Retronauts - 647: The Terminator

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

Forget the time displacement device: in this podcast Diamond Feit, Jeremy Parish, and James Eldred take you back 40 years to 1984 to the debut of the sci-fi action classic, The Terminator. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This episode of Retronauts is brought to you by the printed word. This week in Retronauts, nice night for a walk. Hello and welcome back to Retronauts, and we're talking about a 40-year-old film today, a very important 40-year-old film, and some video games based on said 40-year-old film. That's right, as you can tell by my impeccable impersonation, we're talking about The Terminator. And I'm your host today. Laundry Day for me is Everyday Diamond Fight, and joining me are two guests. Let's start with our guests in Tokyo first. I'm James Eldred, and this is not my honor. impersonation. This is just how I talk. Okay. You're all good, James. You're all good.

Thank you. And far away in the great state of North Carolina. It's Jeremy F-U-I-A-Hole. Sorry, that didn't come out quite right. That was pretty good. Self-censorship, Jeremy Parrish. All right. So, yes, the Terminator, it's, you know, we're recording this in October of 24. The film came out in October of 1980. And it's a very 1984 movie. It's very timely. It's got time travel in it. And they even talk about something happening 40 years from now. So we should be seeing a Terminator every day now, according to this movie.

So we're looking forward to that. This movie did not predict the utter banality of the AI revolution. It made AI seem so cool and not just a bunch of stupid grifters. And it didn't predict the utter banality of the apocalypse. It's just, it's much slower. It's way less exciting. Twice as depressing, half is exciting. I did appreciate in the most recent Terminator film how they discussed that, you know,

apparently Skynyn actually did go away, but some other AI was invented and killed humanity. And Sarah Connor's just like, God damn it. Yeah. Relatable. Yeah, it was just a really great moment for me watching that movie because I forgot about that line. I was like, oh yeah, I guess we're always going to invent something, aren't we? Which movie is that in? Dark fate.

Oh, I didn't see that one. I think the last one I saw was Terminator 2, actually. Three, three, three. With the Terminatorics. Well, we'll talk about what this movie's long legacy is, but let's start with the movie itself. And James has a headache now. I had a headache before, though, the 90s. Okay, go on.

So I'm very curious because we mentioned this movie came out in 1984, and I think all of us were alive in 1984. but did you actually watch this movie as a child when it was new or did you watch it many years later? James, talk to you because I feel like I might know the answer, but go ahead. So yeah, of course, let's play the... Did James' father show this two-metter-two-young age game? Yes, he did.

I saw this when it came on a video in 1985. So that means I was six years old. Okay. And I did okay with it for the most part. It's a really vivid memory because I remember watching it with both my parents. and I was scared when he killed the first Sarah Connor Yes

You know and the laser sight thing kind of freaked me out But I thought it was a cool movie But then the exoskeleton, I was done Like I tapped that scared the shit out of me And I remember going to bed that night A very, very memory of going to bed that night And the door to my room was open And I could see the whole hallway

And I was convinced that the exoskeleton Was going to come out and kill me And I was so scared I went up to go downstairs And get my parents And right when I got to my door, my dad turned the corner, and I just screamed. Oh, no. Was your father very skeletal looking?

I mean, more than me, but he was a lanky dude. Yeah, so, but no, then he had, he had to call me down. And then I think I watched it like 25 times after that. I think just the first time got to me. And then, but yeah, it scared the shit out of me when I was sick. It's like Iocaine powder, you know, you just keep taking doses until you're immune. Yes, it wasn't like, um, when I was. I was on the 9-11 Dead podcast, how that, like, traumatized me for literally decades.

This kind of messed me up for, like, a day. And then I was into it. And then we saw Plyder during the theater. So, like, two years later, three years later. So, yeah, I got over it. Excellent. No lasting permanent damage with you and R. Schwarzenegger. It's good, good news for you.

Not over that film. Other films, maybe. Jeremy, how about you? When did you see The Terminator? It was after Terminator 2, actually. Oh, okay. Despite being older than either of you, my parents, like me, are very much about, you know, following the rules of law.

Like, we're like Jimmy Carter, you know, he just turned 100 yesterday, and people were saying he can't play with Lego anymore because it's ages 5 to 99. And you know, like, he is law-abiding. He would say, oh, it's too bad. I can't build that Millennium Falcon anymore. So that was the way it was in the household where I grew up. My parents just didn't show me, expose me to R-rated movies. So, yeah, it wasn't until I was in high school that I saw The Terminator, and I saw it and said, oh, that's actually way better than Terminator, too. Cool.

All right. Exciting. Hot take, I guess. And I don't know. We'll find out. It's in my experience, has a very 50-50 take. You ask somebody flip a coin, you'll get either answer. I don't like James Cameron's big crowd pleasers as much as I do the sort of smaller movies that precede them. So like with Alien, aliens, I much prefer Alien. And it's the same way with Terminator. It's Team Aliens. Yep. Okay.

That's fine. I don't think less of people who prefer the bigger, more spectacular movies. And I do appreciate those, you know, those like John McTiernan style, everything. is, like, there is no wasted film, frame of film kind of movies, but there is something about the sort of lower budget, smaller scale grittiness of both Alien and Terminator that I really, really appreciate. As for me, I did not see it when I was young, but I believe the incredible marketing push and all the hype for T2 got me to rent it around about T2 time. So I would have seen it probably in 1991, and I remember, you know, I was a teenager at that point, so I wasn't quite

17, but I was old enough to, like, comprehend it, and I was like, oh, I was definitely into that, and I was real into the sequel, so, like, basically from the 90s on, I've been like, oh, a Terminator, I'm interested in this. That was, that was me from that point on. But let's go back again. But let's go back again, since Jeremy mentioned him, let's talk about the people behind the Terminator. And if we talk about that, we start with the head person. if you will, the man from whose head

the Terminator sprung from, if you believe his story. James Cameron, Canadian truck driver, and I think, I still made this, he is, you know, given his record at this point that he's made, you know, what, two or three of, like, the biggest movies ever made.

He never went to film school. He just showed up and started, you know, working with Corman and doing this work. He read a lot of books, and he made stuff, and he's like, okay, and then worked for Roger Corman, like so many people did. and all of a sudden he was a filmmaker. It's kind of an amazing transition there.

Yeah, one of many legendary filmmakers from the Roger Coleman Film School. Yes. Joe Dante, Scorsese, Coppola, the list goes on, yeah. Mm-hmm. And in the case of Cameron, he directed, quote-unquote,

his first feature in 1982, a certainly low-budget film called Piranha II, The Spawning. And depending on who you believe, Cameron was either fired from the film or he quit from the film or he was not allowed to edit the film. There's lots of different

stories on this one. But we all the bottom line is no one's happy with piranha two. I like piranha too. Okay. I watched that. It's better than you think. And he was probably fired because the producer of that is I forgot his name. He did that all the time. He

directed a film called The Visitor, which is a famous bad film, which is how Lance Hendrickson got in Prana 2, which is how he would also got in Terminator. He would hire American directors and then take control over the movie. Because if you had an American and director, you get more financing. Right.

But then he wanted to be a director, so then he would take it over. So, yeah. Pranatoo is much better than you'd think it is. It's not good. It's fun to watch Pranatou because there is some, I don't think Cameron wrote it. He did, he co-wrote it,

and it has the impetus of aliens in it. Like, the main character is a woman who's seen this ship before, and nobody listens to her except Lance Hendrickson. So there's a lot the special effects are good. It has a decent score. It's a well-made bad movie. So, like,

the people who made it knew how to make a movie, it's this stupid. Because it's about flying, it's about flying piranha. Yes. I really like that movie. Prana one's better. And that's Joe Dante, but they're both good films. So the director you were mentioning, or the producer, was he English? You said he liked to hire American. He was Italian, and I believe his name was Ovidio, something? It's a very... Ovidio G. Atenitis.

And he also produced tentacles, which is a giant squid movie. The Visitor, which is a famously bizarre film Beyond the Door. He's a rip-off director. You know, find a trend, make a rip-off. And from what I hear,

not the world's easiest person to work with. So, yeah. But speaking of nightmares, James Cameron alleges that one day he had a nightmare about a robot skeleton coming out of the flames. And he's like, oh, my God, I've got to, I've got to work with this. I've got to work with this idea.

And so he wrote the script in 1982. And one of the key collaborators, you know, the reason this movie got made so fast, is Gail Ann Hurd. Gail Ann Hurd is credited to the producer. She's also credited as with, if you look at the credits, it's very interesting. Not an and, but it's written by James Cameron with Gail Ann Hurd. So I think there's some fogginess about how much writing she did, but she is credited as a, as, you know, as co-writer. And she also worked for Corman, but by this point, she was already on her own.

She worked for Pacific Western, and she and Cameron, I guess, had a good relationship. She bought the rights from Cameron for $1 on the condition that he would direct the film. Obviously, many years later, he said he regretted this decision, but it got to him to make the movie, so I think it worked out in the end. Also, it worked out in the end. They also married eventually, but she divorced him. Yes, and then she married DePaul. And he didn't take the robot in the outlet. Sorry.

Then she married Brian De Palma. Yes, I did not realize that she had a Brian DePaulma thing as well. Although I think they didn't have a, were they long together, no? They were married for less than two years, and now she's married to the director of Jumanji. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. She's another director. I knew it was another director whose name I forgot.

You're saying she has a type. good for her yeah well so does camera we'll get back to that in a second oh yeah yeah his type is woman he works with

yeah but yeah he and gail and her they're working together the script is done they start producer they start production 1983 it gets put on hold

we'll get to the reason why and during this time where he has about a year where they have to the whole thing's on hold he goes ahead and he writes Rambo

first blood part two with Sylvain and he writes a treatment and pitches aliens so it's like even before his first breakout movie actually breaks out

he lays the seeds for his next two big pictures and a really interesting thing about the aliens thing is like he pitched it and they took it and then it was such a strong pitch

they knew he couldn't make it for at least two years but they're like we're okay with that we're going to wait for you to finish this other movie so then you can make this movie and that's one of the reasons why the lag between alien and aliens are so long for an 80s sequel.

Usually they're bang, bang, bang. But the producers of aliens are smart. And they were like, this guy knows what he's doing. We're going to wait. And you know, that's another one of those one, two punches from Cameron. I much prefer first blood to Rambo. So that's the trifectar right there. I do like Mega Man 2 better than Mega Man, though.

So it's not always that the first one is better. Just in case you were wondering if I was just being a contrarian. No, I think it's a popular opinion. Rambo, I mean, first blood is better than Rambo too. I would go first blood, then four, then two, then three, and I haven't seen five. Don't bother. I hear it's missable, imminently.

