the other thing.

It's like not only is so much of the movie him acting against characters who aren't actually on set with him, like animated characters. There's so much of the movie that is Hoskins like Eddie Valiant in a room with no one else having to drive the story. like Eddie Valiant in a room with no one else having to drive the story where it's like detective stuff where he like looks frustrated and then he notices something out of the corner of his eye and then he picks it up and looks more closely and then he has the aha moment on his face and then he needs to have that turn of like determination of I know what I need to do next and that's the hardest fucking shit to do as an actor because it's like so unnatural and it's all indication in the way that like acting teachers try to beat out of you. Like don't indicate, just feel it. But that's like a movie like this calls for unnatural shit where it's like you need to telegraph to the audience exactly what you're thinking.

Because this is a 10 second shot where you need to express four different emotions that advance the plot through your face and close up even if you pull this off no one's gonna they're not gonna nominate you for an oscar like you know what i mean you're not gonna you're your your performance is never gonna be lauded like it should be because it's i mean he's so so so good in it and also like as much as he did have a boost to his career after this, if you're serving the movie well, you're not going to be the guy who pops off of this. This is not a movie that makes you into a conventional leading man.

It maybe makes you more bankable because you've been in a hit, but it's like you're going to play grumpy. You're going to play irritable the whole movie. You're not fun. Roger's the character they're going to make merchandise off of. He's the character the you're not fun like Roger's the character they're gonna make merchandise off of he's the character the kids are gonna like for so many years they were trying to make sequels to this movie and a lot of them didn't

have Valiant in them like it was like if this thing became a franchise it would have been Roger as the franchise that's my favorite kid in the world a kid who's like who loves Eddie Valiant Eddie Valiant that they sleep with david you had an observation when we were texting beforehand and uh you're talking just about how

this film reflects hollywood like i i you did was it correct me if i'm misstating but i think you said this is maybe the best film ever made about Hollywood. I was reflecting on that statement while I was watching it where I'm like, is there a better one? And I'm like, you know, because there's like, you know, the bad and the beautiful, right? Like there's sort of like classic, you know, 50s golden age Hollywood movies that are, you know, about like how the industry but like, you know, they Hollywood movies that are, you know, about like how the industry,

but like, you know, they, Roger Rabbit is so clever and so rose tinted and so like nostalgic, but it's also so weirdly clear eyed about how nasty the industry is. Sure. And how like, uh,

unforgiving it is to like, you know, like, like the, it's things like the Bettyty boop scene that inform me saying that but also things like eddie doing the big performance at the end where it's like there's still some sort of love of what everyone's here to do like you know that sort of carries through the entire movie like and i think that's why I make that statement.

Griffin, I feel ridiculous making it because surely there are so many movies about Hollywood. I mean, I think you're kind of right because it feels like the movie that gets at the most sort of a static truth of what Hollywood is. Right. for us kind of thing. But the very specific place in time this movie has made it, the fact that Disney doesn't really have anything to lose, that they want to make an impression, that Zemeckis has this like wind underneath his wings to really like go for stuff, allows the movie to have that very like clear-eyed view of the ugliness of the industry as well and i don't know if there's another movie that has that holds both in such equal balance now nick your response was that the that you had something at the other end of the spectrum you you if you said right i can't remember oh that's right yes yes yeah but like if roger is at one end yeah i i think i think the you know in terms of movies that are about hollywood like yeah if you if you roger rabbit is the the the best think I think the you know, in terms of movies that are about Hollywood, like, yeah, if you if you Roger Rabbit is the best, then I think that, you know, the it runs the what's the word I'm looking for?

The spectrum runs from Roger Rabbit at one end to, at the other end, Argo, which to me is like, I saw Argo at the Arclight in Hollywood, which is the most LA movie theater. And it was so clearly filled with people who laughter, the knowing laughter, the I'm in on the joke laughter at a lot of their Hollywood references like was just like, so I just I just feel like that's not what the sort of thing you get from watching Roger Rabbit, which isn't trying to be like like wink at the audience and be like, if you know about the WGA, you know, it's more just like representing this is how a Hollywood set works. This is kind of a shorthand for what you might see, you know, it's more just like representing this is how a Hollywood set works. This is kind of a shorthand for what you might see, you know, an executive doing when he's reviewing dailies like

this. It's just sort of presenting the stuff in a way that's accessible to the audience and isn't like, you know, condescending towards them or trying to, you know, expect some sort of knowledge from the audience. All all that said i just like how like accessible a movie about hollywood is to someone who would like never have been on a movie set like you just sort of like you get all of it it's just communicated so effectively it's kind of wild how little exposition this movie has both in terms of setting up its fairly complicated plot and mystery and also in terms of movies like this always do so much like we don't trust the audience table setting.

So a movie is a thing that people sit down in theaters and watch for 90 to 120 minutes. The movie is so good at conveying all the rules of itself to you, and both the imagined rules that they've created for this fantastical world and also the rules of like this is how things worked in this time period this is how show business works and i also feel like this movie has none of those moments that something like argo has where you're like come on guys you know that's not how it works yeah like you make movies for a living you know that would never happen it's like a perfectly easy movie to watch like you know it's enjoyable but like it is crazy to reflect on argo and you're like right they made

a movie about like the iran hostage crisis and all that that you know in the seriousness of this and the ultimate takeaway of argo is kind of like yeah you know guys we just here in hollywood we love the movies like that's such a weird and the oscars responded by being like ben you did it best picture of the year like congratulations ben you're back you know you're back you're batman like that's it you're gonna be batman like i know that that's a real thing that happened. Like, I know it's based on a true story. It's just wild that sometimes when you watch Hollywood distill everything into like, you know, when it comes down to it, it's just about making stories that people love. Right.

Yeah, I just don't. I can't think of another movie that's able to hold both truths at the opposite ends of the spectrum simultaneously. You know, it's like either movies are just fully selling the lies that Hollywood tells itself, or they're just wallowing in like the seedy truth, the underbelly. And it just feels like this movie is weirdly clear eyed about everything. And it helps also that Zemeckis is such a nostalgic filmmaker, but he's always had that slightly cynical edge. I mean, it's this thing about him being like the ultimate boomer, but he's always sort of trying to approach things with like a little bit of a a mad magazine-esque like satirical deflation and this is the movie where i think he balances those sensibilities the best that's the other

thing with this movie is it doesn't feel like a noir parody it just feels like a proper noir film yeah but it's not right it's not winky in the way that could be annoying. Like, you're like, like, I don't know, like dead women, dead men don't wear plaid,

which is not a bad movie, but you know what I mean? Like where it's just like, okay, I get it. This is a total pastiche. I get it. It's,

it's not a pastiche really, which is so odd. That's what I mean. Right. There's a, there's a back to the future three interview, like from a making of thing where Spielberg is like, the great thing about these guys is it's not just a good back to the Future 3 interview, like from a making of thing where Spielberg is like,

the great thing about these guys is it's not just a good Back to the Future movie. It's actually a great Western. Like this could stand up there with my darling Clementine. And I've always called bullshit on that. I'm like, Back to the Future 3 is a much better Back to the Future movie than it is a Western. It is just a Back to the Future movie with Western trappings. But this is the one where that actually applies, where it's like that he made a pretty fucking good noir movie, even if you take all the tunes out of it. And it actually has like a mystery that you're kind of trying to solve with a satisfying reveal.

