Podcast: The Ride - Alita: Passport to Iron City & Epcot News

Episode Date: March 1, 2019

A jam-packed episode featuring news updates from Epcot and Universal Orlando! Then, we did the Alita: Passport to Iron City experience and talked to iam8bit founder Jon Gibson about making it! Listen to Podcast: The Ride Ad-Free on Forever Dog Plus: http://foreverdogpodcasts.com/plus Red Hot Chili Peppers Rockin' Takeover on The Second Gate! Patreon.com/podcasttheride I Heart Yew Nork Shirts on sale in the Gift Shop! https://www.teepublic.com/stores/podcast-the-ride?ref_id=7251 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

FOREVER! DOG! center and give you a passport to iron city the world of elita battle angel with an interview with im8bits john gibson be careful the factory is watching this is podcast the ride Welcome to Podcast The Ride, the show hosted by three men who are jacked by today's big theme park news. And I am, of course, talking about the announcement of the Today Cafe, the today show themed restaurant at the entrance of universal studios uh i'm joined as always by scott gerner woody i got it up on my phone i was ready for this i was ready to do the real news and then but you know what the big one we were thinking the same thing yeah and of course mike carlson i'm here too yes uh very excitedly uh jason this morning when i saw him he goes did

you see the press release we got that's jason shared him by the way uh his we're press now yes inside info we do and it's six in the morning which of course would be 9 a.m eastern yeah so that's that's that makes sense uh because y'all are on the radio y'all were on the radio. Y'all were on KROQ 106.7 and I didn't go because there weren't enough microphones. That is a true fact. You were making a television show. Well, not at 7 in the morning.

We don't keep radio hours. No. Not like you nuts. There were not no microphones. We got to be on KROQ on the Kevin and Bean show today. And yeah, the first thing Jason said to me when I picked him up was, did you see the press release we got? And it was for the Today Cafe, the Today Show themed restaurant at Universal Orlando.

Replacing what again? Whatever that generic restaurant at the entrance was called. The Hollywood Restaurant, probably. Yeah. White's Camera Restaurant. Again whatever that Generic restaurant at the entrance was Called the Hollywood restaurant Probably yeah it's camera Restaurant the today cafe Will soon make its way to Universal Orlando Resorts neck of the woods Is that the press release

These people get that Off the bat do we know neck of the Woods without stopping and thinking about it I think Al Roker has been saying it for like 20 plus years He does that on the time that's embedded in my head because of the tram tour because he did the weather section which spoiler culminates in a flash flood uh and it would always be so the line was uh uh it's what's going on in your neck of the lot i said he would always say what's going on in your neck of the lot because it was always always say what's going on in your neck of the lot

because it was always the same video i play like why am i saying he would always say this what a repetitive guy right in the clip that we had to play over and over again it was video he didn't have the chance there was no option for him to say something else anyway neck of yeah it's coming to the universals neck of the woods which is Universal yeah so this Is this is more synergy From Comcast Universal Obviously this is they did It's a night show ride So I think they're starting to make all their TV

Shows I guess and the last Call with Carson Daly dumpster In the back of the park and that's Being that's over though the dumpsters done The dumpsters done they canceled it Yeahster's done. They canceled it. Yeah. So. Drew Tarver had the martini shot.

Oh yeah. I heard this. He was on like one of the last episodes. The second to last or something? Oh my God. Yeah. It is. It does seem like this is whoever, whichever theme park owns like the CBS catalog.

This does seem like a, like like 60 minutes the cafe or something like what a weird choice i mean i guess today's show makes a little more sense than 60 minutes though uh jason has an andy rooney walk around character at the 60 minutes cafe would be a wonderful wonderful treat can you believe the prices at this restaurant and also maybe not a walk around character you would just be sitting in a? And also maybe not a walk around character. You would just be sitting in a booth in the corner with a big newspaper and you'd like go over and he'd like hassle you and complain about vertical blinds or something. I bought one small coffee early in the morning.

I bought nothing else, but I'm posting up. I clearly brought my own snacks. I'm not paying for their overpriced. This is all like bit stuff stuff but not also bit stuff not just stuff you would do in general yeah uh for those of you don't know jason has done andy rooney a long time out in los angeles at a bit show called tournament of nerds um so those who don't a lot of sense probably most know i think a lot of people have done a lot of research into what characters jason's played on a stage and isolated to Los Angeles.

The impression has gotten worse and worse over the years and the jokes have just gotten meaner. I think it's really that you're morphing into him though completely. Yeah, that's probably right. So every year that goes by, you're turning more into an old war veteran that's upset with everything. Yeah, that's true yeah uh so today's show did what were the other detail were there any other this is the benefit of being podcast the ride today in 2019 that we get access to universal orlando's sharefile.com portfolio with files posted by hayaley Fitch. It says the name of

the person who posted it and we get high res imagery of the meals that will be available. I didn't look at the pictures yet. I didn't see this. Oh God. Let's talk about this. Cheese platter. Is it themed to a person on the show though? Yes, Mike. In fact,

yeah. Additionally, in a tribute to long running tradition in kathy lee and hoda's hour of today guests can enjoy wine and beer on tap with a delicious cheese platter for two okay but it doesn't have a name and isn't the hoda we don't know yet cheese platter okay okay do we unless they currently are just named generic things such as vegan sandwich okay this is i'm just you know if you've been with us for a long time you knew you know that we've always wanted to be insiders and now we're getting official universal emails with three megabyte crystal clear quality photos of vegan sandwiches

we can see every little seed on the strawberries that adorn the vegan sandwich platter well we're blessed my favorite thing is and and most theme park websites had this in their their roundup uh announcements about this opening uh is the the like um cad concept art uh jpeg featuring like what it will look like in 3d rendering which features one of my favorite things the humans humans that aren't quite 3D, aren't quite 2D, but I think feel pain because they look like little monsters. They exist in some horrible world now. By virtue of them being created in this 3D simulation, they're like that Black Mirror Star Trek episode

and they're walking around this awful digital trapped space where they will live for 1 000 years unless they can somehow like zap themselves into suicide this poor this like mother who's not uh keeping a correct eye line with her little son um you mean the song with no face yes yeah yeah and like real like the most like boxy polygony hair they all look like original toy story characters they're pre they wish they were toy story threes they are distinctly toy story ones so like pre are they like pre uh joss whedon rewrite toy story characters that's there Before Joss even got to it Not at that level of rendering

With like a Oh boy With like a big TV Playing the Today Show and then a smaller TV also playing the Today Show And people like cheersing Coffee This is something

We were joking on That one I think it was a Void episode a while ago About all the different like NBC cheers and coffee. This is something. We were joking on, we were joking on that one, I think it was a Void episode a while ago about all the different like NBC Universal experiences. Oh yeah. You could do, which like this is getting closer to that. It's getting closer to that.

At that point, had Matt Lauer been shown the door? We had a bunch of Lauer jokes. We had Lauer jokes. Oh yeah. But we didn't have, Megyn Kelly had not like tacitly gone like, what's wrong with blackface yet?

Today's show's stock is not super high right now. Yeah. How would they, would like the bathroom stalls lock from the inside with a button? Is that how they would honor Matt Lauer and his legacy in the Today Show? Yeah, probably. And if you're, and while you were in,

while you're in the stalls, there's a TV showing you photos of potentially racist Halloween costumes and just to let you ponder it and just a little title underneath and say, what? We're just asking the question. Is this racist? It's not racist to ask if it's racist. Right, it's a dialogue.

We're opening a dialogue. And shutting the door so you can't get out Will there be a Jenna Bush Hager Face character Jenna Bush Hager famously joining The fourth hour of the Today Show Because Kathy Lee is of course leaving

Hoda is staying Is Jenna Bush Hager replacing Is replacing Kathy Lee So in case The fourth hour of the Today Show Is like a drink, I don't know if you want to say like fluffy. Not that the whole show is boozy. Yeah. But Kathy Lee is leaving.

And Jenna Bush Hager, George W. Bush's daughter, is joining permanently. I actually didn't know that. I am a big fan of her work in the annual Barney Christmas videos. I was just posting some of these on instagram every year the bush white house made videos with some bad little plot with their little dog oh right preparing the white house for christmas and jenna acts in the final one and like what barney that is a fantastic idea to spend our final White House holidays together. Like, I don't know what the eyeline is. Yeah.

It's as if like, no, remember when it's your line, exclaim out as if there's a giant theater in front of you. Don't look at the human beings, you know, in front of your face. She admittedly is a child. She's not. Well, no, no, no. All right. Fine. No, not even.

This was the last year. Oh, the last year. So, but she is a lot more polished as a host. I doubt they would give a full hour of a show to somebody who exclaims with no eyeline like that. However, they gave Megyn Kelly, I'm sure. Six million dollars? Was that what it was? We're really in the age of the walk away.

We are cutting ties and she will only be left with 68 million dollars. The payout was like 69 million dollars. I was low balling. Well, wasn't there also a thing a few years ago where um chelsea clinton was given a ton of money to do correspondent stuff for nbc news and did like two segments and then vamoosed with money she's really i think so oh we gotta look into that yikes if we get into some trouble and are forced to exit forever dog we'll make sure that we get all $180 of our

HelloFresh ad read money. There is no way I'm walking without the payout. Yeah, we'll get the big... You hear me, Forever Dog? We'll get the big bonus, don't worry. So, we have covered it, the big theme park news. The big thing. Well,

and let's end with one last thing though one standout features of the take today cafe menu will be seasonal dishes inspired by co-anchor al roker's favorite recipes i mean that's we've all been looking for yeah i mean i like al roker i like al roker just fine yeah you know what i'll say i'm happy for Al Roker because that might have been a fun. He might have, they might have came and they'd be like, hey, there's a Today Show Cafe. We're going to use some of your recipes. And he was like, that's nice. So, you know what?

Great. And that was the end of his interaction with this. You described the proper amount of time. Yeah. And he's never going to think about it again. I would like the idea because Jim Hill brought this up on one of his, I think you called Jim out for this. The idea, or no, his podcasts. I think you called Jim out for this. The idea, or no, it was a different thing you called him out for.

It was the Twister, Jimmy Fallon. That Jimmy Fallon was going to live inside the Twister ride and broadcast live from it every night. Yes. It seemed a little inexplicable to me. But you listened to one of Jim's 15 other podcasts and have come away with something else. Well, there was an idea, I think, for the Tonight Show ride to have a live feed to the studio up in 30 Rock. So if they were taping a show at the time that an audience or a bunch of tourists went through, Jimmy could interact live with the people getting on the ride. That did not happen

i think they like felt like well that's not going to happen that much during the day what's the point but maybe for this you know you can have roker chime in like and just comment on what you're eating or something like if you got the tray you're going through the line and he goes oh i see you got my mashed potatoes there and then you go oh wow it's al roker he's talking to me or something like that would be fun i feel like i hope that i hope it has a successful passage to your neck of the digestive tract that's great writes itself yeah it's perfect all right well that was sort of the above the fold news of the day so i guess we have a lot of news to cover yes well yeah we well news and and

we're also talking about this interesting experience that we had uh in uh getting a passport to iron city yes of course the uh uh the uh elite setting of the i couldn't think of the word setting i struggled there uh the the film alita battle angel we went to this like very odd but but cool uh interactive experience we're going to this very odd but cool interactive experience. We're going to talk about that. But before that, some theme park news has dropped. And we're getting this one out quick so we can talk about it. Yeah.

Staying in Universal opening June 13th. Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure. Continuing the recent trend of new attractions having very long names how many words in that nine one two three four five five five that's only five but only one apostrophe nine it feel it does feel like nine long a lot of syllables in there well because it's hagrid hagrid is the owner of all of it the magical creatures are not the owners of the ride like Hagrid is. So I guess they don't need an apostrophe. They're like, I got to go back to an English class and figure out grammatically and punctuationally how this works.