I hear it's really racist, so yeah. Yes, yes, it is. It's disgraceful. But I have a fun quote from Cameron who said, I literally put every penny that I had been paid already back into the movie, The Terminator, which stupid, but it turned out to be a good investment. So a lot of things that, you know, bad decisions were made in making The Terminator, but luckily for Jim Cameron and everyone involved, they just happened to work out, you know, almost all this stuff could have worked out very, very badly, signing the rights away, putting all his money into this movie, you know, taking all these

chances, hiring a man who didn't speak English all that well, but it all worked out. As long as we're talking about English, though, we should also mention someone who definitely played a part in writing this movie. William Wisher, sometimes William Wisher, Jr. He is credited on the film as additional dialogue. You know, almost a decade later, he is a full-on co-writer on Terminator 2. You see him in The Terminator. He plays a cop who armed Arnold will balk on the head and throw him away, and then Arnold takes his voice in a sinister move. But yeah, that's William Wisher. I guess he's just buddies with Cameron because they clearly work together on a variety of projects. And I know So if you watch the T2, like, audio tracks, I'm pretty sure there's one where it's Cameron and which you're talking together about making T2.

And it's really fascinating because they just, they just, they break down everything they did, you know, really great. Very enlightening commentary from them. And the Terminator and Terminator 2 are the only good things that man ever worked on because he also did Judge Dred, the 13th Warrior, both versions of Exorcist 4 he has a credit on because they read it to that and live free or diehard. So, alas. Okay. Okay. I mean, I kind of like Judge Dred for, like, it's campiness, I'll be honest, but, yeah, not a great movie. No.

And if we're talking about English, we should probably also mention Harlan Ellison. Harlan Ellison wrote a lot of things, but he also yelled up a lot, many more things than he wrote. And Terminator is one of those things, because here's what happened. Here's the story, as I understand it. Harlan Ellison writes a short story in 1957 called Soldier of Tomorrow, guy from the future. And this story becomes an Outer Limits episode in 1964, just called Soldier. Many, many years later, 20 years later, Ellison sees a Terminator, he's like, hey, that sure sounds like something I wrote 20 years ago. And he yells so many times at so many people that Orion eventually settles with him.

And so if you watch Terminator today, there's just a sort of an abnormal credit. I think towards the end, it just says, acknowledgement to the works of Harwin Ellison. Like, nothing specific. Just like, hey, Harlan Ellison, we hope you appreciate it. Shut out, Harlan. Yeah. Shot out and shut up. Yeah.

But James Cameron is on record. He did not approve of this. He did not like this. He insists he did not take anything from Harlan Elson's stories. I haven't seen them recently, but when I saw them, nothing particularly seemed like actionable. But there's definitely themes.

There's a guy for the future. But, you know what I mean? I would love to get Harlan Ellison and Alan Moore in a room together and see who can be the bigger crank about works that people supposedly stole from them and works that people paid to adapt and they didn't like. I feel like it would be a real dust up. Two old men just go in after. If you want to see a really damning case against Harlan Ellison's point, there's a great YouTuber named Rob Hill has a channel called the Badbury Bible. and he did a video on Terminator rip-offs and he talks about Harlan Elson

and then he plays all these quotes of Harlan Elson saying he doesn't want money and then suddenly something changed and that dude wanted money. And it's just, it's one of those things it's a very, very abstract theme to say, no, you got to pay me for this because I also had a guy come back in time.

It's like, no. But I think it's, it's, you pay someone they go away, right? You know, it's, it's easier that way. In a sense, you could say that Harleason's complaints were very video game patent-like. He insisted that a video game that he made was too

similar to your video game, so now he wants some money and, you know, it's like a patent troll kind of thing. I mean, not, I mean, don't get wrong. Harle Nelson wrote a lot of stuff, and some of that stuff is real important, but he also complained about a great many things, and some of the things that he wrote, that he didn't, that he was upset

about. Like, he wrote, you know, arguably one of the best episodes of Star Trek ever made, and he was never happy about it. Never. So what you're saying is that The Terminator is the pal world of movies. My first experience as Holland Ellison was seeing him doing commentary. He was like an Andy Rooney type on a sci-fi channel show. Yes, yes.

Those are still on YouTube. You can watch him today. And I had no idea who he was because I was 12. And I'm like, this guy's an asshole. And later on found out he was a really important writer and he wrote a lot of good stuff. But he just seemed like a bitter old man. And, you know, one day I'll be there. So I'm not going to drudge too.

I'm getting there. I'm already bitter. I understand. Ahead of his time, ahead of our time. I mean, I hope I get to a point in life where people will pay me to go away. That sounds like the dream. Oh, man, it's good stuff. Yeah.

Leave. You don't have to do anything? Just take some money and go away. That's my aspiration right there. I left a job that way once it was great. So, yeah. Well, speaking of time travel and timeliness, we should also mention the great Stan Winston, the late Stan Winston, who at this point is already,

a fairly active, well-known special effects artist. He's not like a celebrity at this point, but he's got a lot of work behind him. He did Gargoyles, the movie about Gargoyles will come to life. He did Heartbeeps, the Andy Kaufman Robot movie. He did the thing. He was part of the thing crew. He worked on the Star Wars holiday special. The man had a resume.

He worked on the X-terminator. Yeah, okay. Not this Terminator, but the Exterminator, which has some pretty gnarly burning effects in it. Yeah, and the whiz. But yeah, so the work he does here. absolutely, you know, like many people launched him Skyward, he suddenly becomes a big name in the

industry, and I believe it's still called Stan Winston's studio to this day even though he has passed on. Yeah, yeah, and he would later win an Oscar for Aliens and Terminator 2. Mm. Yes. Yes. So a hell of a, hell of a trifectar there. I don't know...

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and My Super NES Works Volume 1 for 25% off. Both books cover the early lineup of games for their respective systems and exhaustive depth With comprehensive color photography, screenshots captured and top quality from original hardware and more. You can get both hardcover books for their lowest prices ever exclusively at limitedrungames.com. Note that the discount will show up once you add one or both books to your shopping cart. And if we're talking about Terminator, we also need to talk about the music. And the music is something else. all, the theme music to this movie, not a lot of movies get it hit so hard out of the gate, but this movie hits you with scrolling text and this sort of droning, pulsing, sinister electronic score

that just becomes a signature for this franchise. Every other movie is going to take this music and either remix it or, you know, edit it in some way. And all the credit goes to a man named Brad, I believe this is Fidel. I think it's Fidel. Yeah, Brad Fidel. Yes, who prior to this, mostly does TV work. Apparently, he did a movie about Hitler coming back or Hitler returning. Yeah. And somehow, he had a reputation apparently for like improvising. He did a lot of improv. He'd just hang out in the studio. He'd turn out a bunch of synthesizers. He'd make some noises and he'd see how it all comes together. And that's how he made this music. And James, you found an article that talks about the time signature, which I don't even understand. Can you explain time signature to me? I have no rhythm. I have no.

Well, time finishers, you know, like, the good example of a time finisher is one, two, three, four, you know, one and two, three and four. And then something like a waltz is like one, two, three, one, two, three. And then Germany, you like prog rock, so, you know, we get weird time signatures, like, yes, it's close to the... Sixteen nine. Sixteen nine. Salsbury Hill, seven, four. Or those tracks where it just, like, switches to a different rhythm, a different measure, like a beat for a measure. and then switches back. Yeah, I love those.

Yeah, like sound like sound chase up by yes. But this one, like the equipment didn't work right. And so because he was using a profit and an Oberheim synth. And it would be a little off, but he never fixed it. And so people will always like, what time signature is this? And he's like, I don't know. And so they finally, some writer for Slate did a whole article on it. They did some expert analysis and they determined the time signature.

of that is 13th, 16th, which is a three, that's three plus three plus three plus two plus two. so it was like dun dun dun dun and in the sequel it's 68 they they they he made it a more

standard time signature but I feel like even Robert Frip wouldn't touch 1316 it's a really strange thing

no no that's too much go to bed now yeah and it's I preferred the original version

like because you know the T2 has a real budget it's a much bigger booming score the music

in Terminator is very minimal and I really dig it I feel it's a really proto synth way And a lot, like, people always credit John Carpenter for, like, retroactively making that genre.

But I feel like, stuff like Terminator is a huge influence on synth wave and dark wave and a lot of other, like, modern synthesized of focus music final band camp. I kind of feel like with the Terminator soundtrack, Fidel, listened to the Blade Runner soundtrack that Vangelis created and was like, what if this weren't so, like, uplifting at times? what if it were just like everything is really gone to shit not just kind of gone to shit but like all the way gone to shit and basically just created like the dark horrible version of blades or blade runner blades of steel sorry i would watch that would also be good dark horrible yes i think it's interesting but like because we talked about the soundtrack yes and the you can still get the score the score is available on vinyl CD I imagine streaming i don't i'm not a big stream person but the soundtrack's been out of print since nineteen ninety one so if you want to get those of those songs that you hear like in tech noir and over the credits which i really love um you can't do the burning in the third degree and pixels of view and photo play they're not available anywhere i don't know why it went back in print right before t2 came out i have that cd and then it was gone i think those people who worked

on those nobody really of note like it's credited as tani Kane in the triangles and Jay Ferguson in 16 millimeter. Those are fake bands. It's just Tony Kane who was like a failed singer who I think was married to somebody in Journey for like a minute. And Jay Ferguson

who was a producer, they just made the music for this. Neither of them did a ton afterwards. Well, Jay Ferguson went into, he did intimacy. That's the song name that he has. And I think that's the one that's playing on their headphones when the roommate's killed. But he's

ended up being a composer. He did the music for license to drive, gleaming the cube, tremors 2, and 4 on TV, Iron Chef USA, Erie Indiana, N-C-I-S-L-A and in video games, shoe a shark. How about that? So

the first game to next one now. I really love those songs, and I like how they're kind of tied to the music, to the movie, like burning in the third degree, you know, nuclear war, and photo play is about looking at a photograph. You know, so they're related to the movie thematically.

Yeah, and Ginger's listening to Intimacy on her headphones while she's doing it with her boyfriend, and then she gets up to get a snack, and that's when the Terminator strikes. When you least expected. That chick loves music. Like, headphones on all the time. The headphones stay on during sex. To quote a Slade song, two-track stalia, one-track mind. It's just always, yeah. She was kind of a precursor to kids these days who always have one

AirPod in one year. Yeah, yeah. It was just a movie ahead of its time. Yes. Now if we'd be on TikTok 24-7. I got the night. I need to surrender. I'm not a picture of me.