It doesn't feel like as much as the highway stuff doesn't really is barely even foreshadowed. I mean, you're just sort of seeing the clover leaf signage and stuff and you see the um what do you call it the the there's the discussion of the train cars and all that but it's that thing i think we i said in the used cars episode that like zemeckis's superpower is uh pointing at chekhov's gun and convincing you that it's just decoration on the wall. And there's so much of that where he has plots set up disguised as jokes that you accept as, well, that isn't something that's going to pay off later. That was just for that one gag here, or it was just sort of world building or whatever it is um the the movie works on those grounds and then you add in the tune stuff into it and like all of its themes become more resonant and also it just

becomes this fucking magic trick movie where you still cannot process how they made it where where would you rank this as far as noirs go would you say this is is this in like your top far top far top five film noirs or i'm griffin newman i would rank it in my top five noirs but i feel like that answer is weighed by the fact that my biggest complaint with most noirs is not enough tunes right roger rabbit not involved like i like detour but there's no giant mallets over the head and detour I do love many a noir it's I have never been asked to consider whether Roger Rabbit would crack my

five noirs I don't know I love it as a Hollywood movie more than I love it as a noir but I think it is I agree with you Griff that it's a great noir can i can i can i say just to talk about the donald versus daffy piano scene just because of course it's just one of the best scenes in the movie and you also get to see like two sides of daffy you see like you see like does that daffy going to like berserk daffy moger his hair is insane and

that that that entire scene is just is fantastic and then i want to talk about us uh on the opposite and i want to talk about the saddest scene in the movie which is the shoe getting put in the dip oh poor fucking shoe we haven't even talked about judge doom we haven't talked about judge doom yeah we gotta talk about judge doom we got a lot still to talk about we might put a put a kettle on the iron david this might be a 12-hour episode no this is not gonna be a 12-hour episode this is 11 11 deal put the kettle on the iron david it's 11 uh where would i put a kettle all right guess put a kettle on the iron david uh spielberg is like that's the other thing with this movie is this movie could only be Put a kettle on the iron, David.

Spielberg is like, that's the other thing with this movie is this movie could only be made with the participation of Spielberg at this point in time because it's like, this is the only time Warner Brothers and Disney characters ever appeared on screen at the same time,

which could only happen because Steven Spielberg was so powerful. Every single person in Hollywood wanted to be owed a favor by Steven Spielberg was so powerful, every single person in Hollywood wanted to be owed a favor by Steven Spielberg. So studios would work against their best interest in exchange for an IOU from Spielberg. But the terms of it are so specific where it's like Daffy and Donald have to have the exact same number of words. They need to be visible on screen for the same number of frames like everything they do on screen is completely symmetrical in terms of like their close-ups are timed to the same degree they're mostly in two shots same with the bugs and uh mickey moments yes when he's flying out the window and at the very end like there were all these

rules that had to be established for how they would allow the characters to coexist. But it feels fun. It doesn't feel like contractually reigned in. Wouldn't that be annoying in most movies? And wouldn't those cameos kind of like bum you out? And so like it's it's it's underrated how hard it is to pull that off, like to pull off a Mickey Mouse Bugs Bunny. Like what? You know what I mean? Like those little moments. that off like to pull off a mickey mouse bugs bunny like what you know what i mean like those

little moments look here's a movie that i know you and i love david and has been the cause of some controversy on the doughboys podcast but compare this to wreck it ralph right which is the closest someone has kind of come to trying to do a like roger rabbit it's new characters plus the original characters and you're riffing on the entire medium sort of thing. And the appearances by known characters in Wreck-It Ralph

are so small except for Wreck-It Ralph 2 when suddenly Disney characters have primary supporting roles. But in the original, it's like, well, Mario was off grounds.

Sonic appears as like a PSA on a screen, you know? Like it's a lot of supporting or lower tier characters or in small appearances, they could only really use the villains and not the heroes and things like that. Every time a canonically important video game character is on screen in Wreck-It Ralph, I do think it kind of underlines the fact that the Wreck-It Ralph characters are not really video game icons, that they're creations for the film. You're being reminded that Wreck-It Ralph is an analog for Donkey Kong due to his adjacency

to Zangief. Right. It's something also like the Studio 60 problem of like, the second Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip acknowledges that SNL exists. What is Studio 60? Fucking worst decision they ever did. Baffling creative decision. I like it.

Do you like that decision or are you all in on Studio 60 in general? No, I like that decision because I think it's insane, of course. I like that SNL exists. It's insane. And I feel like it's a trap that most movies fall into when you're

trying to like create new legacy media right and put it in a world alongside the things we know you get so confused by like well if donkey kong exists is wreck-it-ralph not just like a thinly veiled parody of donkey kong is he less popular than donkey kong is he a ripoff like all this shit and i was watching it, trying to come up with some take as to why it works in this movie. And I don't know what it is, but it is so wild that this movie like Roger Rabbit can coexist with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and you buy it.

You accept it. He is different enough from them talking about the archetypes and how he doesn't fit into them cleanly that it doesn't feel like he's a double beat of some other character that already exists. Right. And he's also kind of a schmo. Like, it's acceptable because, like, you don't buy you buy him as like a sort of B-list Mickey Mouse or right. Like, he's not supposed to be a star. Benny feels iconic.

Like, Jessica feels iconic. Baby Herman feels iconic. All the iconic. Baby Herman feels iconic. All the characters. Benny's pretty cool. The introduction of Benny feels like the introduction of the Batmobile. And you're like, this character hasn't even been set up

and it feels epic. It's not even the payoff of anything. It's suddenly just a door opens and Benny the cab comes out and you want to fucking Arsenio. He's inside another car. Yeah, he rules. He's in the back of a police car.

What about when he drives another car later? He drives the car. He drives a car. The car drives a car. When he gets in a car and drives the car. I mean, it's great. Unreal.

So good. But there's that scene where Eddie talks to baby Herman outside of his office. And it's the second time we've met baby Herman. Like you meet him in the opening cartoon. Then you get to see what he's actually like in real life. The second they call cut. And even so your third time seeing baby Herman,

it still feels like, whoa, this scene is huge. I can't believe baby Herman is in this movie. I got a 50 year old sex drive and a three year old dinky. I believe. Is that the line it's something along those lines there's also when he walks off the the set after uh roger blows the

take he like sticks his finger up a woman's dress there's that thing where he like walks between her legs he walks between her legs and kind of grabs yeah kind of whatever he kind of flops around yeah there's an infamous thing when jessica's falling out of the window that her dress flies up and when it was released theatrically it looked like she wasn't wearing underwear and disney denied that it was a deliberate thing but a lot of animators think that they snuck it in is that like the the the dicks in little mermaid or like the cloud that says sex and the lion king like all those weird little urban legend-y kind of, yeah. Yeah, I think it is. And it's one of those things they've, like, corrected on home video releases.

