Podcast: The Ride - Masters of the Universe Power Tour with Griffin Newman

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

P:TR legend Griffin Newman (Blank Check, Masters of the Universe: Revelation) returns to the show to discuss voicing Orko and the late 80s He-Man stage show. And we all fall in love with our new favorite character Songster. Mad T Party episode up at The Second Gate: Patreon.com/PodcastTheRide Listen to Podcast: The Ride Ad-Free on Forever Dog Plus: http://foreverdogpodcasts.com/plus FOLLOW PODCAST: THE RIDE: https://twitter.com/PodcastTheRide https://www.instagram.com/podcasttheride BUY PODCAST: THE RIDE MERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/podcast-the-ride PODCAST THE RIDE IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/podcast-the-ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forever. Dog. Warning, the following podcast contains a limited use sword, lazy toy name creation, a confusing circus, and an arena show that's 5% action and 95% religious service. Griffin Newman returns to talk the Masters of the Universe Power Tour on today's podcast, The Ride. Welcome to our universe, Podcast the Ride universe.

It's Podcast the Ride, everybody. I'm Scott Gairdner, joined back in the Zoomiverse by Jason Sheridan. That's right. Thank you. I like that little ditty. Oh, yeah. Well, we're going to get into that. I mean, why not just get that off, right? You know, the audience might not know that song yet, but you will and you'll love it. It'll rise to the top of your personal charts. Mike Carlson, hello. Hi, I'm here. Yes, I was watching our topic today and I was thinking we need actually some sort of pledge of allegiance to our podcast that we need to develop.

And I don't want to do it right now because we have a lot to get to. But I just want to put that in the air that we need to figure something out to make sure that all the Cliffords out there pledge their allegiance to us. We need to do that. So anyway. Not enough nationalism in comedy podcasts. Podcast nationalism. Is that the name for it? I'm just proud.

I'm just proud. You know, podcast. I'm just proud. Podcastalism? Is that? No, that's not good does this imply that they can only listen to our podcast or they just have to like always listen to it like that's unfair it depends it i don't know it depends how we write the song honestly it's how we write the pledge sorry well it also just that if you can only listen to our podcast then

that cuts out people like our guest with their own podcast. That's true. Because, look, everybody's supposed to get along. Unless we start getting more militaristic about this. Hey, choose a side, I say. Come on. Okay, but until the anthem is in place, then you are welcome to Podcast Hop. You could listen to Blank Check, a great podcast that our guest today comes from.

But mainly, well, here, let me say this. Today's topic is the Masters of the Universe Power Tour, which was the live touring theatrical spectacle that supported He-Man and She-Ra in 1987. Sort of their coming out of our shells tour which is how our guest today presented it and our guest is the voice of orco on the new series masters of the universe revelation which premieres on netflix today as you are listening to this it it is uh accidental ptr legend griffin newman hi hello hello um accidental ptr legend still my greatest credit i i always ask to be introduced that way on other podcasts and they uh refuse i do want to say right off the bat uh scott we've been we've been emailing back and forth for um some months

now yeah yeah yeah yeah some some delays yeah i i've had some correspondence with uh with jason and mike over the pandemic as well for different subjects for different issues what was the thing jason that you were asking me to weigh in on in real time during a recording oh oh it was shrek shaped shrek shaped fun nuggets with swamp pudding right right it was the shrek uh fucking meal uh which is revolting and then uh mike and i of of course, message back and forth about our struggles to successfully pre-order action figures. But also looking into the numbers of how much it would cost for us to produce a run of toys based on our respective podcast. Oh, you're in that game as well. Oh, my God.

I mean, Mike's doing the heavy lifting but i'm constantly sort of trying to compare notes with him yeah i think it's doable i do think it's doable and uh probably next year i think maybe we could shoot for some i i have a thought a possible lead that i want to bring up with you after we're finished recording so i'll just i'll leave that dangling thread here but but scott you and i have messaged back and forth mostly about what matters podcast the ride the most important thing in the world that's a that's a pledge to us yes and i don't remember if you emailed about something else or i emailed first because of this but the chain quickly became me sort of saying look i really feel like i let down Podcast the Ride listeners in 2020.

And I know it was a hard year. I know it was a hard year for all of us. I know why I was not up to the challenge. You know, I went through my struggles and what have you. Well, I don't know. But you're on the show. You were on the show behind the paywall. Is that what feels weird?

That's what feels weird to me. Because there was that thing where the listeners did their vote on best episode and best this and best that and i got voted best guest and i only did one episode i only did one appearance whereas the previous year i did three appearances in one year i only did one appearance in 2020 and it was a paywall only i know it was a long episode. I know it broke the record and made Jason break out into flop sweat, but... I remember I needed to urinate so badly. We might have to plan on a break in this one.

Absolutely. We have to be smarter this time. But I just felt like I didn't do enough. And I would see certain episodes and topics come up and go maybe I should have thrown my hat in the ring for that maybe I should be suggesting more maybe I should this maybe I should that I felt bad about so I reached out to you and I said I want to put three things on the book I want to commit to coming back 2021 main feed and second gate with a vengeance and the first one I I don't know if we want to spoil stuff but there was a ride that

had been talked about derisively on the show and you guys had said we'll probably never do an episode on that and i emailed you and i said i would like to do that episode can we put that on the books the second thing which i do want to announce here yes i said muppet haunted mansion that's mine very good okay people are going to be really happy about that. I feel like I need to tease that. The ride we can keep secret for now. Wait, it's a ride talked about derisively? Is it?

Not to me. I don't think I would. Did we or did others? I've been listening to the show on a big delay. In the pandemic, I got way behind on all my podcasts.

And so I've been that. I feel like also to you, Scott, I've been that annoying fan who like emails you about things you said nine months ago that you no longer remember. I made a joke about how are your two sons doing? And you said, I only have one son. And I said, what do you mean? Eight months ago, you made a joke about Rex being your first son. How could you not immediately recall that? Yeah, I thought it was a reference.

Two hours ago. Yeah, yeah. I thought it was phrased such that it was like a, that he's like not a baby anymore, that somehow so much time has flown. I was like, okay, that must be what it is. Yeah, I think, yeah, we have dropped the Rex as my son thread pretty thoroughly.

I didn't land the joke, and this is what I'm talking about. I've been letting everyone down as a podcast the ride legend. The emails have been sloppy. Too few appearances. No bathroom breaks in the Fallon episode.

These are all problems that I want to rectify. But in an episode I was listening to, I think that is what caused me to email you in the first place. You guys were like, we'll probably never do

an episode on that. You kind of shrugged at this ride and said, like, we never have to do an episode on that. Wait a shrugged at this ride and said like we never have to do an episode on that wait a minute are we talking about the right thing i'm confused by the way i'm confused wait can we just say what it is and then cut it say what it is yeah yeah we will believe what it is wait oh of course we would do an episode what do you mean wait you have a zoom background that's fighting it's getting blurred it's getting blurred out it's still a secret oh wait trying to in the zoom background that's fighting it's getting blurred it's getting blurred out it's still a secret oh wait trying to in the zoom background it's we all that's that's the thing

we all think we're talking about yeah of course we would do an episode what are you talking about when did we say that who was derisive on it was it one of us i'm telling you there's an episode where the three of you say we never have to do an episode no it can't be possible there's gotta be confusion i'm gonna ask the listeners to go back and find it but that's what motivated me to send the email in the first were you watching a dip were you listening to a different podcast were you listening to jim and len and like len said that sucks the bumper car boys yeah they'd hate that right boys would hate it i'm just telling you i just know that's why i sent the email because i was like concerned about it you're sort of like maybe we don't maybe we don't ever do an episode on it is it not necessary i can't i truly cannot imagine was it a bit were we being uh was our bit not

it was the pandemic we were all losing our minds the point is yeah i can't but now it's pandemic too and we feel so much better because we've had practice we're all pros at this at this point we know how to handle it um but yes but then things uh shifted around i was having health problems you had a job scott and i said like the third thing i'd like to do is when the he-man show is coming out do you guys know that there was a he-man equivalent coming out of our shells tour and it feels like it's right in your guy's wheelhouse and so absolutely and i you guys uh mike and jason tell me your thoughts on this i uh i had never heard of this i didn't know this existed you brought a totally new thing at least to my attention i i i may have found out about it like a month before we put this on the books i was not this is not something i've lived with for very long i i feel like some account that we probably both follow mike one random day started tweeting out

a bunch of photos from like the the playbill like the big full color photos of the costumes like i remember they were circulating around twitter around the time my message scott which had sort of activated my mind like oh this this might be a ptr subject yeah do you think it was one of our toy accounts one of our toy twitter accounts i think it was i think it was a preternia or something like that toy bro i was gonna say pixel dan did he tweet about it i look who could it have been pixel dan might have retweeted it but i think if pixel dan did he tweet about it i look who could it have been pixel dan might have retweeted it but i think if pixel dan was the one uploading the photos i would have remembered and i don't say that as any slight to preternia or toy bro but i think of pixel dan as the preeminent sort of like

motu obscura scholar you know i agree agree. It wasn't Poseable Pete. Poseable Pete. Scott, that is not funny. Yeah, not funny. That is not. When it's theme park stuff, I could do it. This I gotta know when I'm not wanted. Would be very upset to hear

you just wantonly making up fake toy YouTuber names. Mike just muted his Zoom window and threw a folding chair like Bobby Knight. How do I do a podcast with this guy? I don't get that reference, Jason. Did I get the name wrong? The coach's name wrong? No, no, I did.

I'm just saying I'm a toy guy. I don't know sports. Oh, you're a toy guy. Oh, I see. I don't know college sports yeah i think i saw yeah something like what you guys are saying like it was tweeted or like a he-man collage of stuff of like different like oh remember he met like a nostalgia account and like showed a quick flash of like this show. My He-Man, I was very into He-Man as I was learning object permanence.

Like I caught the tail end in the late 80s. I caught the tail end. My real passion for He-Man, I believe, was the reboot that was called The New Adventures of He-Man, which was noticeable because he wore full pants. And I had this toy sword, which was great. I just, can I read, Jason, your notes?

You just screen shared your notes so you could show the picture of the sword you had. And your notes were our 1990 show. It was awesome. This was the one where He-Man wore pants. Yes. And then there's this plastic sword on the ground yeah i specifically owned i specifically owned this sword oh my god looking for it i didn't share it it wasn't a co-op thing could we publish your notes for patreon subscribers

no but they're all they're all like me writing out thoughts i've had like it's it's it's yeah really yeah formatting is funny the formatting is insane because sometimes they use dashes sometimes they use nothing sometimes you use the apple notes bubble i have like five gigabytes in apple notes of just mostly notes for the show will you allow me to have access to those and pick out the ones I think that are the best? Absolutely not. No. These have to be public record.

The people are given the pledge, and at this point, they should be able to peruse the Jason Sheridan Library. I agree. For the right price. For the right Patreon price. Well, now we're talking. We will certainly be digging into this

because this is the interesting context of the show is that, like, I think this show was sort of supposed to be a victory lap for them, timed out around the same time as the movie, which they thought was going to be this big brand rejuvenator. And then this show ended up being like a death rattle. Like, this was the last successful thing to come out of He-Man, and it was very successful at a time that the rest of the brand was like plummeting. Like sales were down, the movie bombed. And then the new adventures of He-Man was their Hail Mary pass. They were going to do a show called Hero that was going to be like a prequel show about He-Man's ancestor and like an earlier person who had held the power uh and then there was an alternate pitch at one point where hero was going to be he-man's son

but the the first hero show was going to be set in pre-eternia so there were going to be dinosaurs in it and that was their big business like thing was like this is how we're going to save he-man we're going to put dinosaurs in the toy line now it's new characters so the kids have to rebuy all the heroes and villains and they're all riding dinosaurs and the dinosaurs are gonna be huge and expensive and i think they were trying to sort of get in on like the gi joe vehicle playset money uh of just like constant huge dinosaur toys um but then new adventures was like the like fuck this is plummeting so fast we need to do like a huge pivot go steer totally out of the like the barbarian uh swords and and castles shit and go

into space and just fight fucking star wars but they were fighting star wars like 10 years too late and that show was a huge flop except as i know because i've spent the pandemic watching too many videos by former masters of the universe brand manager at mattel scott nightlick and his new channel that sword was like the best-selling thing mattel produced that year and the rest of the line bombed like everyone everyone bought that fucking sword. No one watched the cartoon show. Specifically that sword? The one that Jason showed the picture of. That sword was like a huge seller specifically.

And then no one watched the show. No one bought the figures. Every kid I knew had that. Yeah, had that sword. I played with it so much and it was pretty solidly made except the blade because eventually the blade just snapped

off and then i just had a handle with a tiny light bulb sticking out of it so it was made great except for the sword part i somehow never managed to break that tiny light bulb it's a miracle wow it's a like a hanukkah miracle yeah it's uh it's fascinating there's that netflix documentary i watched recently the power Power of Gray Skull. Yes. It has a lot of that history in it. And it is fascinating. Maybe I even talked about it on one of the episodes we've done recently about just watching a bunch of guys go, I don't know.