I don't want by her name. I need to be telling me. There's not your body. I'm going to be more. I'm looking, look, look, I'm looking for the men's in my free. let's advance to the cast the people who appear on the screen because let's be honest they make up a significant portion of this film and speaking of big I didn't say the word big

but let's just pretend I did Arnold Schwarzenegger Arnold Schwarzenegger now it's important to realize this Arnold Schwarzenegger was not a not a babe in the woods he was not an unknown factor in 1984. But he was still a relative... He was Mr. Universe. Yes. But he was still a relative newcomer to the film business. He, uh, you know, he had been in Conan the Barbarian. The movie did very well. But he also, you know, as we've, as we all know, English is not his first language. He's, you know, a very large man. He has, you know, a strong stream presence. But he doesn't, he's not usually the kind of guy you would put in a movie as like a handsome leading man or a sympathetic character. You know, he's good at playing Conan who's this mouth.

who swings a sword around and screams and, you know, kill snakes. And indeed, when they first talked about putting him in this movie, apparently an executive with Orion, I think Mike Medivoy is the guy's name. He was like, this movie needs Star Power. Go get that Terminator, get that Conan guy. He can be your coyote. He can be the hero. And James Cameron's like, that guy?

Like, James Cameron did not like the idea at all. But then when Cameron met him, Cameron's like, oh, crap, this guy, he should be the killer robot. He's already, he's built like a goddamn robot already. He should play the killer robot in my movie. I have a good quote from James Cameron who says, originally the Terminator was supposed to be this anonymous guy in the crowd. You know, the killer could be anybody. Arnold stands out in a crowd, but it gave the film a power in a way I hadn't anticipated. Yeah. And I know Arnold didn't want to take it at first because it was kind of a smaller part in terms of dialogue, because he only has 17 lines he said

but he took a pay cut to do it because I fought an old news article and he's he was like this was the best script he's ever been offered you know because before this he was in he was in Conan they had filmed the second movie wasn't out yet the Conan the Destroyer and he was in a few smaller films before that

like he has a small role in scavenger hunt and he's in a very strange drama called Stay Hungry about bodybuilders with Jeff Bridges and Sally Field um want to see Arnold Schwarzenegger play the fiddle watch that movie. That is a weird movie. And of course, Hercules in New York, what he was dubbed in. Yeah. So, yeah. Now, I feel like The Terminator really plays to Schwarzenegger's strengths,

which are his screen presence, just to be intimidating, to be terrifying to look at and imposing, and not to say much. Like children, he should be seen, not heard. I feel like they used a lot of how he was filmed when they made Commando the year later they made him very, like in the opening of Commando's famous where he's superimposing and scary, but then Alyssa Milano lones up and oh, Daddy, and it kind of flips

that to show his soft, sensitive side eating ice cream. And feeding a deer by hand. Feeding a deer. I forgot about that. That's a great movie. So, yeah, but he is, I remember, like, my stepmom told me that when

she saw Conan Barbarian, like, people saw the trailers and they were laughing at him because they thought he looked so ridiculous. It's this mountain of a man. And then you watch the movie and you see, oh, no, this guy actually is good at his job in this role. So I think he had an uphill battle to be taken seriously as an actor. And it's

an ongoing after Terminator. People are still like, this guy's just a mountain of muscle. I wouldn't say he had a really good performance until Predator. But regardless of, you know, public opinion, certainly the movie and the success of this movie and his role in this movie absolutely launches him Skyward.

It gets him a lot more roles. You know, as the quote I have from him, it's like, people, the studio said they didn't want to cast me because of my accent. It's like he did, like, a lot of people just like, no, we can't hire this guy. He, no one understands him. But then, yeah, the next movie, Commando,

he's playing all American John Matrix. You know, it's like, and then throughout the rest of the 80s and 90s, like no one questions it. You know, like a lot of, like a lot of Van Dam movies, they have to put in a weird line to explain why he speaks with a heavy accent. You know, he's from French Canada or he was raised by nuns or something, but Arnold, no one asks, no one questions it.

Arnold just shows up. He's like, hello, I am from, I'm from the cleaning corporation. And then you're just, okay? Yes, sir. I mean, he eventually was governor of California. So, like, it's, it's an accepting country. Yep. Yeah.

I do, like they did never try. It's like, it's like Osang Connery, same thing. It's like, why does he talk like that? Eh, don't, don't worry about it. Also, if you'll forgive me for a quick moment, I have to shout this out because. many, many years ago, a friend of mine insisted, insisted that Arnold Schwarzenegger only said

17 words in the Terminator. And I was like, that's ridiculous. Don't say that. That's not true. Lines, maybe, but not words. But the friend insisted, and they insisted so hard, they made a bet. And listeners, I won that bet because, yes, he says more than 17 words in the movie.

But, yeah, he's a lot of short lines. Like, nice night for a walk. That's five words right there. Nice day for a walk. Sarah O'Connor, I'll be back. Fuck you, asshole. Well, if I ask one way, get out. Yeah, it's close, but yeah.

Well, you said Sarah Connor. Let's talk about Sarah Connor. Sarah Connor played by a young woman named Linda Hamilton. Again, like a lot of people, Molster TV prior to this project. She said she came out of the Strasbourg studio in New York. She thought she was going to be a Shakespearean actress. So she says, you know, I wasn't excited at the Terminator as my people were.

Maybe I was a little bit snobby. I would argue that this is probably 40 years later. This is still Linda Hamilton's biggest movie. I mean, she's, you know, she's done a lot of other stuff, but I would say, like, her biggest stuff has been this and T2 and the recent, you know, T6 or seven, whatever number that's supposed to be. I feel like Beauty and the Beast was pretty big back in the day. For TV, yeah. That's your Buma mom's favorite TV show, like, without question. And my mom was like, when it was time for being a beast,

get, stay the fuck away from her. Like, he's watching this show. So, I feel Linda Hamilton kind of was her own worst. And I mean, Hollywood's really bad at giving leading women who don't want to do romantic comedy lead roles. Mm-hmm. That is true. However, she was in King Kong lives.

Yes. And Black Moon Rising, which is a completely forgotten Hamilton, like, sci-fi movie about a, about a supercar written by John Carpenter, which is just absolutely horrible. Was the Emerson Lincoln Palmer's album Black Moon a soundtrack to that? It would have been better. That's a bad, oh, God, of course. That's a lot of sorts of, it's still a good soundtrack.

I'm sorry, I didn't, I didn't mean to derail this. But, like, out of the NIST, I think the only big roles are like probably Dante's Peak. The mayor of Volcano Town. We were looking up some movies last night, and we found a movie called Bermuda Tentacles, which has, which she made in 2013. 14 with Jamie Kennedy and Maya, the singer Maya. And she went from that to Dark Face. So I had to step up.

But it was sad. I don't want to watch that. That's just going to make me depressed. Yeah, yeah. She does it a bitter. I've actually seen Black Moon Rising and King Kong lives very recently. And yeah, neither movie is very good. And her roles in them are pretty small.

You say she doesn't remit to comedy, but let's be honest, her role in King Kong lives is to have sex with the leading man, you know? so like you have a human couple getting together and you've King Kong getting together with a Lady Kong and it's like it's symmetry it's like poetry it rhymes it's just that's the movie no love triangle thankfully but yeah she too will later marry and divorce Jim Cameron I think pretty quickly I believe I think it's a very short marriage the long relationship but a short marriage I think it lasted until Titanic because he met somebody there comment he met another actress so that I think it's Gail Ann Heard Kathleen Bigelow Linda Hamilton the next one yeah Yeah, I don't know, yeah.

I think it's too. I forgot her name. I'm sorry. Honestly, since Titanic, I don't know that she's worked on anything else. I think she's been to do James Cameron. Longtime camera collaborator who has not married him yet is Michael Bean. Michael Bean is his movie. Again, mostly TV movies.

He definitely had James Hugh highlighted The Fan, not the release, not the Tony Scott fan, but another movie called The Fan. Yeah, he's in a movie called The Fan. I believe he plays Lorne Bacall's stalker. And that was like savaged when it came out because it's a gnarly film. for a mainstream Hollywood film as later on it got a better

reception and Lauren Bacall liked her performance in it he plays a crazy stalker in that really good movie it's heard

James Garner Michael Bean yeah that's a good I recommend that movie a lot it's really an intense film he's really if you would have

shown me that movie and said this guy's going to be in a movie with a psychocatic robot killer and a hero I'd be like

well that guy's the killer because he's really convincing in that movie. Yeah. Never did it again. But yeah. I guess the closer would come would be the abyss. He goes pretty wild in the abyss. And he's the bad guy in Tombstone.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I actually didn't see the one yet. Oh, man. Yeah. He's really good than that, too. He can't play a good bad guy, but usually he plays a soldier a lot. Hmm. Yeah. He's got real aweshocks energy. You know, I was like, oh, darn it. You know, like, I'm here, and I'm not necessarily heroic, but I'll step up if I have to.

I mean, he's easily one of the best parts in oh god is it Deadfall it's a movie that's infamous for Nicholas Cage

showing up and just being crazy but it's actually a movie about Michael Bean that doesn't narrow it down yeah but it's

deadfall yeah Michael Bean's the lead in that I think yeah he's the actual like main character and Nichol's Cage

just shows up in like two scenes and everyone remembers those scenes but Michael Bean is like the actual the actual driving force of the movie

but he's also like in Navy SEALs yeah yeah you know and he has that really small part in the rock

where he's basically playing Hicks, but then he gets killed. So if he has a lane, he stays in, he's still working. Yeah. Yeah, so I was, I've always been a big fan of him. I've always wished he had more work. You know, I thought he was a cool one. I saw him when I was a kid. I've always liked Michael Bean.

Lance Henriksen, who you mentioned earlier, definitely a big part in this movie behind the scenes in that camera would show up with Anderson at the pitch meetings, and Hendrickson would walk in first, and he would basically play a Terminator. He would storm into the room, He would stare at people, he would just intimidate them, and then Cameron would walk in, I guess, be like, good cop or good director? I don't know.

As a stands, he's only in the movie, a very small role. He's one of the cops who, like, gets told to shut up a lot, a guy named Hal. A much larger role for a policeman is Paul Winfield. James and I have podcasts at Paul Woodland before, but Paul Winfield was a really great character actor. He shut up, he did TV, he did movies, he did everything. This is post Star Trek 2, but it's pre-Star Trek D&J. You know, he was in everything for minimum of years. Who was he in the next generation?

Darmock. He was Darmock? Oh, my God. I had no idea. That's it. I never bothered to look into the actor behind Darmock. The second time I've heard, I've heard Diamond yell Darmock about Paul Winfield to someone. So, yeah, he's great.

I love Paul Winfield. Jeremy, his eyes opened. Yes. Seeing Paul Winfield, Lance Hendrickson and Earl Bowen, the actor who plays Dr. Silbman, on camera together, I always love it when you can. get a group of really dope-ass character actors in one room together, and all their scenes together, they're playing off each other really well, they're having a lot of fun. Like, I would have loved to have seen a TV series prequel where Trexler and Howard is buddy

cops, just hanging out, you know, doing cool stuff, or secretly a couple, one of the two. Yeah, I feel like their play, their interplay in this movie is very, is very couple-coded in my sense. Like, even at a point, like, hey, how do I look? Like, he's checking his tie and Hal's like, yeah, not great for us. Yeah, yeah. So, I feel like something's going on there. Something's going on there. And also, when Trexler finally gets it, what does Hal do?