But there's no possessive qualities of the magical creatures they're just on it i guess yeah they're just on it uh i guess yeah so so what i know about the ride what we know about the ride is it's like a giant cool roller coaster with a lot of launches and there's a lot of robots of creatures so that's fun stuff now back to the title now let's talk about the title punctuation i already joked on twitter we gotta have we gotta feel superior to this cool ride somehow and it is through the amount of words that they chose it's a little nuts and this is in the wake of what are these star wars rides called again uh star wars falcon millennium Star Wars Millennium Falcon Smuggler's Run Smuggler's Run

which sounds like the reminds me of the Glenn Frey Miami Vice song Smuggler's Blues Millennium Falcon Smuggler's Blues it was soundtracked by that song yeah is there a button I can hit in the ride to make Smuggler's

Blues play oh wow then I'm on board I think maybe there'll be a phenomenon where we could bring in a little boom box and set it on the console of the millennium Falcon. If it's about making it your own and making it, then it's an interactive experience. I should be able to do that. I agree. I think, and you know, what's going to happen too, is that when we all go together for the first time, I'm going to hang my trusty dice on the rear view mirror so that's i'm gonna make that my own that way and also blast uh some red hot chili peppers music to tie in with our patreon those but i bet one of those buttons has to be uh one of them has to turn on the world

famous 106.7 k rock am i getting that right do you do you know 106.7 k rock and then sublime plays yeah so that's that's my millennium falcon right anyway what the hell is the other one called rise of the resistance all right i guess that's fairly that one's shorter but that one still feels a little vague it doesn't sound like the name of a ride right because like i think the name like what would be written on a lot of websites before that was revealed was battle escape attraction which is cooler like battle and escape that sounds fun there's going to be fighting there's going to be some sort of an escape this one is rise of the resistance which is a very general like this could just be like a powerpoint presentation

on the resistance or like in the middle of a rise of a resistance in the nation for the last two years. And it's about the boringest thing you could ever. There's never been like a cool moment of it. You don't think like, you know, a bunch of Georgetown graduates are the same as like storming the Bastille in the second act of Les Mis? As exciting. As exciting. Nancy Pelosi clapping is a bunch of yeah yeah that's like firing a cannonball ivy league people going sir excuse me uh exciting time 45 i don't even say his name you shall not be named i think yeah i think that there might be some more thrills and chills on this ride than the clapping.

But maybe not. We'll see. We'll see. Kylo Ren robot clapping at you, maybe. It could be all Imperial Senate. We don't know. Escape the First Order! Exclamation point. That could be cool. Escape the First Order is good. I like that.

That's more exciting. That's more dynamic. I do like the ride title. It gives you a little command, like Twister ride it out, which is to bring it up for the second time. I mean, I think from the rumors we've heard, too, there's a little bit of, like, there's a couple, there's like a narrative and then a fake out. So I do appreciate maybe it just keeping it general to, like,

hide the surprises, perhaps. But does it really need that? But they kind of revealed something this week uh i don't know if you look you can find like what's gonna happen scott did you see this you might be concerned there's a ride there's a height requirement oh on rise of the resistance because they're saying spoiler that ends with a drop a drop i did i did read that and go oh no but at least now i'm prepared but it's only a two it is two stories but i feel like the most to drop you is one story yeah right unless they dug into the ground oh potentially or they shoot you up or real high out of the

building this is not part of the deal it's gonna be crowded enough as it is i don't want my rides having drops and launches obviously there's just the uh wi-fi vehicle drives its way onto a giant trampoline you bounce out of those building itself i think it's possible i mean they're doing crazy stuff with this technology yeah uh anyway hagrid's coaster yeah what does hagrid's coaster uh you know a lot of rumors about this uh orlando park stop had you know they were the ones who had the video going around like showing the expected track layout what the encounters with creatures are going to be uh so it's rumored there's going to be multiple launches on this ride like five to seven launches

no it's another problem probably more like conquered it but still that's a lot of launches even for even if you are a launch queen yeah how much or can you really how much can you i mean it is a family coaster so i'm assuming more like the way that slinky dog dash has starts with a launch it better be let's hope awkward sections also potentially a drop on this at one at towards the end on a roller coaster i'm not having it uh there are launches and drops scott's worst nightmare on one ride so unless i can unless this ride has a part where you pull up to a tavern get out to have a beer for a little bit and then get back on no that's no dice yeah that should be part of that star wars the rise of the resistance though because it's a 28 minute experience so yeah you should be

able to stop off and have a drink in the middle of it well spoiler the thing that the main topic of today's show this experience we got to do i think the main way they got me on board is drinking was involved in a bar yeah that's true they were after they were after my heart but we'll uh we'll get to that later yeah two hours thing you need you need drinks for sure um hegrid's like you don't imagine it's two hours no i think the waits will be long but i i think if this were any other year if the star wars stuff wasn't opening this would probably be the new attraction of the year hands down it might still be because yeah it'll have less intense waits i mean i waited uh four hours three and a

half hours for gringotts the opening summer but it is interesting i mean i hope we're about the we're at the start of this i think we've said this before like a theme park or a renaissance where it's like this is just one of the crazy rides opening yeah this does yeah in another year you'd be like this thing like a different like years past you'd be like this is the craziest new ride ever it's amazing whereas like this could be the third best ride that opens this year. I hope so. I don't want it to be the nightmare scenario is what happened in all of our childhoods where the Indiana Jones adventure was the part of this climb of great attractions. And then it's sort of stopped.

There was not really great new rides after that. I don't want a peak to happen. And then we plummet down the peak i don't want drops in general sure metaphorically or uh on my actual rides i agree i think i think that probably nothing can beat this nothing will beat this year next year like nothing there's not enough rides next year like that are coming out but i hope like it's an overall trend and then nintendo and let's see what's nintendo well nintendo is the rumors i believe it's next year for japan out here i think it's 2021 and then they don't seem that close yet it's still i feel like they're still like getting

ground clearing mode yeah well yeah if you drive by the lot over here they're still doing like site prep or maybe there's a big tall crane though we have passed by that a lot i like seeing that crane i know good stuff's coming yeah because what's also weird is i keep forgetting jurassic world opens this year too out here which is obviously a reskin but still like this is that's way down the list and they did it looks to be a ton of work yeah i don't don't think that's an insignificant, uh, yeah, I think it's, yeah, it's a little more than a paint job for sure. And since we're talking Jurassic stuff, we're just starting to hear the rumblings about

a potential Jurassic park coaster in islands of adventure. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. It's unclear like where, cause there's rumors of Jurassic world going in that third park in Orlando. clear like where because there's rumors of jurassic world going in that third park in orlando and it's very it's it's i think there's a lot of stuff moving around there yeah so who knows what's gonna land where and we're in a theme park arms race yeah the the rumor is that disney knew that some

long-awaited details about this hagrid ride going to come out and they had to strike back, which is why on the same day they announced with their press armada launched quite a missive, which is an attraction, an unnamed attraction about the general notion of play coming to Epcot. So, yeah. So they did a big press release. They announced a while ago they announced, you know, big changes Epcot. They've announced that Guardians coaster and then they shoot. Ratatouille is coming. Yes. We haven't talked about that a ton, but that's going to the France. Is that this year?

I don't know what year that is. Does that be this year too? I don't think so there's also a beauty and the beast sing-along that will alternate with impressions to France did you guys know I don't even know what that is I'm not quite sure they're still gonna do impressions

but then sometimes in the day they're gonna do like a beauty and the beast sing-along no child will have a bigger tantrum than if their parents got took them into the wrong screening. I have to say the last time I was in Florida that one the very end of one night, I was like, OK, according to the map and the app, I this should be open. And I got there and I forget what the excuse they're like. Oh, no, it's he's close.

Like I was and I was very specific. Why is your story from so mournful so sad uh ratatouille the rumor i think is may 2020 wow yeah so that's guardians until 2021 yeah that's right on the way or as part of this rejuvenation of epcot yeah we're getting a new um what do you call it a right uh what the pavilion no yeah but uh the entranceway i'm sorry oh the entranceway yeah you're getting a new entryway right which i don't know what else to call it a new entryway guess what universal eat it new epcot entryway um this actually probably will be very nice Yes it looks nice It looks beautiful Tabuya trees someone was speculating

That's what the pink trees are called Tabuya trees Tabuya I was trying to find a pronunciation of it online And I could only find those YouTube robot Pronunciations where it's like Eight seconds long and it goes like Tabuya

Why in those videos I've had to use these multiple times, why does it take so long before the word is said and you don't know what volume to set it at? So you might like, am I just not hearing it? And then you turn your computer up all the way. Awful. Whoever, whatever bots are making these pronunciation videos, get your acts together.

Stick to Johnny Johnny. Glad we're addressing this finally. I could see a robot in the play pavilion pronounce words for you. Like that's the job. That's the whole thing is you would type a word and then it would say it like that's, I think that might be what they're going for. You think it's pronunciation robots? I kind of do.

I kind of think that maybe that's sort of what it is which one or which one do you want to discuss the entryway or the flight it's like we don't know whether to go into interventions west or east which way do we go um sure i don't have much to say about the fountains or about the new entrance i but i have a couple quick things one well let's here's their press release that it will be. So as you're entering Epcot Center on your way to the glorious golf ball, you'll see a lush area with sweeping green spaces, new pathways, and a reimagined fountain.

Take that, Potter, that will pay homage to the original park entrance with fresh takes on classic elements. I'll probably like that because i love the architecture of epcot center so much so maybe this will be good but one thing that i want to talk about a little is that they are moving the leave a legacy pillars uh if if you don't know about the leave a legacy pillar congrats you're not a dork uh but the leave a leave a legacy pillar if you don't know are uh around the millennium they put up these big gray uh tilty boxes monoliths yeah yes 2001 ask monoliths but not as aesthetically pleasing as the 2001 monolith no no one ever gathered around

one like those apes nobody was ever intrigued by these everybody marched past him as quickly as possible so big monoliths that sounds scary and unfriendly with lacking a personal touch right no no no this is the millennium you need to leave your mark on this era as mankind crosses into a new century uh you you could make a they'd take a picture of you and then they'd make a weird etching on this monolith so and and there's like hundreds of thousands of these things all lining these bizarre not too detailed black and white etchings of visitors to epcot center and they promised these would not get moved for at least a decade. I think they made it almost two and now they're getting moved somewhere outside the park to a garbage can.

I don't know, but apparently, but I, do you guys ever looked into the leave a legacy pillars for any reason? I am shocked. I'd be very curious. I should ask my parents, like,

did you ever get a brochure about this? And did you ever consider this? Did you ever consider naming a star? Did you ever consider having your name on one of the spaceships on the Mars rover? I haven't looked into the details. How much was it to leave your legacy? $35 a face. There'd be a twofer deal.

You get a little maybe maybe if you're doing two faces, maybe you get that for 60 so they cut you some millennium slack very kindly well now i'm mad that we didn't because that is a lot less money than i thought it would be really to me like if you look at the quality i don't know that it's 35 quality i you might be right how much were the um cobblestones in the esplanade do you remember that man i don't know outside disneyland between the two parks you notice all the names and the stones uh as you're passing back and forth and i don't recall i'm sure i must have been tempted to ask my parents to do one but those i feel like were probably more expensive because those at least look i would think they're a little nicer it's a little classier uh and more prime real estate less likely to go away but you know

who you know who popped out at least five uh sets of uh 35 dollars uh i never knew this in sync if you know where to look somewhere there's like 150 000 faces wow but all in a row five in a row is 1990 1999 era in sync wow yeah weird right that's interesting i wonder how many like famous people are on there i is somewhere in there they say uh in the last zodiac killer letter he says i bought him my face is in here find it if you dare the solution to the solution to the crime everyone is like. Everyone is like, uh, that's too boring. I don't know why they didn't.

Yeah, it was too boring. And it's also, they should have just looked cause he was wearing the burlap sack too. So it would have been a dead giveaway. There we go. Yeah. It's like he has something to hide.

There are some creepily, some people without faces in those, because apparently you can find where people, you know, commemorated them and their wife or girlfriend or vice versa and then went back after the relationship ended and scratched their face up that's bleak yeah that's really that's like that's a fairly common syndrome there uh yeah yeah pretty dark so um yeah so the shards of lost relationships can no longer be viewed outside of Epcot.

We get some dumb booyah trees instead. We will do a full Leave a Legacy episode, I think. Oh, man. I was hoping we could skip it by doing it now. That was just a little teaser to a 2023 episode about the Leave a Legacy. So I guess the right preview center. We could do that when you're in Japan, but I think you're going to sleep on it and get too

excited and change your mind. I mean, I did happily, willingly share information about the Leave a Legacy pillars. Are they filled? Filled? Is there any room left to Leave a Legacy? Oh, there's got to be, right?