It's Skull and I want to call it whatever you want. Gray Skull? Okay, great. Like nobody gave a shit about it. But then they were all trying to strategically just figure out how to keep this thing going and yes they were getting there were like there were some toy people that were like we weren't even that creative we we threw it to somebody else and then they gave us a better idea there's a guy who's really like down on all his

ideas from that worked out on the toy line initially i forget his name in the documentary there there is uh that documentary is worth watching on Netflix. There's also the Toys That Made Us episode about Master of the Universe. That's a really good kind of more condensed version of it. But like I am a huge Masters of the Universe fan. Like it sort of is to me what I would argue maybe what Ninja Turtles is to you. And similarly in lockdown my collection has gotten out of control it just became my uh large overarching obsession but I like actively

actively uh sought out and fought to play Orko on this show perhaps more than any other job in my entire career like I was just like very single-mindedly focused on like i love he man there's a new show i want to be part of it orco's the character i want to play partially because i feel like orco's very divisive and people either like love him and they were like that was my favorite fucking character when i was a kid i dressed up as oracle oracle was the funniest i rooted for him or people like hate oracle he's like 50 jar jar 50 chewbacca like there's like no middle ground um and i i just felt like there are a lot of easy ways that someone could sort of sell oracle up the river you know that you could kind of like make him into a joke uh whereas he is the

comic relief character and he should be like silly and fun i didn't want it to be like a like scrappy do thing you know like in the in the scooby-doo movie where you have to sort of like reframe him as like oh well we all hate him um and i also got bummed out at the idea of some famous person just doing it because they were offered it and like oh sure and not knowing it or just doing it as themselves and not like making a new orco as in an actor leeway and he's got a very fucking specific voice which i'll get into i maybe not here but uh I I was like very protective of all this shit my mind as a fan I was like I really want to be the one to do it and I was working like 18 different angles to get cast on this show like I had like friends in the writer's room I found out the

Netflix executive had an Instagram account that was just action figure photography so i started like following him and liking his posts until he followed me back and then i like slid to dms and then was like i'm gonna be in la i'd love to have like a general meeting and then just sort of talked about how big a fan i was of motu and then ended by being like by the way i just sent in a tape for orco but like just wanted to prove to him my bona fides. That I was like, I fucking know this shit far too well. So I really worked really aggressively for it and have been working on the show for a year and a half now, and now it's finally about to come out.

Animation is just such a long, drawn-out process. But needless to say i uh my first record was like right before the pandemic it was maybe like end of february you had one weird at home one and then it got weird i had one i actually i got lucky i was able to do all of them in studio i did most most of my work. I did like a real marathon session most of the episodes in February in person in a studio. And then they sort of put everything on pause, started just animating everything they had. Because the season's going to come out in two chunks. What is dropping today when this episode's coming out is the first five episodes.

And then there's another five that are almost finished that i don't know when they're going to announce when those are coming out but within this year um so they focused on the ones that they had totally in the can and then when i had to go back and record more it was when things were a little less scary at least numbers had dipped in new york like, I was terrified about being on a set, but being in a hermetically sealed recording booth felt as safe as any type of performance could possibly be. That's pretty ideal. Yeah. You barely like meet anyone on the way in to do that kind of thing. Right.

Right. And like everyone's directing over Zoom anyway. So, yeah, I was able to do all of it in studio which was great because like doing shit from home doesn't feel professional it's very hard to feel like you're doing a job and there's no pump up there's no like the commute where you think about it and what could go wrong but what could go right and how do i like sort of talking yourself up and then you're in a place and you perform right you lose that and you also uh gain a thing i'm sure you guys can relate to the added stress of am i fucking this up on a technical level at every single moment just like constantly

checking to make sure everything's plugged in correctly because it's like oh i have to be my own engineer is now well as well um tad distracting yes yeah which i had to do for some other voice over things but i was like very happy that i got to do Orko, like, all those sessions in studio in a normal way, not rushed, with, you know, the animators and Kevin Smith, the showrunner, and the voice director and everyone, like, on and sort of guiding me through stuff. I think the show is going to be really good. I'm really proud of it. And hopefully people are liking it now but all this to say um my my love of he-man stems from i'm i'm a little younger than you guys and as jason said like generationally that's when he-man is just petering out right yeah so most of my he-man toys came from garage sales. Right. Like my object permanence phase comes in when He-Man is like done.

When, you know, like the New Adventures is bombing out. And I was a big nerd kid and like just never stopped collecting action figures and was obsessed with comic book stores and everything there. And every other, I feel like, 80s kids' property still existed in some form into the 90s, right? Like, there were evolutionary changes, but, like, Transformers is still in the ecosystem. It might be Beast Wars now, but Transformers still exists, you know? Like, G.I. Joe is going through reinventions, but G.I. Joe still exists.

He-Man was just nowhere for, like G.I. Joe is going through reinventions, but G.I. Joe still exists. He-Man was just nowhere for like 10 years. It was just like memory hold. It was time and i'd be like what's this reference i don't get like i was very much a kid where i was trying to understand what the nerds 10 years older than me liked so i could like be in the club and make the jokes and i was so confused by the fact that there was no like cultural presence for he man outside of this one magazine that was weirdly still obsessed with it they would be in like cartoon toy fair would have like these like jokey cartoons which honestly felt like the precursor to robot chicken to me it twisted toy fair fear theater yes most of the writers and creators okay yeah it was twisted me go and then they changed it twisted toy fair at a later point because of copyright shit i think so both of you are both right jason and i are both right great

but uh no but literally the creators and original writers of uh robot chicken are largely guys who wrote that yeah with seth green yeah that makes sense to me it's the direct precursor and it was this toy magazine that had like a sense of humor and they would put Skeletor and He-Man in their comics but they would also just like write them up as like oh these are the big ones you know it's like Duke and Snake Eyes and uh Lion-O and He-Man you know like that's their sort of like Mount Rushmore for like 80s kids who grew up with the you know fighting action figures um so it was when i went to summer camp and there was a kid who was older than me who was obsessed with he-man uh who started like telling me about it and then i got really into it and then there was a relaunch in 2002 where they did a new modern

he-man show um that was on cartoon network and i was like 13 or 14 at that time and then got super into He-Man, a children's property from the 80s. It was a great, very cool time for me to suddenly be all in on this thing where everyone was like, you're obsessed with a cartoon show from before we were little that none of us remember that is now rebooted for current day children. Like, why can't you exist in your own time? we were little that none of us remember that is now rebooted for current day children like why can't you exist in your own time why are you like simultaneously sides of fences older and younger than you should be amen that pretty much guaranteed you became a podcast like how if you survey podcasters how many could be described in that way it's it's the the unconscious training for the media landscape we now live in yeah i feel like thundercats kind of fell into this memory hole too and like and then got rebooted later my my exposure to a lot of this stuff there was a run

there was period in time kind of related to the comic book boom kind of related to like action figures just becoming big business when people would open quote unquote collectible stores and it was mostly just like junky old toys some still in boxes some not in boxes a handful of comic books if you could rent a retail space and you could get a bunch of this shit some of it's probably your own collection you're selling like that was that was where i would find some of this stuff like especially in south jersey this caught on and my family's like we want to go to the beach and i was like i want to go to this dank basement where someone sells dusty old toys please absolutely yeah and and like if you're seeing he-man toys at like a flea market or a collectible store or whatever, they truly looked unlike any other action figures. Like they just – as they say, their whole thing was like this was Mattel trying to fight with Star Wars first wave, right?

Like, you know, early 80s going like we passed on Star Wars. Kenner has just been making hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars with these things. Now Hasbro has rebooted G.I. Joe. I mean, I might get my timeline wrong. I don't know if that's right before or right after. But it's like they had their sort of famous boys property that they were able to relaunch and make smaller and build into vehicles and new cartoon show and all that shit.

Mattel was like, we need to own something. And this is what, as I've gotten older, I've come to love more and more about He-Man is sort of what Mike was talking about, where it's like, it's a boardroom of people trying to solve the equation of how do you make something that every single kid would find cool. And it's just like these cynical guys, like chain smoking, throwing every idea at the wall. And then at some point someone comes in and goes like, what if it's just like these cynical guys like chain smoking, throwing every idea at the wall. And then at some point someone comes in and goes like, what if it's just all of them at the same time? And it's sort of just like this jambalaya of all of it, of just like sci-fi and fantasy and barbarianism and monsters and robots and like everything with this mythology that is like so thinly sketched out names that are like established within like five minutes in the back of a napkin

when someone's taking a shit and then it gets passed around to all these different mediums and all of them start trying to actually make something out of it. So like, you know, there's no media to support it when it comes out. They go in and pitch it. And Toys R Us is like, how will, I mean, this is cool, but like how will kids know any of these characters? And they're like, oh, because of the comic books. And they were like, what comic books? And like, they're comic books inside the packaging.

And they're like, oh, good idea. Okay, we'll order like 10,000 of them. And they walk out and the one junior metall guy says the other guy like what comic books because i don't know that's your job to fucking figure it out now whoa like i was just saying some shit but now that's your purview we have no budget make comic books and so they started like hiring these guys who were like science fiction novelists to write these comic books that came inside the action figures which were starting to establish the mythology which then when the toys get big

they do a cartoon show the cartoon show almost immediately negates 50 of what is in the comic books that come with the toys and then they're like dc comics you should do some comic books too and the dc comics that maybe comes before the cartoon show but dc comics creates a bunch of new things that negate that so you already have like the dc comics are different from the comics that come with the toys are different from the cartoon show and there are shared elements but there are areas in which they totally bump up against each other and the movie comes out it's its own fucking thing when they reboot it's its own fucking thing modern comics are their own fucking thing there's a modern toy line from the late 2000s into the 2010s that established its own mythology that was trying to reconcile everything. And weirdly, Power Tour, I would argue, is one of the first times they kind of cleanly laid everything out and presented a somewhat definitive story that tracked they took all of the mythology

and they because this is what happens actually now i feel like because like turtles is the same way where there's like 15 different timelines you can go back so when you're making a new version of it you literally just have to pick and choose and try to make something like cleaner out of a bunch of just like haphazard decisions people make because they're like i don't know this got thrown on my desk today i have no affection for it because it's new who gives a shit and then 20 years later people with actual affection are like here's how it actually happened here's what i think is actually the true canon because i have that with turtles i know what i think is real and what's not like i get right so this is the

cleanest version you're saying of masters in your old days way yes in that early days because like what you're saying with turtles it's like everyone every time they relaunched it someone kind of came in with a new thing right whatever the creative team is whoever wasn't on top they sort of like well this time we're going more cartoony or more serious or more like the comics or less like the comics or whatever he-man it was like four things right out of the gate that all clashed with each other that like didn't make sense and there's even stuff where like the paintings on the back of the packaging for the original he-man toys half of them look nothing like the characters like they made prototypes they painted the prototypes and then they changed the look of the characters. And then when those characters showed up in the cartoon show, they had a third different design.

And in the comics, they had different colors. Like it was just such a mess. It was so disorganized. But there's weird magic that comes out of that like that's an interesting counter to like a uh a george lucas star wars universe that is very specifically crafted and it's the vision of one guy and then watching like 200 people try to replicate that and not really talking to each other there have been so many lawsuits with guys who claim like no i was the creator of he-man because there are like 10 different guys who can say like well i'm the creator of he-man because i there are like 10 different guys who can say like, well, I'm

the creator of He-Man because I built the model. But like, I came up with the name He-Man. But I came up with this part of the mythology. Well, I had the idea to do a toy line that was like this. You know, they looked at these like Star Wars action figures and they were like, these are small and wimpy and they just put clay on top

of it and add as much muscle as they possibly could. And the he-man toys and this is like when arnold is starting to get big and schwarzenegger is presenting this like new body type and they were like just go for that just like absurd muscles upon muscles you know what's the timeline with conan the barbarian like in terms of affecting and influencing this are they sort of separate but then interweave at some point? Great question. A lot of controversy in this era. There is a rumor

that Mattel had the license for Conan toys, started producing them, then found out the movie was going to be rated R, realized it was not a child-friendly property,

took the prototypes they had made and made them He-Man instead. That they were actually supposed to be Arnold sculpts. That has been disputed by a lot of people. That the timeline doesn't work out, that there was one meeting taken, but that didn't really line up, and that this was already in development.

When He-Man was originally created, the muscle thing was a big thing because they were trying to like big dog the Star Wars toys. That was the big thing was that all the Star Wars toys had that like kind of like straight arms, straight legs,

kind of very vanilla posing and were all very skinny to fit in vehicles. And they, like all the He-Man toys are in this crouch and their arms are bent and their knees are bent. They sort of look bad already. And they just have, like, grotesque amount of muscles.

It's rock and wrestling time, too. It's Hulk Hogan. Yes. It's so, like, kids are just, kids are desiring a jacked guy. They want a toy of a jacked guy now. Yeah. And the original idea for He-Man, there was this character that Mattel had in the 70s named big jim who was like their competitor to gi joe hold on yeah now i just want to know about big jim oh i'm about to tell you

oh please please big jim was like their answer to gi joe where it was like oh this is like a 12 inch like handsome built brunette man uh doll with removable outfits and he could be anything like hair is nuts or sometimes he has this like helmet hair it's crazy this is the thing big jim they were just like he's just like a blank slate and he can be an astronaut if we want or he can be a fucking like the six million dollar man or a secret spy yeah or a lifeguard or he's the next generation of action man yes action man was a very similar like kind of a thunder kind of had a thunderbird sort of outfit but yeah you could get a million different he could be a sc different, he could be a scuba diver, he could be a soldier sort of thing. And then Action Man survives in the UK and becomes the dominant thing.

Like, in the UK, they have no cultural fondness for G.I. Joe. Action Man lingered and has become their, like, dominant boys action figure hero in history. Can I just say, Big Jim, I'm looking at a lineup of Big Jim's Look down in the bottom right Big Jim is a firefighter In a silver suit He looks like he's a 50's Sci-fi robot

What firefighters have you ever seen In silver suits I mean let's be honest Big Jim's a sociopath He's right You can't be everything Catch me if you can You're telling me he's Talentedopath. He's right. I mean, it can't be everything. You can't catch me if you can. You're telling me he's talented. Mr.