He immediately discharges Terminator and gets killed. Like, he's like, well, I'm going with you, Hal. I'm going with you, buddy. So. Yeah, out in a blazer glory with his man, we're respectable. I also, I love Earl Bowen, the doctor. Yes. He's the only person in all three of the first movie, other than Schwarzenegger.

Yes. So, yeah, he sold up each one doing his thing. He's a good, good character actor. Yeah. Also, he did a lot of great voice work, especially in video games. People forget this, but he's in Eternal Darkness. I think he's one of the major, it's like the Lechuk in those Monkey Island games. Oh, really?

I didn't know that. I'm pretty sure he's Lechuk. I'm not Bob, but I know Bob has talked about Earl Bowen in the past. Unfortunately, he passed away recently. Yeah. Another Canadian, actually. they get around um and it's funny a lot of the cast here like a lot of them show up on the different things like no one's huge but a lot of people like would become bigger later like in the opening

scene you got punks bill paxton is one of the punks he's the guy with a blue hair brian thompson is the larger guy who's looking through like the spyglass um he would play a lot of tough guys he was the like the bad guy in cobra he played a lot of clingons on star trek he played shall con in the terrible second mortal combat movie not the first movie he's the second movie. He has that drawline. Yeah. He's got a face. He has a very, very unique face. I like that until

Aliens versus Predator, Bill Paxson was the only person to be attacked by a Terminator and Alien and a Predator. In Aliens versus Predator, Lance Hendrickson's killed by a predator, so then he gets the trifecta also. But I feel that's cheating. That's a crossover. He's got to, Bill's the only one to get attacked in

each of their own individual franchises. Right. While staying in his lane. Yeah. Also, he plays a human. Lance Henderson in aliens is technically, you know, an artificial life form. And the alien does not kill him. It just tears him in half. And he's fine. Yeah.

He's still there in Alien 3, begging to die, but still with us. Been there, man, relatable. I was surprised. I recently watched a film called Roxanne, which is an old Steve Martin comedy, kind of Cedar under the Bersiak movie, really great movie. And the hunk in that movie is the hunk in this movie. Yes. the roommate's boyfriend, Rick Rousevich.

And he's a hunky dude. Yeah. Not a good actor. He's not very good in Roxanne, but he's pretty. So he's like, let's be quiet. He's playing to his strengths here in a bikini briefs and then screaming. That's the plot of Roxanne. Like, beautiful man, please be quiet.

Yeah, just don't talk. Please. Yeah, I've relatable again. And of course, Dick Miller. Dick Miller. God. Boy, 1984, Gremlins and Terminator, Dick Miller fans were eating well. He shows up here. He gets to play the gun shop owner. It's a very brief scene, but he is Dick Miller all over it. And then he gets shot with a shotgun. That's a common refrain for Dick Miller. He'll show up for a second and die.

Like, that's, especially in the mid-80s because he's technically alive in Glemones, but as far as you know, he's dead. I'm pretty sure that movie was spent to kill him But then they realized oh wait We're gonna make a sequel come back Come back Dick And so he's alive again Then of course two years later He's in Choppy Mall

Playing a very similar character Who it ends very poorly for him But he's in all these films Because he was a Corman guy also Sure So when people like Joe Dante and James Cameron Moved up They were like I like that

And I want to put in my movie again So that's why he made it into that He made it into more mainstream fare In the 80s just by association Also, since we're here in 2024, we're supposed to shout out the fact that Dick Miller appears in past tense. The D-Space 9 episode that everyone's been talking about lately because the events have just transpired, you know, in our reality. But Dick Miller is in that episode, too. And he accurately predicts that the 1999 Yankees would win the World Series.

And no one talks about that fact. They're all hung up on this whole, like, you know, oh, we're actually predicting the dire economic future of America. But, you know, the Yankees. No, no one You're from New York I know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry Also, Franco Colombo It's Colombo, but it's with you, Colombo

The Somewhat Petit Italian bodybuilder Has a very small role No lines for him He shows up in the future As another Terminator He's the one against the red eyes And very sinister

That's Arnold's little buddy He would work with Arnold together On many, many different projects And I do mean little For a Colombo was only 5 foot 5 165 centimeters So shorter than most of us I feel, maybe close to Jeremy, but

When you say a little 5-7, come on. Sorry. When you say little buddy, I imagine like that cartoon or okay George, like the big cat, the big dog and the little dog. When they put us together.

The guys in Mad Max. Yeah, or me and my boyfriend. You know, one of those combinations, yes. Yes. The two of you also. If you look for pictures of Arnold and Franco posing together, it does look like because Arnold's well over six feet. So they do have a very funny dynamic together, even though they're both ripped.

Little ripped guy scummy. Like, that's so dense. Like, it's like, how do you do that? Anyway, you actually, you see him either in face or in name appear in a lot of Arnold movies because they were just, they were buddies for many, many years. he actually passed away and I think Arnold seemed really torn up about it because they were friends

for like 50 years so... That's sad. No. No. Oh. Oh. Oh.

Oh. Now, Now, now this part where we actually go through the entire movie, but I don't know if we need to do that for this movie, because I feel like everyone knows it pretty well. I mean, does anyone listen to this podcast? Well, have a good night. Ed, well, out.

I re-watched this a couple days ago, and I almost didn't do that because this is like, there's films I know, and there's films I know a lot, and there's films that I can recite all the dialogue to, and then there's Terminator. It's right up there with, like, for me, like, The Muppet movie and Fairth People's Day Off of, like, films I have seen

probably 50 times and I imagine most people our age you've seen it a lot but there are some beats that I think of what's talking about or just stuff happening Maybe we should just highlight the things

that we think are memorable or just particularly cool from this movie I just feel like the setup is so is so solid honestly I wonder if you got a note or something because like

you get this text at the beginning which is certainly a foreboding but almost you don't even need it because the movie really like in the movie it tells you everything you need to know Like, these two guys show up. Right away, you can tell something's wrong.

Like, I mean, they show up, they fall out of the sky, and they're nude. And they just start walking around. But even before that, you get the future footage. And watching that now, that still looks amazing. Yes. Because James Cameron knew how to use stop motion. He knew how to use force perspective. And he knew how to shoot things so you're working within his budget.

And he is the master of, like, the rear screen projection shot. Yes, yes. This and aliens use it very well. And there's like, like an aliens is only one shot where you can really tell he's using it. And this, like, in that opening shot, like, it looks so good. And I would also tell everybody, if you want to watch this now, I would buy a Blu-ray now before the 4K comes out because James Cameron's 4K releases have been, let's say, spotty. So if you want to get a good transfer of this, pick it up now. But the rear projections is great and it works with the music and just everything in that futes of stuff.

looks amazing and then we go to the present and then we forgot to mention the first person you've seen in the present is that the garbage truck driver who is uh that's that's Ceno Fats Williams who if you watch enough 80s movies you'll recognize him because he talks like this and he's in weird science he's in roadhouse he's the guy who Patrick Sway he gives his car to he's in and he's in and he's in Axon jackson um and he's a voice of the baby in baby's kids he's kind of a famous famous character actor another great character I like him a lot

and I just love his voice and he would get small parts in Joel Silver films all the time because he just liked his voice but yeah then you get who shows up first yeah Schwarzenegger shows up first

yeah yeah but I just feel like right away like so much this movie it does so much work without even laying it out that's why I'm saying like the opening text it feels almost unnecessary

because you see this huge guy you see a little guy they're both naked but it's like what does it build what's the big guy do? Big guy walks up to people and basically murders them right away. It's like, give me your clothes. They threaten him, but he just kills them. Whereas, you know, Kyle Reese, Michael Bean, short, you know, sort of scrawny, or you can tell, like, you see his body, he's all scarred up.

Like, he's been through hell. He steals clothes, but when he gets a gun and he gets a beat on a cop, he doesn't kill the cop, he just runs away. So right away, you're seeing a difference. Seeing difference, it's like, okay, large man is here. He's here to kill people. smaller man doesn't want to kill anybody he's like he's got he's got other things on his mind that does kind of play against some suspense you have later where you you think where um

Sarah thinks that um Reese is the killer but you know he's not so it kind of like I think they try to do that more on Terminator 2 because like in Terminator 2 camera didn't want the audience to know that Arnold was the good guy so I think he's trying it again they are to a better effect if you haven't seen the trailers

but here it's like yeah you know he's not the bad guy because he hasn't murdered half the half the city yet, while Schwarzenegger is out killing astronomy-loving punk rockers, which I love that. Like, I didn't know that punk's, punks were into looking at telescopes. I mean,

Halley's comet was coming soon. It was all the rage. Maybe the friends of the punk in repo men are trying to find him. He was in space. Yeah, what follows, I feel like, it's just so great, you know, like, once Arnold gets his stuff together and he gets his guns, and he

gets his, you know, his own sort of punk outfit. And it's like, what does he do? He goes, you know, both and both of them. Go to a phone book and they look up Sarah Connor. You see the look of Sarah Connor. Michael Bean actually tears the page on the phone book, which so many movie heroes do. Arnold just reads it, because Arnold just, you know, he always does read it. And then they both start chasing Sarah Connors, plural. Um, except, you know, Arnold's out there shooting him. And Kyle was out here sort of tailing them through bad neighborhoods. I feel bad for the second Sarah O'Connor. We never even know anything about her. Yeah, no

screen for her. And it's because her, because in the phone book, she has a middle initial. So she's before the last one or doesn't. And that's what killed her. Shame. Middle names. They're always a mistake. Alphabitizing, kill someone again. The Dewey decimal system

is bad news. Yeah. The scene, what he does kill the first one, though, that was the first scene that scared me when I was a kid. Because it's so cold. It's just like, Sarah O'Connor, boom. laser to the head. And I remember at the time, I thought all guns worked that way then, because that, like, why don't all guns have laser sights? Still, I mean... I'm trying to think, though, is this the first case of a laser sight in the movie? It's got to be

one of the first, if not the first. They didn't work that good at the time. The one in the movie is fake. Okay. To make it look stronger. So, I don't know if they were all around a thing. They're still not. I mean, they exist. But I think, you see them in movies because are cool. Right. Lazas are cool. Cobra, also starring Brian Thompson, has it, like, has the laser side on the poster, but like this movie produced Cobra, so.