I don't know. I don't know if it's still available. They shut it down. They shut down the center where you buy them. But if we wanted to go crudely etch our own faces in there without their permission, it'd be easier to do, especially because they're moving them to bumfuck outside the park. They're putting them where River Country is right now. They're just gonna slowly sink into the seven seas lagoon they're going to try and fill the various sinkholes scattered

throughout the property they're gonna solve a lot of problems crush a lot of uh potentially uh child eating alligators by dropping them into the lake yeah all right 20 alligators underneath i have to say i i'm excited for this new entryway because it seems like they are going to restore or do as they say in tribute to the original entrance it looks like the fountain the clear glass fountain that oh that's what they mean well now i think like in the picture it looks like that and i also just think greener like if you just fill Epcot with beautiful, lush green trees,

like that does feel optimistic about the future and it will help cut down on the amount of, uh, brown, the brown stone, brown metal, just everywhere. Oh no.

I love my brown metal. Uh, yeah, that's, that's part of it. Or at least like, I mean, I don't think they'll ever fully get

rid of it but just some touches of green because the other the thing about all the brown is it can get hot it does make it feel a little hotter than it usually is so it is a hot area that is correct yes it is like a big skillet honestly if you look at the map. Yeah. Like a foreman grill. Potentially like our very own future. Oh, potentially. I don't think it's potentially. It's for sure. Oh, God. I'm going to cook alive.

Well, there's more things to dread in the future because, you know, we just did this interventions episode and I did not put it together. But based on our work, they just put up. It seems like they're tearing those buildings down. I think we got no interventions. Yeah. That's what's called becoming gardens, it looks like like i've heard the sordid stuff on the one that they they disney when they do concept art they use like greenery or like trees in in like the the distance or the middle distance of just like yeah ignore this and look here like they they oh that's why it may like it may to uh don't to not distract

the eyes and the way that the go away green paint is like don't look at this this isn't important look over here i see so the buildings might still be there and we still might be able to use our fiber optic brushes and see ty burrell and uh um i i guess no longer hear the electronics president's rap sadly though if the guard so there's a rumor that the guardians q is going to be filled with retro epcot stuff which fingers crossed electronic should for sure be in that line yeah with like buzzy and whatever like figment and stuff so i think maybe there's a chance fingers crossed we could get electronic and i'd like it i'd like them to update it so he would do raps about the president's sentence oh oh yeah oh yeah uh uh maybe there's some just off

the top of my head maybe barack rhymes with like a stilted way that I talk Just I'm throwing that out That's good For a future president's rep I think that's good You could start there I'm sorry I didn't freestyle the entire thing I'm no Eminem We call for like scoops a lot

And if you are an imaginary who listens to us And you are currently working on the Guardian's Q And you want some more jokes for electronic to say a rap uh please contact us we will do this for free much like we did uh the street naming at margaritaville yeah which now that i think about i don't know if that has come out yet the episode we did uh no maybe not uh perhaps not i well preview of things to come uh and and we understand the voice that we're writing for we're not going to write mean raps about trump or george w bush they're going to be the most both sides material are you allowed to if can you do satire about trump's hair if like he makes fun of his hair So you could maybe do a rap

Or would he like tweet angry things about Electronic and how Electronic has been rigged I think he would mean tweet About Electronic The robot is biased because then he would compare It to the other raps about the other presidents Now I guess if Electronic

Is still doing his rap about How Gerald Ford falls down A lot then you could say okay well, he's roasting gently roasting a lot of the presidents. I feel like he still might say no president has ever been rapped about so unfairly as sloppy electronic rapping about me. Your president. Glitchy electronic. Low talent. Low talent low talent least skin of any Disney animatronic if you're so if you're so cool get some skin medium talent medium talent is so much more devastating right

I think medium Trump has definitely gotten under some skins by calling people medium talents for sure I couldn't deal with it I feel like Alec would just electronic would just do like a joke about you're fired or something like, yeah. Oh yeah.

I've got my big red tie. I'm very famous for saying you're fired. Right. It would be very benign and like also be like celebrating his famous catchphrase, I guess. Cause he didn't want to get too political. Cause you don't want to, you don't want riots in the line for guardians of the galaxy.

Yeah. I am so upset about what this defunct animatronic brought back to rap about a current president said that I'm going to burn the roller coaster down. Yeah, we don't want that. Maybe we'll know more because they're turning in the Odyssey restaurant in the sort of on the border of world showcase and future world into like a preview center they sure are and i'm psyched about that because you talk about your dull browns i love that odyssey restaurant i'm really glad that it's getting used uh i we're we're going long on all this but i would just like to point out i learned a little bit about the odyssey restaurant it's on kind of it's between future world and world showcase and it's this boring building and i would describe the theme of this place as hexagons it is a hexagon themed uh building

that is a restaurant for like three weeks out of the year yeah i think at one point it was a full restaurant the odyssey restaurant in which you could buy these three items odyssey burger voyager hot dog discovery salad god damn it so when we're bringing away if we're putting a preview setter in there pay you know so much apricot retro love is coming back it's time to start selling the discovery salad again which i imagine was lettuce with maybe three cucumbers right and ranch dressing well they gotta they gotta put a nod to that on that space restaurant they're building oh yeah those items you've already trademarked these names voyager hot dog is the perfect hot dog space name i i always thought this the deal with odyssey that and i guess it's probably just a conclusion i drew was that they thought well we need to have good we need to have good food options since it's

a more adult themed park in in all areas but then world showcase restaurants were such a big hit and so quickly that they're like oh this place isn't really doing that well because i feel like there are people like who like the restaurants in the land the quick service and then the the character sometimes character buffets sometimes garden grill whatever it's it's currently serving um or just go on that land boat ride and just kind of reach off when no one's looking and grab food a little bell pepper yep that's your epcot hack for eating for free i an alligator. Bring a little like a shepherd's crook and like sneak it and like poke, pull it. Or a little like robot claw

like you get at the dollar store. My grandmother had one to like get something off a high shelf, which still doesn't really make sense. And maybe not the most practical thing, but that was a fun gimmick to have. If you're already a shepherd or the sandman from

showtime at the apollo take that hook into the park sneak it in in your clothes like condense it yeah take it on the boat ride and yeah nip yourself a tomato if it's like a selfie stick but a shepherd's crook where it could extend well you can't take those selfie sticks in you can probably get a shepherd's crook in you could buy an extend extendable shepherd's crook in orlando here's the secret uh bring in a sheep but say that it's a therapy sheep oh yeah the crook to uh you know lead it around right it's like a leash this is a quick side note but i think i saw on an airplane like because we were traveling with a dog and i think you could bring a therapy like horse on a plane or something not a full side note, but I think I saw on an airplane, like, because we were traveling with a dog, and I think you could bring a therapy, like, horse on a plane or something. Whoa.

Not a full size, like. Like a dog-sized horse. Like a dog-sized horse. I'm pretty sure. It sounds crazy. I'll double check that. But it was an animal that you're like, no, that's a joke, right? But it was on the Alaska Airlines approved therapy animals.

I thought you were going to bring up the more uh insane shepherd's crook story recently which is in the connects which connects to disney yeah which is that pita i think it was pita oh so in toy story four you're right that's a perfect segue that i didn't mean to make he's back uh and she's kind of like she's got pants now or pantaloons. She's got a new outfit, but she's still got the shepherd's crook. And Pito is like, how could you bring back this character with that barbaric shepherd's hook? Weird. Of all the things to be mad about now, I don't, okay, I get it. I understand.

I see what they're saying. We don't condone cruelty to animals, but of all the things to be upset about in 2019, one is a fictional doll who her sheep are porcelain, as is she. She is not using the crook to ensnare real sheep and grind them up into some machine. These are toys. She is a toy. she is a toy she is a toy and also aren't we all happy that she's not gone forever i thought yeah i thought it was alluded to that she was just gone forever and now she's okay she disappeared forever seemingly never to be heard

from again now she is like the basis of toy story 4 and it's probably going to be a strong female character that is a like good new way to bring back annie potts who's a very good actress but we still found a way to be upset yeah it's a little weird but now i sound like my dad or something my my feeling is like if i thought that like i sometimes there's stuff where you go like aine can't smoke a cigar anymore. And it's like, yeah. I don't know. He's a big, he's like a gruff, dirty man.

It's like, I guess he should be, but I get it for hire. But to be fair, I guess I also understand that like a ton of kids see this and okay, fine. Wolverine looks bad-ass smoking a cigar. We don't want to promote that.

I don't think there's a chance that a ton of little kids come out of Toy Story 4 and go, mommy, mommy, we have to go get me a shepherd's crook because I want to use it on a sheep at a farm. Like, I don't think that's going to happen. So I could see where you would advocate it if it was like possible that kids are now going to start just crooking sheep left and right. But I don't see that happening. They start with other animals at home. Yeah. I'm going to crook the dog.

By the way, he crooked the cat. Crooking, is that a verb? Is that crooking? I hear all the kids are crooking now. I saw this thing on Fox News. It's called crooking. And your children may be doing it behind your back. They're probably doing it right now.

Turn and look at them. They presumably just hid their crook in the time it took you to turn. Of course, if the crooking was around when we were kids, we would have not done it because we were too good. Good boys. No crooks for us. Anyway, let's get back to the play pavilion. We still haven't talked about the play pavilion.

Okay. Okay, so where the Wonders of Life Anyway, let's get back to the play pavilion. We still haven't talked about the play pavilion. Okay. We, what? Okay, so in where the Wonders of Life pavilion once was, you've heard about Buzzy and Cranium Command. This is also where the Body Wars attraction was. It's this dome that's been mostly empty at Epcot Center, and now they're going to turn it into a new space devoted to playful fun with an innovative city

that will come to life with your favorite characters. Okay. Okay okay so yeah i i'm hoping so that kind of doesn't mean anything in plain english yet uh not yet i am hoping people are speculating this kind of looks like the portals and ralph breaks the internet which i have not yet seen i'm hoping that's not the case i feel like that would age really poorly um a tribute to the 2019 internet yeah because it kind of looks like a city i mean i'm hoping it is this color scheme the interesting theory and i'm going to shout out theme park insider their theory is that this is a disney imagineering pavilion where they will show off new technologies show off new technology, show off like smaller scale attractions

that they don't have to scale to huge things. I think that's a really cool idea. I think it's very wishful thinking. I hope that's right. I mean, I would like it to be that. What I'm afraid of is that it's going to be a lot of shit that you do with the Disney Play

app on your phone and they pass off as interactive because I think the Imagineering Pavilion, they would going to be a lot of shit that you do with the Disney Play app on your phone and they pass off as interactive? Because I think the Imagineering Pavilion, they would have to be really on the ball with updating it and rotating in new exhibits. There's a lot of... Okay, first of all, we haven't talked much about Disney Play, the app, which basically... And I don't know how it's been working. It's been out for a few months now. It's basically a line like time killer. And they had a version of it a couple of years ago where you would answer trivia in line.

And that was kind of fun. You just answer. It was multiple choice. You'd answer, I think, out of four or whatever. And then, oh, yeah, your score at the end. And now we killed some time in the line. Now there's a thing. And I've only tried it with Space Mountain called Disney Play.

And it is an an insane uh pain in the ass there's no other way to put it uh there are just like tasks where you have to like put little puzzles together and if you're you have to do it with another person and you're just it's like stressful and you're doing it while you're walking in line but it doesn't make noise that would distract people around you. It absolutely makes noise that is distracting. And you look over and you go, what are those people doing?

And then there's like a race every 15 minutes that you've... So basically like the idea for the Space Mountain one is you have a ship and it levels up after you do tasks correctly and the tasks are hard,

but then you're playing against the other people in line. And if you win, you get like a fast pass to go to the front of the line and the race is hard and confusing and it doesn't like you can't even control it really you're just like hitting a button and it's like and by the end so we did this it took the whole line and we just got to the front of space mountain finally and we were just like exhausted and we were like what because the idea of oh fun game when a fast pass is cool i like the idea of it this was insane i don't know if it's still like this uh but the

concept of i hope that this is not tied into like a long frustrating complicated game system that you play i mean it's the same disney play and this is called uh this is like a salute to play or whatever they say it doesn't have an official name yet that's true that's how people are framing it like if there's the imagination pavilion then there's the play pavilion the power of play is what i think the press release says it's like a something like more name or play modern theme park names. The power of play place. Sound like, like John Kerry or Tim Cain describing fun. Well,

yeah. The power of play. Yeah. The power of play. So as a child, what would that mean to you? Nothing is a child. Like show me a ball pit.