Ripley. Yes. Yeah. Yes. He's camping, football, baseball, firefighter,

Arctic Explorer, race driver, boxer, cowboy, Safari Hunter, commando, warm up, skin diving,

karate, and basketball. And this is like one page, like spies, not on there as you pointed out he's got his like secret disguise shit why is how come when he's a football player why does he have a cape football players don't have capes that's one thing i know about sports the big gym's got a lot of shit going on and like moderate success but didn't really linger in the 80s they come back around they go like is that the concept do we do a modern big gym thing in a smaller scale where it's like a hero who can become anything and

they were sort of thinking a more fantastical version of it they made this prototype i love where it was the one figure with like the body pose we sort of know in the musculature of he-man but they were removable parts and it was like he can a spaceman, and the spaceman armor was just Boba Fett armor painted orange. It was the helmet and the jetpack, the exact Boba Fett shit, painted orange. He can be a barbarian, and it was like a Conan-style barbarian, but a slightly different look,

and this predates when Mattel would have taken the Conan movie pitch. And then the third one is a tank man, and the tank man is his head is just the turret of a tank he like he is a military vehicle um and they were just like the barbarians the thing they did all this focus group like shit with little kids and they were like little kids are obsessed with the idea of power that's's the whole thing. They want to feel powerful. They want to feel in control. The whole thing is, I have the power. That He-Man is this dude who has power.

No one can tell him what to do. And then they just threw every single thing into the pot to flesh out his universe. Every type of supporting character, every type of genre, all of that. And it was, yeah, hugely uh outsold barbie for like a number of years was mattel's number one thing was making like billions of dollars uh the cartoon show was huge it like just flowered and then uh it was so big and they realized that they had a very

very uh sort of unusual percentage of female viewers as opposed to most boy action shows so they decided we're going to spin this off we're going to do she-ra he-man's sister uh make a show and have to explain why his sister has never been mentioned until now because she was like stolen maleficent style um but uh she was very big and at a certain point i think was even out doing it in the ratings out doing in sales maybe and then like 1986 1987 it just plummets it just plummets out of nowhere it was one of these things where it went from like he-man is making 500 million dollars a year to he-man's making 20 million dollars a year it was like one year where it dropped like that and they're all these different theories on what happened all the cranky dudes at mattel blame it on shira they say that like there was this show

that the boys little sisters like to watch and that was fine but then once there was a girl show then it made he-man look like a girly property and when the girls had their own warriors to play with, then the boys got territorial and abandoned it. Which I don't know if I really believe that. There's also a story that they fucked up circulation. The toys were

selling so well, the retailers were like we want more and more and they kept on creating more and more characters. They made so many different characters in the original line over the span of only like four years or something um but at a certain point they weren't still producing the main characters and so the stores just got clogged with like a lot of these final year deep cut characters who end up in the power tour who they were desperately trying to

make cool who like never made it onto the cartoon show were only in the power tour and now like your shelves were filled with snout spout and like blast attack spout these guys weren't in the because i'm not so up on all this mythology so some of this is only tour some of these uh i i i don't want to get uh reamed by he-man fans who are more um uh comprehensive in their knowledge than i am i don't remember which are which but some of these characters were never on the cartoon show were only in the tour some of them only appeared in you know like mini comics like there was that sort of like uh scattering of it and um the the movie was supposed to be the big thing that sort of rejuvenated it and then it bombed really hard it was tied up in canon sort of like going under and superman 4 and the budget

was getting cut and it sort of like fell flat but this show was like a huge fucking success and to the best that i could check it still holds the record for the most sold out performances at radio city music hall that seems so insane i was trying to find any like further validation than the people involved in this show but it is 18 is the number i don't know that's a lot of like why wouldn't that be the be the winner of that stat? That's crazy. They sold out 18 performances at Radio City Music Hall, and that is the smallest venue they ever played. I was going to say, because if you're comparing it to Turtles, this is arenas. Turtles was a theater tour, and in LA it was the LA Sports Arena. Yes.

And if you see any videos where it pans to crowd yeah it's always like you know theater in the round radio city was the only theater they played otherwise it was stadiums jeez yeah this i i as i started looking up pictures and videos of this i was kind of surprised because this looks expensive really Really fucking expensive. Yeah, the Mortal Kombat show looks a little chintzy, but this looks like they spent so much money. I think that's why the costumes were sort of going viral however many months ago it were. I mean, viral within our very nerdy corner of the internet,

but like all of us sort of noticed it in our timelines because you are kind of taken aback by like, these costumes look higher quality than the other types of these shows that you've seen before. Like there's something less chintzy about this. And even just the scale of the show, like the narrative ambition of the show is wild. Like this is a thought I had watching it it feels like this show is every different type of theme park show run back to back to back to back like it has like 30 minute stretches where it's like now it's a condensed musical version of the story now it is a stunt show right now it is this weird fucking attorney and circus thing.

Yeah, which is less less tracked on you or less like archived seemingly. I didn't ever see like a really good copy of the attorney and circus. But then also like Starlight Express kind of performers on roller skates. Skating. That's where it really hooked me.

Skating. It's like a dance show a stunt show a musical a rock opera a little bit rock opera sort of pseudo futuristic rock opera the moment where i felt like i need to bring this to the good boys we need to talk about this on podcast the ride is songster just feels like such a PTR character. Oh boy. Oh, you know, I lit up at Songster. Let me just,

I'll pull them up on the screen. So let's explain Songster. I guess he's, uh, well, there's a little, this, we're looking at kind of his, like his hero shot from the program of the tour.

And we'll post these somewhere. Uh, but his little like, uh, attribution at Songster, the cosmic troubadour tells these somewhere uh but his little like attribution songster the cosmic troubadour tells the ancient legends through his music so he's introduced like i guess we have to say a little about the premise of the show because it's not just it's not you know that the he-man characters are touring a concert and it's not just that this is happening and you're not part of it

it is a tour power tour is correct it's almost like if the pope was coming to your town or just like a bunch of dignitaries from a nation that you knew a little about but wanted to know more and they're bringing the best that they kind of a shen yYun, right? Yes, yes. It's really like a Shin-Yun. Yeah, 5,000 years of Eternia civilization. But that's like a very important distinction, Scott, because coming out of our shells is the turtles have decided they want to rock for you, right? Yeah, that splinter taught them about music, and now they want to just share it with the world, yeah. Right, and they're like doing a tour.

You know, it's like we're treating this like it's a concert. And then I remember seeing like a Rugrats Radio City Music Hall show when I was young. That was like an original stage show with people in terrifying costumes, you know, and lip sync songs. But that was just a play. You know, that was just a Rugrats musical that toured. This is the format of the show is, as you said, it feels papal. It does feel like

you are going to be blessed by visitors from Eternia. Yeah, and it's very, because it's very pomp and circumstance in like a way that things in the 1600s would have been pomp and circumstance where it's all like banners and fine linens, and then they show you their traditions. It's circumstance where it's all like banners and fine linens.

And then they show you their traditions. It's like it's their culture. It's not like here's like a random smattering of people and bands or something. It's like this is the best and brightest of an entire culture. Right. The narrative of this show is the Eternians, the high Eternians want to share their culture with you and some things get disrupted. Right. But this is almost supposed to be a very regal, austere, educational presentation for the audience.

You know, the first act in a way, if it wasn't characters who you knew about from toys and TV, you as a child might be bummed to see this. If it was for anything else that you'd never heard of. Is this like a royal wedding? Like, what are all these weird traditions? It feels like religion. It feels like you're in church. Yes! It's like, you're like, what? Now we're reading from the book of, yeah,

like, they tell you to, that's what Songster does. And when you say it's interrupted, I feel like it's not interrupted that much. It's interrupted a couple times, but they get to do a lot of their presentation. They get the bulk of it out. Yeah. Act one is totally uninterrupted.

It's mostly like an in-universe show. You know, it's like, well, this is what those characters would do. It almost feels like you're visiting the palace, except, of course, they are visiting you, which is the other weird wrinkle of this. Eternia is like a far off planet in a distant universe, right? That's a big thing. And in the movie, there's like a portal that forms, you know, like Skeletor sends He-Man to the New Jersey I think it was shot in California but I think he's sent to New Jersey and all the good guys are stuck in New Jersey and they have to find their way back to Eternia but it's like that sort of like fish out of water thing um

this is sort of doing like a non-terrifying alien encounter thing where at the beginning they're like we have technology we're going to bring them to you you know like but only nice stuff only good things right but i find it fascinating that like they even kind of cared enough to be like no we have to answer why they're able to come to like uh uh you know the izod center i was trying to think of what these things would have been called fucking 35 years ago uh but but like you know well kids know they come from a different planet they can't just show up here they're not gonna show up here in a spaceship you know you need to create this new like commander character at the beginning who's like we have the technology hold on transmission

coming through let's beam them onto your stage i i imagine that now this is just not i'm not saying it has to be i just appreciate that they justified everything logically because i think now if you see paw patrol live it's just so these dogs are doing a concert for you they are here in your city and you're going to sit and watch them i don't think that logic holes other jobs they have to go to on monday but they took a break for this weekend yeah to do seven performances like i feel like if you're a little kid you go see this show it does make it feel more real to you where you're like they are really justifying how these characters could be in the same physical space as me you know yeah was this like first oh sorry oh i was gonna say they even work in like the souvenirs well that is so fucking canny and

very canny so craven but i love that as a kid like i bought it hook line and sinker you know right they do they're sort of like if you believe in tinkerbell you have to clap moment except the clap costs 50 you gotta get a sword like there's like uh everybody everybody takes a pledge basically um and which by the way that's that's one part that i i like not to jump around too much but i i really enjoy when i think part of the uh by this point skeletor has been introduced skeletor is a presence in it and there is the line that he man has everybody or asks everyone which is do you do you promise to protect this country from the wrath of Skeletor? And this particular performance was filmed in Calgary.

So when he's talking about country, it's Canada. I find it really funny that like, will you children protect Canada from Skeletor? Well, I'll say the online records of this show are the guy, I think his name is Greg Park. Gus Park. Gus Park, yes. Thank you.

He played Ninjor in this show. And he videotaped like 50 different performances. But not great because it's 87. Don't forget. So it's just like camera in the back. It's as best as you could do a little hard to make out but like there's a video that's just the first hour of the show and then on his account he has like three parts of the attorney and circus in the second act but

they're titled weirdly and then i missed them it's it's a really hard youtube to navigate yeah it's hard to navigate and they come from different nights at different venues, I think. And then he, a couple years ago, went to PowerCon, the He-Man convention, and they screened it with some of the other actors who were in the show and did like a live commentary. And there's a video of that. Which you watched. I watched that. Right before we did this, yeah. Yes.

So that's a better quality performance, but it's like they only have, it's a better quality performance. No, it's, it's the opposite. It's that the video he has up of just the first act is the better quality, but he doesn't have the second act of that show. And then he has the second act of a different performance split into three videos. And then when they screened it at the convention, it was the whole thing all the way through but from worse angles with worse sound if you go on his youtube it's so weird and messy where it's like a it's all masters of the universe and then numbers but

then you there's a missing number or two and you don't know if that video is going to be um a bad back of the room video of the show or a brief clip from pm magazine an early 80s new i guess all of 80s news show where they interview some of the cast and then there's five videos in a row he's like well all right i better upload all these masters of the universe videos finally although i should upload this oak ridge boys music video as well i gotta get to that because if i don't do it got like modern martial arts like demonstrations on there as well. I got to get to that because if I don't do it. He's got like modern martial arts like demonstrations on there as well. I found a thing on a message board where he said

a couple years ago that he was trying to get the clearances to do like an ultimate cut and take the best performances from whichever sources he had and put together the most viewable video, but he still hasn't done that. But there are some great,

in addition to the local news interviews, there's some great local TV, like coming soon to the local Spectrum, He-Man, Masters of the Universe Power Tour, like great local commercials for this show. All of this to say, you do kind of need to navigate the Power Tour,

unlike coming out of their shells, where it was recorded professionally released on VHS there was like clear representation of it if you didn't get to see it live you have to sort of construct this event like it's the JFK assassination you're looking

at it from different angles at different sources not the best video ever but they're trying their best reading synopses looking at photos is there any talk of why where is the master recording of the audio like with the songs do they exist nobody knows because i just i want to put this forward right off the bat the songs in this are good right yeah yeah pretty good yeah yeah pretty good yeah are they as good as turtles i don't know but they're pretty good yeah I knew this was going to be the issue.

I knew Mike was going to come in arguing. And now I'm not going to, I'm going to back off. I'm going to say this, but just know that I already backed off of this point. But when I'm watching it, by Songster's first song, which I did a little snippet of at the beginning by the end of that number and looking at the scale of the set which is this bit this like giant round uh like uh cliff piece essentially and there's kind of solid gold dancers and like bright purple uh i really like the song uh songster descended from the ceiling there's so much going on and knowing that there's fighting and roller skating there was a moment like 15 minutes in where i was like

i think this is better than coming out of our shells and i don't i know it lost me a little bit so i'm not i'm not going to say that now but there was a minute where like just pure scale i really like the music um that i it was uh it was neck and neck for me for a minute i'll say this to be democratic i think at this show's highs it is better than coming out of our shelves coming out of our shelves is a more coherent cohesive work and i say this is the person rarely said point but i say this is the person who has watched the entirety of the attorney in circus which is like interminable it's it's so fucking bad and in the

commentary where they're watching it at the convention they're like so we're just gonna talk over the next 20 minutes because this part sucks it never worked we never once went over well with a crowd we never figured it out we never fixed it it was a fucking nightmare the second act of this was like a problem i have to go to mike for your any is this like is your blood boiling at the that there is no i mean it's ambitious i appreciate the ambition and then the songs too like i especially i would like that's what i'm looking i'm looking to hear like an official recording i don't do they even make one like i would like to hear it because then you could really judge yeah because it does feel like from the songs they're like the songs are a little

more interesting than most of the turtle songs well i look i love uh skipping stones uh and i thank you guys for turning me on to that one i think it's a genuine jam i've listened to it a lot it's the biggest genre breaker because the right because they get into a run of like there's a few like mid-album cuts that are very just like all right they're doing kind of uh new kids rehash but that's the just like, all right, they're doing kind of new kids rehash. But that's the one, like there's a new genre applied and I think it really hits a new height. It's also just the vocal performance that is unbelievable.