This does, yes. Also a good film, yeah. But I also, when we cut to, you know, I think it does a good job building those characters' worlds, but I also think it is a really good job in just one scene of showing how much Sarah Kana's life is kind of hectic and crazy. Yeah, like, she's just, you know, she's a working girl. She has a waitress job. She's clearly trying to date people, but it's not.

working out for her. She's got this roommate who's got a much more stable relationship, even if the guy's, you know, a little flaky, but, you know, seems to be nice, even if, you know, a little quick, a little quick on the, on the telephone to switch to sex talk, but, you know, he's really apologetic for sexual harassing Sarah Connor, and I appreciate that, you know, it's intent matters. I feel like Sarah Connor is kind of drawn from real life, just one of, you know, hundreds of thousands of young women like that living in LA, trying to get a break, trying to get by, not having a great life. But, you know, they still have their social circle and they're doing their best. But what is their future really? They can barely pay rent because all the money's

going to hairspray. Exactly. Because they've got to tease that. That hairs all the way up. So he has very good early 80s big hair. Yeah. That never goes down for the entire film. I also appreciate, especially this time watching it again, I feel like there's a not so subtle but steady background noise of like showing how people and machines are more closer working together than ever before. You got the garbage truck. You've got Ginger and her constant headphones. You've got Sarah and the punch clock. Her answering machine. Her answering machine, which actually plays a big role. She's like, oh, hi, you're talking to a machine and then it ends up, you know, ends up screwing her later on because she calls her own machine

and gives away a position, you know, like, she calls the police, she has put on hold. Like, I think there's a thread here of, like, technology and humans, you know, because it's the early 80s, where everyone's excited about technology, but this movie's also like, but what if it kills us? Pans out. Yeah, her answering machine message is even like, but don't worry, machines can be our friends too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Something like that. It's like, oh, honey, you don't know. And I think that also plays into when she goes to the. the club, because the club is called Tech Noir. Yes. Which I'm not the first person to make this joke, but I love it when a movie has a location named after a genre.

This is, and the club is playing into, like, sci-fi imagery, and I think, again, going back to, like, synth wave and dark wave, like, the tech noir scene is massively influenced on aesthetics that you still see to this day. I wish

there were clubs that cool. It's such an amazing location. Also, I do love the fact that when she calls the cops, Treacher's like, oh, yeah, Tech Noir, I know that place. So that's a good club. If the cops know it, it's probably a good club. Say no more. Say no more.

I'm always rocking out there. The cover was 450, and that's a lot for 1984. That's a lot of money to get into a club. It's a really cool place and good signage. And I will go to the games later, but of all the games I saw, I liked how all of them show Tech Noir. Yeah, you can't drop that location. You can't.

You lean in. to it pretty hard. Because also with the first big, that first real, real big action sequence happens, though. Right, because all three parties who have been served inters separately all come together.

Arnold was there to kill, Kyle was there, protect, and Sarah's there to have a very, very tiny ginger ale, and it just, it all comes together. And, yeah,

the movie, it teased up to the last second, like, who's going to shoot who, but Michael Bean shoots Arnold. That's where you first see the point where it's like, something's wrong here,

because Arnold eats like six or seven shotgun blasts and just keeps getting up he keeps getting up so you as a viewer like what the hell is going on what the hell that's when you get the first famous line

of come with me if you want to live right which becomes a runner just every movie also takes that away yes you've got me burning you've got me burning you've got me burning in the world or green

You've got me burning You've got me burning You've got me burning You're going to me One thing I picked up this time I actually did pick up something new here Which happens later But he gets shot a ton in this movie, obviously

Arnold does And when he's at the slum Rat House he's staying at The landlord or the janitor said it smells like a dead rat in there. And so is he decaying? Like, is his skin, yeah. Yeah, rotting, which is kind of gross as I think about it.

I think that's the concept because when when Kyle sits down Sarah and explains the plot of the movie. And, you know, honestly, she's fairly receptive. Like, all she does is bite him. Like, I think that's receptive, given the story she sees spinning. Yeah. But he says that the flesh is grown for the robots. And he says it does everything. It sweats.

But he has sweat and bad breath, but like the hair grows, he says, which I think is key to future films. Because future films play into that and speculate that if the robot were to just hang around for a long time, the skin would age. And that's why you get old Terminator's in creature movies. But it's like, oh, this Terminator has been operating for 30 years. So, yeah, it looks old now. That's why the robot's old. Cheaper than de-aging. Yeah.

So, works out. And more convincing. Well, yeah, that's true, yes. But, yeah, James, in that scene, you actually, like, there's flies. There are flies gathering on the puppet's head. So, like, it's clearly meant to show you that the Terminator, like, you know, its flesh is still there. It's serving a purpose to, like, shoe Normies away.

But it doesn't really care at this point, you know. It's so close to its mission. It's so close. Yeah, and as the film progresses, like, he looks gnarly or gnarlyer, and they start to rely on that puppet head a little too much. but I think that's the only effect that hasn't aged well is the puppet head. But it's so good. It's such a good puppet. It's like this year, this year, my children watch the movie this year. They came to, I didn't do it. I didn't force on them. They came to me. Like, I want to watch Terminator. I was like, okay, kids, let's do it. And they got really freaked out by the scene where he's operating on himself. Because you have that scene where it's like a hand that's moving hand. But you see like the skin and the moving parts inside the arm. And it's pretty gross. And I'm like, like, okay, kids, don't worry, it's just a puppet.

But they were like, oh, geez. Like, they can, you know, they're, they've seen like realistic special effects at this point. You know, they've seen grosser stuff in movies and in video games. But still, those puppets, they, they intimidate, you know. There's something different about practical effects versus CGI. It just has, it has a, an authenticity that can be, when it's done well, it can be very unsettling. Yeah. It also helps.

It helps that Arnold Schwarzenegger's head. kind of always looks like a puppet. It just always does us, you know? I think C.G.I. Gore can work really good when it is combined with practical effects, and sometimes you don't even notice it. But the visceralness of actual physical things, unless the CGI is to the point where you think it's still real, which we all have a confirmation bias against CGI. Like, we don't notice the good CGI. We don't notice the good de-aging.

Yes. Because most film, almost every made's a studio film has the aging in it now. You just don't see it because it's just to hide small things. But like real gore, physical, visceral gore looks better than CGI gore usually because it has a weight to it. But I understand why modern films don't do it, especially of blood, because if you're going to have blood packs, you have to clean the set after every take. So it just, it just makes sense to use CGI blood, CGI gore. but you lose the hominess

of actual blood it's just not the same actual corn syrup who are the filmmakers who are the filmmakers out there who are going to have an actor

carve their own eyeball out and have it drop into the sink you know Takashi Mike that's true yeah

there's that new slasher film I forgot it's all like fun perspective of the killer I forgot oh yes

I just said recently in a violent nature in a violent nature that guy would because that movie's that movie's

It's got some extreme gore in it, but it's also clearly using, it's using practical puppets with some computer effects that make things, like, make the impossible possible. Like, you can see someone clearly moving until, like, they get crushed by a rock. And it's like, it's all one take because it's a special effect, but you can still see that they had like puppets and stuff. And, you know, there's some, believe me, there's puppets in that movie. There's some puppets in that movie. But going back to the violence in this movie, we did skip over the police shootout, which I think is the. probably in terms of like gunplay action, the set piece of the film and where he delivers the line.

Right. Yeah. And it's a big thing because I would say for a good chunk of the movie, Kyle and Sarah, you know, once she understands and she believes him, she is on board and she accepts him, she accepts him, she accepts on his word. But when they get caught by the cops, the cops are like this dude's crazy. And the cops give Sarah every excuse in the book, like, oh, that guy, he was wearing bullper vest. And she's like, but he punched through a window.

It's like, oh, yeah, PCP, you know? Like, go back to our narc episode. Like, in the 80s, everyone was obsessed with PCP and believed that you had superpowers when you did a PCP. Like, that's just a thing they did. So. It's like, Angel Dustin, that's a TV movie about PCP. Yeah.

But it's like, so they're making excuses. They're making excuses. They are of the opinion that whoever this guy is, he's not going to come to the police station because it's full of cops and the cops all have guns. But that's exactly what he does. He showed up to the police station. He asked the desk clerk, is Sarah Connor here? Desclerc is like, uh, yeah, but don't come in.

And he's like, I'll be back. And he comes back with a car, drives over desk clerk. Again, good puppet. And then just shoots every cop he can find in the building. Does not stop shooting. They shoot him. He doesn't care because he's a Terminator. It does not matter.

He does not stop. He can't be bargaining with. He got to be reason with, you know, all the lines. You know, it's just, and that's it. And they only get away By sheer look do they get away I forget how many cops They mention how many cops

He killed in T2 And it's a lot of cops Like he He des If that was If it was the real world That would be like A nationwide tragedy story

For like forever Yeah To the cop 9-11 Yes Eric Adams Get so much funding Oh God Speaking of timely

Jesus Christ Oh Jesus Christ The hell with that guy And then like The film The film does have a weird structure in that like so there's a lot of buildup and then it's accent scene respite accent scene respite sex scene accent like once they leave like it's it moves at a really good pace and it's

keeps a very small world like once once they leave the police station there aren't many other actors in the movie you know which also works to keep the budget down and works to you can establish the relationship between Reese and Sarah much better, you know? I think the future flashback sequences are there to help make sure the audience doesn't knot off or get, like, if people are there for action, I'd be like, okay, let's make sure, let's give him a couple scenes here with like some laser beams and some, you know, grenades and stuff. Yeah.

Because you, like, those scenes don't really advance the plot. I mean, I guess they give you a peek into Kyle's past, like, so you know he's tortured. But, like, I feel like Michael Bean's sort of haunted expression and all the makeup they put, all the scars they put in his body, I feel like that does, that does a pretty good job of it. But yeah, having him have a, you know, wake up from a living nightmare where he saw soldiers get exploded by laser beams or, you know, Franco Columbo broke into their, their hidey hole and started shooting them with a machine gun, and he had scary red eyes. That does say a lot.

And also, the fact that you see that scene where Kyle has a picture of Sarah and he's staring at the picture, and then he loses the picture in the fire, sets up nicely the later scene where he meets Sarah, and he's like, I came across time for you, Sarah. I'm in love with you, and then they, they bone. You know, he came, he came across time. Okay. Two things, two things. One, I like that, like Sarah's like, I was dreaming about dogs.

Like, what are you, 12? Like, I like ponies. And I am impressed that Kyle Reese with a bold in him still manages to have a moment with Sarah Connor. that's that's dedication yeah he's already been shot he's already been shot at this point in the movie it's lonely in the future is the problem like well this is my one this is my one shot literally he made it count because uh yeah it isn't they don't they don't sit they don't say it but yeah he's he's a virgin yeah they make it pretty clear she asked him a girls he's like no not even once

they're good soldiers yeah in the future we got we don't got time for that shit in the future yeah um so it and i think the the flashbacks help flesh out his character and it makes that a little less forced i still think the idea of spending the not having time for a romantic interlude while a terminator is out to kill you is a little not realistic but it's a movie so and it has to happen for john to exist so yeah that's the kind of the the great part of the movie is that i feel like you get these actions up and you get the you know Get the big finale where they, you know, she gives away a position again because Terminator is clever. It goes, it basically, it kills Sarah's mother and waits for her to call her and then answers the phone as her mother and it's like,

Ma, Sarah, where are you? And then she tells her about where she is again, sorry. You have to admit, though, that's a hell of a pickup line. Hey, baby, want to close the time loop? Yeah. In my pants. But they're both loops. That's what's amazing.