At least if you want to talk play. Yeah. Get me in some tubes in a ball pit and show me a robot band we're a massive room full of free uh sega genesis game sure i mean that is what that's what this looks like to me it looks first of all it looks neon it looks cool this is no offense to any imagineers i hope i love this thing and i love to celebrate the power of play but what this looks like to me is like oh this is a new interventions this is a new end of spaceship earth where there's a bunch of like

computers and kiosks that will age very rapidly after a year or two like spaceship earth where it's like put your heads on the future family and you're like oh that must have been cute for a few months and then now you're doing it and it's Oh, that must've been cute for a few months. And then now you're doing it. And it's just like designed to keep you inside for a few minutes longer. So you don't go back out into the park and like fill up the frozen queue. I'm awfully worried. I think it,

I agree. It could be great. I am the Disney precedent of interactive exhibits and stuff. It's a pretty messy history. It just never, it's just, yeah history it just never it's just yeah there might be a couple things in there but it's all it feels like all the things we're talking about they're like the the stuff in the queue on haunted mansion where it was like play a game in the haunted mansion queue at disney world and it's like that's gone. No one wants to do that. Just enjoy the real line.

Whatever happened to the old way of passing time? The art of polite conversation. Yeah, good point. These kids are the game where they flip their name up on their forehead. That drives me crazy when people do that in line. It is

so... But you know, I actually did it one time with people and I did enjoy lied. It is so... But, you know, I actually did it one time with people, and I did enjoy it. It's not bad. It's a fun game. Maybe I should try that. I've been judging it, but I did have fun. I assume the pavilion is just like a lot of phones with the names.

I think I may have been... Jennifer Lopez. I may have been in a queue that is enjoyable, like the Guardians queue or something, where I was trying to figure out what the songs were, and then people are like, yeah uh uh president clinton i think there's fun i there's fun probably applications with a phone and like raw like cues where it was like you would discover things or you're going through big thunder and you discover like uh some piece of sea history on the phone

and you answer a trivia question and then like there's got to be something cool um wait you're saying you want sea trivia you want children to have to learn about the inside disney mythology of explorers who all own nice buildings in the past yes i guess that's Yes, I do think kids should learn about C. What's the right age for a child to learn about C? Yeah, I mean, that's between the parents and the child. But my, I would think

eight, seven or eight. Then when you explore, introduce the concept of it. That's Harrison Hightower. That's Harrison Hightower. This is Barnabas T. Bullion. He created the train we're going to go on son oh wow here's something else you should learn son you will have no friends as an adult now that you know this much about harrison hightower you got a rough road ahead of you

no friends well you will but you'll be in your 30s. It'll just take you a minute. Yeah, it'll take you a minute. Maybe you can start a podcast. Yeah. It's a whole different world. Maybe you can start a podcast. You will have anxiety. There's a lot of talk in the press about characters.

So it feels like we're going to do all the character greeting stuff here. It'll be a catch-all for that. So, they're going to move wherever the character spots are now here. People were kind of where's wallowing the concept art on this. And you can see, I mean, Mickey came in with a family. Mickey came in with a family. Mickey is holding their hands? Yeah.

He's holding a young child's hand's hand great and then kind of on the buildings they're sort of kawaii cutesy versions of like edna mode somewhere in here is joy from inside out um she's on the right by the hotel it says hotel oh yeah it does say hotel is that okay i think that's marie from the aristocats that that If you want your theme park destination To hang with Marie Done in pretty explicitly Hello Kitty Style If you want to help Disney cut into the San Rio

Market shares This is your place to do it I mean the building that interests us has like the Wedway logo on the top and then the Sort of bottom kind of has a Monorail sort of pattern to it kind of how much do you mean the word interest we like that you're figuring it out there's there's like a kind of a rubik's cube type

uh building on the top left here that i i might be interested and i could be see being interested in it i don't know what's inside maybe Maybe puzzles, perhaps? I love the colors. I love the blue and purple. I mean, yeah. I'm hoping it looks like this. And then there's like a... It looks like you sit down and perhaps there's a show in the middle.

Did you see that? Sort of an amphitheater look. But it's like a small area. So this feels... Look, this is much better than what they have now, I think. Empty drop ceilings? Empty rooms with drop ceilings empty rooms with naked robots yeah so i think this will look cool like look at epcot it's gotta look cool at night and i think that's what this is gonna do love the colors this concept art yeah sick colors that

does a lot to do away with my complaints and it's all in a dome i like that too cool colors and domes neon pinks scott's in fantastic so uh yeah who knows we shall see but you know maybe there's a reason to be optimistic about this because we have recently had an experience where we've that was sort of an immersive world of interactive elements and games uh that transported you into a into another dimension of fun and we did find this to be a surprisingly satisfying experience and i am referring to passport to iron city uh the pseudo main topic after a lot of today's show talk Of today's episode This is this interactive experience

That is based on the film Alita Battle Angel And this is something That's been set up in Los Angeles In New York and in Austin And it is a Very theme park-y thing That I guess Mike

You got curious about And you poked around If we could go visit it And we got the opportunity To visit it Yeah i this is this like there's a lot of like movie promotion stuff that pops up but this one was particularly intriguing because it's like kind of downtown it's in a weird spot and it felt like it was there was much more to it than like i saw there was like a lego movie 2 thing that was in like a tent on Hollywood Boulevard. So it felt like getting pissed on every day.

Yeah. This felt like, OK, well, this seems like they're going a little more. They're going a little the extra mile, I guess you would say. Yeah. So it was like, let's see. Let's poke around. And also here, you know, let me just not to make people just listen to a video. But, you know, it is hard to explain what

this thing is and i discovered that there is a video you can watch where james cameron explains what this thing is for the fact that james cameron is involved and does a sort of michael eisnery presentation about it that sure legitimizes it doesn't it of course here's a quick little moment of james cameron sport to iron city is a truly first of its kind immersive experience. It fully transports you to the world of Alita Battle Angel. After you enter, have a drink at the Hunter Warrior Hangout, the Kansas Bar. Don't mind if I do. Explore Iron City from the marketplace to the Motorball Stadium.

You can even dig through cyborg parts in the scrapyard. We brought Iron City to life as a 12,000 square foot high-tech living board game where you are one of the game pieces where you're one of the game pieces a living that's a lot of square feet there's a bar you can even scrap for parts weird james cameron is telling me about something that, I don't think I would have like naturally been aware of this if you hadn't poked around or our friend, our friend Charles texted me about it. He came along with us, but so we were like getting curious and circling around this thing. And then, uh, and then we got to do it. Yeah. We got to be game pieces. What a weird cell right that is oh yeah that is a funny way to be like you're a game piece so if you ever wanted to be one of the the blank color pegs and sorry yeah if you want to be a pawn in my game like that is sort of what he's saying you can experience what it's like for like a rich man to buy you and unleash you on his island to be hunted. Right. I guess that's just sort of how he thinks.

Because he could do. Because he's very rich. If anybody could hunt humans, James Cameron would be the guy. Sure. He obviously hunts underwater things. He doesn't hunt on land. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He hunts species that have only been discovered by him.

Right. That's how deep he goes. Yeah. So no one misses them. Except the ecosystem. The ecosystem misses them except the ecosystem the ecosystem misses we'll find various way various butterfly effect ways that james cameron is destroying the oceans yeah species elimination uh yeah so so i i i didn't know a ton about it i just knew there was a lot

like seemingly seemingly a lot more to it than a normal kind of walk through or whatever and you get a t-shirt or something it seemed to like a lot more than than a pop-up experience that's sort of themed after a thing and where yeah where you like maybe you go get some lightly themed refreshments or whatever uh and it also you go well is it sort of like an escape room and it's not quite that either though it has components of that it becomes a teamwork scenario i mean my favorite description that i found was that this is a dystopian cyberpunk playground accurate it's very much like uh interactive or immersive theater elements because there are a number of actors walking walking around in character like um uh uh i i well you'll hear i said that i meant this as a

compliment but like not breaking character like they were fully in character once you get into the main like room this take place and i met that as a compliment when we talked to the guy but i realized it sounded yeah we laughed at your the actors did not break but i was admiring their commitment like there was this taxi driver guy who i just thought he was delightful i would have i would have just talked to him for half an hour well and there's things like uh and it seems like that would have been possible you could have like broken like you could do whatever you want when you're in this room you could yeah you could have broken rank and just talked to this guy for a while there's things like there's people who have to do functional things such as check you into an ipad

check-in the procedure and a guy who has to give you beer and he stays in character like functional things are all done by people who have to like speak the language of iron city and i think it's i think it's done pretty well yeah it's like because those jobs especially or the checking you in job is so hard to do in general because you're a bunch of people going to a new place and there's a lot of people with them and they have to access things on their phone and get a qr code or whatever but you have to like stay it but you have to like be like hey listen up all yous people you come in here and you check the qr code and then you get on your phone and there's six of you and you have to scan in and then you go over here and you get

a lanyard and it's like you have to do all of that then you have to troubleshoot people's oh the ipad ain't working for you hey or whatever and mike spent about three minutes tapping a laptop screen before realizing it was not a touch screen it was just a regular old laptop with a mouse. Hey, you tall idiot. It's not an iPad screen. It's a computer. We don't got this kind of technology here on Iron City. What do you think this is, Zalem? Keep it moving, screen junkies.

Screen junkies. When I say Zalem, I'm referring to some mythology from the movie. And by the way, so Alita Battle Angel is a film in theaters now that is surprisingly well regarded. And I have to admit, I have not gone to see this film yet, but it seems like people who have have liked it. It's in that 4DX format that we had so much fun with yeah and it's doing you know okay in america because it's weird new mythology and people distrust it like they do a valerian or a speed racer or such things i equate it it's sort of in that genre a little bit but where it's like neat and original and if you get in you're really in not but doing okay in america seemingly gangbusters in china so elita battle angel 2

i imagine is around the corner uh have you guys seen this film uh no we haven't all right so i kind of like browsed uh when we were there at the at the end of course there is a gift shop but they um they reissued the original manga has been out of out of print in America for a long time. And they put out some nice volumes, full collections of that. I think you can now get. They put out a video, too. They got Kishiro, the writer-artist, the mangaka who made it, to come to the events and, like, sat. They talked to him in the Kansas bar. So I can only imagine for him that was a unique experience.

Well, and OK, so what's cool about this is that this is a this is this experience that's a very committed to trip into a very specific mythology that is not super established here in america yet and it's like you feel like it'd be a tough sell to get something like this made like a multi-city immersive experience it'd be tough to do it for the star wars probably yeah uh let alone this sort of like not tested uh property and we and we got to talk to to one of the people primarily responsible for putting it together and it seemed like they really had their uh their their run of the property to like for putting it together. And it seems like they really had their, their, their run of the property to like, to do like they,

they got to do whatever they wanted. It's the, it's people involved in avatar, John Landau, a long time producer of, for James Cameron. He sort of oversaw it as he did the avatar stuff in, in Florida to some extent.

And I don't know, it seemed like it's an interesting mix of well why not try something and uh why not promote a movie in a in a different way and in a more full way um i don't know it was cool uh uh well what how do we begin to explain this thing like we said it's like it uh uh it's it's got escape room components it's like you you break off into teams of six and we assemble it was the three of us uh we you pick colors and we were the purple team because our logo is purple i had to get purple uh uh and our friends andrew and charles and uh and lindsey and uh uh you break break off into groups of

six and you enter a bar and you get drinks, which are apparently custom made for this thing. There's a custom Alita beer. We drink Battle Angel beer that was brewed for this event.

And you're in the Kansas bar, which I'm told, if you see see the film has some very exciting events happening in it. Of course, none of us would know now. Okay. Have we dropped the ball by none of us seeing this film? Perhaps maybe.

However, one thing that I think is cool about this experience is that I was, I was hoping that I could, I would go in and there'd be this really specific mythology that was so odd and confusing to me and I could sort of make fun of it. And like, what is going on? I'm so confused.