They, like, painted underwear on her. Yeah, I remember reading about it because it was, like, the Laserdisc release was when consumers noticed it because you couldn't frame-by-frame a VHS, but you could frame-by-frame a Laserdisc, and people were like, whoa, what's going on here? Yeah, and it was in clearer quality. I mean,iams was this guy who was sort of this like outsider british animator whose whole thing was like i think the art of animation can be pushed so much

further than what anyone's doing uh and very briefly i think i've talked about too many times on this podcast but like you know animation is 24 frames per second even like the most vivid animation like disney level animation is usually shot on twos which means you're only doing 12 drawings a second and you're photographing each drawing two times and that's still enough to create the the persistence of vision that you know makes motion look like it's happening richard williams was a guy who was like, you do everything on ones. Like you just do everything as clearly as possible. And the stuff that you were talking about, Weiger,

where it's like the perspective shifts and like, you know, inanimate objects moving in space and all these sorts of things that like the second CGI was created, that opening, everything in the kitchen would have been CGI other than the characters. It's like the ballroom in beauty and the beast. They're likegi other than the characters it's like the ball room and beauty and the beast they're like there's no reason to hand draw the ballroom especially if we're mimicking this big crane shot if that's like a set structure it's easier just put it in a

computer and have the computer spin around this you know environment or these objects uh the birds and and rescuers down under, the stampede and Lion King, anything that's like quantity or large spaces or non-organic material, vehicles, things like that. And that opening sequence is just, he had been for years trying to make his big passion project. He would take jobs in order to self-finance his movie. The thief and the cobbler.

Right, yeah. Yeah, which people believe Disney stole for Aladdin. The designs in Aladdin are very similar to Thief and the Cobbler. It's not based off the Aladdin myth, but there's like the Sultan in Aladdin is like identical to Thief and the Cobbler. The villain looks like Jafar,

but his whole thing was like i'm gonna make this on my own terms in a way no studio will allow i'll direct some commercials i'll direct like the ziggy christmas special like he did all these for hire jobs in order to self-finance his movie which he never finished really it got taken away from him by rights holders and then harvey weinstein bought it and he finished it with shitty animation and dubbed voices over it added songs it was never supposed to have any dialogue you can see people who have sort of reconstructed on youtube and it's incredible but that opening sequence is richard williams being like disney is giving me the most money anyone has ever put towards animation like this was classified as the most expensive animated film of all time because they put so much money into the animation because it was such a hurdle to have it coexist with the live action.

That opening sequence is just him showing off and also him like stretching his arms and going like, finally, I get to do this shit. the degree of like the number of knives that are flinging towards roger through the air and the gleans off of them the fact these animated how sharp they are and how shiny they are and they keep on spinning around not just going straight and you have all these camera moves in it it's just like wild fucking shit but i also think it was kind of done by this rebel outlaw crew consciously put in a bunch of really fucking horny shit into the movie it's funny in the beginning when they were when when the director's so mad at roger for having birds around his head because it was a great take and then he just then he just improvised he improvised birds instead of stars why would he be so upset about the birds instead of stars and then

at the end of the movie when the bricks fall him in the start the call back to the stars going around his head is great also i mean you gotta as a as a filmmaker you gotta accept the happy accidents you know maybe it's not what you storyboarded but the birds work the birds play do you guys know who that director is at the beginning of the movie no joel silver wow Every time I watch it, I'm like, who's this character actor who's so good they cast

who's like a Joel Silver type? It's actually Joel Silver doing such a good job of playing a Hollywood asshole. That's wild. He's so funny. All those like little touches

of like, I mean, just even when the patty cake thing and then he, Roger Rabbit flips, flips it into a movie, basically. He does like the little flip book animation oh yeah it's so it's so great i mean there's just all the little movie like movie touches and nods to to to just movie history

and stuff and the fact that all the voices are a lot of the original voice the people who did the the voices in the first place right isn't there a there a lot of- Isn't this, yeah. Right, one of the last Mel Blanc performances? It might be the very last. I mean, yeah. It's right at the end. Wow. It's in the last, and there's so many background characters

who are like deep cut animation nerd picks that like jumped out to me where I'm like, oh, that's like the clown from like the old Fleischer Brothers shorts. Like things where you're like, there's no reason for them to license it other than that it adds versamilitude that in any of these group shots, you're combining sort of like iconic cartoon characters, characters who just look appropriate because they actually have that history, even if they aren't known by name to most people. And then these new characters and part of it is that you have that tapestry. Like it's one of the reasons why I think.

You buy all the characters that this movie is created is because you have so many different art styles on screen at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. And I think I think the other element of that and this is Griffin, you you touched on this, I think, very well earlier. But it's it's just that there isn't a clear like one to one of Roger Rabbit is blank. Benny is blank. Jessica Rabbit is blank. It's not like there's a clear existing analog, you know, because because I think a lazier version of this movie would have been Roger Rat. And it just would have been Mickey Mouse. You know what i mean it just would have clearly been mickey mouse mickey mouse doesn't exist in this world and we're just going to pretend that this is our

mickey mouse stand-in is this are you pitching the wiger version of this roger rat i've been trying to get roger rat off the ground for a while not a lot of takers i've been trying to do that and i've also been trying to reboot the ziggy Christmas special. Again, not a lot of luck. Not bad. I'll say the Ziggy Christmas special, not bad. Let's talk about Judge Doom and the dip scene. I was gonna say, we have to talk about Doom. Because we were talking about the different moments

that make us tear up, but I also feel like this is a big seminal, like, this movie scarred me. I still am haunted by this imagery movie yeah i can't believe they killed that fucking shoe yeah like people will pick different images or different moments for me it's definitely the shoe moment is the one that has always upset me the most i think part of it is very upsetting i said to david it feels like this movie's version of the like look into your heart Miller's Crossing scene.

Like the thing that makes it so upsetting isn't just that it's so violent, but also that like the shoe is pleading for its life. You see it experiencing pain. Oh, it's heartbreaking. It just is. It's like a it's like a like an animal being killed. And but they're doing it in a way that you know it's just a cartoon but it's still just it hurts your heart for for something that's just on screen for just a few seconds and it and it gets fucking wiped out i mean just a great introduction to the this most evil man on he

feels like the most evil guy on earth well and also the the status of toons within this reality whereas that there are cops all around you know and he is and this this is a shoe he is just executing in cold blood with no consequences no one cares it's just like no one gives a shit but and it's also like the shoe hasn't even as far as i can tell hasn't even done anything wrong it's just sort of there right it's just one of the ones that flopped over yeah all the shoes fell out he picked that one randomly and just killed it for sport if he yeah it feels like murder it feels like he yes it feels like he should be in trouble for that right like it doesn't feel right you would think so it's abuse

i mean it's one of those scenes where i just now like it it freaked me out when i was a kid and now when i watch it i have to like go away inside yeah if that makes sense like yeah i just have to be like this is a scene from the film roger rabbit and that's what i'm watching and that that's why this is not like a thing that i need to be worked up about like i i have to detach i gotta i gotta disconnect myself from because when i was a kid just thinking of the just saying the things that's that stuck with you the shoe for sure and and and judge doom is a judge it's judge doom right yeah judge doom but uh also the like the other one is the baby the car and the

bullets i really like the bullets or maybe a little bit problematic now but the the the bullets always stuck with me too but the shoe the shoe scene is just like for a little kid seeing that moment it just it it the the it makes it feel like the it little kid seeing that moment, it just, it, it, the, the, it makes it feel like the, it's,

Oh, this is like the real deal. This is, this is intense. Roger Rabbit could be destroyed in this movie and you don't want to see Roger Rabbit get dunked in the dip. It's it, uh,

it really raises the stakes of the entire movie. Yeah. They had to show, they had to show a character getting dipped early to, for you to understand what was going on. And like the fact that the color of the shoe bleeds into the dip and then when he takes his glove out, it's like paint colored. Like it's like, you know, their essence is dissolving. Dear God.