And it's like this move, it's the film, they're deleted scenes that. actually explained this explicitly, but they were cut. And it becomes canon and T2. But this movie, as written, makes both stories loops. John is there because Kyle Ruiz goes back in time and father's his father's his own leader. The Terminator exists because the Terminator came back from the future and was destroyed in this computer factory and they found the pieces and they decided, oh boy, this is really cool. Let's build a robot. And if you watch it on Blu-ray or iTunes. You'll see the cutscenes. Like, this is, this is all shot. They just didn't use it because frankly, Cameron, Cameron didn't like it. He also didn't like the fact that the, um, the guys who

played the computer factory guys were apparently not actors. They were like someone's friend. And he just didn't like with the performance. So like he cut it, like, almost out of spite. But it also like, it's great. It's good. It's better without it. It's a better ending. It's a better ending. It's a better end. It's a better. It's a better. And it's a way better. And also, you get to see him take the picture. The kid takes the picture. It's like, oh, there's a picture we saw earlier. Another loop.

Another loop is closed. It's perfect. When do you think Sarah found out her mom was dead? Because, I mean, sure. Was that like the next day? It's like, well, I'm alive. Everything's okay. Well, fuck.

Like, it's just the disaster. She read the obits the week later. Probably. Or she tried to go home again and no one answered, you know. But the movie does set up. Like, it cuts out all that set up. But it does set up the future's not set. Yes.

He says that line. He says it explicitly. Actually, when he first meets her, he's actually very open about it. She's like, you're from the future? He's like, one possible future. I don't know. He's like, he admits it's like he doesn't really know how it works. Yeah.

And that's kind of integral because what's going to happen is this movie does make a lot of money and they decide to make more movies. But like, the way this story is told, it is a closed loop. It's done. So for any of the movie to exist. The own bootstrap paradox. Yeah. For any of the movies to exist, they have to make.

basically retcon this movie a little bit. And each future sequel retcons more and more stuff. And I would say, depending on your patience for retconning, that will affect how much you're willing to accept the future sequels. Because all of them change. Even T2 makes changes. You know what I mean? T2 hyper ages the kid, the starters. Like, he's too old. But I'm just saying, this movie establishes that Kyle Reese, when he goes through time, they blow up the time machine so no one else comes through. Like the plot is, this is it. There's him and there's me and that's it.

But every other movie's like, well, we found a backup time machine. We sent another Terminator. We sent it to the Terminator, but not at the same time. We sent it 10 years later for some reason. I don't know. I mean, you know how many weapon capsules Dr. Light left for X in the future? And always, always in the areas where the replicants were going to take over and go Maverick.

So, you know, let's just keep bringing Mega Man in here. How plausible is all of this? And hey, once you build a time machine, you don't have enough of, time. Yeah, that's true. So there you go. Yeah, it's, I think they try to explain it in, like, records of blurry. So they don't know. So, like, maybe if they can't find Sarah Connor before she has the kid,

maybe it's easier to find John Connor as he's alive, you know? it's it's they try to they do retcon i feel the retconning later i i haven't seen all the sequels but the retconning does get a little silly as it goes on yeah it goes from wibbly wobbly to timey why me i believe that's a good quote okay Thank you. I'm going to be. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm going to go. Oh! Oh! I don't know. Well, honestly, I think the sequels deserve their own episode, especially T2, because T2 had a lot of video games going on. But let's focus our attention right now on the video game adaptations of the Terminator. By which I mean, the video games that are based on the Terminator, not video games with a Terminator,

because of a lot of those, honestly. You know, once this franchise took off, a lot of people decided. they would have a Terminator in a video game. Maybe you'd fight Robocop for some reason. You know, it's like, so I'm talking, what we want to focus today on are video games that are based upon the Terminator. And spoiler alert, none of them came out in the 80s. They're all from the 90s.

Yeah, honestly, no one ever topped Contra 3's Terminator, even though that was off-brand. It's just, it's hard to beat that one. Yeah, we should, we should also say that out loud. Like, honestly, I would say the Terminator is right up there with, like, HR Gigger's alien as far as like a creature design that Japanese artists fully embraced as their own like oh we own this now. Darth Vader also yeah

yeah Darth Vader Konami embraced aliens and Terminator Capcom embraced fruits of fire and never the Twain sell meat. So there were two attempts to terminate video games in the 80s and neither

one worked out. One was a Danish studio called Robetech R-O-B-T-E-K but Apparently, as soon as they got the deal, they went out of business, so no game from them. More curious is the case of Sunsoft, Sunsoft got a deal and announced the Terminator. Like, it was announced. There's a trailer for it on the internet. I'm told it to Nintendo Power somewhere, but never made the game because the game they made became Journey to Silius.

Which is still very much a Terminator game with the serial numbers rubbed off. Yeah, people speculate that the game they made was two. too dissimilar to Terminator, and that's why they lost the license. I don't know about that, but it certainly got robots in the future in it, so it could be Terminator. I do like the Japanese name is Rough World. It is a rough world, yeah. Is that game any good? Yeah, it's fine.

It's Cromulant. It's Sunsoft from the late 80s, early 90s, so good quality stuff there, yeah. Yeah, I'm looking at it. I'm sure I've played it, but I just don't remember. Aside from Festers' quest, Sunsoft didn't really disappoint in that era. Yeah, that's a good point. And, hey, Fester Squet still has great music. It does.

It has its appeal. It just should have been the other parts of Blastermastermaster, not the top-down sections, the cool jumping tank sections. I don't know why Fester would be driving a jumping tank, but it's a video game. You can make it work. Hey, they're kooky. They're creepy. It's fine. So the first game that did come out is, my opinion, the most interesting one.

And it showed up in 1991, all in your Dawson. systems, your DOS boxes, if you will. And it was developed and published by Bethesda. Yes, that's Bethesda. Yeah. The Bethesda that is still around today making very expensive video games. That was them in 1991. They made The Terminator.

And I got to say, for 1991, this is ambitious as hell. It's incredible. It is a first-person open-world video game. You get to choose. You can either play The Terminator or you can play Kyle Reese. and whoever you choose, obviously your mission is to find Sarah Connor and deal with the other guy as best you can. But, like, the map is apparently based on a real section of L.A. Like, they didn't get all the buildings right, but, like, the street structure is apparently very close.

They threw in landmarks like Dodger Stadium, and you're going around town, you're trying to find your objective. There's people running around. There's cops. There's cars you can steal. There are banks you can rob. You know, when you look it up on your... YouTube, one of the top comments called the Grand Thift Terminator, and it's not that

far off. It's kind of funny. Yeah, I watched some video of it. Unfortunately, like, the first result, the guy puts in sound effects that aren't in the game. But it's interesting. It looks like the kind of game that now I would not know what to do. It's so arcane.

Even critics at the time. Even people at the time said, how do I even play this game? You have to push so many buttons to, like, even move around. Like, again, it's 1991 on a DOS machine. it's going to be hard to understand you're going to have to use a lot of different keys like all the keys probably do different functions

like it's complicated at hell and of course also it's not 1091 so like the frame rate is let's face it ass it's just ass it is yeah I feel like if they really wanted to go with the theme they should have given you like a key cheats card

but instead of doing it as a card do it as a page of a phone book that you could tear out and use it for reference that would have been really cool but yeah I've never actually played this game, but it's one that I've learned about from Retronuts back in the one-up days of the show. We had a guest on who was talking about it, and I thought, that sounds so cool. But sometimes I will take information and file it away and do nothing with it.

And this is one of those cases where I'm like, what a neat idea. I'm not going to go to the trouble of actually playing it. You know, Jeremy, you mentioned the phone book. That's funny because there is a phone book in the game, like a yellow pages, where you can look up stuff. Yeah. But I'm thinking you can look up stuff in the video in the video game yellow pages and like learn where things are at like locations you can visit on the map because like the map has a coordinate like X and Y things. So it's an incredibly deep game that's absolutely not like any of the games we're going to see based on Terminator. No, no.

Everyone else is going to say, all right, let's give the player a little guy to run around and jump and shoot things. Like that's going to be their other game. All the other games are going to be like that. Yes. So they pretty much built on this for Elder Scrolls, right? Like, they took this concept and said, what if we did fantasy? I mean, I think there's a lineage there. Honestly, if you look at the Terminator, look at the games that Bethesda makes today,

I feel like you can connect the dots, you know? Oh, yeah, definitely, yeah. And I still don't want to play them. But it's definitely, and like you talk about the phone book thing, I bet it's one of those games that, like, that stuff's not randomized. so you get the phone book in one play-through and then you remember if you're smart you write that down

and then when you play it again the next time you don't have to look for the phone book you just go to those places to get that stuff it's the kind of game that to beat it probably only takes like half an hour if you know what you're doing but the know what you're doing part takes days probably I mean that was that was the era certainly

yeah a lot of games from that era were like that for sure yeah yeah and if those don't and when you add on the technical limitations It's almost impossible to play now, so it's a shame. So next step was The Terminator for basically every Sega system. There was a Master System version, there was a Mega Drive Genesis version, and there was a Game Gear version. I would say based on my analysis, the 16-bit game looks like the most playable, even though the games are all very similar. But I could also certainly shout out our friend Stuart Chip, who called the Game Gear version one of the least enjoyable Game Gear games ever.

made. Wow. Saying something. Yeah. That's really... Stewart played a lot of Game Gear games and wrote about them all, and he had nothing but bad things to say about the Terminator. I started playing Game Gear games while ago, and I quit, so I can only imagine how bad

this one is if it's one of the worst. Yeah. But all three of these versions are... Come to us from Probe. Probe, certainly spent a lot of time making licensed games at the time, and it's kind of what you expect from a license game of that era. You control Kyle Reese, you're a little guy, you're running around. I think what's interesting, though, at least from the start, you start off, and your main weapon is a hang grenade.

Yes. And you're in the future, and you're fighting the robots in the future with the hang grenade. Oh, my God, it's Atlantis donazzo, but as the Terminator. So I played, I played the, of these ones, I played the Dennisus one recently. Okay. It controls fine. Yeah. It has that problem of a lot of games of this era, of it has the, like,

the animation priority a little bit too much. So, like, the animation for throwing the grenade is so long. And every time you want to shoot someone when you get the gun, you have to take the gun out. And so you have to keep that in mind. I do like, the opening stage is interesting. You have to get into the base, plant the bomb, get out, and jump into the thing. You kill a lot of cops later on.

Very strange. The music's okay. But from what I can tell you, have one life and if you have a life bar but you I think you only have one life and if you die fuck you um start over so it's 1999 it's still very much like you know it's it's not divorced from the arcade era it's like here's your here's your game learn to play game or you cannot play you cannot finish game I made it to

tech noir I made her to the stage after tech no one I think the police station and it's perfectly as licensed games from the early 90s go it's fine but it's not good I regret not discovering this game back in the day because I really enjoyed probes take on Alien 3 which came out like two years later

and it has very much the same feel and the same dynamic as this game like this really you know this feels like a step toward Alien 3 so I think I would have enjoyed it And it's all Virgin games, right?