In fact, they have created an experience that does not rely on you knowing the world of Alita and in fact, just serves to make you curious about it. Yeah. I guess not curious. We were each given each team was given a table on that table was a tablet with different uh pages and that kind of gave you the whole background everything you need and and later on you would it behooved you to spend five

minutes reading this information because there was like basic trivia stuff because the whole thing of this you're trying to be the team with the most credits at the end of it yes and this is where i feel i let you guys down because as i said like there's a themed bar great i'm just gonna chill out and have a beer then i was i believe the second person to buy a beer i got right to it to my chagrin the bartender says hey you know that little icon on your badge there's somebody else in this very bar who has the same thing if you find them you're a match it can help you get credits in iron city and i'm like ah damn it i wanted i just wanted to sit and have this beer talk to the people i came with but you are thrust out of your comfort zone with stuff like that it's it's you should go

interact with other people and get out of your get out of your comfort zone uh but in addition i'm just sipping on a beer not retaining any information you get into iron city and immediately realize oh i should have been listening to all that stuff uh because it would it would have helped us play the game well i think all all of us caught little bits and pieces and that added up especially in the trivia point we got all of that pretty well and there's an introductory speech from uh i believe the young lady's name was cobra introduced kind of gave us the rundown of you know you're in iron city this is the year it is this is what the deal is. Everyone wants

to get to Zalem, the city in the sky. Literally a heaven kind of a very anime-y city in the sky. Yeah. Which is the funnest thing to talk about. Like, that's where it was a lot of fun to go in not knowing the specifics

of this world and to just keep talking about Zolom and like oh one of these days man i'm gonna get there i've been i've been dreaming of zolom every night what does zolom smell like uh and it was kind of more fun in a way to not know about zolom and to read the bizarre little text like you may even earn enough credits to earn passage to Zalem now spoiler you get to the end of it I don't know that the winning team right which could have been us

could have been a different team but the winning team did not enter some beam and then ascend to some sky city no that did not occur there is a cool reward for you it would it would be cool if it's like there a version of Zalem was a different cooler bar.

Hell yeah. Where the drinks are free. The drinks are free and... So that was my one complaint. I do think I do think everyone should have gotten one drink ticket with their admission. I think that would have been because

the breweries involved and the wineries involved in this are getting with their admission. I think that would have been because the breweries involved and the wineries involved in this are getting some free promotion. I wonder if there's some weird thing like with a liquor license there. I mean, that could be. It's a pop-up event. You should have asked that question in our interview.

Yeah. First things first. Oh, I thought you meant asking character to the bartender. It's like, hey, Mac, can press? Yeah, first things first. Oh, I thought you meant asking character to the bartender. It's like, hey, Mac, can press? Does the press badge mean anything in this goddamn Iron City hell? I don't know. We don't have the press here in Iron City. Oh, just the factory, huh?

Just another factory stooge. The factory doesn't represent podcasts with a, you know, mid growing fan base is that how it is is that how it is uh we should say the factory runs everything in iron city that's true yeah yes and that'll help you in the trivia round all of this will help you in the trivia round yes uh and what i you know what i'd like to drive to encourage people to do is to perform better in the iron city experience than we did at the end we'll give you our stats and if you're encouraged and are in los angeles new york or austin and want to see if you can beat podcast the ride uh we'll give you some tips on how to do it um yeah so i we were all like everybody in there is like seemed like they were game but uh i was thinking like for a

second i was like oh are we all gonna have to be characters are we all gonna have to be like and like i don't know because i don't know i was gonna make up an alien name but it was gonna sound stupid um like m e m carl or something like cars like whatever our friend andrew did you have the option to put whatever you want on your name badge? I didn't. I stayed Scott, but I amended it to be Iron Scott. Our friend Andrew made himself for the evening into Amdu. That's good.

I was a big fan of Amdu. None of us chose Alita. Should have just gone with that. Then we would have been the hero automatically. Yeah. But I was like thinking for a second Oh are we going to have to act Are we going to have to act And now part of me thinking if we go back and do it

Maybe we should act Well we did kind of because we started getting mad At the taxi driver when he Like did a bit where he was kind of like Pickpocket Lindsay We started yelling at him But I mean like I'm going to go there with an eye patch or something. I'm going to go there with like a little bit of flair, a little clothing.

Maybe I'll work on a character beforehand. I think a little bit goes a long way at this thing. Because again, the actor's really good, really into it. Kudos to the designers for not giving anyone the big eyes that unnerve me for the promotional material from this that only one character has. I don't know how it would be possible to get the big eyes in real life. I don't know. Prosthetics, you know. Or some like there's LED screens in front of all the actors' eyes that respond to what their real pupils are doing.

Now, that's how it would have been an escape room. If you entered the main room of this thing yeah and everybody had giant eyes we would have all been like get me out of here banging on every door one of these has to be an emergency exit poorly labeled in some made-up language yeah um so yeah it was so it was pleasant and what it ends up being is that although you know feel free to just go do it and not listen to us explain it and find out for yourself uh skip ahead but uh you're you're chilling out in the bar you're learning some stuff it's sort of like it's you're getting accustomed to this world but then you enter this big uh marketplace slash arena where there's all these different stations and little

rooms that can help you earn credits and that reward teamwork, but also reward being bold and strategizing and splitting apart and maximizing your time. And some games are fun and some are sort of like tedious and time wasting and probably like eat up time that you could have been more easily accruing credits. And it's interesting to get in there to have had no opportunity to form a battle plan and to just like oh god we have to like learn the system of this and uh work together and figure it out it reminded me of not and this is not quite the same thing but it reminded me i had a similar feeling that i would have when i

would do field day in elementary school. Did you guys have field days? Oh, yeah. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. You did. The days I looked forward to the most because it wasn't school. Sure. It was just fun.

Field day, yeah, you would get a little team together. And then at our school, at least, you would have like stations, basically. And a lot of them were physical channels. You're saying it's like... Oh, no. Ours was just like like it'd be like you know movie in the morning lunch for mcdonald's that's not a field day hour long recess instead of 50 minutes field day did you think i was saying having a field day ours was having a field day it

was like stuff kids like so it was like because our field day was like you would run a mile or run half a mile there would be relay races there would be like yours is like color wars at like a summer camp or something almost it sounds like i guess i've never heard that color wars i guess maybe they were colors were the teams yeah the colors were the team so like so we so basically like you would split up at our elementary school like all the one through six would have... You'd be split up. So you'd be on teams of sixth graders, first graders, uneasy alliances from the different grades. And then it would be a lot of physical challenges, throwing a ball far, sprinting and stuff. And you'd all... I forget exactly how it would work, but it was like the most exciting day of the year because it was a big thing. You do it with a group of people and then you would get points at the end. So doing this, I would describe it as like the feeling I had with field day where you would be like, oh, cool group. We're trying to figure this out.

We're going to beat this other team. And it's like a very fun, like kind of big, like multi-challenge. But pro, it doesn't involve strenuous physical activity and another pro it does involve beer so it notches up in a in a couple big ways yeah it's all adults and everyone's a little buzzed a little but yeah a little buzzed even on just cat like i just had a mexican coke but like those bottles so big because i had the caffeine uh so you were you were buzzed i mean i was when we were going down i was like i know this is crazy but i would kill if i could get a cup of coffee here like i said that to one of you and then we did go into a bar and i was

like hey coca-cola next best thing huh yep yep close yeah uh yeah y'all got coffee in Iron City? No, coffee was outlawed in 2472. Yeah. We all know there's no coffee in the world of Alita. That's why everyone's so stressed out. We drink Go Juice. They always have something, though, right? Ooh, I like Go Juice. Death sticks.

Go Juice. Smoked death sticks. Go Juice, one go away from Go Go Juice, the drink Honey Boo Boo had on toddlers in tiaras. Gogojuice. It's a dystopian world where Honey Boo Boo reigns supreme. We all must play games to win her favor. And she rewards us with gogojuice. The juice is a mix of Mountain Dew and Country Time Lemonade.

Is that what go-go juice is uh i think it was like you had a real energy drink big honey boo-boo kick there for a while yeah you were really into the show yeah uh yeah and then there's some disturbing things came up anyway reality shows forget about that that's anyway you moved on to duck dynasty yeah there was something problematic there yeah um let's talk about some of the things that you do uh i think we all enjoyed the music audition yes the music audition i was looking forward to um part of me thought you were actually going to be able to play the piano and i would get to show off my lazy piano skills maybe even lazier pianos

i thought it was gonna be karaoke i thought you were just gonna do karaoke sing the iron city national anthem go no words go uh that would have been great uh yeah it was basically just they had they had like rigged up a bunch of keyboard like midi keyboards and then they kind of played the music-ish thing an approximation of whatever music and you people would listen to in past or iron city excuse me and then you just like hit a set of keys when they would light up so it was basically like i kind of felt like it was a like my hand was like a cat's paw trying to get it like a toy. So I just like kind of claw at the keys. One of the would light up for a brief second and I just kind of hit it.

And like, it was very stilted. And I'm like, I was trying to do two at once. Cause they're like, do as many as you can. So I had two keyboards in front of me and I was just trying to hit it. And it's quick. It was quick. Like it was really quick. It was like maybe less than a second,

but your chance to pretend that you're a keyboard cat. That's a good point. Very exciting. Yeah. Just cans. You know what a lot of these things felt like was it's almost like because there's also then like you put a puzzle together. They frame it as like it's a propaganda poster. You got to form the pieces and you together as a team put up a magnetic poster.

It all feels a little bit like Legends of the Hidden Temple. I was just going to say that, yeah. But without the horrible men that grab you and without the monkey that seems so easy, but that everyone messed up so badly. Everyone is fine. No one scared us. No one scared us in this.

No. No one was scared. Half second, I was concerned, will there be scary stuff? And then we walked into this beautiful, brightly lit marketplace. Thank God. I was let down. I was hoping there would be a few scares. I won't say why, but I was hoping that someone would jump out at us.

And that all five of us would leap into your arms at the same time. Like Scooby-Doo. Like the Three Stooges. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was hoping there might be a little bit of a scary element but no nothing was scary um yeah so but how legend of hidden temple also yeah uh can we side note real quick on legends uh those men in the temple at the end as a kid because you'd fantasize a kid watching those shows you'd fantasize about doing

it uh and that's i was scared of those men, for sure. I would sit closer to my parents of like, I know the men are coming. I don't want to watch them. And now as an adult, I'm more like, I know that was a non-union gig. I know they were getting screwed in addition to... The real horrors were right for them. Their faces weren't on camera. Yeah. Didn't have to be

Taft Hartlead. Yeah. Which, by the way, a good idea in general is Legends of the Hidden Temple for adults. Oh, 100%. What a good idea. They own this property. Viacom is failing. That's a good way

to make money. And they do a double Their tour yeah Yeah imagine little pop-up legends Of hidden temples they do at comic-con It's funny to watch the Nickelodeon Booth evolve from like shows Current children

Enjoy to like remember The go-go 90s remember I have a photo with Monsters I have an old mech photo me and old mech from like two years ago comic-con and i don't think they brought the show back i think they just brought it there to make idiots like me try to relive their childhood and i did was he cool yeah he was cool so down to earth i bet yeah he's really he's chills but no they did bring the show back now i think

about it was like a different voice it was a film it was not a game show they made a weird jumanji light okay i don't know anything about that uh that the host kirk fogg did appear in uh acting um it's yeah it's odd and they were like so it was like a game show except nobody gets to play it it was like a narrative film of Legends of the Temple. All right, you're all getting out near. I ain't going near that temple. I had enough of it. Then he drives off, drives this off-road vehicle,

like, send up a flare if something goes wrong. It's like Dan Aykroyd leaving the scary house in Casper. Yeah. Are you going to call someone else? call someone else the problem is they need waivers but the idea that you would go into the legends of the hidden temple bar drink two beers and then get thrown into a temple monkey beer silver silver monkey i uh victory brewing golden uh golden monkey i believe it's one of their most popular it's a silver monkey right on the show or green monkeys what's the what's the color in the don't know offhand

purple parrots i know okay i always wanted to be a purple parrot purple parrot pilsners okay great uh at the very least you could do it because you'd have to have people sign waivers if it was an actual physical thing where they have to climb. But you could just do a haunt. You can do a Legend of the Hidden Temple haunt. You're only taking out the worst part of it? You can't like haunts that much that you want the horrible temple men to jump out at you. I kind of want, well, I'm just trying to think of a way for them to do it. Cause it would be hard to get a bunch of drunken adults, uh,

in and out signing waivers. People would be hurting themselves left and right crawling like on their knee, hands and knees through like that section. You know what I'm talking about? There's a section where you crawl sections where you climb. It'd be too much for, for men and women in their thirties.

Jump zones in every abandoned mall across this nation which i want to go to take alcohol out of the equation you got to pre-game it they aren't going to officially you have to get a flask in the parking lot and get hammered before you do your adult legends of the hidden temple hot boxing before going through these competitors are moving very slowly today. It's funny. There's so many of these game shows now, like the Titan. Have you seen any of the Titan games? The Rock is hosting this. Oh, yeah, yeah.