I also feel like these types of cartoons that this movie is riffing on pointedly don't have physical stakes, right? Like people can get hit by an anvil and they spring back to life. You can run into a wall and then inflate yourself back up. There's something so upsetting about seeing a cartoon character actually be destroyed, especially in a way that acknowledges that they're like kind of made out of paint, because it feels like it's a betrayal of the rules that we've all accepted for a century well well no one they they even say it might be judge doom but who says something like like they thought there was no way to kill

a toon right or they thought there was no way to like like it's basically establishing right yeah these would otherwise be immortal so then if you think about snuffing out an immortal life... Yeah. I mean, we're, like, Battle of Helm's Deep. Elves getting killed shit. It's just, like, holy shit. The stakes of dying... I mean, that's, like, of non-existence for something that would have otherwise been around forever.

That's a completely different level of just, like, you know, mortal death. Also, other than Judge Doom... Spoilers. like, you know, mortal death. Also, other than Judge Doom, spoilers, like, the worst cartoon characters we meet in this movie are kind of chaotic, you know? Like, the most menacing cartoon character we meet is probably the gorilla bodyguard,

a bouncer at the club. But most of them seem to exist just to give other people joy in one way or another. So there's something so upsetting about like why are you murdering a child like the shoe just wants to make you laugh yeah the the evil cartoons are in cahoots with with evil people like the gorilla or like the the weasels the weasels yeah yeah to think that like mickey mouse could be dunked in dip is just terrifying by the way but right i i want to say that tweety

bird is a real motherfucker in this movie well i was gonna say addendum some of them are agents of chaos what's tweety bird makes me laugh he i mean he's funny but he's funny he he he sends valley to his death basically i mean i guess you can't die in tootown right yes yeah hey tweety the fact that he has familiarity with tweety it's like much like the betty moment where he speaks to her with the sense of longing in that moment it's like oh this isn't a random occurrence he doesn't just recognize tweety as a fan they've been through this shit before and and that's that is a funny point because because he because Tweety knows him. Yeah.

And David, it makes me start thinking, is there some sort of situation where Valiant is fucking Tweety at some point? I think it's fair to ask questions. This is a very unusual world. And like I say, he greets him with familiarity. I mean, I don't know. It's another thing I love that they all know him,

that he used to be like Toontown was his regular beat. He was a friend of Toons. Right, right. He has that line where he's like, we used to have fun doing, we thought it was like funny. You know, we thought it was a lot of fun. I love how he says that with like total disgust. Right.

He was, even if it was somewhat condescending, he was friendlier to Toons than most humans were. They clearly all have this affinity for him whenever he shows up. And his brother's death, yeah, made him go a little crazy in that. But to talk about Toontown in general, I just want to talk about it for a second because it's insane. As soon as they go into Toontown, it's insane. And I love it. And theessica rabbit is fucking insane i mean but there's two crazy parts the two craziest parts in this movie is bob hoskins driving the car and then and then uh and

then bob hoskins going into toontown for the first time which is just the the flip of the movie where it's just this insane cartoon world that's the wizard the Wizard of Oz moment when they're in the tunnel and it's so dark and the end of it is just like a boarded door and the Sylvester music is just like rising and rising and ominousness. And then it just opens and it's like a fucking musical number with the trees singing. It's incredible. I would have thought that,

that, that, that song smile, darn you smile. I would have thought like, I'm surprised darn you smile I would have thought like I'm surprised that doesn't come up more I'm surprised that isn't a song that has a little bit more staying power I mean I always asked for it back when I would go to the club I I would I would ask people to put it on so I could get lotus smile darn you smile but it usually fell upon

deaf ears I'm not sure what the what the title of the song is actually called but like that's that's the part I know of it but like it is it is a thing of just like going back to judge doom you get his menace and his malevolence when you see uh uh you know a valiant driving into toontown and it's just like pure just like joy and like wonder around him and what judge wants to do with himself yeah exactly yeah yeah and and and and doom just wants to like just erase this like i'm almost literally erase it via the dip the movie is so good at holding off toontown for that long and the way that everyone speaks of it and the fact that the movie itself takes place in such a seedy uh vein makes you think that Toontown is going to be in some way gross.

You know, you're like, well, this movie is already transposing cartoon characters into like a hard nosed world. Toontown is going to be like some sort of ghetto. It's going to have crime. It's going to be chaos. And then the fact that it's so cheery, it does really hammer at home. And that's where it's just like, Hopkins is acting off of nothing. Hoskins,

sorry, is like acting off of nothing. Like at that point in the movie, you're like, he's just in a blue screen environment talking to walls. Anthony Hopkins was acting off of nothing in Thor, Griffin. That's what you're thinking of. Right. No acting required. I want to go back to Doom for a second.

The casting of Christopher Lloyd is so wild, especially, like, coming right off of Back to the Future, where this guy's just fully minted as, like, the lovable lunatic. Like, he's this guy who's so, like, high-wire energy. He's such a, like, sort of, like, lunatic. Right, he's so cheerful. But he's very guy who's so like high wire energy. He's such a like sort of like lunatic. Right. So cheerful, cheerful.

But he's very cheerful and innocent. Even like Reverend Jim in Taxi is like a real innocent character. And then in this to just make him like like a human vulture, like the Grim Reaper. Yeah. And all the weird makeup they do on him. He's got that weird nose and that weird chin. And I noticed they also like paint his jawline on to make his face look thinner.

But in a movie where all the other humans are like, you know, they're not filling in Bob Hoskins' bald spot. Like they're not making anyone look super glamorous in this movie. The fact that he's so artificial looking. Yeah. Puts you off. Like it,

it makes you ill at ease before you even start to suspect that he might be a tune because that doesn't feel like a rule that's even been established. So I feel like the, the shoe moment is the one child scarring moment. And then the other moment is his, his eyes, right? Like that's the other moment is his, his eyes, right? Like that's the other moment that freaks kids out.

Did that freak you guys out? Yeah. Yeah. And the hair and the buzzsaw. I remember the eyes really getting me when I was a kid. And now when I watch that, I'm like, this is great.

This rules. Like it's so cool. And his, yeah, it just rocks. But I also think like the fact that you never see him in full cartoon mode, the fact that it's only cartoon elements coming out of this rubber skin, even when like Mickey comes in at the end and says like, I wonder who he really was. There's something that lingers with you that makes him so horrifying where it's just like, who the fuck was this guy? Like they don't really answer the mystery.

I do. I do wonder. I do. I do want to, I do want to see the tune version of like the full tune version of him. I want to go full tune. I want to see full tune. Wow.

I need it. So people who audition, it's crazy again, that Lloyd isn't the first choice considering that he'd worked on, but like Tim Curry apparently auditioned and was too scary yeah which is one of those tapes that i would love to see where like people are watching it like now this is this is just fucked up and like no one's gonna be able to handle this um and then who's oh christopher lee turned it down right which is another one i'd love to see christopher i mean I mean, Christopher Lloyd's perfect in this movie.