The company. Virgin published a lot of them. Yeah, yeah. I know they didn't make it, but for some reason, when I see that Virgin logo, I have a vibe in my head. And they fit it, for sure. It's better than animation. A lot of over animation, way too big a world, good music. Yeah, it's better than the Ness one.

Well, one of the things that's interesting about this game is that, you know, it gives, obviously, it inflates the future section. a little bit because they want to have you, they want to give you time to, like, run around and shoot robots. But once you get to the past, as James mentioned, you're killing a lot of people, especially cops.

Some of them are punks, but mostly you're shooting a lot of cops, as Kyle Reese. Even when you escape from the police station, you escape by killing all the cops on your way out. That's not how it works in the movie. They just run away.

But in the game, well, you shoot a lot of cops. And then they give you a big finale at the computer factory where you actually see, you actually, you fight the Terminator. you have to like explode it enough and then you get it in the press and you crush it

and then a drug press just like the movie but it's funny because you know as the movie ends Reese is dead Sarah pushes the button she gets to say you're a Terminator you know like she gets to say it but in this video game and indeed most of these video games you play as Kyle

Reese so even though you win the game as Kyle Reese the game ends and the text is like Rees was dead but Sarah lived on and it's like I thought he was fine he was we were just playing as Rees? What happened? Did he die of old age? Rees died on a way to on the way to his home planet. Yeah. It's very incongruous with the actual the actual bits of screen. It's like one of those scripted RPG battles where you

beat a boss and then it cuts to a cutscene and he's like, okay, well now I'm going to kill you. I'll show you my true power. It's that kind of crap. Yeah, I guess when they turn the press, maybe some shrapnel killed Reese and we just didn't see it. But yes, James, as you mentioned, that same year, but yes, James, as you mentioned, that same year, there was a Terminator game for the NES. However, this was not from Probe. This is a different game entirely. It's from radical entertainment.

And I would argue this one focuses even more on platforming, and that there's a lot more, like, jumping on narrow things. And also, they love drippy drops. Like, every stage in this game has little drippy drops falling down. Like, Jeremy mentioned Mega Man 2. Like, imagine that in every stage. I gave this a go. The music is horrendous in the first stage.

It's just, like, two notes. Yeah. It's horrendous. The control is terrible. You're fighting slimes. Yes. You're in a sewer. It reminded me of total recall, the video game.

Like, it's... It has that same look, like the character sprites. They've got that kind of chunky, like, really... There's a style to it, and it's really offensive. And it... Or the dirty hairy video game. It kind of looks like that, too, which is also terrible. And I'm looking at...

Radical Entertainment's lineup now and they still exist I think so yeah they're owned by activism apparently they're probably just making call of duty stuff now

they support they're an activism support studio so yes you're correct but in the early 90s they were a licensing house it looks like they made Battle of Olympus which I recall

liking they did not make Battle of Olympus they ported it to Game Boy oh they ported it to Gameboy which is which is rough. And I asked the creator of Battle of Olympus about that

like when I talked to him 10 years ago and he was like, I had no idea of this existed. What is this? What is this thing you're telling me about? Okay. That makes substantially more sense because when I look at every other game they made them on that time, but it's all garbage. Wayne's World, Bebebe's Kids. Second, Bebeye's Kids are fun's on this episode.

Yeah, wow. It's really... The Beavis and Burhead Genesis game. That was bad, right? I'll have to have Bob Mackey. Bob would know that one. And a lot of not mad in football games. So, and yeah, you got to eat. But yeah, this NES game, yeah, there's a lot of platforming. There's driving sequences where you've got to run away from the Terminator.

There's chases. When you escape the police station, it's one of those games where everything's trying to kill you. Even the electrical outfits are shooting lightning at you. It's just like, I get what they're trying to do, but I feel like the audience is just, I don't know. I think the audience has got to be too exhausted by this point to enjoy the game. If everything's trying to kill you. Come on. Yeah.

And a killer robot? Mm-hmm. Also, funny, you never even see Sarah Connor this time. It's just about Kyle in Terminator. You don't even see her. She's like... Well, she's absent. I mean...

Yeah, you have to rescue her from the castle at the end, obviously. Yeah, the Terminator Castle. Yeah, just a giant skull. And she gives you a kiss. Mm-hmm. So things get a little more thing in 193. We get two more games in 1923, both on Newer! systems both from different companies. So Virgin Games develops the Terminator for Sega CD. And while I would

say thematically, it's very similar to the other Sega games. This is in fact an original game. It's not a port. It's a different game. But it has a lot in common. There's a lot of future stuff. There's a lot of running around shooting people in 1984. But it's Sega CD. So in between every level, you get FMV clips of the movie to show you where you are in the movie. You know, and they're very small, That's exactly what the thing is he did. And it's kind of funny because, first of all, when you watch the opening credits, there's good old Tommy Tullerico telling you he did all the music. But the music is actually kind of...

The music's actually kind of good. I don't know if it's on brand for the game, but it's pretty good music. The music was... I didn't know it was Tommy. I watched a play-through of this, and I skimbed it. And I didn't know he did it and talked it up later. And, yeah, sir, not the... Whatever.

It's really good. like um some of it feels like full on like old school like pc midi music um some of it uses electric guitar and like actual instruments they sample the movie um it doesn't really fit the game but i want to buy i'm sure it's redbrook audio and so because when the song ends is a long there's a long pause and it starts again i'm sure it's just playing the song off the CD so i would love to buy the game rip the soundtrack it was really good I was and then I found out who it was I was angry you know but hey

there are worse people who make better music so whatever but that's true that's true yeah he's not

aero Clapton so no the game looks good like it the level design looked better than the other ones

it had some interesting ideas good tech noir you can suit the spotlights in the club and they fall on people oh like elevator action

yeah yeah just like elevator also great soundtrack. Yeah, I do want to try that one, actually. It looked much better. The only downside was when I was watching it, the gun sounds were omnipresent and very high in the mix, which made it even kind of, and the music's so good, you're like, stop it. It's like the Japanese version of Strider, where Strider just won't shut up. Shing, yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, I think they got some notes, because in this version of the game, Kyle Reese doesn't go around shooting cops

anymore. Every stage just has them shooting generic like tough guy punks. Even inside the police station, when you escape the police station, it's full of punks. They guess they broke out of jail. They took over. They took over. Yeah. And also half the games in the future. Yeah, they put a lot more time in the future. A much more time in the future. A lot of muscle-bound terminators you kill. They actually have you, they actually have a boss fight against a terminator in the time to place a chamber. So I guess like you to destroy the terminator to travel back in time, I guess. And likewise, when you get to the final, final stage where you're in the, the robot factory, all of a sudden there's

like other killer robots and like guns shooting you inside the factory, you know? It's impressive, though. They do put Sarah Connor in the game and they let her push the button to crush the Terminator this time. You see her. Like, she gets an animated sprite and she pushes the button. I think that was nice. But Kyle still looks fine.

He seems okay. He seems okay. He's just chilling whilst he does it. But no, see he died on his home planet. Yeah. I do want to try this one. It looks better. And that same year, we got the Terminator for Super Nintendo, and this one is, again, it's a different game entirely, and it's more action-focused, but they got, you, again, they're trying the kitchen stick again, like there's running games, and there's driving parts. I thought it's impressive that this is the only one I found that actually shows Reese die when he bombs the Terminator. He puts a bomb at the Terminator, and he blows up the Terminator, and he dies.

However, they rewrite the end of the movie, because in this case, he blows up. with the robot, and the robot is gone, and that's it. So there is no hydraulic press. So Sarah didn't do anything. Still the princess. This one, um, this one looks like it really wants to be turrican, turmican. Is that what it's called? Termican.

Um, but it's more, but it looks like, it looks more like turdican. Um, it's, which is not, not like a turducken. Uh, it looks, okay, so you know, I'm going to bring, bringing Mega Man into this again. You know the high tech expressions, DOS version of Mega Man? It looks like that team tried to make a Turrican clone. Oh, dear. And this is what they ended up with. It just feels stiff and cheap and awkward, but it's like, no, no, we're aiming toward

something better. There's an aspiration here that we can't possibly meet. But we're trying, darn it. Yeah, I didn't get to see any footage of this one. I'm sure it's not great. I'm just going to spitball, you know, again, early 90s license game. Yeah, looking at this sort of this collection of games, I would say, like, either the Genesis or the Sega City one looks like the most entertaining, but the early probably plays like crap, Bethesda one seems like the most ambitious and interesting. But I'm not surprised that so many of them just decided to go with a more tried and true formula of running around, jumping and shooting things, and it doesn't matter what you're shooting.

You know, cops, punks, robots, electrical outlets, doesn't matter. drippy drops I just Why is that game so wet Why is it so wet in the NES game There was a plumbing crisis In the early 90s People don't talk about it

That's why Mario's around That's where plumbers Don't Wear Ties came from It was actually created As a solution To the plumbing crisis We've referenced like three different Recent Retron episodes

All in a row Go seek them out listeners They're all good But, yes, Terminator made a lot of the box office, pretty good for a small film. It eventually earned $78 million. And like a lot of people, it really launched, you know, Cameron. Cameron did this. He had his name on Rambo First Blood Part 2, which made a lot of money.

We can argue it's not a great movie, but it made a lot of money. And then he did aliens, which made a lot of money and is a great movie. So he was kind of set from that point on. And it's funny that his next movie was a weird undersea adventure. But still. One thing I want to point on about the box office. Yes. So younger people might not realize this, that like, this movie played in theaters for 61 weeks.

Yeah. That's how it was back then. And so, and it opened, it was really fortuitous opening. It opened at the end of October and it was horror adjacent. So that helped it. It was number one with four million, this is all box office mojo stats. Yeah. It opened it number one with $4,020,000.

Number two, with only $11,000 difference was Tara in the Isles, which is a clip show movie with horror movie footage. What? Yeah, that's all it is. It's just with Donald Pleasence and Nancy Allen. I do like Nancy Allen. I like Notting. I'm glad they got paid, yeah.

And then number three, Diamond, body double. Oh, that's a good movie. And then the next week, nothing came out. Literally no major. Killing Fields played in one theater. That's the only release. So it had its run of the theater for a few weeks. weeks and then it was it would stick around in the top five like you know missing an

accent beat it for a week oh god you devil beat it for a week but it was it was I know and it it stuck around until Beverly Hills Cop came out and then Beverly Hills Cop was number one I think for 20 weeks yeah that was a juggerna uh Beverly Hills Cop had that had that record until Titanic so yeah so but even then it was in the top 10 top 20 for most of the year movies used to have long tails. They didn't, you didn't have the home video market and streaming and so forth. Not like it is now. That was the way you went to see it.