These giant elaborate sets, which is just like a less... I mean, they're very... They're crazy themed and the scope of them are amazing, but it does feel it's just a different version of Legends of the Hidden Temple with strong people. What's the... A Lin's game show at night now, too? I don't know.

Game show? Game of games. Game of games. Here's my question. Do any of those shows end with a final trivia question of how much money is enough? For either of those people. Like, when is it? No.

When is it enough? What more do you need? But the thing that's invaluable is having cameras pointed at you and being able to tell people what to do and fetch you coffees. Well, wait a minute. They point the cameras at you. Now you have the intro. Okay. I think I understand. The last thing I'll say

is that the new let's make a deal. The case, what's the stupid case? deal or no deal now shooting live from Orlando Florida at Universal Studios oh boy so there's got to try to get on it some one of the

three of us should get on it but they're doing a lot of like public human interest stuff where they tug at the heartstrings on the episodes so we have to find an angle for one of us that makes us look like a sad sack hmm so we'll figure that out and get yeah we'll get on it right now if we frame jason's frequent hot dog eating as poverty we just have to tilt the look just because when i was driving here today i had the thought do i have enough time to stop for a hot dog?

And the answer was no. At Costco? No. Well, Mike got me on the 7-Eleven app and I was trying to see if I had enough points. You were going to get a 7-Eleven hot dog? Yeah. Where else would you stop for a quick? I guess it could have gone to Wienerschnitzel.

That's gross. Joe show the famous simpsons given homer all day or like weeks at a time never done me dirty okay how many a year one maybe two a year i think that's low i forgot about the costco you're going into a battle in the parking lot i guess i guess wienerschnitzel has a drive-thru i mean i didn't even think about that ultimately i understand the hot dogs are barely edible and it does not matter but there is a weird thing in my head about 7-eleven food in general which you don't share i guess uh no i'm very curious about the pizzas i heard someone saying

the pizza if you get a whole pie it's pretty good you said before we started this before scott said you heard i heard the pizza is better than little caesars people online arguing and i like little caesars i saw people on the line arguing saying like 7-eleven's actually better if you're talking a five dollar six dollar pie so i don't know. Can I? On the $6 pie. We're talking price points. Dot com's message board. But now it's pizza, pizza and Domino's are trying to compete with also like deals where

the pies are hitting $5 or $6. It's a lot. A lot of exciting stuff going on in the. We have formed that now Jason can go on deal or no deal. Forced to subsist on 7-eleven hot dogs i'll stop go to pocket this discussion for doughboys just copy and paste it we'll just they'll go over our lines and that saves them some recording time yeah the thing on deal or no deal that they're doing now is that um there was like a guy who

worked at the ford plant his whole life and didn't get like oh treated well might not have been afforded might have been different car company um but then like the president of Ford came out and was like, for your service, here's a plaque and you'll get to sit with us at the executive box in Detroit at the next baseball game. And it's like, Oh, like they're delaying that I'm thick. So for the Jason episode, the CEO of seven 11 will come out and gift you with a year's supply of free 7-Eleven hot dogs. With 711 hot dogs. All at once.

Almost to a day, but not quite. 7-Eleven truck pulls up in front. But a voucher if you want that second one when it's getting into the dregs in December. You can get it for half price. And then you will swim in them like Scrooge swims in money. You will swim in 711 hot dogs in an old time bathing, a one piece bathing suit. And say, say that for your, for everything is terrible.

Like that's not where there's need. Fine. All right. You got to be careful in that hot dog pit that you can very easily suffocate. Scrooge goes in. Scrooge swallows the coins and spits them out. If you go in for a mouthful of 10

hot dogs, you might not be coming out of the tank. Jason knows what he's doing. I'm a man of the people, okay? I'll brave 7-Eleven food. It's not a thing I do Every week Or even

Or certainly not every day I acknowledge that I eat at McDonald's A good amount And Taco Bell And God knows Those probably are not Dissimilar in their quality

But for whatever reason 7-Eleven I do feel like The food is just sitting there So I'm saying Stigmatized I'm saying yeah There's a stigma and I'm probably

incorrect about it and you're more progressive than I am. All right. Is that good? It feels like the morsels of food that they have to scrounge for in the poor pockets of Iron City. Yeah, that's right. We're doing a podcast.

Not getting up on Jason Marathona. Something new comes out about your hot dog Yeah, that's right. We're doing a podcast, not getting up on Jason Marathon. Well, you always say something new comes out about your hot dog eating every week, and it's hard to not examine it. You offered information. We can't go here. We're going to name this episode more about Jason's hot dog eating habits. Epcot slash hot dog slash Alita Battle Angel Passport to Iron City the experience. Yeah. Okay. One thing that we have not

gotten to in this episode yet is that we talked to the people, the person, one of the main people who are responsible for this thing because this was done by I Am 8-Bit,

which is a very respected art collective, but they see, he was talking the philosophy of making stuff they do uh releases of video game soundtracks on vinyl and they and uh you know and like then video game re-releases and and they've they've got an art a gallery here in la and they've also like i guess what happened was they made a uh a resident evil escape experience that toured the country

sounds pretty cool you love scares yeah i'm sure they give you some scares this was apparently this apparently caught the attention of the people uh producing alita and seeking to promote alita they reached out way in advance gave him like a big jump to do something really cool with the property and that's what made this, this thing happen. And we got to go talk to, to this guy, John Gibson, the co-owner of I am eight bit really cool guy, uh, passionate about themed experiences as are we, and seemingly a big deal in, uh, in LA art world.

We got to come to his place and, uh, bug him a little bit. And, uh, you're going to hear some of that right now. All right. We're here with John Gibson. I guess to start, just tell us a little about I Am 8-Bit, the company behind Alita, Passport to Iron City, which we all did and enjoyed. Sure. Well, thank you also. You had fun. That's the operative word we've been tossing around. So when that is achieved, we are quite happy. My name is John Gibson, as you said. I'm the co-owner of IM8Bit. We've been around for about 14 years. And we, for all intents and purposes, call ourselves a creative production company. But that's kind of a bit misleading because

everything we do is predicated on experience in some way. And that's kind of a bit misleading because everything we do is predicated on experience in some way. And that's not necessarily traditional experiences. That's anything from our perspective that you can tangibly interact with. So that could be an event that could be a stunt or activation or just anything that really brings something alive in the real world. And we really appreciate analog experiences and things. We come from the era of VHS and laser discs and cassette tapes. And so we like to combine technologies and analog things and make experiences that are cool and most of all fun. Well, and we appreciate that because we're, you know, as theme park aficionados, we're always excited about real tangible experiences and anything that's not a screen ride.

That's one of the big things. That's one of the big complaints in our world, which you see a lot of these, which can also be, look, if you're on a ride, it's still a ride. Hey, Soarin' is a really fun ride. I mean, like there's, it's a screen ride, but it's, you know, you're up there if you're on a ride it's still a ride soaring is a really fun ride i mean like there's it's a screen ride but it's you know you're you're up there you're hanging your feet are dangling right it's it's fun i'm afraid of heights so also it's exhilarating for that reason it's the only way for you to get that experience uh fake height um i guess if you could tell us a little bit about how you guys got involved with uh Alita project and how far into them making the film did you guys come on board? Because it certainly can't have been an afterthought.

It can't have been like, well, we got to do something to promote it because it's so realistic and the production design is next level. So you must have been working with the filmmakers in some regard. Well, thank you once again. You've noticed all the things we were hoping people would notice. Yeah. We started working on this a good 18 months before we went live, which is super duper rare in the film space. If you're to approach it from traditional marketing channels, which we did not like, this was not a venture that Fox marketing had anything to do with. It was produced and financed by our partners at the CELU Group. They came to us one day and said they wanted to change live entertainment and do something different in the space,

but also do something that didn't cater to typical marketing habits, bad habits, if you will, where you get called up by a studio two months before a film comes out and they say, Hey, let's do something cool. And if you can imagine, two months is not a lot of time to achieve much of anything, let alone something of the caliber of Passport to Iron City. Did they have any ideas for you? Do they just go hit us with your best stuff? Do you guys present basically to them and then they approve? Is that sort of how it works? They were really integral in providing a thing that also isn't very standard in the film world, which is the reason why we don't usually work in film. We work in video games primarily or TV. They provided us access and trust in a way that studios typically

would never really allow to happen. As you can imagine, certain things are under lock and key in the film world. Alita, when we first read the script, we had to sit in a room and Amanda and I both gave up our laptops and cell phones and everything was watermarked on the page. And we sat in a conference room for two hours and read the script 18 months ago. That wouldn't have happened in a traditional environment in the film space. But it happened because the fine folks at TSG and Lightstorm were buddies. And Lightstorm trusted us and TSG trusted us. And they said, hey, read this. Watch the movie. It's in a very infantile early state at this point, because, you know, there's a lot of

CG involved that's not finished or polished yet. But, uh, after that, like, let's, let's discuss what you guys think would be cool and different and unique in the space. So you're saying you saw the movie with, uh, with normal sized eyes. Uh, we, uh, you know, I think we actually saw the film before and after the, the first trailer came out. And so like they actually enlarged the pupils, uh, since the first trailer when, uh, complaints came in. Uh, yeah, you can look it up. It's kind of amazing. Like you compared side by side, James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez gotten a conversation and, you know, they, they took note that people were complaining, but they also are visionaries in their own respect. And they're like, you know, we should enlarge the pupils to make them more expressive. Because when you see the film within

a minute, that does not bother you anymore. You are fully invested in this universe. And you realize in the context of a trailer, it might be odd, but it doesn't matter because, you know, films are not trailers. Films are films. Sure. Were you guys familiar at all with the original manga that inspired the movie? Because it was out of print in America for many years and Kodansha just put out like new collections of it, which you can buy at the end of the experience. It looks nice um but there are 2 000 pages of material of like the full run of alita and i read them all as a an adolescent when i was a young boy in middle school yeah yeah yeah i i grew up in detroit and i used to go to the i think it was walden books or like one of those mall bookstores and i would special order the Viz editions, the trades. And it would

take like a month to get each one. I fell in love with the anime and then realized it was based on a manga. So I just started special ordering those with allowance money and eventually got through them all. And I still have all the original manga. And I got to meet Kishiro, the creator of Battle Angel. And he signed my OG first edition copy a couple weeks ago. And that was like kind of a little boy, you know, like if I don't know what my might faint, not sure. He barely speaks English, but like all I all I want to do is like like hang out with this guy who like really influenced me. So this comes full circle for me personally too. Wow. That's great. Did he do iron city? Did he do passport or you just met him?

Oh yeah. No, he was like, I, we met him, uh, at passport iron city. He went through and, you know, that was the most, uh, terrifying part I think is, is to like, you know, in Japanese culture, uh, you know, perhaps it's different than American culture where it's harder to discern expression sometimes. And it's like, are they having fun? Like, are they nervous? Like, I don't know what's going on. Like, I hope he likes this. I hope he's smart.

And then they had a blast. They got into the T-Rex lab and started doing those activities and got on the running pad. And they loved the Kansas musicians area with the keyboards. Like the minute they got in, uh, I asked them what they wanted to drink and they asked for waters. And then I said, well,

we have this beer that we've made for the experience. Uh, they're like, Oh, we don't want to drink. Like we just got off an airplane. And I'm like, but,

and it's Panzer Kunst, uh, the fighting technique in the, the manga and the film. And once they saw that it was like Alita beer, they're like, six of those. And they like downed them. And that was the moment where I knew like, all right, these guys are having fun. And a thing I really like to have to give them a lot of credit. The actors were all really great.

Like no one broke character. Like everyone was so committed. Well, not that I thought they would like the base level yeah i don't all right um we'll send you to secret shoppers next time yeah yeah that's good to know i mean the taxi like we spent we probably could have gotten more correct we probably could have gotten one more game in if we hadn't spent like five minutes arguing with the taxi driver but i was like no i want to keep arguing with this guy he's really funny well and you touch on something really integral to the experience and something that uh early on in playtests uh i don't know if

you guys are familiar with playtests it's akin to you know a prototype like you you have something that you think works pretty well uh but you just don't know until people get on it and experience it and go through it. And her playtests were really interesting because a lot of people criticized initially the fact that you as a player have agency over this experience. It is your choice. You are a tourist in Iron City and we've created a bustling metropolis that allows you to do whatever you want to do, but you can't do everything. And on some of the forums before like, oh man, I just need someone to tell me what to do. You have domain over this environment that is not your house. You get to

walk around and touch things and experiment and engage in a way that a theme park doesn't necessarily provide you when you're waiting in line for something. It's not as linear. The thing that we knew all along was the magic in a lot of ways. Because you come out of it having made every decision and every decision either got you credits or it didn't. But you spent time with that taxi driver arguing with him and he was wasting your time, but you were also wasting your own time having fun talking to him. So maybe you couldn't earn as many credits as you initially maybe went in wanting to earn, but it didn't matter.