But this also kind of feels like Christopher Lloyd giving a Christopher Lee performance for most of the movie. That's fair. The reason why you need Christopher Lloyd for this is because I don't know that. Right. Exactly. The end is like what he pulls off that few actors could. What's surprising is how scary he is up until that point i mean he murders his shoe he murders his shoe no but he does seem legitimately scary and he is

and that turn at the end is so like i mean i just feel like no one goes as big as christopher lloyd really he just can just explode. It sounds like for this part, they opened the audition page up to just L's. Lee and Lloyd. I mean... Lee and Lloyd. They should have had a double act. They would have been great together.

I'm happy to never see another roger rabbit but i'm also sad to never see another roger rabbit i i i want both i want to never see a sequel and i also would love to see what the sequel would have been so definitely a ton of scripts that have been written over the years there was one that seems like it got closest to getting made called the tune platoon that would have been a prequel of roger and the tunes fighting in world war one i mean i don't mean to bring him up but you know who worked on the the roger rabbit sequels right like in the 90s who jj abrams wow then a spielberg you know protege wow it like definitely like was helped helped in developing the movie you're talking about, Griffin.

Still want to see him, Mitch? JJ could have done it much earlier. He could have done it. I've read reviews of Tomb Platoon scripts that made it sound good, but it certainly feels like a thing that they just struggled with for years and years. And I also think that the deal structure was very weird on this movie, especially in terms of getting Spielberg involved. And Spielberg made like a bananas percentage of the gross of this film. Like as a producer, he had one of the richest first dollar deals that I think anyone's ever had. And it was sort of a thing where Disney retained all of the marketing, merchandising rights to Roger as a character. And they just went off and did like, we'll do three more theatrical Roger shorts. We'll do like a lot of Roger merchandising. We'll put him in the theme parks.

Like that was the area where they could make more money. But I always heard that there was an issue where like, it's so expensive to make the scripts that were written were even more ambitious than the first film. And they would always crunch the numbers and go, there's no way we can make this and not lose money because between Zemeckis and Spielberg, we end up giving away like 60% of the grosses or something like that. It should have just done it. It should have just done it. They should have just done it.

It also just feels like this is, I mean, there's a Toontown in Disneyland and Disney world, and it just feels like this sort of thing of like Disney knows to hold onto it. Like, I mean, the idea of Toontown anyways is a,

is a good Disney property is like, Oh, this wacky place that kind of kids like i guess i but it does it does feel strange that i'm just like what is the relationship to do young kids still watch roger rabbit do they even know who he like you guys were saying early on is like so i i liked roger rabbit himself when i was a kid but like what does he even represent to people now? I don't know, because I feel like nerdy people, nerdy film fans probably love him. But then do what, like to a younger generation, do they even know he exists? You know what I mean? I don't feel like this is a film that

that Gen X parents are showing their kids. I could be wrong, but I don't feel like this is a this is along the lines of some of the of like, you know, even other Z wrong but i don't feel like this is a one this is along the lines of some of the of like you know with even other zemeckis's i feel like back to the future yeah you're you know you're seeing you're screening that but i don't feel like necessarily that there it's being made a point to pass this down generationally i'm just assuming i don't know yeah i don't know i mean because like right i'm i'm the youngest of the four of us and i certainly feel like this movie was presented to me as like, this is a movie that all kids need to see, you know? But I don't know how much that extends past like maybe a generation or two beyond.

Like, I know my sister certainly saw it. My sister's 10 years younger than me. Yeah, but she had you for a brother. Right. And she loved it. But I also feel like this is my bigger question. I feel like she loved it. We watched it a number of times. It feels like it was a film that was one of her favorites at a certain age. But I also feel like I had curated a lot of the context for her in terms of what I was watching all the time. And my big question is, because this movie doesn't over-explain itself, so many of not just the best jokes, but the best plot points are based on trust in the audience's

knowledge of how cartoons work. And I wonder if cartoons have changed in terms of their basic language the types of humor in a way where this these things aren't as known as a given to young children but also that i feel like my generation our generation vaguely was like sort of the last to have to inherit older cartoons you know it was still a time where there was like a, a lot of reruns happening. You were still seeing, like, Looney Tunes on Saturday morning and 60s Hanna-Barbera cartoons. And then even, like, Cartoon Network,

when they start and it's 24 hours, they're filling up so much of their programming with that sort of legacy stuff. But I feel like from 2000 on, there's just enough new cartoons that kids are never seeing older things that their understandings of these characters and these tropes are so much more limited that even something like the what you were bringing up mitch the the fake jessica rabbit is so the kind of joke that

was repeated in like so many tex avery cartoons that you would see where it's like, you know, here comes the woman. She turns around and her face is like a dog, like literally or whatever it is, you know, the rules of like the being able to throw a hole up onto a wall and then be able to transport through it. Like all these things, I don't know if they make sense anymore. I'd be very curious as a man who probably will now never have children uh but like raising kids with this movie shut up griff what are you talking about i don't know in this landscape freak yeah in this roger rabbit made you realize this no no no the pandemic made me realize this but i'm saying roger rabbit admit admit it. No, I used to think, man, I can't wait to show my children Roger Rabbit someday. That was my largest sort of incentive for wanting to have a family, was being able to sit them around the fireplace, show them some Roger.

But I don't know. I feel like the movie just works fundamentally. like the movie just works fundamentally but i'm curious if it's one of those movies that still plays even if you don't understand the things it's riffing on or if it's a movie where we're slowly sort of like eradicating its context from the the collective consciousness that's the real question you could be right yeah because it's looney tunes no no that's the question do kids watch looney tunes like 100 I don't think they do. Because, like, the piano falling on your head gag, which we've touched on a bunch,

like, I feel like a lot of contemporary eyes who grew up on Peppa Pig and Paw Patrol. Right. And then maybe you don't have any context for that being a thing. Like, you're just like, oh, that would kill somebody. You don't even understand it's a joke. Totally.

But even, like, the best of modern children's animation stuff like adventure time or whatever has such a different temperament has such a different relationship to its medium i just think there was like 40 years where everything was trafficking in that vocabulary of like the rules of cartoon physics and violence and then those 40 years of entertainment kept being replayed over and over again to later generations. And now people, I think kids just watch whatever premiered on Netflix that week.

Not to be like the cranky old man about it, but- Kids today. I'm sure they watch Looney Tunes. They don't even know about a spinning bow tie gag. I mean, the new Looney Tunes on HBO Max, I think are really good and have done a really good job of threading that needle between like modern sensibilities and the classic rules. They don't feel like they're trying to update them. But I who knows?

I feel like the people watching those are me aren't kids. Right. I know we're going to do we get to just make a short of roger rabbit eating jessica rabbit's ass or vice versa right that'll get millennials on board yeah kids don't relate to roger rabbit it's because they think he isn't down with eating ass griff griff this just flashed i have a news break for you griff what what forky just won an emmy what forky forky ask a question oh my one outstanding short form animated program forky my favorite modern cartoon character congrats just just speaking of cartoon characters yeah this is like a real life roger rabbit moment the forky's uh he's up on stage and the emmy's winning uh

winning an award i hope he waddled up to that podium and they had to lower the mic all the way down i don't want forky to get covid though they gotta they gotta be careful keep forky safe uh well this is this is the other thing i wanted to say so we will do a merchandise spotlight sometimes on this show a segment that is very unpopular that i constantly have been trying to push up a hill for five years uh and because you guys are the dough boys i thought oh can i do like a spotlight based on fast food tie-ins like this movie must have had fast food tie-ins but i started digging into it and the tie-ins it had at the time skewed kind of more adult like they had a promotion with mcdonald's and a promotion with coca-cola and they animated an entirely new ad that was like roger rabbit jessica rabbit going through drive-in but it felt like their promotion was just the cups

have roger rabbit on them now like the adult supersized soda cups have Roger Rabbit on them now. There weren't toys. There wasn't anything like that. It feels like the movie was pitched a little bit more as like, you know, an all ages thing rather than trying to send it straight down the family lane.