You went to the second run theater and watched it for 50 cents. Yep, that's how I saw Bill and Ted, too. Yeah. Yeah, I do think it's funny that we should have body double right there because James and I podcasted about body double recently on his podcast, Cinema Oblivia. And guess what? That's a Brian Napola movie who eventually married Gayle and Hurd. So it's all symmetry here.

it's all part of the family the really weird complicated Christmas tree or Christmas card family yeah but yeah it took a few years because yeah

Cameron would build up his reputation he would make bigger and you know not necessarily better but certainly higher profile films and he wouldn't come back

to Terminator until the 90s where it would be a very different sequel even though thematically it's kind of the same story and that sort of turns the Terminator

into sort of this bulk almost too big to fail franchise in that people keep make Terminator movies, and when they don't perform as well as they expected, they go back to the drawing board and make a new Terminator movie and ignore the last one, which is why each movie these days tends to rewrite the previous films, and you get really strange results that it's like, so there almost is no continuity anymore because what is continuity when every single movie features people traveling back in time

to change the past, in some way? And I'm sure you'll do a whole episode on T2 at some point. Yes, we have to. That has its own games. Talking about that. But I'd never seen T3 or Salvation. I would deliver my opinion. Here's my opinion as a Terminator liker.

I would say all the Terminator movies have their merits, except for me, I find nothing of merit in salvation, because that's the one movie they decided to set entirely in the future during future war. And to me, that's the most boring part because. Well, then what are we doing then? It's all future war? It's all robots and lasers? Okay. It's like when they made a Matrix movie and it all took place in the real world. Well, okay.

I kind of like that one, but okay, but still. I have not seen salvation. Like I said, I would say that Terminator Genesis is, without question, bottom five big budget films I've ever seen in my entire life. it is absolutely it is insulting to the audience it is it's right up there with that reboot of the predator they did

which was also just infuriatingly horrible it's almost the same year isn't it maybe maybe one year apart pretty close that's a little bit later because that came out when I was in Japan I know but the both I mean it was Terminator is an atrosis film the person they got to play Sarah Kana

couldn't do it she's too sees you know not not strong enough like and it has a good idea of rebooting it of like okay there were more people coming in the past and it has the idea of okay terminator you wait here for 20 years will come back and get you that's a cool and now you're old but it was just it I stole that from chrono trigger though oh okay you whoa boom mind blown um yeah it's the robo it's the robo side quest yeah and um it was horrible and it was horrible and what One thing that really pisses me off about Terminator Genesis is that it was so bad.

That's probably why Dark Fate didn't do well. And Dark Fate was really good. Yes. Like, Dark Fate was fantastic. It had problems a little bit, but it's a solid three and a half four-star film. Really well done. It's great to see Linda Hamilton in and again. Also, that movie had a weird right-wing, you know, in-cell reaction because of all the, oh, no, the girl of Terminator.

I'm making a jerk off most of it. but it was really good I really liked that movie I wish they would have would have been able to continue that story unfortunately it bombed

Yes but even though some of these movies didn't perform well I personally I'm a Genesis defender in that I recognize it as stupid and I

I like it for stupidity personally but these movies keep coming there's been TV shows Fox had a show that was apparently well received but canceled

to the Sarah Connor Chronicles That's hard to say. It's real rural, jewelry energy. Yeah, it was well as Seed and did okay, but it cost a lot of money.

Yes. It also has Shirley Mason from garbage in it. Sillie Manson from Garbage as a Terminator. Oh, good for her. Wow. There was a Machima series around the same time

that was based on a tie-in game using like computer graphics. This year, 2024, as we're recording this, there was an anime that came out on Netflix. I don't think anyone saw it. I saw it. It's called Terminator Zero.

And it's entirely set in Japan on Judgment Day. So, like, it's 1997, the bombs are falling, and here we are in Japan. Some subtext of that. When does Rao sew up? No, it's the thing. Japan survives Judgment Day. That's what happens.

It's a weird story. It's different. It's actually kind of, it's almost cerebral times. I mean, I'll give a credit, but like, they want you to see, they want you to tune in to see the robots fight, but like, they are trying to say something. I'll give him credit. An attempt was made. I don't know if I love it, but...

Terminator in the shell. Kind of a cerebral Terminator take. Probably less boobage. But, yeah, like this... I feel like the Terminator, because of its long tail, because everyone loves killer robots, because of its legacy at this point, I don't think they'll ever stop making Terminator stuff.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Maybe the movie, Maybe the movies are going to hold for a while because the recent film didn't do too well. But I feel like this story is always going to have legs because so much of it is, you know, holds such a wide appeal. I think it's harder to keep making new ones because at some point you have to keep rebooting or they should just start over at a certain point. I think that'd be easier. Unlike predator and alien, when you can just make another movie set in that world, no problem.

Just completely ignore the other films. just have another alien, have another predator. It's a little bit harder of Terminator because he has to have a purpose, the purpose to kill Sarah Connor or to kill John Connor. And you can only tell that story so many times until you have to

just eventually reboot it and start over from scratch. Which is what's funny about Genesis to me, because Genesis is a reboot and a sequel and a requal. It's all at the same time. And it's shit. It's four things at once. I'm sorry. I have such, I have a visceral,

visceral reaction to that film. You hated it. I laughed. I saw it in the movie theater. I just laughed. I was like, look at him. Look at Arnold Schwarzeneger flying through the air like a wrecking ball. I watched on a plane and was angry. And also, Guy Courtney is no, no Michael Bean. No. That guy, yeah. That guy is not good in the role. No, he's terrible. Anyway, I'm done. Okay. And that's kind of the story of the Terminator, I would say.

This is basically the end of the podcast here. I think, I don't want to overset my bounds, but I feel like we're all pretty positive on this film. Pretty good? I mean, yeah, it's one of the great. One of the greatest films of the eight. One of the greatest action films of all time. It's pretty good.

I give it two thumbs up, even though we're only allowed one. I am Siskel and over. Thank you. No, no, that's good, Jeremy. It's the one thumb. The one thumb. But yeah, and actually, James, you're right to mention it. It is kind of horror adjustment.

It's got some slasher energy, you know. Arnold is a stalking killer. Yeah, especially at the end, once it becomes a full-on robot. Yeah. We didn't talk about that. whole sequence, the whole safe sequence at the end and A plus projection scenes and everything. Like

the stop motion robot, they do such a good job of filming it even though it has no mass and momentum. It's intimidating as fuck. It really reminds me of the Jason and the organized skeleton fight. Yeah. The way they use stop motion now. Michael Bean is fighting with like a pipe

and he's hitting it in the head back and forth and then it just sort of backhands him with this big animation and it looks fantastic. It looks like it really hurts. Yeah, it's a fantastic sequence. Yeah, and that's, I think, why the film, you know, the film continues to get new fans and because it just holds up so well compared to a lot of other sci-fi and accent from that era. There's nothing problematic about it, for starters. It's a simple story.

It's well-made. It looks great. And the action is still exciting. And you can't say that about a lot of films from the era. So, you know, all-time banger. Yeah, I mean, I think. so many action and sci-fi and fantasy films of the era had a pretty flimsy, unconvincing look even back then, or they just had terrible acting or terrible plotting and pacing and

dialogue and editing. Things like Kroll and Legend. I was going to name Legend. I was going to name Legend. Those movies were, those were kind of the standard. And Terminator really was a step or two above those movies like it's up there with the better Star Trek movies and Star Wars and things like that even though it was made on a much smaller budget and without the name recognition so it has that kind of like

swinging for the fences like a big blockbuster movie with with you know a modest budget and I do not to keep going but I do think one one of the thing about Terminator is that it takes a lot of sci-fi stuff and dumbs it down in a way that's like Like, it's an action movie first, you know, that happens to be sci-fi. And a lot like aliens, alien, it focuses on the grunts.

It's not about, you know, the captain of the spaceship or anything. Reese is a, it's a, just a grunt. He's a foot soldier. And I think that also. Sarah's a waitress. Yeah, Sarah's a waitress. It's this normal, normal-ass people in a messed up sci-fi situation. All right.

Well, we have no time to place some device, so we better wrap things up here before we get too long in the tooth. so let's go around and let's have everyone tell us where they can find us around the internet because this has been an episode of Retronauts Thank you very much for listening to Retronauts we really appreciate it If you listen to this episode for free Thank you very much for listening to Retronauts

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We appreciate it. We appreciate you supporting us. We love to talk about all these things. Science fiction, long-tail, pop culture, and, of course, how it applies to video games, especially old video games. That's our kind of our bag, baby. James, why don't you go first? Because you're taller than me. Yes, I am.

All of you. You can find me towering in Tokyo, for starters. Also, I'm everywhere on the Internet as Lost Turntable, and I have my movie podcasts. Cinema Oblivia where I talk about old movies and such. And I want to plug someone else really quick. I recently recorded an episode for another podcast called Calibur 9 from Out of Space, which is a podcast where I talk about two old genre films. And I want an episode talking about Miami Connection and Ninja Terminator, which Jeremy, if you were, the intersection of ninjas and Steve Hillage meet. Two things

I would Two tastes I would not think to combine Are they great together? Ninja Terminator is a fantastic mess of a film The whole film uses Stolen Music And somebody who worked on that movie Really liked Green by Steve Hillage

So like half the soundtrack of Steve Hill is And the other half is anime It's a great bad movie But yeah I'm on that one check that out And I'm around And then lost turn table on the internet That's me Yes

I can voucher cinema oblivia it's a very good podcast. I've been a guest several times. Yes, I have. Jeremy, how about you? You can find me on Blue Sky as Jay Parrish. You can find me at Limited Run Games doing stuff for games that, unfortunately, I can't like really do a good job of promoting because if the things that I'm doing are available, then it's, you know, it's all pre-sell. It's hard to explain. Anyway, the point is, I'm there.

And also you can find me on my YouTube channel. And I will say that very recently, as of actually today, I published a video that has another robot-based time loop where they have to wait in time for everything to catch up with a robot who's stuck in the past, an episode of Star Trek called Times Arrow. That was not the topic of the video. But I encourage you to go watch all of my videos. videos until you find this amazing treasure that is shockingly relevant to this discussion in

this podcast. It's almost like destiny, like fate, like a dark fate. You know, Jeremy, you joked about Terminator ripping off Kroner Trigger, but Kroner Trigger takes place after Time's Arrow. So they, Kroner Trigger ripped off Times Arrow in a way. It does. It did, yes. It's late.

Anyway, Diamond Fight here. Find my internet. Go to look for Fight Club. F-E-I-T. That's my last name. C-L-U-B. That's the makeshift weapon Kyle tries to kill the Terminator with, and it does not work. Dot me. Fightclub. That's you can find my socials and what I'm working on and other podcasts, things I'm writing. I'm all there. And so, I guess we'll go. Okay, quick, I must choose a list of options to end the podcast. Good night. We'll be back. You know, Oh, Oh! . Thank you.