In water. I'm so fucking unhip when it comes to popular music that most of my major music discoveries of the last couple of years have been because of podcast The Ride where I'm like, have you guys heard Hot Drinks? Hell yeah. Like Hot Drinks and the McGruff Crack Cocaine song and Skipping Stones are like in pretty regular rotation for me and all three i only know because of this podcast i'm honored but also like oh my god we're those and us are your reference for for uh new music discovery unfortunately yeah phoebe bridge that's all i know you haven't gotten into south side johnny and the esbury jukes yet? I have not even heard of them. That's a podcast of ride favorites.

You say that, but I've never listened to them, even despite all of their references on the show. They're fun. When did you guys bring them up? Maybe I just, it slipped past me. That's okay. We brought them up once, and then Mike said, frequently brought up on the show, and I was like, are they?

I brought them up on the last episode was get a gether episode we did um but i don't know i feel like i brought him up twice before that but maybe that's only once yeah i'm trying to see if there was any official soundtrack release but it doesn't feel like there was and it feels like such a bizarre missed opportunity i mean there was like obviously feels like such a bizarre missed opportunity yeah it was like obviously this show existed to sell merchandise and sold a tremendous amount of merchandise you can only imagine how many millions of swords they sold not specifically the sword jason has no not specifically that one no that's pricier that's a nicer sword no But we haven't mentioned most of this show was pre-recorded. Like Songster and Man-at-Arms were the only two people with live microphones.

Yes. Is what I saw. Songster we started setting up but is the cosmic troubadour and is not only the narrator of the show but the lead character of the show. He's like the one guy who's on stage the entire time. And he is the new character created only for the tour, which in and of itself feels audacious to me. But I think it fits into this concept they have where it's like, well, He-Man's not going to put on a show for some kids. That's not what he does. He's a hero.

Songster's a performer. He-Man will make his appearances, he'll he'll wave to the crowd he'll fight off evil he'll show up when he needs to but you need someone whose power set is music music you go to see the pope he waves from a box he doesn't go he doesn't sing a song for you people sing sing for the Pope. Right, right. He mans the Pope if Skeletor invaded and the Pope had to get out of the box and fight a little bit. Like if the devil showed up during a papal visit. Right.

Which sounds like, God, I wish that would happen. Boy, I mean, who wouldn't go see the Pope if the Pope comes to your town if you thought the devil was gonna actually be there. Especially if Songster was narrating it. This is the tale of how the devil became the devil. I'll say there was a, this I mentioned previously,

but this action figure line called Masters of the Universe Classics that started the models that have ruined Mike mike in my life uh forever right where all these toys get pre-sold online you have to order them on a specific day uh because the 2000s he-man had failed there were still like a big adult collector's market yeah there's mutagen man uh from super 7 which is a direct lineage of masters of the universe classics uh in in how that toy line structured but um it was this toy line where they were trying to make the definitive version of every character from every version of the property and all these characters that never been done before and variants and shit like that and um i i heard that they wanted to make a songster

action figure. Oh. And they were going to do it as a San Diego Comic-Con exclusive, which, like, Mike, you were beating the drum for the Coming Out of Our Shells toys for so long, and Randy and Nneka kept on being dismissive about it for years. But then all of a sudden he started playing along with me on Twitter, and then it made it feel like I may have been the reason he did it.

I just feel like there was this been the reason he did it i just feel like there was this like attitude for a long time that you really helped push back against that like coming out of our shells is not real turtles that's embarrassing whereas mochi was was gonna do a fucking songster figure like 10 years ago is there are you on multiple facebook groups masters of the Universe Facebook groups? I mean, it's going to be hard now that you're on the show, but I'm on multiple Facebook groups that involve the turtles. And when the turtles,

when they made Coming Out of Our Shells Tour Turtles, there were like half the audience, maybe 30% of the audience that were furious. This is garbage. This is dumb, childish shit. They shouldn't be making this i want more serious turtles i want the eastman and laird red bandana i want a new version of that from neca and there was a very a large angry portion of the audience that felt coming out of shows was not real turtles

so i wonder if it's similar to this those people are so fucking cool yeah you know what's really fun mike is when you're going into those like message boards and groups that you've been part of for over a decade and now they're arguing about the thing that you're a part of and you can't say anything must be weird it's fucking weird and it's social justice warrior orco i can't handle this character uh jason not even a joke not even a joke oh yeah it just absolutely absurd projection shit and like shit that uh is based in nothing or shit that is correct but like it can't be explained because it's a spoiler and why don't you just wait and watch the thing and then decide whether you like it or not rather than listen to these youtube channels that are trying to stoke outrage anyway songster it felt like for a long time motu because of its goofy

origins and how disparate all of its different like incarnations were was more accepting of all the weird nooks and crannies and things like songster um they were going to do this songster action figure as a san diego comic-con exclusive and the idea was to get the guy who played songster on the tour to come to comic-con and do a concert and like be in the mattel booth and make like a splash and apparently he asked for too much money oh geez oh bummer um i've had this this uh image up on the screen for for a while let me just like we'll post it on twitter but like let's just describe some details it's like a little bit ren fair with spangles and open chest and it's a little kiss too like the color palette is different but the actual pattern of the outfit with like like big shoulder guard kind of things.

And yes, and like tight in the pants and big boots. Absolutely. It's a colorful kiss. Long, tall boots. Yeah. And then the guitar is unbelievable. It is like, it's like a space broom. It is.

It's got no strings, seemingly. No strings. Yes. Big turquoise rod and then like big kind of angular like cut weird pink plastic uh with stripes that mean nothing but then still a dial still like a like a little crank it to 11 dial um i mean this image and then he he himself is sort of it feels like um i mean it there's like a little bit of Siegfried and Roy in there with the cape. Yeah, a lot of Siegfried and Roy, yeah.

It's a little bit like if you squint, and especially you look at this black and white one, you know like Prince is influencing this a little bit. Oh, yeah. The guitar and the hair and the earring. Yeah, in this one, there's kind of a, you could sort of make out the penis shape in the pants. Kind of. The He-Man as a prince yes extremely he looks like that robin chris o'donnell hot toy that i'm going to buy next year um yeah although a little kind of a little bit of a tiny shape if you're gonna show it so well maybe kind of like he could have done some stuffing um i think that you

no i'm not gonna that's the i just had the grossest thing i was about to say no no mike you have to say the grossest thing say it i was gonna say maybe that's just a vein that's oh so the penis that is the grossest thing you could possibly say that's pretty gross yeah that's the grossest thing i've ever said on the podcast that a vein just a vein on a penis would be as big as someone's actual penis well yeah because you're not seeing the rest of it that seems like it'd be more concerning than aggressive so i don't know his actual penis goes up his back he's hiding it because it's too he wrapped it around i just i like a i think this guy playing songster is giving and i i there was an injury where songster got stuck from the opening where they drop him from such

an insane height so i think he missed a small number of shows but it was the one guy doing it for like 98 of the tour um i have his name uh and his uh wait i got it uh doug howard is the guy's name and i sparked to his wikipedia because a couple things uh one he uh for one tour and one album uh was in the band utopia which was todd rungren's prog rock band oh wow i'm a big rungren guy um and also here's one for jason this guy songster's grandfather wrote the song hello my baby hello the writer of that if you ever thought frog song yeah yeah which was apparently at some point purchased outright by Warner Brothers. It was like a

song in the world and then became Warner. So it could be in the WB server verse. LeBron and Granny could run into, they could run into that song and the writer, Joseph E. Howard, as much as they needed to. Blouses win again.

Of the many, uh sort of uh systemic failures of space jam a new legacy some of which we were talking about right before this record we did an audience we did a full pre-air podcast about space jam a new legacy we did at least a second gate on space jam a new legacy sorry we didn't record it. The day before I have to record a fucking two-hour episode about Space Jam A New Legacy. Oh, yeah, wait. You'll be covered. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You gotta get warmed up a little. You gotta get the muscles flexing, you know? I was just gonna say, because it's so hard to formulate an opinion on that movie. I was just gonna say, you just made me realize, how does that movie not use

Mr. Gen J. Frog once it how do they not call it cyberspace jam oh it's right there jason yes right there yes i was saving that for blank check but yes i had the exact same thought yeah yeah this was bug main texted me space jam 2 is not in space no never the title is not applicable i mean i guess their justification is that they hijack marvin the martian spaceship and they go into toon space briefly it is planets kind of the game is distinctly not in space it It's in cyberspace. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, onto things that are great and perfect in media, I think Songster is a virtuoso performance. And I think it is just fascinating that this is like if Botanicus was the main character of the E.T. ride and E.T. just showed up a couple of times.

But everyone loved it. Like it worked. Yeah. Yeah. I have a video clip and this is, I'll ask for patience from you guys and from the audience because the quality is not great, as we've said. But I think just to give you a taste of the song, not only that, but also this might be good

for like setting the stage in general because you will not just hear songster but also he-man and shira's introduction and as jason mentioned this is a classic theme park trope pre-recorded so we are looking at actors who are mouthing along to a track and boy there is something this he-man this this voice i mean i guess it's his this is that's what he sounds like in the cartoon right but um just so yes just verbose and clear and not that emotive about that skeletor like it's all very there's this weird like winky quality to it um a little removed yeah this is the first section of the show which is like a meet and greet where they're like telling you the customs of Eternia and just introducing the characters to you one by one yeah yeah and uh so you've like met a lot of the folks and then who beamed in

and then it and then you get to He-Man and She-Ra um and they introduce um Songster and say what his purpose is. So forgive the quality. I might interject with a thing or two. We'd like you to know a bit more about the magical history of our planet. And so we brought along our kingdom's finest storyteller. His name is Songster. And so his name. Songster will create our Eternian legends before your very eyes. That's right.

That's right. She wrote and enjoy songs. That really that that's right. She wrote so much like when the equivalent of a, when Osmodee are the tiny green space alien that only Homer can see. Damn straight, Troy, my man.

Um, all right. Now then songster goes down. From the ceiling. God. Where are you? Where are you? Now a bunch of solid gold dancers come out. he landed perfectly in the center all the dancers had to guide in his little stage which is very

precarious um i mean love the song i love that in this performance he's shouting out fairfax virginia hello fairfax he's just got like like, such a fucking, like, smooth voice. You know? It's a really good voice. Yeah. Very, very strong. Very powerful. Very smooth.

I also just, to continue my E.T. Ride analogy, that's the other thing I'm realizing about the structure of this show is, like, here are the attorney and customs, right? Here are all the characters. It's building to like a boiling point he man and shira holy fucking shit they're here and they're like wait a second you were excited for us no no no now let's introduce the real star of the show it's songster it's like if the opening of the et ride was like guys just wait until you fucking meet botanicus

i'm telling you this guy is the shit. And then you just spend the rest of the ride in, like, Botanicus' apartment. You know? Like, Songster just becomes then the protagonist of the show. Yeah, because from this point on, he does, like, five songs in a row. And they all correspond to a different tale of attorney and legend. Before he finishes this one, let me say, because I don't want to get to it in the clip. But he starts singing about, oh, we've got stories to tell.

And he gets kind of, you know, into the meat of what's going to happen tonight. And then adds, and by the way, Songster's my name. He takes you back to... And why would you... He-Man, the guy with the clearest voice in the universe, said his name is Songster, and then

he said it again. Some people might have missed it. Yeah, if it's a new guy, you want to make sure. You say, I'm Chevy new guy, you want to make sure. You say, I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not coming in and going out of update. And that's why you became a star. And that's when you say your known name on television, things change. That's what I was talking to Songster.

I gave him the advice, you know, you got to say your name twice. Somebody has to say it once. People will tell you it's overkill. They're wrong. I said, Songster, when people go to the zoo, the first thing they go to see are the lions. But also just in isolation, and by the way, Songster's my name, is such an incredible sentence.

There's something about anyone saying, and by the way, blank is my name, is such a weird way to introduce yourself. Because it's making it clear you're not introducing yourself up front, right? You've front loaded some other shit, and then by the way, blank is my name. But then for your name to be Songster is incredible. But yeah, narrative reigns completely thrown over to Songster. He-Man and She-Ra have vacated the stage.

Not just the star of the show, but two stars of two different shows. The cross section of this audience has both been told it's not about them. Don't worry about them. Songster's you through this, like, abridged reconciliation of the origins of, like, the He-Man mythology. Yes. Going back to, like, the legend of Greyskull, the formation of the tower, the power of the sorceress, the formation of the castle. You see dancers turn into Castle Greyskull. And, yes, setting up, up like this thing that was all

retconned like that's this insane thing where it's like he-man doesn't have a sibling right like it's prince adam is the clark kent the uh mild-mannered teen who gets this power uh this ancestral power in the form of the sword that he can conjure turn into he-man but he is the prince of the kingdom uh his dad is an attorney and his mom is a human astronaut from earth who landed on their planet something this show takes the time to work in like i'm just impressed with how thorough they are in their backstory um which admittedly it lost me a little this is where it lost points to ninja turtles but yeah the mythology sense and then also the songs end up i mean that first song

is there that's guns a blazing i love that song a lot and then you end up in a little bit more of like um space version of medieval bard like like that's like structurally that's what the songs are like a little bit, is like telling you, it's like the guy in Robin Hood, the rooster telling you. Sure. Like, they work less as like fun concert pop songs,

so I have to give it back to the turtles in that area. But then I think it becomes like a decent theme park musical. Like, there's this 30-minute stretch where it's just straight up, here's the story, and you're having story songs sung by the characters, right?