Because I think they were trying to overcome the perception that if it's animated, no grownup is going to go see it. They wanted it to seem like a cool movie. But then over the years, there were multiple times where Roger Rabbit was included in a Happy Meal promotion, but it was always when they would do those sort of like

the best of Disney promotions, where it was just sort of like this month's Happy Meal is like the five biggest Disney characters. And Roger Rabbit would be included with like Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Pluto, Minnie, Roger. Or it would be like the 10 most famous Disney movies of all time, you know? And it would be like Pinocchio, Cinderella, Roger Rabbit. Like they were really kind of putting him on that pedestal of we're doubling down on this character being one of our legacy characters.

Mitch just changed his virtual background to a rabbit. Yeah. Now he's, he's petting it very aggressively. Mitch, no, Mitch, you're going to hurt it.

You don't know your own strength. But even like Toontown was building this like area of Disneyland that was themed around Roger and and that environment which over time has become mickey's toontown and even though it has the roger rabbit ride still in it it doesn't really relate to that movie anymore like it feels like there was a brief window where they were very committed to making roger rabbit like a dis legacy character, even down to the shorts. And then I think it's once the Renaissance happened, once like Little Mermaid hit and Beauty and the Beast hit, they were like, oh, we don't want the funny character anymore. We have these big sweeping

romantic musicals that are taken seriously. We don't need some guy who's only going to work in like shorts and commercials. Yeah, I was surprised on that note i was surprised by how unceremoniously it was presented on disney plus it was just like you like it's just kind of like right next to like you know the apple dumpling gang rides again or whatever it's just like it's not even like that it has its own like crazy splash page and i you know i don't know i mean sometimes i feel like these streaming services try to call a little bit more attention to some things and it didn't feel like that at all. I felt like, oh, there's just another thing in our library.

Watch it if you want. It's just like quietly a beautiful 4K transfer that's on there that looks excellent. Yeah, it looks great. Do you know one of the things I remember is the car as a plush toy. I remember there was a plush toy of that car, and I think it even maybe still exists in some form but like at disney if it's just some shitty toy in in toontown still i found there there was like a limited amount of merchandise for when the movie came out but then i found like a licensor catalog from a year or two later from like 1990 that disney sent out that was like 80 different roger rabbit items like two years after this movie they were hitting it hard and they just clearly were

invested in trying to make this character stick around. I do think there's something kind of beautiful, though, to the fact that the character, like as much as it's a bummer because I think Roger Rabbit rules and he deserved to stick around. It's nice that he's kind of crystallized. And those shorts are are good which they would release before other disney films i know one of them was before honey i blew up the kid and i forget where oh yeah and then one of them ended up going straight to video it never got released but they were like all really good and they were sort of the farm team used to develop

people who then later went on to direct the disney features like rob minkoff who did the lion king directed the first two roger shorts i think oh wow yeah you're right he directed the first two uh was one of those a roller coaster tummy trouble and roller coaster rabbit and then there was trail mix-up yeah uh which is from the guy who went on to direct mulan so another another how yeah can you can you watch them anywhere are they available to watch i'm gonna watch some of these i have to imagine they're on youtube yeah but it feels like they've never gotten a proper release no if you buy the 25th anniversary roger abbott blu-ray apparently they're on that and i do have that so i suppose i could yeah i have i remember i remember i remember some other i remember uh my i remember there was some other merch i remember

my dad bought the baby herman uh condoms bringing your dad into this yeah really my father who's passed away he bought the baby herman condoms uh rest in peace dad yeah um is there anything else you gotta use your dad as a punchline you gotta you gotta do it like for the joke you just yeah yeah especially he's not here to defend himself yeah especially if the punchline revolves around his penis being small right right of course that's huge father like son um is there anything else we want to discuss before we play the box office game any scenes we've forgotten the only thing i wanted to mention is that i do think in the legendary mickey bugs duo appearance bugs puts mickey to shame like i don't yeah even i feel like mickey's easy to beat

up on because he's kind of like a non-character especially now but like bugs is being the cool bugs bunny that we know and mickey's lines are just like hey bugs you know yeah you better tell him like he's not doing it he's what is what is mickey contributing it kind of just like exposes like the coolest movie star of all time. No one has ever been cooler on screen than Bugs Bunny. And he just drips personality. And Mickey at this point is like a wet fucking blanket. Mickey just immediately goes into like beta mode.

Like he's just like, I'll just bounce off of whatever Bugs says, I guess. Well, I got to just say that both of them though, Daffy and Donald just put both of them to shame I mean the piano scene is just a better scene that seems great better scene yeah I have a moment the uh that I that I think is great is the moment where there's

I'm looking up his name right now oh Angelo it's a so they're like a guy like Angelo they establishes a dick and then... Oh, at the bar? At the bar. And Bob Hoskins is like, I don't like tunes or whatever and puts his head down and shoves an egg in his mouth or whatever.

And then he's like, that guy's going to sell you out. And then Judge Doom comes in and that guy doesn't sell Roger out. You think he's going to sell him out? He doesn't sell him out. That moment rules. Angelo proves to be a good guy and he likes roger enough that he's not gonna even sell him out it's awesome all the human casting is so good like the guy who plays maroon is so fucking good the marvin acme guy is so good like these people don't have a lot of impressions

yes they do yeah yes yeah uh but they also look like faces from like the 1930s Yes. Yeah. But they also look like faces from like the 1930s. Right. Yes. They do. They do.

A hundred percent. And like this movie is like a hop and a skip from like Barton Fink, like from like similar satires of that era of Hollywood. Like that's basically like the Coen brothers could look at this and be like, oh, we could use that guy. You know what I mean? Like it's, it's that vibe.

It's just such a good movie that there's nothing to really critique. Of course, you can critique how some of the graphics have aged a little bit or whatever when he's driving his car, but it still looks fantastic. I mean, it's just, I can't even find much more to say just because I love the movie so much. Yeah, I have literally one critique. Wow. There is a moment on the studio lot

where there's a saxophone player playing for the cast of Fantasia. Why? I noticed this too. It's not a real saxophone sound. It's a synth saxophone. Wow. And I feel like,

use a real saxophone. Double read. But double read, is that also the fact that like maybe it is like a little electronic tune sounding saxophone or something but it's a it's a it's a human in the human world playing the saxophone playing a human saxophone yeah so that it should it should sound like a real saxophone i get it should be ashamed of themselves. I noticed it too. It's inexcusable. I noticed it too. I just want to quickly say, I mean, I feel like it is easy to underrate Jessica as a character because she feels so much like she exists for the sort of eye candy of it and for sort of the running gag of why is she with this guy right so much of the

plot is actually driven by her and and she's a character that's constantly revealing new dimensions to herself in terms of you're constantly struggling to get a read on what her drive is and what what her her strategy is but she's always sort of four steps ahead of everyone else. And I think they're so good about, I mean, Kathleen Turner's amazing in it, but I also feel like there's the thing where she knocks out Roger and Eddie takes that as proof