Um, where we, we talk a lot about specifically the ET ride on the show, uh, at universal studios, cause it adds so much to the mythology. When you're doing something like this, that has like new characters or new stuff, like how much is that you guys, how much is that it's just a collaboration? Like, do you have to get a new character? Do you have to get each character that we interacted with approved as part of the mythology? Does James Cameron now acknowledge all those characters are canon? An actor might just say something that just becomes gospel. If you're an actor and you're working one of these experiences, you know, 40 hours a week, like you're going to know a lot more than us after a week or even a couple of days. Cause you're just playing that game. Like

you're specialized in that role. And it's like, we want to hear your feedback and we want you to have enough room to wiggle and grow as long as you're keeping to the vocabulary and the fiction and the lore and you don't break character. Don't talk about modern technology or don't talk about the latest Ariana Grande song you heard. There's simple rules of the fiction because you're 600 years in the future. Or if you said that Ariana Grande song from 500 years ago. Exactly. That would make it. Just commit to or if you said uh that ariana grande song from 500 years ago exactly that would that would be just like commit to it if you're gonna do it the one thing we didn't really want to do uh nor anyone else was retell the story of the movie because like who care like why would you want to do that and it's like the whole idea was how do we expand the

universe like how do we how do we make this something that if you saw the film, like it kind of opens your eyes and lets you explore this universe more thoroughly. Or if you haven't, you know, it introduces you to this like cool, new, rad, futuristic world. That's just transportive and neat. You know, you don't have to ever have seen Mr. Toad's or Wind of the Willows, right? But you can go on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride and still have a blast. I think that half the rides at Disneyland, that stuff is so old that kids

don't even know what it is anymore. They probably prefer people to not have seen Song of the South. Just go straight to Splash Mountain. That's where, you know, as we record this, I still have not seen Alita yet. So I'll be going in reverse order like when I say, and it did make me want to see it much more uh but like in the same way i'm a weirdo who saw who went on star tours before seeing star wars so to me it'll always

be those movies uh in the world of that ride which i guess this will be to me as well well there's a movie of uh in iron city that's crazy like Star Tours before Star Wars yeah it makes you appreciate the strength of the world too like a leader is a brand new IP for but you know ninety nine point nine percent of people like you don't see a lot it's exciting in that regard in the manga existed but like not really in America like not really stateside at all and it was like out of print everywhere for a long time like even in in Japan, it was kind of invisible for a bit. I guess here's a question. Can you often think of like the ultimate,

like the mythology you would most want to tap into or explore or a mythology or a property that would be like a dream to set up something in? I just get lost and immediately always thinking of Home Alone. Not that that's realistic or makes any sense. I'm on board right away, but any thoughts as to what that is?

I just feel like it would be hilarious to go through a booby-trapped house. I don't know how you would do it without killing your guests, but it sounds fun. It seems like more of a Halloween Horror Nights maze, maybe. Can you imagine? I kind of can imagine it.

How fun if there's paint cans flying just above your head. I mean, there's so many complications to what that experience would be. It's half choking, but if it became a reality, I'm sure we'd figure it out. It'd be complicated to figure out how to give gifts the experience of stepping on a nail into their bare foot. It would have to be like a rubber nail. And they'd have to have reinforced shoes that we give them a check in. And it's legal. It's just like a haptic technology.

Technology has made great leaps and bounds. If it could trick me into thinking I was stepping on a nail, I'd be very impressed. Just to see the house almost like i feel like i do you feel like you'd uh you've watched a movie enough to like know your way around the house like the house is so iconic and he made the map i could probably draw the house yeah i feel like i know it but but you know fake nails all right like sensations like technology that would simulate that you know one of the things that we try to deploy in Passport to Iron City too was things that were high tech, but things that were also super lo-fi and like just tangible, tactile things. So it's like the marketplace relies on that like old Halloween

game of like reaching the bag and tell us what you feel. And it uses your senses and it like everything is designed very deliberately across the whole experience to make everyone feel empowered and cool. Like they've accomplished something and they're, they're valuable in that universe because one thing that not that this is an escape room, but clearly there's escape room elements. Uh, escape rooms can make you feel really crappy. Uh, if you're not really good at very particular things. Very claustrophobic, very insane when you're trying to figure out puzzles and stuff. Yeah, if you're not a very specific kind of person that has a particular kind of brain that really enjoys that kind of simulation, you can be really polarized by that kind of thing. I'm not saying all escape rooms are the same, but it's a very particular thing. I find them very nerve wracking, personally. And so it's like, yeah, we have a countdown clock in Passport Iron City. We have a dynamic

credit system where teams are competing against each other, earning credits. There's a leaderboard that refreshes like Grand Central Station, flipping all the time. There's elements that would stress you out in theory, but they don't because you're having fun and you're distracted by the fun you're having. So the leaderboard is there and yes, it's competitive and yes, there's a winner, but that's not the point at the end of the day. Because you realize it's not about winning. It's about creating memories. Yeah pre i before this i did not have a memory of arguing with a shifty taxi driver and half of my friends thinking that he was uh not to be trusted and half uh we were like literally torn back and forth like some of us were starting to go one way and like

no you're cut you're coming this you're with me or you're against me no hang on i think there's something here like how weird we're around each other all the time now we're in like a weird like marketplace fight together like yes what a what a strange way to like hang out with friends you see all the time we've gotten some hilarious feedback too where some people are like one of the actors told me to bet on this this one racer in motorball and we lost i'm'm like, well, why did you listen to them? Like, well, do you just immediately trust anyone on the street that you're talking to? Like their job isn't to give you the answers. It's not that easy in the real world, nor is it that easy in iron city. There's a rhyme or reason to everything that happens.

Like everything has a solution there. There's a bunch of puzzles throughout motorball is also a puzzle. You know, you just got to look at the clues. And it's like you can discern, for the most part, who is going to win the race. And the races rotate like you're never going to see the same one twice. But, you know, you're still gambling. You know, like Vegas doesn't guarantee winnings. But like you can discern and deduce pretty logically like who's going to win if you pay attention, much like anything. And we forgot Slott's rules for Vegas, where it's like, if you can, max bet every time because that increases your chances.

That is the one thing that our cast members in Iron City will encourage everyone to do. Because what started happening early on in playtest was some people would go crazy. Like they're just like gamblers at heart and they would just bet the max. But so many other teams would just bet like a thousand credits and you can bet up to 50,000 credits. So like you got to think about it like Jeopardy. It's like a weird mix of Jeopardy. Yeah. Jeopardy and slot machines. It's like the whole point is that like this is like the group activity where you can, you can rise up to number one but

you do have to risk something but you also have to pay attention to what you got on the leaderboard and a thousand credits isn't going to get you anywhere yeah this is how neurotic i am i guess that i'm not even willing to risk fake money like i didn't i wouldn't even bet like non-existent but like money that i've had fake money that I've only had for 20 minutes. I'm like, yeah, but I earned that. I fought for that. I pressed a keyboard. It's real money in Iron City, Scott. If it's any consolation,

you may sink into a giant pool of self-doubt now and depression, but these credit coins, the actual... If you're a winning team, you get a full-on thousand credit coin

that were screen used and minted by a really awesome old machine in Colorado. Whoa. Wow. They're super... I don't know if you guys have held these. They're really substantial. Well, no, because we lost.

They're really substantial coins. Yeah, that's... It's a prize that is neat and cool. They're like, they're really substantial because we lost. So they're really substantial coins. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a prize that, you know, is neat and cool. And it's like a little piece of movie propped them, if you will. This is, yeah, it's very heavy, very detailed. Like the etchings on the side. Uh, this is cooler than I thought the coin was. I was a little relieved when I saw people win the coins.

Like, Oh, just some plastic coin. Now it's a cool coin. It's a very cool coin. But now they're selling on eBay. We saw a listing for like 72 a couple days ago and maybe it's gone up but i'm like one or something yeah now you can translate into real money or bitcoins if you're crazy sure i got some it's down right now but you know so i guess does anybody i sort of have like a wrap-up question you guys because we talk about how it feels like the world is becoming more theme park. Like experiences like this are popping up more and movies especially are doing promotional

things where there'll be like a crazy pop up for something. But like, where do you see the future of this type of entertainment? Like, do you have a vision for it in a way? We hate that word pop up. Okay. Some people have paraphrased us as pop up, but we're not a pop up. What do you have a vision for it in a way we hate that word pop-up okay so some people some people have paraphrased us as pop-up but we're not what do you think about activation because it sounds a little manchurian candidate to me activations is a very like insider baseball

term for like agency talk uh right it's an activation it's like everywhere a comic i mean i introduced what i'm ape it was at the beginning of this. I said the word activation and stunt. Stunt is another marketing word. But this is not an activation or a stunt. This is like a thing that will exist as long as people want it to. We'll run for many months. We're not going away just because the movie opened already. And we'll keep extending our lease.

We have lease extensions for as long as people want us to be in these cities. So it's its own standalone business and experience. You know, it's just about fulfilling the destiny of expanding the universe and lore of this place called Iron City and Alita Battle Angel because you bet your butt

they want to make sequels to this thing. Sure, sure. Absolutely. Well, yeah, it's very cool. Congrats on it. And thanks for giving us a passport to Iron City. John Gibson, you survived podcast the ride. But where else can people find out about you or I Am 8-Bit? You can check out the URL, iam8bit.com. It's I-A-M, the number eight, B-I-T.com. And if you're interested in Passport to Iron City and experiencing what everyone on this podcast have so far, it's just eliteexperience.com. And tickets are up until the end of March so far, and we'll keep on going if people want us.

Cool. Great. That gives us more time to finish the episode. That's good. We can drag our feet. Awesome. Cool. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having us. Great. Great. Okay. John Gibson, co-owner of I Am 8-Bit. Cool guy. Fun to talk to him. And he told you a little more about what this experience was and the ultimate goal of getting this this very cool coin which we were disappointed to learn was cool uh um especially because uh uh well we should talk about our uh results okay yeah a little bit so we were doing so there's multiple challenges so basically yeah i think we we kind of said it

but like how it works is there's multiple things to do and you kind of run from station to station and you try to do your challenges like we were saying puzzle or the the keyboard thing dr chiren's enhancement assessment that's what i meant to say i i don't know what that was because we didn't have time to do that one so it's a mystery to me you don't know who dr they tell you you're not going to be able to do everything and that turned out to be true yep um and then there's what's the smell one? Marketplace one. Marketplace one. So like there's no doctor in that one.

Like a very like mysterious person. I will give you some smells and you'll say what it is. You'll have 30 seconds. And like I was so proud of myself. They waved it under my nose and I said chocolate. And I gave me a good sense of self-satisfaction. I think we all did pretty well. No, I was the first one up

and only in a technicality was somebody nice and threw me bell pepper oh right right because like that was the first challenge and i was the first person to do anything and i fucked it up and i felt stupid well but that's you know that's it's a teamwork thing because i had it later when you there's a challenge where you put your hand in a bag and see what's in there uh and i was like it's that thing it's like a it's like a branch that's in a cocktail and someone was like uh nutmeg yeah so like i was describing it but somebody it was an assist you know so you shouldn't have felt so bad about that teamwork was part of it yeah it's part of it like the starting at that point right um. So we were, so long story short, we were kicking ass. Yeah.

We were number, there's a leaderboard. So you get to, we were running around. We were in triple digits. I think before everyone else was, they were still in double digits. We all, I think, felt like the smarty pants kids. And we were like, we're going to do like, that's another thing. I was flashing back to like an elementary school feeling of like, we are the smartest kids here. I cannot believe it.

We are going to beat everybody. And yeah, so we were doing really well. And then there's a final challenge, basically, which is a guess. Essentially, you're placing a bet on what what's the name of the sport motorball it's gambling it's got the risk uh challenge type right it's like horse racing or something but it's like robots essentially so they kind of they help you along on all the challenges and and the helpful man was like you know i would would say go with the two that have been upgraded recently. Some pick between those two.

So you see that there's two characters that have been upgraded and I don't have anything in front of me. What are the names of the characters? Crimson Wind and Juggernaut. Juggernaut? Juggernaut. I thought it was Juggernaut. You threw an N in there. I was not crazy.