Like, songs are singing as well, but you have, why am I immediately forgetting the tune of it? But that weird, like, staccato, semi-spoken Prince Adam song about the fact that he can't lift the sword. Mm-hmm. Yeah. What's the... Where he doesn't have the power? He doesn't have the will? Oh, right, right.

Right. But the rhythm of that song is so odd. I just think it's interesting where I was watching this and going like, huh, this is interesting that like, as opposed to these concert shows or writing a new narrative, they're kind of making like a big budget musical out of the origins of these characters and the universe that were never very clearly laid out in the cartoon and instead they

just do that abridged and then they're like and now some other things it's yeah they really threw every again as you were saying they threw everything at it because it was like it feels like it's uh somebody probably was just like yeah let's just make let's just tell kids about what happened they should know that and then someone's like no we have to make it present something has to be happening now right and then they're like yeah let's just do all of it because i guess it's like you're watching this and you didn't know anything about like what this kid show you that your kid likes you'll know what's going on by the end of this you know it's sort of helpful they're giving the parents like a crash course but isn't i guess

it's like are we seeing like historical documents of what happened or reenactments or projections but you're right they're like we want present action we want the kids to feel like the shit's happening here so then like you have this 30-minute section, 20-minute section, whatever it is, of, like, the telling of the story where the characters are singing their own songs and you're seeing how He-Man got the power and Hordak, like, rude the day,

said he would some back come back to claim his prize, which ended up being She-Ra, the twin sister, and that's why she's at her own show and all that shit. And then when that ends, like, Skeletor shows up on the screen and is like fake news not how i remember it happening and their solution is we have to fight for who gets to tell this story and the fight is what do they call it the power race power race right it's not a fight it's a power race which is a roller skating tournament yeah and he like want he kind of just seems to want to be included in the ski he's just like your skeletor seems lonely and wants to be in a skate thing

yes he just wants to have friends there's a line line in there, like, once, so yeah, I get where you're, you're all the way through the first act with no presence of Skeletor, and then, fine, then you hear him, then it's just his voice, right? Right, there's like a half a second appearance where they say, like, and then Hordak found his, like, protege. And Skeletor's on stage for half a second, then disappears, is not part of the story as they set it up, and then only comes in afterwards to say,

like, I dispute the telling of those facts. It's propaganda! It's propaganda! Review all sides before you judge. Right. But he, then, there's, I think my favorite line in the whole thing is right after Skeletor first appears and then He-Man says,

Where are you, bone face? How did you get here? Show yourself. Where are you, bone face? Bone face is what a dad would call like, hey, why don't you go play with your bone face action figure? Bone face? Skeletor is already like one letter off of what dad would have like that skeleton like

okay well we could change the name and now it sounds like it's like a little bit dad couldn't have thought of Skeletor an average dad but then bone face yeah it's perfect peak dad Skeletor specifically says I will destroy everyone in that arena which shows you that they are committed

to being in arenas it's not an open-ended venue in this uh this this production hall it's like yeah this is an arena show for sure and really specific and then i think there's some he-man stuff about like somebody says how is he going to destroy everybody i don't know but when skeletor sets out to do something he finds a way i don't know that really doesn't put the urgency there it's also you you should if anyone knows how to deal with skeletor it would be you yeah you don't what do you mean i don't know we'll take i don't know what's anybody's guess what he's up to they They build up the power race like it's like someone challenging you to a duel in medieval times. Like, oh, fuck, this is the way things get settled and it's definitive.

And then, but yet you're allowed to have like eight participants on each team and only one of them needs to win for your side to win. This is life and death so let's real quick this side of the audience cheer for the enjoyer and this side of the audience cheer it's like medieval times also they bring them out one by one and tell the audience to like let them know how you feel about them but it is funny that like this show hits the major characters, right? Which, like, on the good side are He-Man, Man-at-Arms, Tila, Orko, and then his parents to a lesser degree. And on the bad side is Skeletor, Beastman, Evil Lin. And then everyone else in the cast is the newest line of action figures. Like, these are not the primary supporting characters on the cartoon show.

These aren't the toys the kids own they're the toys they want them to buy so it's like odd if you're a he-man fan to see like uh a real blast put in like such a position of prominence you know well tell me who because i pulled out just my favorite ones from the program uh and i don't know the mythology super well so but you know this is just a good excuse to see him yeah also uh here's grizzlor okay so grizzlor comes from the horde they were originally supposed to be a new group of villains for he-man and then the she-ra team took them so then she-ra kind of had better villains than He-Man for a while. Oh, okay.

And the toys sold really well. When did he learn to do, like, the thriller hands? I'm like, ha ha. The other thing, I mean, the famous thing about He-Man was they had, like, four sculpts, by and large, that they just reused for everything. And would, like, kit bash different parts and be like, now the robot has lizard arms and his name is Robo Lizard. Like, it was just the same pieces finding ways to paint different colors or whatever. But Grizzlor, the action figure,

looks like this, where it's a muscle body and then they just put fur on top of it. Oh boy, I bet that is aged well. I bet that's preserved well. It's not flaking off in anyone's you know cardboard boxes and start absolutely not yeah and then just regular boots just like kind of like you know um hot topic sort of boots um and then this guy i really like this guy clamp champ he's good

does anyone uh know the movie laser blast the mystery science theater movie laser blast where a guy gets a big like clunky thing that's a laser gun attached to his arm um it's like the tomorrow war except much bigger entire arm um and that's kind of a clamp i guess yeah that's this is his he's got a big big old clamp on one arm no clamp champ is like a fan favorite because he was the only black character in the original show so like a lot of fans had affinity for him because for a lot of people it was like their only representation he is funny in the sense that uh so many of the he-man characters are like otherworldly or inhuman and whatever their power is is part of their physical being like there's a guy named

mechaneck whose power is that he is like neck and telescope like a thousand feet up in the sky like he's like a human periscope or whatever but it's like he's got a fucking robot neck whereas clamp champ just holds a thing that can clamp people oh it's not even i thought this was clamped to him that was absolutely not it's like a thing he holds in his hand and then from either side of this like two pincers come out and he can sort of trap people clamp champs just a dude who has a weapon owns a good thing okay he owns a good thing um i i really like uh that you're telling you're saying this guy's new he's one of my all-time favorites he's got a freaking like robot elephant head like a big pipe trunk so this is a question amongst fans is like is that a helmet or is he a robot elephant

like is that his true form or is that a mask um but he is people who made it don't know probably no they don't care he is canonically an attorney and firefighter like it's the point is that he uses his snout to put out fires and the toy squirted water wow oh that's cool god that would have been my favorite toy that's why it says yeah a frontline attorney in war that's about a rule i was always really like as a kid really into the toys that looked like very detailed or had very odd features in addition to he-man like the toxic avengers character like action figures were so great like i kept those in such good shape because they just had such odd features to them well that was a lot of the he-man designers then went over to playmates and did the ninja turtles line and the toxic

crusaders line some other lines and that was them trying to like one-up he-man and be like what if like the poses are even more extreme and the detail is like bananas and if you look under their foot there are like five different objects sculpted there yeah like muck man right turtles yeah he's he was like a muck monster had a lot of garbage stuck to him you remember um here's uh we got man at arms and teela man at arms is just a great mustache dude um the musculature on these suits is also just kind of insane like they they really have gone for you know in the way that people always throw out that statistic of like oh if barbie like if someone had barbie's proportions in real life they wouldn't be able to stand up right they like took the musculature from the

action figures and made it just as grotesque as it would look scaled up to a real human. So it just requires like a bunch of padding. It's just the most like fake sumo suit. Soft muscles. Because like nobody looks as mighty. It's hard to find a bunch of people

who are built like he-man and shira which brings me to this point do we know the thing about where who those people were in the tour and where they came from yeah it's so great charming story yeah we all landed on this yeah i think so i mean somebody else feel free but uh jack and leslie wadsworth are, and by the way, Jack and Leslie Wadsworth are their names, and they're married in real life, and they met while portraying Conan and Red Sonja at Universal Studios Hollywood.

They were in the Conan live show. Date met there both as Muslim people, and then were married by the time they were touring the country as he managed shira brother and sister who kids were often confused what their relationship was played by a married couple a happily married couple who are still married to this day um did any of you uh read or hear about their wedding no yes oh that's the best yeah yeah jason do you want to go ahead um uh i don't think i saved that part of the article in front of me i'll say show us your notes no i just click them public oh wait no i do have it uh universal offered to pick up the wedding tab if they would exchange vows on the set the wedding album shows briding bridegroom

in the set's dungeon with barbarians looking on and that's terrific they got married in the red sonja conan universal stunt show universal was so charmed by the fact that they were together in real life and that they met through the show that they came to them and said we will cover your entire wedding if we're allowed to make this into like a press event yeah and and bob mackie built her dress for her wedding wow that's insane and she's like it was crazy i was like not a girl who grew up dreaming of like my big extravagant wedding and then i had the most extravagant wedding of anyone i know i only had to pay for like the material cost of bob mackie's dress he just all he asked me to pay for was the uh the materials themselves and that everything else was comped by universal but all my wedding photos look like they're in hell they're in this like nightmarish set can we take a picture by the glow no the set the photographer will only cover the set um that's

just a reporter that's like catnip for like a human interest story for universal for the he-man people there's a long la times article about this tour it's a very funny artifact because i feel like it's pop culture reporting that isn't done nowadays because it's kind of like confrontational it's kind of like well this is silly bullshit that's a sinking ship right um and it's it's kind of it's a little mean and i kind of but like reporters don't write about companies like this nowadays because they would immediately get a call as soon as it hit the press. Like, what the fuck did you say? We gave you free tickets, motherfucker. Like, it's, but it is very funny where they're like, yeah, the show's really big and it's touring a lot of places, but these toys are making a lot less money, so who knows how long they'll be around for.

Whoa. It is fascinating to me that the toys were cratering so fast and that this show was maybe the most successful element of this property ever. That, like, simultaneously the two things are happening where this is the only part of the property that is succeeding. Weird. Yeah. Very strange.

It's funny, conan reference because i feel like the the conan stuff the rights get really weird where it's like oh the robert e howard robert e howard created conan but red sonja with a y was in a conan story but red sonja with a j was created by roy thomas Barry Windsor Smith at Marvel Comics. So they're sold off separately. Red Sonja comics are published by one company. The others are published by Marvel at this point. And it's very bizarre.

It's like Micronauts or He-Man, where it's like the legalities of it is just totally insane. Well, He-man is also now because filmation got hired to do the cartoon show and then filmation was bought by like company after company after company and then was bought by classic media which is one of these companies that was like gobbling up every independent vintage cartoon or property that was out there and then that got bought by katzenberg and then universal bought dreamworks so like universal owns part of the he-man rights and then mattel owns the other part and some characters are in one silo and some are in the

other and some of like the imagery or the music can only be used by one party or this or that. Like this feels like the last moment maybe where everything's kind of like in one place and everyone's working together happily. Yeah. Right. Because, yeah, I mean, there's all this. I think I talked on the Turtles is like that all of a sudden when Nickelodeon or Viacom bought Turtles, it was trying to get all the rights from the various places because of how confusing it was. So the characters created in the Archie comics, they'd have to go to the guy who was writing and the guy drawing

and get the rights for, like, say, Raphael's girlfriend, Ninjara. And then the writer would say, no, I'm not selling you the rights to Raphael's girlfriend, Ninjara, the sexy female ninja fox and he still owns it to this day i believe like orca was created by filmation orca was not in the toy line or any of the comics first but mattel seems to have a lot of leeway and control over orco whereas there there are certainly characters that were filmation only that like can't be touched unless there's an additional license taken out but also i know like the the show the show that i'm on revelation is primarily produced by mattel with netflix but then the she

rock cartoon which was also for netflix was produced by dreamworks animation and not mattel it's very confusing everything is very confusing and part of it is that i think more of she-ra was developed by filmation in concert together whereas he-man the toys were already on the shelf before they brought them on to do the cartoon but like like, it's the question I've been having to answer for the last year and a half, which is like, oh, the show I'm on is not connected to the Netflix She-Ra. And the rights answer is so boring and convoluted, it's not worth answering.

So the easier answer is, this shows a continuation of the original 80s cartoon, which is in the same continuity with the 80s She-Ra cartoon. So technically it's connected to that She-Ra as opposed to the new She-Ra cartoon which is in the same continuity with the 80s shira cartoon so technically it's connected to that shira as opposed to the new shira which is a new reboot there is a theme park connection in the midst of this 2018 shira was briefly in universal studios islands of adventure in the lost continent taking a wild a few years ago like uh when that come out 2018 i think yeah so around there there was a walk around She-Ra. Universal seems to have a lot more free reign with what they can do with She-Ra without Mattel's permission.