that she's like actually trying to hurt Roger. And then he asked her why she did it. And she said, well, I want to knock him out so no one trying to hurt Roger. And then he asked her why she did it. And she said, well, I want to knock him out so no one else could hurt him. Yeah. And it's that thing where like, she acts more like a human than any other tune enough that she feels closer to an equal to Eddie and that he's constantly kind of tempted by her

sexually. But then there are these constant reminders that she still operates by totally upside down tune logic. Right. Um, the bullets as well. I wanted to shout out the bullets that was my favorite gag when i was a kid and they also get such a hero's entrance like every new character gets like a movie star entrance which is it's also that sort of thing of like these these old these old bullets that are they get the that get their screen time again it's kind of it's kind of right it's kind of touching right um so let's

play the box office game let's play the box office game uh guys we're gonna talk about the top five at the box office the week this movie came out griffin's gonna show you guess you guys can guess as well if you wish of of course. It came out. So the movie was a huge hit. Yeah. June 24th, 1988. Opened to $11 million and made $150 million, which is, you know, it's just not how things work anymore. And it was so, you know, it was a,

I feel like it was a hit beyond whatever they imagined. Yeah, it was their highest grossing film in a really long time. It totally revitalized Disney, both their live action and animation. A hundred percent. So a huge hit. And they would never take this kind of risk ever again. Right. I went to see this movie opening weekend.

Really? As a sleepover. A sleepover event. Perhaps my first ever sleepover. So Nick, you were like chaperoning a bunch of children on a sleepover all right i was a young boy and i remember the movie being sold out i remember it like we couldn't see it and we had to see our compromise movie and the compromise movie i have in my head is possibly being one of the box office top five but i don't know am i supposed to give hints what am i what do we what do we do i'm going to give you some hints. And if any of these...

So Roger Rabbit, number one, $11 million. That's number one movie. The number two movie is another big comedy of this year with a big star. $11 million. That's even bigger than the opening weekend of Tenet. It's huge. Exactly. Was John Candy in the movie?

John Candy is... Oh, he is isn't well no no he's not in this movie no way i i'm confusing it with another movie with this star no no john candy is it scrooged not scrooged uh it's not like at this point he is still a comedy star is it a robin no but he's about to transition into mainstream startup i feel like we recently discussed this movie griffin eddie murphy hanks it's a hanks it's not big no big as it is it's big it's big yes wow big wow which has been hanging around for a month you know just kicking ass like a huge huge hit yeah now this now this is crazy to me because that like in my head i remember seeing big as a kid and who framed roger rabbit so this is like a

big this is a uh a heavy summer movie yes yeah uh we we talked about it in our back to the future episode as a movie that should fundamentally not be able to handle its premise right right exactly yes another sort of high wire type yeah that's right that's makes sense right um so number two is big i thought big might be the movie uh nick but apparently not so no it wasn't big number three at the box office is uh one of those movies uh it's a comedy with the actor you just named um me uh mitch yes oh um it's a junkie oh great outdoors great outdoors there you go wow so great outdoors is one of the first movies i remember seeing in the theater so this is so that maybe is just not right but well but that makes sense i mean all these movies are coming around the same time i mean great outdoors has been out for a few weeks i have never seen the great outdoors do you guys i loved it as a kid and then a lot of people think it kind of sucks but as a kid i really and the

raccoons are like the raccoons which like I think if you were making the movie and the raccoons were inserted into it like you'd hate the raccoons but I loved it as a kid Annette Bening's film debut The Great Outback wow no way first movie yeah isn't that crazy that's unbelievable she's like famous like three years later like I feel you know what i mean she's like in the grifters right away after that i also i feel like dan akroyd's career as a movie star is incredibly weird because he he never really figured out what his leading man persona was but he also abandoned doing characters pretty early on like he sort of went to playing everyman roles but you're like what is his energy you know yeah yeah am i supposed to root for dan akroyd or not like that's sort of the weird thing about him in the 80s like is he the everyman he was too focused

on his vodka brand of course he already thought about it yeah he just dreamed of starting the distillation process he's the skull guy right yeah crystal skull yeah yes okay all right all right next movie it was number one the previous week it's taken a big dip compared to these the other you know comedies back in the day when comedies would just play weeks and weeks basically making it's taking a big dip who directed this movie judge doom griffin that was excellent that was really good thank you i loved it thank you i leaned all the way into my webcam that that's your favorite punchline mode just leaning all the way into the camera all right this is one of those action star action star and funny man movies right like uh-oh like this is a mismatch is it red heat

it's red heat wow how did you do that schwarzenegger and baluch my brain is broken this is the only thing i can do wow griff i'm impressed you weren't even like another 48 hours first you went straight to red heat nailed i went straight to red it was a feeling look a lot of times it's a feeling but it's like i have like a mental map it's like there's a web in my head and i think about like when things happen in relation to other movies and people's careers and events you know it's it's like everything's itemized this way this this this to me though is insane that it was number four i mean i i can't believe that that movie was ever number four or was even number one it It had been number one the previous week. It had been number one the previous week.

Just insane. I mean, Schwarzenegger's big at that point. Yeah, that's true. Directed by Walter Hill, who made both 48 Hours and another 48 Hours. So you weren't that far off, Nick. It's also like, you look at like Belushi and Aykroyd three and four at the box office. People were like, so unwilling to give up the seventies Saturday night live thing that they'll take a Belushi brother.

I was about to say, I mean, wrong Belushi, but right there, they're just like, look, if it's a Belushi, sure.

That's my point. They're like, we don't even care any Belushi at this point, please. We're not ready to move on. Um, I just love that. It's also Schwarzenegger.

He's like a Soviet cop, right? Or something. He's like, you know, and he's in uniform and he has a gun. And Belushi has a cup of coffee instead of a gun, even though I think he's also a cop, right? Like he would have a gun. But he's like a Chicago cop.

He loves eating a hot dog or some shit. They'll just pull a cup of coffee on you. All right, number five, Griffin. It's a franchise that we have discussed so much during this lockdown over text message. Is it Crocodile Dundee? But which one is it? Two? It's Crocodile Dundee 2.

Wow. David and I have been talking about Crocodile Dundee and Paul Hogan's filmography a lot, despite the fact that still neither of us have seen any Crocodile Dundee movies. I might have seen the first one on TV when I was a kid. That's about it. I keep saying to David, like, fuck it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to watch all three Crocodile Dundees tonight, and I keep on not doing it.

Three, there was a big gap between two and three, but I watched one and two pretty obsessively as a kid. Really? Right. It i watched one and two pretty obsessively as a kid really it's right it's the origin of the that's not a knife this is a knife guy yes i mean i understand there had to be a 13 year gap between two and three though because they had to take that long to figure out the new angle which is that what if he went to los angeles i mean that's that's not something you can just think about like you, you know, like, all right, like tossing ideas around like they had to really workshop that. It's also it's just the phenomenon I'm so fascinated by of like him landing here. This movie being like this Australian culture clash fish out of water movie and everyone being like, oh, my God, Australia's biggest comedy star.