You said Juggernaut, right? It was Juggernaut and Buka Depepo. Okay. Oh, I think I just got mushroom out. I was not crazy. You said Jungernot, right? It was Jungernot and Bucca di Peppo. Okay. Oh, I think I just got mushroom out. Juggernaut. Yeah, Juggernaut. Great. That's what I thought.

All right. So Juggernaut and Crimson Wind. And we were looking through. And then on the iPad or whatever, you could look at like stats. And Crimson Wind looked like she had better stats than Juggernaut. And Juggernaut looked like a bad guy. And Juggernaut also looked like a bad guy. I didn't care much about that but i i because it's iron city baby i can't i can support my i want to support the winner i don't care my only allegiance is to money in iron city

sweet sweet credits sweet sweet credits so i was like i think crimson win so this is i don't think we would have won because we were still, I think right at the end, we were not in smarty pants first place. I don't think we might've been second or third, but the whole thing is that you bet credits, you can bet up to 50. So it's like jeopardy. You're sacrificing, like you could potentially be sacrificing your credits if you lose. So we all had like, it happened too fast.

We should have done this earlier. I think we weren't all together. We weren't making the decision as a group too fast we we should have done this earlier i think we weren't all together we weren't making the decision as a group right we should have been so there was a debate of how many credits to yeah is it like vegas rules where it's like okay double or nothing you know right which we probably should have leaned more toward because i like afterwards when we were talking it out we're like well this is a silly nonsense thing and we weren't going to get to keep this fake money. The hints were strong of who you should pick.

So a lot of people were going to pick the winner and potentially bet more. So what did we bet? 10 out of 50? 20 out of 50. Yeah. And Crimson Wind beat Juggernaut at the very end. Everyone cheered because everyone had

picked Crimson Wind, I felt. And we should say, this is not the winner every time. All of these games change on a regular basis. There's multiple variations of them. Yes, I don't think you got their goat by knowing it's Crimson Wind. Right. Sometimes it's Crimson Wind,

sometimes it's Juggernaut, sometimes it's Jungernot. It could be any of the three of the robots. Okay, well, gonna have to extra hot dogs to uh make up for this inadequacy later i told you about the app though so it's kind of like i treated you to the hot dog uh well we've discussed the hot app does the freebies on the app do not include hot dogs and you're right you gotta get more points um so we got like second to last place i think third to last third to last okay but it was very so now we know we could pass that along to anybody yeah and after being first for almost the whole time we were like the thing you want to have when you're

down in the gutter in sixth place you think well if i bet it all maybe i could bring down that cocky guy at the top and we down that cocky guy at the top. And we were the cocky guys at the top. Yes. And thus we ended up with a final credit score of, not like in terms of bank credit score, but just within this, we'll give you our credit score later. In Iron City, our credit score was 151,500.

So if you get a group of six to go do this thing, try to beat 151,000. And you will have beaten the Iron City Masters here on podcast. Honestly, it should be easy. We did so poorly. Would you guys like to talk about your assessment results? Yes. to talk about uh your assessment results yes um i the factory evaluated my performance and determined i will serve as a factory clerk um there's little stats that you get based on your performance in the various games and i was on the scale of safe to adventurous all the way down at safe uh i am i slightly notched barely towards rebellious uh

and uh and i'm way down towards passive this is an accurate reflection of me in life i feel i'm 60th percentile rebellious not close to 100 yeah so basically on the chart of like interest risk alignment compassion it's like there's one two there's there's eight different boxes belly is not close to 100 yeah so basically on the chart of like interest risk alignment compassion it's like there's one two there's there's eight different boxes so you can go through the spectrum so if you're like so so what were you on passive of which box did you check i'm closer to passive was it three away three away uh i am also three away on the passive and do we all have the same i don't know my risk my i'm safe i'm two away from safe which just means very safe i'm right on safe i'm right on safe oh so i'm a little less safe than you well because they because they were scanning

this is because they know i like yeah they. Yeah, they were scanning. They've heard the podcast. So they know I've done like three more haunts than you guys have. So I'm a little less safe. I'm cold. I'm three away from being most cold. I am also that. I'm also that. All right. We're all the same.

But what were your guys, what's your job in the factory? Deck man. What is it? Deck man. One word. Is that a boat? Do they know about your boat stuff uh all i can say is it's fleet week and the ship's just stopped sailor you would be a good deck man all aboard wow uh mine is not as good as yours deck uh mine is factory farmer which is like a bad job that's not a thing good thing we like in this world

yeah yeah so the factory is it how does the fact is that what does the factory make what do you farm in the factory do we know credits credits i'm a credit farm like a bitcoin miner you're a credit crooker you take a big shepherd's crook and you scrape all the credits around and polish them up and get them back onto the street. I don't like the sound of that. Yeah, sorry. That's your life now. The main thing is none of us are on Zalem. We didn't descend.

I did notice the green team on here has 63,000, which is so much less. So green team did really bad. We can feel superior to somebody. Hey, green team at the four o'clock showing several Sundays ago. You know who you are. Yeah. You fucked up. A little too much in the Kansas bar.

Yeah. I saw them. Those guys were like, you were tipping over and shouting and punching each other. And hiccup never Wiping their eyes like they couldn't Believe anything they were seeing never Going to catch a liter that rate A real quick thing I'll say before

Before we're done with this is that Jason Loved this one performer there And you said he was like an older Gentleman and he was the one giving the trivia out. And he reminded me of, I'm trying to think like a little bit of less of a character. Richard Jenkins,

maybe. Yes. I would say that. And you said something like he was, he was good. Everyone was good. But you said, I want to be in something with him and I want him to play my dad.

Yeah. You never think about that? Like who would play your family members in movies? Like not a biopic movie, but like, oh, if I wrote a script, who would you cast as the father, character, whatever. I mean, I guess if I were thinking about it, I want Star Trek The Next Generation's Jonathan Frakes to play my father in something. So I can see what you're saying.

Just off the top of your head, it'd be Jonathan Frakes. What about you, Scott? Oh, man. Like love? Yes. All right. Thanks for giving it to me. Hey, sonny boy. Special hat for your 32nd. Keep on rocking.

32 years of good vibrations. In addition to this man I met once, Richard Jenkins would be like High up on my list Let's ask the listeners Who would you want to play your dad Of all the actors you know Hashtag who's your daddy

Maybe who's your Hashtag who's your daddy actor I feel like that would be Just who's your daddy That would be a been used for anything before. All right, just who's your daddy. Yep, that'll be a clean hashtag for us. Yep.

We laid claim to that first. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to that. But let me say one thing. As we've said, our Iron City stats, not so good. Our risk was low. We are somewhat cold Yeah But And we did not Walk out of Iron City With the

The precious metals With the beautiful coin Right But We did go to IM8Bit And we interviewed John Gibson And he gave us the coins He gave us the coins

And we won anyway That's the benefit of podcasting Yeah We cheated our way We outsmarted everybody In that dumb city Because you don't have to Follow the rules in iron

city yeah yes we understood it more than anybody uh uh we played the 13th round where you go interview the guy for a podcast later yes no the secret round they didn't know existed yeah we outsmarted everyone he uh we were interviewing him and he pulled out what i only can describe as a pog holder uh from the over by like where he was sitting and he pulled out what I only can describe as a pog holder from over by like where he was sitting and he opened it up and I'm like, oh my God, does he have all those coins? Those are Alita coins. And like, he kind of pulled them out and I was like, oh my God, is he going to give us

a Alita coin? And he did. He put three too. He did like a real cool move. Did you see that? Almost like a, like a dealer in Vegas. He kind of put the three coins out and I was like, oh my God. Oh yeah. See that? Almost like a dealer in Vegas. He kind of put the three coins out and I was like, oh my God, we're getting the coins.

He didn't have that magician familiarity and slickness to it. I wonder if he does magic. We should have asked him. Oh, maybe so. I was so swept up though and like, oh my God, we're going to get the coin that I forgot to. I was starting to wonder. I wasn't like banking on it, but sure enough, right after we were finished recording, he gave us the coins. We'll prove it.

We'll post a picture so you know that we got the coins. We're not faking it. But this is I I'm realizing that this is the second coin that has been important to us over the course of doing this podcast. The first one, of course, being the famous CityWalk. Sector 19. Sector 19's coffee coin. Which was the key to the whole thing. That was unlocking a key at the end of a long journey.

And now we have a thousand Zalem bucks. I think I like this being I think whenever a coin is in play we gotta pursue it to the end of the earth. I don't know if there's other good coins around theme park world. I mean, I guess you can get a crushed penny at many theme park locations yeah we should maybe we should start

our podcast the ride coin book and then that should like it should be some sort of like the simpsons and the paintings where like the last one of us alive gets the fortune at the end oh yeah yeah yeah sure which i'm sure is based on a real thing in literature but i can only think of the one of us alive gets the fortune at the end. Like the flying health fish. Yeah. Which I'm sure is based on a real thing in literature, but I can only think of the Simpsons one because I'm dumb. And then we'll try to kill each other when we're a little older to get it. Like three years

older. Yeah. Global warming starts hitting the fan and maybe we can like Iron City sell some of this like scrap metal and try to get robot hands It starts hitting the fan and we, maybe we can like Zala, like, or like iron city, sell some of this like scrap metal and try to get robot hands. Cause our hands broke off long ago. And we're all like knocking down Jason's door.

Cause he is the only supply of hot dogs left on the earth. What's it worth to you? And now you're all with hot dogs. I seem to recall you mocked me on a weekly basis. And look at you now now these will never go bad and they're all for me 711 i've gone down to one a day it's been tough but if it's just how i survive then it is what it is you know what they say the one who lives the longest wins and that is hot dog throne

um wow well um we we survived podcast the ride iron city experience but will we survive this new real world who will survive the podcast the ride coin hunt that will go for the rest of our lives yeah our gentlemen the race is on and who will survive the hot dog wars I have one guess Jason Sheridan hot dog warrior

for you warrior were warrior killers in the or were they hunter killer i forget hunter killers hunter yeah killers hunter warriors i forget enter the eater killer hot dog area where your experience begins hot dog ball you bet on hot dog ball i when the shit's going down you will, here's what you do in the apocalyptic future. You use all the coins to pay your way into, you've heard there's like a secret vessel where you can survive. And you're taken all the way down under the sea with only hot dogs as your offering. And you get to a little submarine vessel. And inside is James Cameron, who is,

it turns out as a big hot dog fan. And it's a, his submarine is an underwater, uh, Oscar Meyer wiener mobile wheels, no wheels on the wiener mobile aerodynamically, actually the perfect submarine vessel. Um,

and you live in the Oscar Meyer submarine with James Cameron, and chowing down on hot dogs while the shit hits the fan up on the surface. I would love to be in the Marianas Trench in James Cameron's sub toasting hot dogs and laughing knowingly like, we really got them, didn't we, James? We really pulled a fast one. Then you hook your arms, you eat each other's dogs like if you were drinking champagne with your new wife.

And you guys eat each other's hot dogs like, ha ha, we did it. And little do they know that unobtainium is real. And it actually keeps you alive for a thousand years. Wow. Here's another shot of unobtainium, brother. And then you somehow end up on Pandora. Yeah. Because it is alsoora. Yeah. Yeah.

Because it is also real. Yep. Flying, flying mighty Akrons and turning, turning other Akrons into Mott dogs. Sure. Sure. Well, who's laughing now? Jason. Jason.

And James Cameron. And hopefully you, hopefully you had a good time listening to this episode. And if you want to hear more podcast ride fun, go to patreon.com slash podcast ride where you'll find the second gate, a whole new world of fun and adventure. And check us out on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit. Do I forget one

in that list? TeePublic. TeePublic. We're not going to have coins. That's for damn sure. Those are for us. Although we should make coins. Oh, yeah. weren't we're not gonna have coins that's for damn sure those are for us although we should make coins oh yeah now that we're famously coin boys it's time to acknowledge yeah any anything could put out pins we're gonna have coins hashtag coin boys each one will cost us hashtag who's your daddy Hashtag coin boys Each one will cost us $500 to mint Yes

A limited run though Of 10 To get them You'll have to find us And kill us Good luck The chase is on Thanks for listening

Bye bye Bye Forever Dog This has been A Forever Dog production Executive produced by Brett Boehm Joe Cilio And Alex Ramsey dog. This has been a Forever Dog production. Executive produced by Brett Boehm, Joe Cilio,

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