Versus He-Man, where it's like Universal owns these cartoons. They don't own the characters it's it's also complicated and it's why everything needs to merge so that all properties can be in one convenient server verse just you know one something as clean as and understandable as warner 3000 where algae rhythm reigns supreme and can dictate uh what properties everyone makes oh it'd just make life so much better. It wouldn't be very easy. I was thinking, and I didn't find anything about this, because I wonder if, like, by the time Turtles rolls around,

if it's like they've learned, I wonder if this was brought up in the meetings, because Turtles is so much more synergy. The tape was being sold at Pizza Hut. It was an immediate quick show. Obviously, the tapes, VHS tapes, not the audio cassettes were also being sold multiple i have the making of vhs i have the actual first performance of it um and i wonder if masters of the universe they were thinking like they're gonna do the jay leno stand-up comedy idea of like you know don't ever put it on video

because people won't come out to see it like Like, is it was that they're thinking? Because like it does. It's crazy for a property for toys. That's all about selling people things and merchandise and souvenirs from that live show. I wonder if that's what that was their thought process with it. Like, we want people to come see this music. We don't want them to be able to. They'll never come if they have an audio cassette of it. You have to imagine that

was the thought and I guess also that by the time the tour was done and I guess they would have released the video now that it wasn't cutting into the tour, the thing was pretty much dead. You know? Yeah, I guess it's all of it at once. Where's the demand to even have the

record of this? The other thing is Turtles I do think Tur turtles learned a lot of lessons from he-man which like blew up so quickly and then burned out relatively fast uh another one is like turtles has been so consistent with reinventing itself and even if every reinvention doesn't work, they sort of understand, like, if your thing's been around for five years. I heard some, watched some fucking YouTube video where some toy executive was explaining this. But, like, when kids realize, like, I'm five years old and this thing's been around for five years and the older kids are into it, I don't own this anymore. Like, this is some old cartoon that's predated me you need like a new version every like six years so that new kids can come in on

the ground floor right yes that makes sense i mean in my kid brain it was like oh man turtles was gone for a while but turtles they did next mutation with venus de milo like right after the first original cartoon like the original cartoon is like eight seasons nine seasons i mean it was like a healthy run but then next mutation actually yeah jesus yeah but next mutation is only like a year or two later and then there was that reboot in 2003 which it's like that's the longest they were ever dark it felt like and that was five years right well and like say power rangers never stopped i mean that's a totally different where it's like they'll make a season in japan right fly the costumes to not america i think it's new zealand and then they will make a totally different story, a totally different set of rules of like, all right, we have these costumes and we have footage where the Zords are trains and then they become fighting robots. How do we do this?

It's because of the weird way in which that show is made. But I do think it's sort of provided that model that everyone else has copied now where you just need like even these netflix cartoon shows i noticed that like season two will have an entirely different title than the first season you know they never position something as like it's season two of this show it's this show colon new subtitle you know yeah it's interesting i don't know i'm trying to think about what's the most modern version i guess it's hard because you need to have some property that's been around for like 20 years but like because i know like modern cartoons and stuff you know they're still trying to screw people over and it's like they'd like to end something at season three before they can

renegotiate contracts um unless it's very very popular and then they will bring it back and then milk it forever it's like a weird yeah go ahead no i feel like there's also this thing with like i i i think it happens a lot with superhero cartoons where like oh they'll do a spider-man cartoon and like everyone will flock to it and be like this is the best one they finally gotten it right and then they cancel it after three seasons and immediately announce a new show which is on the air nine months later and they're like why did you cancel that everyone loved that it was working and they were like i had time for a new spider-man like it's just like what can you say every three years new spider-man like these things just they they don't let them linger and i think the same thing happened with ninja

turtles where there was like the nickelodeon reboot that was going over very well. Then they canceled it somewhat abruptly and then did rise of the mean teenage mutant Ninja Turtles, which was very well liked, but didn't connect. And then that just ended like kind of in failure. Like they just canceled it for low ratings and everyone was kind of left saying like,

why wouldn't you have kept the earlier show on the air? It wasn't losing steam but it feels like now these companies don't want to let things get to the point of he-man like you have to reboot it before the audience starts dipping well the yeah when with turtle and with i'm sure with all this stuff and i maybe i'm not sure but i'm i think this is what i i think this is what i know is that it's like they're you know what, the ratings aren't going to be, if we just do a new version, the ratings are going to be pretty similar. So as long as they're pretty similar, we don't have to renegotiate contracts

for all the people that are making this who are going to want more money because they're doing a good job. So we tell them to fuck off, we get a bunch of new people for less money, and by and large, the ratings are going to probably hover around the same place. And if they're not, cancel it and try another one. I think merch is a big part of it, too, where it's like we have sold 18 versions of Donatello in this design style.

And we've done the entire supporting cast now. Like the kids have them all. We need to reboot it and redesign everybody. So there's a reason to rebuy all the characters there's yes three seasons is like a very there's an economic reason why companies are stopping things there right and if you get to five it's like a blockbuster and they're like we let you stay longer than we should have now Now, please gracefully leave. You're lucky. You're lucky that we let you do this.

Yeah. And it seemed like He-Man had some of the like behind the scenes, like the writers, like the big name like that. I remember this about He-Man. I double checked it and I never know how to pronounce his name because I always just read it. J. Michael Straczynski. I think that's right yeah but yeah he was the main writer on it uh or at least one of the best writers on it yeah yes and then he was paul dini on it too correct yeah yeah and so straczynski left eventually and he was writing on like a million cartoons and stuff eventually creates

babylon 5 does a very well received like five years on the amazing spider-man comics somewhere down the line writes the script for the changeling is that what it's called the clint eastwood angelina chile movie yes so there there people certainly like you know came out of the he-man world people went on to other careers. Well, and I think that's, you know, why there is affinity for the cartoon show, because there are a lot of things that are easily mockable in it, and it was produced very

on a very thrifty sort of way, and there were famously all these regulations about what they could and couldn't do with the show at the time, because it was like when the government was fighting against the idea of cartoon shows just being commercials for toys which they absolutely were and also uh like whether cartoons were perverse influence on children so like he man's an action show where the characters

can never really fight he man has a sword that he never once uses in a single episode. He's never allowed to swing it at anybody. He's never allowed to stab anybody. I think he can only use it for deflection. Like, he can only use it to block. And then he uses it for his transformation. But, like, the fighting on He-Man is almost always one guy gets behind another guy and gets him in a bear hug until the other guy like, you know, pleads uncle. This is another problem.

I think the turtles, I mean, I think government regulations, but the turtles solve the problem with robots. Because like, how are you going to have Leonardo use his sword unless these are not humans or are living living beings right they had they have some robots like horde troopers and skeletor has robots but they i i think they were always so invested in trying to sell the new characters you know yeah that like they didn't have as sticky uh a sort of like uh army as, as the foot soldiers. But what was I going to say? Oh yeah. These people come to it,

these comic writers and these animation writers cutting their teeth who like really have grand ambition, the type of genre storytelling they'd like to do. And they start imbuing it with a weird amount of thought and consideration, you know? So it's like this shoe, the show produced on a shoestring to sell toys with a mythology that doesn't make any sense and guys like j michael straczynski

come in there and go like but can we like actually turn this into something right yeah that's what i always like anytime i'm complaining about any any modern day movie i haven't seen space jam 2 maybe i'm gonna love it i love i would love i would to love it. I would love to be the contrarian. It's a very pure, good movie made for the right reasons. And you get to see some of your friends. You know, you get to see your friends. Jabberjaw. Way in the background. McGilligurrilla.

I am excited to see McGilligurrilla. But anytime, like, any of this stuff that we would see as kids, and I know you're like, even just professionals going in and seeing character designs, you go, I could make something cool out of this these characters are really awesome but especially as like kids it's like it doesn't even matter that some of this stuff sucks like you watch old turtle cartoons i don't give a like it's bad the show is bad i own all these toys because visually this was making me think this show was fantastic and it was not um but that's what

anytime i'm complaining about like any modern version of a thing i liked as a kid i'm like there's like eight-year-olds watching this and this is maybe the greatest thing they've ever seen for sure like they're not worried about a certain character not being like treated the way i think they should be treated they don't give a shit about that. But I do think it's funny and interesting how like humans view like all of this stuff that's made cynically. And I guess this is what our whole show is about. Stuff that's a product and made cynically. But like we all feel it's real magical. And some of it you can look back on it and it's not.

It's not magical at all other than just your child brain memory of it and wanting to see it. I think part of being a healthy appreciator of these things is learning to accept like the goofiness of it when it exists, the crumminess of it, the cravenness of it, like all of these things are part of it. And sometimes the parts come together and create some greater hole, you know, that does transcend like its intentions or has some meaning for you or whatever it is. Like this is, I, whole, you know, that does transcend, like, its intentions, or has some meaning for you, or whatever it is.

Like, this is, you know, I mean this genuinely. This is not just me trying to sell a show. But, like, I work so hard to try to get cast as Orko in this show, right? I do these audition tapes in my closet where I'm playing every single character to show them, like them how invested I am because I didn't have anyone to read with me. And then I get the part and I realize I haven't read the scripts and I have

no idea if this thing is good or not, right? And I'm a fan and there's that worry where you're just like, am I gonna read this and think this is dog shit? And now I'm Orko on the dog shit show and I have to just kind of stay quiet for a while. And the thing that I genuinely love about the scripts

that was such a relief for me was sort of, I've been told that the idea was like, this is the show for people who grew up with the cartoon. The idea is like the way it felt when you were watching it as a little kid and everything felt important to you. Can you make a show at that level where the stakes are

real the budget is higher the scripts you know have more time to be polished you're able to actually show fight scenes but you're able to sort of like put the emotional depth into the things that you projected as a child but maybe weren't fully formed and that was what they were saying

and my fear was is this gonna be like overly self-serious the thing that i think all four of us dislike where it's like trying to make fans of a thing feel less guilty for liking a thing right yes it's real there's real stakes insecure you can feel how insecure some things it's like. This is deathly serious. The chest puffiness of it. And the thing I love about this show is that I think it is so in touch with everything that is incredibly goofy about the original cartoon. Not just in terms of where it puts the humor in, like which elements it embraces it's not like shunting anything that was too silly you know in a way that i think a lot of these modern things go like well you have to drop

that character that character wouldn't work you can't do this you know that plot line's a problem they sort of like without spoiling anything and i you know i guess some people might have watched it by this point but they like they found a thing in the original show that is fucked up. If you think about it, that like would be like a cracked article, right? Where you're like, oh, there's this like weird plot line on this kid's show. If you actually think about it, that's kind of fucked up that the characters did this. And they just kind of invested in that being a real thing and like wrote this 10 episode season that is about like the emotional and and larger fallout of that situation but you know are trying to do the show that you imagined when you

were a kid but something i think kids would also enjoy watching and something that is also like completely unembarrassed about how silly this thing is and where it came from is trying to keep those two things in conversation at the same time which is which is what i find very exciting about it and once again if i thought it was dog shit i would just say nothing uh this is my genuine opinion you don't have to promote anything right people might disagree with me and it gets into this thing uh we're talking about here where fans get very territorial like that's not my version that's not what i liked about it i only like this era and these characters and whatever you're never going to make a thing that everyone likes and also we live in an era now where everything gets rebooted every

five years as we're saying so it's like there are already people who are upset about what they think this show is going to be i think some of them will watch it be pleasantly surprised some of them will watch it and they'll hate it but guess what like netflix has another he-man show coming out this year for kids and they're trying to make a live action movie and they'll do a thousand more things like none of this stuff is sacred anymore i do think at a certain point being uh uh an adult nerd is learning to accept that like for so long we had this very clenched territorial position of like they're only going to get to make one

Batman movie and if they fuck it up then Batman will never get to be a movie again you know that there's that pressure and it's like fuck Burton did it it worked it worked but now it's Schumacher and then that bombed fuck we're never going to get Batman again Schumacher ruined Batman forever and now it's like well he did he ruined batman and robin well and then it was forever

perfect he was he made a perfect movie with batman forever and then he made batman and robin which i still like at this point you're just like like i used to be so anti-snyder just on a level of just like this is not my vibe yes I agree and then I switched I completely switched because I'm just like you know what let this guy make his thing it's not for me I appreciate what he's doing in the same way I read fucking

comic books and if I don't like one Batman arc I'm like well okay and then a new writer will come on and negate all of it and do their own thing whatever who cares yes I 100% I was feeling the same way I was like oh this is just gonna be the all of it and do their own thing whatever who cares yes i 100 i was feeling the same way i was like oh this is just going to be the all of the dc it's all going to feel like this oh man come on like i don't want it to be so bleak or whatever and i'm like there's going to be another one next year who gives a shit and then i watched them again now

in that context and i'm like there's a lot to enjoy with this nonsense, with this bleak nonsense. And I think if you're going to be a healthy fan of anything, you have to learn to love your songsters. You know, like the songsters aren't the things you hide. You have to accept that's part of the weird history of the thing. It's what I like about Masters of the Universe is that it was such an accident that these things get like pieced together in reverse you know that like you cannot claim the sanctity of the thing well i think you got to do like two things you got to play it straight you know you gotta like you know be a little respectful to what's come before and like play in the world but then also you have to have fun with it and like part of my engaging with stuff and having fun with stuff it's like teasing the goofiness like i feel like on on this show like people sometimes have been

like oh well they hate that i was like i don't hate that i love that i would rather be on this attraction than running errands my day-to-day life but it's a little goofy like there's some corny shit in it um but uh yeah i uh, yeah, I think the fun sometimes, uh, uh, you know, I think, I think especially the Marvel stuff,

they're starting to branch out a lot more in the movies and TV shows and add more characters. And, um, uh, but, but I think some of the shortcomings like, like rougher,

it's like, all right, you've set up too many rules. Like you're not playing it straight. You're not honoring your, your, you set up too many restrictions for yourself and you don't seem like you're having fun you seem like you're checking off boxes yeah and and like you have to have if not embrace the goofy elements you have to at least sort of accept them as being like part of the whole of this thing right at the very least the evolution of this thing, right? At the very least, the evolution of this thing,

the different eras of these things, whatever these odd elements are, be they a theme park ride or, you know, a cartoon show or a toy line or whatever it is, rather than starting a change.org petition to ask that it be officially taken out of continuity. Because it's like, sometimes the best shit comes out of people

course correcting after something that's unpopular the answer isn't that no longer counts it's unofficial never acknowledge it ever again it's like what what can we learn from what didn't work here and when you step back you can like appreciate adam west and michael keaton equally for doing different things. And like, you know, that's, that's part of the,

the beauty of the stupid shit we care about a lot. Yes. It's just, uh, seeing anyone who's like, like religious and dogmatic is really, isn't, as I said on those Facebook groups I'm on,

it's, uh, you'd be surprised how many people get very upset. I'm not surprised. I mean, I mean, I, you wouldn't be surprised how many people get very upset i'm not surprised i mean i mean you wouldn't be surprised are you in the man are you i don't maybe i'm outing you i shouldn't even say which i did you tell me off air which i i look around i look around uh some things yeah yeah yeah i i look around i mean i and i have forever you know i, I just feel like I don't want to harp on this, but it's weird because there was no new He-Man stuff for a while. Right.