They're finally giving him to us. And Australia was like, he's like maybe in our top 10 right take him like we weren't trying to present this guy as being our represent he's fine griff i have to read the tagline for crocodile dundee to you okay you have to hear this it's very important okay so the you know in the first poster for the first movie i believe he's sort of pulling the skyscrapers apart he's like right now it's me like it's tall grass right right exactly the second movie he's he's standing atop the skyscrapers he's like a giant he's like 10 times bigger than the empire state state building he's got his knife and it says the tagline is the world's favorite adventurer is back for

more pause much more that's it that's that's the whole taglineurer is back for more. Pause. Much more. That's it. That's the whole tagline. He's back for much more. Is the female lead on the poster with him for two? Yep. He's grabbing her. He's got her in his arms.

Because he marries her between one and two. And I feel like he very much front and centered her on the sequel. It's just wild for me that they were like, what should the premise of the sequel be? that they were like, what should the, what should the premise of the sequel be? And they're like, I don't know. He's just,

he's still crocodile Dundee. Like that's it. I like, you know, he's just still in New York. My, my guess would have been big, great outdoors.

Roger Abbott, all sold out. Crikey. Go see CD too. So, uh, Nick, we're done with the game but what was your movie not not on that list and perhaps a perhaps a bomb or perhaps i'm misremembering the weekend but the movie we saw instead of who framed roger rabbit was willow wow willow seems earlier to me maybe it had been in theaters for a while you You know, a movie would come out in May and still be in theaters in August.

It was a different time. Please let Willow be like 84. Willow is in the top 10. It's number eight. Wow. So yes, Willow was hanging around. You've also got Bull Durham. A little too grown up for you, I would imagine.

You've got Big Business. Oh my God, that's popular over here. I would imagine yeah of course you've got Big Business oh my god those are popular over here it's Crocodile Dundee he's pissed off alright keep that in it was a food delivery

wait what's Big Business Big Business is Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler oh yeah right that's one of the

Disney movies that you were talking about but there's also another Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler it's a very weird film that movie's fun so um why did they fake a crocodile dundee sequel was there any point to that just to go back to that for a second what do you mean what what are you talking about remember there was like a thing where they're like yes oh yeah it was for fucking austral tourism. They pretended like they were rebooting Crocodile Dundee with Danny McBride, but it was actually, they were teasers for a Super Bowl commercial

to promote Australian tourism. Just remake it if you're going to do it. Don't pretend. Was Paul Hogan involved in those at all? I think he wasn't at all. Croc-tease, more like. They were pretending that mcbride they were pretending that mcbride was playing hogan's half american son and then like

every big australian movie star was in those ads with him like margot robbie was in them wow chris hemsworth wasn't can i share very very quickly the really funny crocodile dundee 2 anecdote please i i know we've gone long but this is just such a good story that i think you guys would appreciate colin quinn was hired to have like one line in crocodile dundee 2 as like an up-and-coming you know sort of like new york comedian uh i i His role is credited as onlooker and mansion. I think he literally had one line and they gave him the script and he read it and he's like 24 or whatever.

And he's like, the script is fucking garbage. You know what I could use? He could use like a sidekick who's like a streetwise New Yorker. And Colin Quinn did a rewrite of Crocodile Dundee 2. And then when he went to set, handed them the script and was like hey I thought you guys might appreciate this I feel like your movie could use

and I think they maybe took away his line I think he's now in the movie non-speaking but it's one of the best movie star stories of just like like being a young actor and being like oh you know they'll appreciate if i rewrite the movie and make myself the second lead that's more of a take then he's back for more much more i mean it might have been right right you know i want i would love to see that version yeah yeah me too that'd be way better uh Yeah, Bull Durham, Big Business, Funny Farm, Willow, and the Presidio. Funny Farm, pretty good. Yeah, you got Chase, Ackroyd, and a Belushi in the top 10.

The shadow of 75 SNL lasted for a long time. Funny Farm, I remember being on Siskel and Ebert's top 10 list, and me being, as a kid, being like, I can't, I just, how did this happen?

But it's a comedy. Those movies don't go on top 10 lists and like not understanding that sometimes a critic just, you know, likes the movie like that. You're right.

Ebert called it a miracle and Siskel said it was the best Chevy Chase film of all time and compared it to like a Preston Sturgis movie. Yeah. That's incredible. Did they both put it on their separate tens? I believe so. That's my memory. Yes, they did. And the wildest thing is like,

it was a movie that got buried by like Big and Crocodile Dundee 2 and like, you know, Roger Rabbit, you know, like it was a movie that did not succeed at all. Like it was the end of Chevy Chase is a comedy big shot i feel like is around i've been watching a lot of old siskel and eber in quarantine as like uh uh one of the most relaxing shows out there it's like my version of i think what other people turn to uh bob ross for um but i watched this one where they were like it was their movies of the year they're like undersung hidden gems or something like that. And they called out this comedy that I had like never heard of.

I'm forgetting what it even was now, but it had like a couple of big actors in it. It was a high premise comedy I'd never heard of. And they were like, this movie is so much better than has any right to be. And it's clearly like the emergence of a major new comedy director. This director who wrote and directed it the premise sounds like it's nothing special but it's just the singer not the song he's really got a deaf touch and this movie is clearly

showing you that this director is one to watch and then I looked him up and his next film was Mac and Me Wow what's the movie I've never even you don't even I'm gonna figure it out while we wrap up the show. Well, we're done.

Yeah. You wrap it up. I'll, I'll, I'll find you there. You got to send these guys in a merry way on their, their merry way. The Philadelphia experiment.

Is that the movie? No, maybe it's the one right before that. The ice pirates. Maybe, maybe it was a couple. I think that's what it is. High risk. Yes. High risk, yes.

Yes. Gregory Hines. James Brolin. James Brolin, yeah. Yeah. That's it. Yeah, anyway. Anyway, anyway.

Right, Cleavon Little. It's a weird cast. Anthony Quinn. Anyway, Nick, Mitch, thank you so much for doing the show. What a delight. Thank you for having us. Guys, thanks for having us. Thanks for having us for such a great movie.

What a great film. Anytime you guys want a movie, just let us know. You get first round pick. You're the kings of podcasting. We've said it before, but you guys, Dave and I constantly talk about how you guys are the absolute best in the biz, and we crib so much from you guys.

And by crib, I mean steal um but it's truly all right we want to do this for a long time it's a bummer that uh you know a pandemic is the thing that finally made uh podcast crossovers happen but also it's it's one of the few silver linings i feel like of this whole thing is that we've uh gotten to be text chain buddies and done these appearances you guys came on our show it was a delight a couple episodes much beloved we're thrilled to come back to return the favor appear on your show so so fun and everyone get out of our twitter mentions we did each other's shows yeah it's happened yeah you never need to ask us for shit ever again stop bothering us with your engagement in the things we make and by the way not proctologist i forgot the joke already i was trying to do the

call back to the beginning oh boy all right right. Let's wrap it up. Thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review, subscribe. Thanks to Ange for Gudo for her help with the show and social media. Go to our Shopify page for merch. Go to blankies.red.com for some real nerdy shit. Tune in next week for Back to the future part two because this really is a miracle run uh and on our patreon uh doing the uh the alien franchise commentaries uh and as always who framed roger rabbit gets five forks

platinum play club right right 100 platinum film club for sure Gets five forks. Five forks. Platinum Play Club, right? Right? 100%. Platinum Film Club. For sure. Wager. I think four and a half forks. Wager. The saxophone wasn't real.

It was sin. Yeah, you got to dock it for that. I take it back. Absolutely.