And in that time, fandom has curdled. And I feel like these message boards and these websites and these groups and whatever that I used to lurk. I was never a big poster, but I would read these things and I would be like abreast of what fans thought were responding to things there'd be disagreements about things people dislike stuff they'd get up in arms about toys and whatever you know it's like it's not like it was entirely civil and serene but there there is this weird uh aggro defensive paranoia about this new show, about whatever the kid show's gonna be, where there's this,

it's an extension of the Kathy Kennedy shit, where people wanna buy into this idea that whatever is being rebooted is being rebooted by OCP, and Dick Jones is behind the boardroom, and he's like, I want people to die I don't care and 209 has to succeed it doesn't matter you know like it like there's a conspiratorial attack and resentment of fans there's like a yeah there's like whatever whoever's posting is like

he really thinks like Kathleen Kennedy is like I want to punish Ben from Missouri. I want him to feel pain. I hate Ben. I hate that Ben likes Luke. And so I'm going to cuck Luke so Ben feels bad. Like, and they truly were not exaggerating. You see people post these videos and they're creating narratives about, like, this is the fight going on within Lucasfilm. Oh, I know exactly who you're talking about.

I know exactly the videos. I mean, these people are claiming Kathleen Kennedy did not want Luke Skywalker to be in The Mandalorian. Spoiler for a season two finale that came out fucking nine months ago. It was written about everywhere, yes. That Jon Favreau smuggled him onto set and

Kathleen Kennedy didn't know about it and was outraged and wanted to cut out. Smuggled him into the pre-vis department. Smuggled him into the after effects. What the fuck are you talking about? He previs department into the after effects are you talking he was that guy you're talking digitally rendered what are you talking about the guy you're talking about makes videos every week about this yes and like that john john he calls him john favreau first of all which always funny to me and uh he's like it's just like it's like he's like physically battling kathleen kennedy like uh it's kathleen kenn's like he's like physically battling Kathleen Kennedy. Like, uh, it's Kathleen Kennedy and Brie Larson.

And now there's a different channel that once a week has been doing anti Motu revelation stuff. Oh, interesting. Oh no. All right. Look, Griffin, you get, you got to pick. You either get the super fans who love this stuff or you get the weird moralistic teens who are doing like tipper gore shit.

And it's like, I don't know. I think He-Man revelation is like, Oh, that's kind of weird. It's look, it's a, it's a,

it's a tough choice. And ultimately I try not, I try to focus on the people who seem to be enjoying things in a healthy way. It is just frustrating to see uh doing that sort of like rumor mongering and projecting of what they think is going on behind the scenes and knowing for a fact it's false like with kathy kenney i know it's false because i am a reasonable human being who understands how the world works and someone does not not take over Lucasfilm and go, my job is to destroy this. I want this to fail so that boys feel bad.

But I don't want to keep having money. My mission is pain now. I mean, I saw a website that claimed that Disney literally has decided not to care about money and to instead let all these properties fail to advance the woke agenda and it's like if you think that's what they said at the last meeting we were all at at the last media meeting we were all there uh if you just typed out the sentence Disney doesn't even care about money anymore you should take a really long look in the mirror the woke oh by the way i want everyone to be reminded that the woke agenda means on a piece of paper it says loki is

bisexual yes that's what reflected in the series it's no not yet that's like people are projecting into the fact like tila has a different haircut and that Orko has eyes that they think look more feminine on this version of the show. And then your ass is grass. My ass is grass. And they're producing like 40 minute videos of their conjecture of what they think is being like planned out in a boardroom to punish people who

grew up with this stuff. Uh, and it's just wild so the character who is on this live tour in skating around in a dress yes they are worried about some femininity entering yeah and this is like a character that half of them found annoying in the first place and i i say this is someone who loved him dearly did not find him annoying uh orco the winner of the attorney and race right the best roller skater i mean you gotta feel good about that you must have been on pins and needles wondering i feel incredible i mean he's got he's got some hits in the show he also has his number

where he's trying to make magic work saying hocus-chocus. And it keeps on failing until he does successfully conjure up a dancer. His magic is conjuring one dancer added to all the dancers that are already on stage. And then in the Eternian Circus, he comes out in a different outfit, like a different robe, and is like the co-ringleader. The Eternian Circus circus stuff like sucks by the way we didn't talk about it but it's just they parade i've never found it what is dumb animals like it's all these like uh the actors who were playing the actual heroes and villains you like in the first act of the show are now in like two part four people eight legged, like this is an Eternian giraffe. That's like very Taruk, the avatar,

like Cirque du Soleil, I feel like, a little more like. It's very Taruk. It also feels a little like the weird circus number in the Star Wars holiday special. Oh yeah. Where it's just like kind of a long parade of like, here's a new species on Eternia. Our elephants have four trunks or whatever and it's just Songster and Orko like spinning around singing the same song

showing off these crappy costumes uh and then the show finally kind of rebounds in the last 15 minutes and Skeletor comes out and they actually like do the fight but then there's like the big fucking fight that everyone's been waiting for nobody said was that on youtube i never found the fight it's also could fight i only saw a lot of skating yeah the fight's hard to find once again it's labeled it's a video that i think is labeled vts 013 oh yeah well i don't i guess i don't feel bad about not finding it then yeah uh and it's really, really low quality and it's statics out pretty early. Um,

but, uh, yeah, the first half of the show is definitely better. The second half is way too much, uh, attorney and circus. What the hell is this?

I'm looking at this, this synopsis. Uh, he, man, uh, I just saw the sentence. He,

man fights all three Skeletors. He beats the fake ones and eventually finds the real one. We got multiple Skeletors around? It's like a magical decoy thing. Yeah. Does that happen on your show? Fake Skeletors? Yeah, they're fake Skeletors.

No spoilers, but. There aren't. There are decoy versions of other characters. Oh. Can I ask who's bi on the show? Well... I want to be mad. I want to get mad about that. Mike, if you ask Clownfish TV on YouTube,

everyone is bi. And it's being shoved down our throats. Got it. Seriously, maybe this is a question off the air. Internally, are you trying to push for a new tour, a new live show that you could be a part of? I would love nothing more. I'd love nothing more.

Because I've been trying to nudge my way into Turtles for years, and I would be the most annoying person if I had even one line on an episode. I an episode i'd be like i would try to get everyone's email and be like no we should do i i've really like the amount of energy i've had to spend keeping my cool about this mic like when i'm in the professional settings and doing the job um i mean a because it like i i i become very quickly overcome with then the terror of what if i fuck this up right sure so like a lot of that like nerdy like can i ram myself into this and pitch a thousand ideas shit goes out the window because i'm just like oh what if i suck at this i just need to be laser focused of at least doing the things they're asking me to do. Right.

But I also would voice Orko in anything. Like I would do anything. You would do like a 90s city tour of arenas playing Orko on stage. Absolutely. In the suit with your face not visible. Yeah, you wouldn't be seen. It would just be your voice. Right. not visible yeah you wouldn't be seen it would just be your voice right like they the the other

the the sort of kids modern reboot show for netflix that's coming out later i i looked into like playing orco on that and they're like no it's like a different show it's a different continuity but i was like but what if i just played orco on everything what if i just sure they claim to this so you've soft you're soft you're soft um like touching the So you're soft touching the boundaries lightly. I mean, that conclusively didn't work, but I have tested. I have tested, yes. So maybe live tour is not something

you could get done right now. I'd push for it, certainly. I mean, I think it depends on what the response is to this. It's five episodes coming out the day that this episode comes out, Certainly. I mean, I think it depends on what the response is to this, you know? It's five episodes coming out the day that this episode comes out, and five episodes coming out another point this year. And I think it works as a self-contained thing. Like, I think if this is the only thing we ever get to make, I think this is pretty good.

Like, it's sort of, in my mind's eye, the kind of thing i'd imagine a he-man movie being it feels like a a very epic story that is tied to the history of this property uh told on a grand scale incorporating as many characters and vehicles and things as you remember as possible um but i think everyone would like to do more if if the interest is there like it has not been designed to pointedly be a one-off it's not one division sure um if people want more i think everyone wants to do it um and i i certainly would uh like to uh just absolutely um run orco into the ground. Hey, great. Wow, it looks like, hey, Mayor of Easttown has a new partner this season. Why, it's Detective Orko. And he's bi. So bi.

One more question. On your show, does Orko have visible duct tape holding his hat onto his head? No. It is a funny thing. Just pulled up a photo, by the way.

It is so, like, this is what they put in the program. It's such a wild costume, especially because I would argue the rest of the costumes are pretty high-level executions, especially for this type of show and the oracle one is really kind of haphazard um oracle is also tough because like oracle's tiny like oracle's sort of like great gazoo size just floating around characters heads uh so when you need a human person to play it the scale gets all thrown off so like the like the commentary I was watching from the convention, they were saying the woman who played Orko was 4'10". Like they found the shortest performer they possibly could. But even so, it makes Orko look weirdly gigantic.

Yeah. Because like Orko doesn't have any legs. So the robe has to extend past the actor's feet which makes it the torso look huge you know right and then the hands are bigger because they put bigger gloves to be in scale with the torso and then the hat has to get so big and then where's the head in this is the head up this is what i was about to say oh the actor's head i think is in above the eyes. Maybe, maybe I feel like the arms we're seeing, like the shoulders are in the scarf. If that makes any sense.

I think so. Yeah, it is. It is confusing where they're coming from. Right. And their, their face is either above the eyes or in the hat itself. It does not look like a very easy costume to operate,

but this is the other thing. Orca from a design perspective, the idea is he's a Trollen, right? Which is like this magical troll-type species in the Motu lore. But his face is hidden all the time. They can't show their faces. So Orko, it's like supposed to be

that that's the shadow created from under his hat and the scarf around the lower part of his face and so the eyes are the only things that you're able to see from within the shadow right whenever you three-dimensionalize orco it gets very spatially odd because it looks like his head is just a black featureless orb with two eyes on it it's not like a black tree trunk right right it's the idea is that like you can't see his face uh it's cloaked in mystery right yeah well it makes you wearing it i'm gonna be wearing it yeah yeah you'll you'll have a perfect understanding of how this works when you're hitting the road when you're yes giving shout outs to calgary

happy happy to do it when i'm begging them to let me do this yeah it might just be an orco tour if they don't want to do the whole thing it might just be like orco comes alive yeah oh sure yeah river dance with orco yeah or just one man show just every every talent you have and every talent you think orko would have and you have to like develop that from scratch it's like mark twain tonight i just do my sort of like yeah yeah the poster is orko with like his tie undone holding a cigarette and a drink like a little lip yeah yeah we're gonna do some songs do some stories just telling tales from his childhood yeah fun stuff weird stuff you know guard brooks like guard brooks's facebook long-hauled facebook presence start the conversation what a time um let's see i well did we do it did we survive

podcast to ride uh legends of attorney edition i think so um i mean feel free to shout out anything else from the i just have like spare quotes throughout the rest of it like oh no where's rock on i don't know what they're connected to i mean there's so many this great little or or as we call him rocky i think i just love that's oh good the thing i love no i thank you for reminding me of this rock on is also a late character he's comes from the the stone warriors and they're a race of sort of semi-cybernetic characters robotic characters who have the ability to camouflage as rocks so that people don't attack them. And they can sneak up by just laying stagnant on a battlefield. And it's Rock-On and Stonedar and Granita.

They only put Rock-On in this. But his whole thing is that he's like a Transformer, right? It was Mattel trying to get in on the Transformers market. And so they announce him in the show. And I was like, how are they going to fucking pull this off as a costume? Because it has to look like Rock-On in like humanoid form and the rock form. And in the cartoon, they do all sorts of like they take all sorts of license with design to make that transition happen. And with the toy, it's like engineering that a human body can't do.

And with this, they're just like, Rock-on? Rock-on? Where's Rock-on? Has anyone seen Rock-on? Then a video screen shows a meteor.

Then there's a crash sound and then Rock-on stands up and they're like, oh, there he is. So they just never show him as a Rock-on stage and explain why that was him and now he's just gonna be standing up the

rest of the time oh that's why oh no where's rock rock on yes yes take care of that problem um i love this lazy bing crosby-esque um take on he man i could listen to this guy's voice all day i really wish i'd seen this thing if i'd seen this show, I think I would have thought about it my whole life. It is so grand. And I guess that's, hey, Griffin Newman, you survived Podcast the Ride. Once again, for time, I believe time number five. I think this is the, I think you're in the five timers. Five timers five timers

there's there's the wow this is huge uh yes it's the 3d movie trilogy of 2019 yeah um and the and the second gate jimmy fallon record-breaking jimmy fallon uh episode yes yes yeah yeah um and unless you count smaller can't unless you count your performance as the... Oh, sure. Whichever, no, I think it's host, I think, or not hosting, it's hosting for guests, yeah, yeah. Full guest appearances.

But look, some people will decree that this does not count as a proper five because Second Gate is its own continuity, to which I'll say that's why we have redacted controversial ride and muppet haunted mansion on the books for 2021 yeah which i think would get you up to i was trying to crunch the numbers i think eva anderson has the title for most appearances if you count unless second gate counts as his own thing she's almost entirely second gate but i i think it's one kind of that fucking youtuber i know he goes on about it every week

listen you don't know anything about kathy kennedy and you don't know anything about the second gate he hates the second gate the second gate here's what's happening behind the doors of this behind the gates of the second gate the second gate is too woke, quite frankly. It is just bizarre that fan culture has gone from like, oh, like fan fiction is this robust thing where people want to write their own stories with the characters to now people want to write their own fan fiction about what's happening at a corporate level. Yeah. He popped the core egg pod into the machine machine grumbling as he reached for his mug the term like forced their dinner plans for that diverse it forced diversity and you're like did

you ever see the movie predator like the movie is diverse like it's in like i you know you know you can cast you cast people humans cast people that are, you know. Yeah, I mean, also, I try to repeat this whenever I can in any fucking medium because I don't feel like this gets circulated enough. There recently went viral again, a clip of Carl Sagan on Johnny Carson complaining about the fact that everyone's white in Star Wars, right? And he's like, on a scientific level, that doesn't make sense. Like, on a scientific level, it doesn't make sense that the people in power look like humans, even though they're not, and they're all white, and they're all like this.

Like, they would have crazy alien colors, or at the very least, would resemble other races on our planet. Sure. And people were like, Carl Sagan saying the shit that everyone was afraid to say what doesn't get acknowledged a lot is that he says that that was a big fucking interview because it was the tonight show and everyone watched it people in the media started talking about the lack

of diversity in star wars and lando was specifically written and created to address that like the exact thing that people get up in arms saying that Disney is doing, which is like shoving diversity down their throats and creating characters just to fulfill a quota. Lando, who you all fucking love, was George Lucas taking the criticism to heart and going like, yeah, I should hire a very charismatic actor and put him in this franchise

and set him up as an old friend of these preexisting characters so that he's earned his place in this universe. Isn't it interesting that you liked it when you were a kid and when you watch it now, you go, what's the agenda here? Why are they forcing this on me? I mean, if you watch Alien or Predator, the original Alien, like I don't. All these things. Yeah, all of them.

And they always go like, well, I like Ripley because she's actually a good character. Not these characters today where they're just a woman for the sake of making me angry right like what's the what do you think the difference is yeah and science fiction like the history of modern science fiction is authors slipping in future looking ideas ideas of like progressive societies of diversity of different ways of thinking and like people either, you know, they absorb it and inadvertently get the lesson or like maybe it goes over their heads and they just see it on a surface level,

but it's in there. Like it's in all of this stuff. Yeah. On that note, I would like to plug Masters of the Universe Revelation, the wokest He-Man to date. So much is going to get shoved down your throat. Open your throats, everyone,

because so many agendas, Scott. Nothing but agendas. I'm a big fan of episode five, which is just Clamp Champ explaining critical race theory for 30 minutes. Well, I'm glad someone is. Yeah, someone has to. No, I think it's a good show

and I think most of the people who are up in arms about it will actually like it if they watch it and don't listen to YouTube. I think the people who are paying, I think they like, probably the megaphones loom larger currently because it hasn't come out.

And when it comes out, it'll be mostly people who like and enjoy it and enjoy i'm i'm not losing sleep over this but it is just one of those frustrating things to watch where you're like oh the the loudest megaphones are the people who are creating hour-long videos based on conjecture versus the people who will like this show who cannot weigh in because they haven't seen it yet and aren't writing things about what they think is going to happen like a lunatic. Well, we get all that preconjecture about what blue shirt Jason's going to wear next.

And I just like, let him pick the shirt and then you'll see it. I got a couple new ones. That's part of the process. I also, I just want to plug, as I always do, Blank Check, my podcast with David Sims, past guests of this show as well um uh what's kensington chessington world of adventures the most frightening uh 80s sci-fi rides you've ever seen that was really something he really brought us something we were completely

unaware of but to acknowledge the uh a now non-joking online podcast controversy there is a there is a section of shared blank check ptr listeners who have continued to be outraged at the fact that the three of you have not appeared on blank check yet oh sure i want to stay getting acknowledged oh my god not a conspiracy uh there are there are culprits most of which are based around disorganization the fact that until the pandemic we never let zoom records happen yeah we book things far in advance there's a lot of weird strategizing that goes into how we plan out our main series a regret was that uh scott you obviously would have been a great guest for back to the future

part two nicole byer had called that very early oh you don't say no to nicole byer you never will right right but but if i can just also say just to kind of peel back the curtain a little bit, A, I want to, as a commitment, okay? Whoa, whoa. Our schedule, we have booked very far in advance. We always do. It's because we go chronologically through filmography, as David has a baby now. We need to plan things out in advance. Congrats, David.

The rest of this year is full. I'm committing to all three good boys appearing on Blank Check Main Feed 2022. Wow. Oh, feed 2022. Wow. Oh, my God. Wow. That's so exciting. That's something to look forward to, at least for us. I don't know about the audience, but I'm excited.

I want to say, because this is the other factor that was at play, and this is not a good excuse. As a friend, I feel like this is not a good excuse. I'm not talking as a podcast creator. I'm talking as a friend. I don't think this is a good excuse in my mind i had this idea that it would be cute to save you guys for pirates of the caribbean wow oh interesting that was my thing where i was just sort of like maximum impact would it be best and i never told this to you guys i was like would it be best if we saved it and we had all three of you on one or we did the trilogy

and each of you did one because gore verbinski felt like he was a guy we were going to do at some point then we put him on our march madness bracket this year and chaos broke out and i don't know if gore verbinski is happening any time in the foreseeable future oh interesting so a lot of weird shit got stirred up in the gore verbinski thing and at least for the time being we're putting that on the sidelines so that's why i'm saying look also i've never seen any of these films so i probably wouldn't be a good guest like theme park movie are we gonna cover it's not like you guys can only come on to talk about theme park but i thought that would be a nice kind of poetic crossover and that was the one obvious thing to do and there's three of those movies and what have you so i kept that in my

mind that's now off the table we booked the rest of the year 2022 we're gonna figure something out wow i don't know if it's separate episodes i don't know if it's three of you in one episode we don't know exactly what we're doing for 2022 yet but i just want to state that cleanly well if you do carol reed the long dead carol reed uh the third man has a big Ferris wheel scene, a vitally important Ferris wheel scene. I like that you jumped to the third man as the next most obvious theme park movie. Well, that's my favorite movie, so I was being selfish.

Oh, sure, sure, sure. Well, you already, look, you already did Joe Dirt, so I'm up shit creek now. That would have been Scottott's choice yeah obviously if there's an adam carolla movie about wokeness i'll do that one the ringer right there's a ringer is that what it's called about is it didn't you do one yeah but there's also a stand-up one there's one called like road comic or university like triggered university i feel like he made a movie maybe his first movie wasn't so like focused on

carola's a great blank check director i think if you ever do bill maher um obviously yeah let's throw our heads in the ring dennis prager you know oh yeah prager dennis prager is one of my favorite filmmakers oh god

don't click oh no don't let anyone clip that fuck you beat me to do that i will say i because last year not last uh two years ago for march madness our bracket we do where we let people vote on which director we're going to cover we had this idea to a theme bracket where one side was all uh best director oscar winners and one side was all uh worst director razzie winners and david and i had a very long drawn out like over weeks or months fight about whether or not to include dinesh jesuza in the bracket and i wanted to include him well i don't know if that was the

right choice but at the time i was arguing to include him he did in fact win a razzie for directing uh hillary's america i don't remember if it was that or if it was uh uh 2016 what is it 2016 is hillary's america then the other one is called like america imagine a world without her well we when the three of us and paul sheer and i forget who else was there ben rogers maybe gabriel like when we saw mission impossible fallout in the downtown la with the seats that rattle and move we were like making fun of in the lobby there was a poster for a dinesh desuza and then as we were going to our theater there was like a big like step and repeat background and like a photo and we're like are we walking by a dinesh desuza premiere there's no one here i i went to see two of them in theaters i bought tickets for

other movies so i didn't have to support him but i was very fascinated by him uh in a pre-trump era where it felt like the damage he could cause was somewhat minimal but just to clarify that i combined three separate titles there's 2016 obama's america then there's america imagine the world without her and hillary's america the secret history of the democratic party which is a movie in which he presents his grand thesis that actually the democrats are nazis oh my god that was discussed at the meeting where we talked about um disney not being interested in money you know yes yes absolutely um all right well we'll get we'll all get to that one different there's three of them than the three good boys exactly the ultimate good boy to see on the book we'll do the the

america trilogy his his remaining two films i feel like once trump got elected his juice was gone like i know he got a lot of retweets on twitter but those three movies made stupid amounts of money in theaters and then the other two death of a Nation and Trump card, I feel like made no impact once he wasn't standing in opposition. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's well, it's been a nice diffuser of a lot of of a lot of bullshit stuff that's like pretty bad on kind of a moral level and mainly on a graphic design level. We see so much less horrendous graphic design in documentaries now that... I mean, the poster for Death of a Nation is a composite where the right half of the face is Abraham Lincoln and the left half is Donald Trump. And I will tell you, that is a very jarring transition.

Yeah. In hair, in skull shape, in complexion. Okay. So we're set for that we're set for other i still am like i am so curious about the to me it's not a controversial redacted ride but unless you guys feel different but is it less interesting if it's not a fight oh yeah it's it's it's on the i think i can say this on mike it's on the books yeah i'm going to be coming to los angeles in a couple months for for in fact power con the he-man convention oh i wasn't sure if you wanted to bring it up you're going to be at power where by the way the anaheim convention center where the power tour uh played when it was in town you'll be in the room where songster himself said his name so i'm i'm

gonna be in anaheim for that and i'm uh the the four of us are going to go to the parks together which i've never gone to go to the parks with you guys oh my and then we're gonna record an in-person episode theoretically about this redacted controversial ride but all i'm saying is in the time between now and when that happens when i see you guys next in person and it's lovely i'm going to fucking go back and find the clip where you guys talk greasy about this right because i swear it i swear it happened because i know my email was in response to that huh maybe it was a joke it just felt like it wasn't super critical but it was kind of like a little off the shoulder dismissive like i don't care about that we're never gonna do an episode about that well the

the biggest most questionable thing to me is that we would ever say let's not do an episode that's why i emailed because it was so wild that it was like not even that's a second gate it was like can we just say we'll never do an episode about that ride? Could that be just the most deadpan joke delivery possible? Like the most Bob Newhart style deadpan? I don't know. I'm just saying, stay tuned for that episode, Redacted Ride. I like that we're treating this ride like it's Kevin Spacey.

Like it's like the subject we can't name. It's going to be so confusing when it comes out and when it's just like a ride. People are like, what? People are like, I believe. There's really no way to know, I don't think, what was said exactly, except I think the only way might be to release

Jason's notes. It's the only way we're going to sort this out. Do it! Specifically, release the notes. New tear! I this out do it specifically release the notes new tear i agree jason's full archive of notes needs to be released if we could actually you know let's publish it in a book jason to end this episode can you just scroll to a different part of your notes and share screen with us yeah a different page of notes that we haven't seen you don't have to share with the whole podcast but can we see it and read it out loud and you get to pick which page it is of of what the masters of the universe your notes for this yeah yeah any no any part you want any note for this episode

or else we're gonna have to make a really we're gonna have to make a crazy documentary about you jason's america 2022 jason's notes all right let me here's the bottom that so this is this is sometimes i will when watching along make just like impressions when watching them introducing songster was pretty stiff agreed yes next his name is songster some of these are also could have used a songster. Mortal Kombat Live? Absolutely. Oh my God, there wasn't a lot going on with Mortal Kombat Live.

Of course a songster. A cosmic troubadour for sure. I will say, Jason, yes, some of these are direct quotes, but seeing them in this format just as like kind of bullet-pointed notes on a spreadsheet where you don't put them in quotes, it makes it feel like you jason yourself are typing in welcome to my universe masters of the universe oh yeah well i use quotes if i'm like you like actually writing down but if i'm watching live i'm trying to keep up with the live video so uh yeah lots of presentations and singing and roller skating

there's a sword fight and still 15 minutes left in the show so i think that was because i watched most of the act one one and i was surprised like wait wouldn't you this is either the end of half of the show or the end of all of the show wouldn't you end on a big sword fight and then no there was like another 15 minutes of just hanging out well it show, wouldn't you end on a big sword fight? And then, no, there was like another 15 minutes of just hanging out. Well, it's like, wouldn't you end this episode by saying you survived Podcast The Ride and then like a couple more things?

Right. Or do you do another half hour after that? Right, possibly. Which is what we did. Yes. But I don't mind it because now there's plans. There's plans for 2021. There's plans for 2022.

And you can keep abreast of all of it on our socials at Podcast the Ride. There's merch in our TeePublic store. And for three bonus episodes every month, check out Podcast the Ride, the second gate, at patreon.com slash podcast the ride. Where Griffin will not be. It's main feed, you're saying. Look, maybe one of the two, maybe Muppets Haunted Mansion is second gate. I want to show love to the second gators I don't want to feel like I'm neglecting them you know

when we do three hours on the good the bad and the low key you know we're gonna probably hide behind the second gate on the Simpsons the good the bad and the low key yeah that's right everyone's demanding it I just noticed on Disney Plus the force awakens from her

from a nap where From her nap. Where did that come from? I've never seen that. I think that came out on Star Wars Day. Okay. That came out recently, I want to say, May of this year. It's the same fucking thing as the good, the bad, and the lucky. Yeah, yeah, one of those.

Okay, yeah. Well, we'll get to that. We'll get to so much. Griffin, thanks so much for being here. Thanks to you all for checking it out. And by the way, Podcast the Ride is our name. Forever Dog. This has been a Forever Dog production.

Executive produced by Mike Carlson, Jason Sheridan, Scott Gairdner, Brett Boehm, Joe Cilio, and Alex Ramsey. For more original podcasts, please visit foreverdogpodcasts.com Thank you.