Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 344: Die Hard

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, and Henry Gilbert celebrate the ho-ho-holidays at Nakatomi Plaza—a machine gun in hand, feet clenched into fists—by looking back at the film and video game legacy of John McTiernan's seasonal classic Die Hard. Hit it, Argyle! Art by Nick Wanserski. Edits by Greg Leahy.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, yippie-Kye, motherfucker. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish, recording remotely from North Carolina with the usual madman over there. I am the John McClain to this podcast and downstairs on the floor of the Nakatomi building, the plaza. We have. Hey, it's Bob Mackey, and I am the Mr. Falcon of this podcast.

You're not the original Val Johnson? I wish I could be as cool as him. But in case you're wondering, that it was what they dubbed motherfucker with in the TV version. Yippe, K.A. Mr. Falcon. With a guy that sounds nothing like Bruce Willis. And hey, it's Henry Gilbert. And these Twinkies are for my wife. Okay.

And yes, we are talking about Die Hard. That's German for the Hard. The story of Officer Die Hard, running. around inside a Japanese building in Los Angeles, trying to stop British terrorists who sound German, pretending to be American. It's very confusing. It's extremely international. And it is also, I think, the third in this kind of informal series that Bob and Henry and I have going, where we're talking about games that, or sorry, films that inspired video games in the late 80s, but also kind of redefined how violence was presented on screen in movies. And

and really kind of changed the sort of baseline of what was acceptable in Hollywood in terms of, you know, mainstream violence and not so much with diehard. It's not as violent as some of the others we talked about, like Running Man and definitely not Robocop. But there is definitely some kind of frank violence here. It's central to the story, but also a lot of language, very salty language that would not have been in vogue five years earlier than that. And in a way, this is kind of a continuation of the series that I've been doing with the Retronauts East Gang, which, you know, is about other movies from the 80s that inspired video games and kind of became tent poles of pop culture, such as Star Wars, and of course Indiana Jones. I really feel like Die Hard owes, it owes a great debt to a lot of things. But John McLean, the central hero, the Bruce Willis character, who's the protagonist here, really, really, I don't think would have existed as. as he is without Indiana Jones to sort of pave the way. Because Indiana Jones, you know, Harrison Ford gave a performance where he was heroic and dashing and cool, but also kind of a little bit of a clutz and very vulnerable. And playing off that vulnerability and humanity

made him a much more compelling character. And that's definitely the case with diehard. John McLean is very, very much, you know, a one man, not a one man army. It's not a Schwarzenegger movie. although Arnold Schwarzenegger was courted for the part. I think it would have been a very different and much worse movie if he had been in. But Bruce Willis presented him as a guy who was in way over his head and doing his best to make the, you know, to survive, basically a terrible situation and help prevent other innocent people from being killed. And he takes a beating throughout the movie. And that's very, very central to the character. And it's why most of the diehard sequels really suck because they just completely abandoned that, especially the most reason to diehard.

What is it? Live free, die hard, die another day. I don't know. I can't, I don't even care enough about those movies because I've seen them and they're bad. And they just completely missed the entire point of what this movie is and what made John McLean different than a Holly, you know, the typical Hollywood hero. And, you know, as a result, this is a really great movie that I think holds up really well now. I'll be curious to hear from our podcast guests who had not seen it until recently. Big surprises there. I won't spoil who that is. But I am curious to hear that perspective, but I feel like this is a movie I can still watch and still really empathize with the protagonist and really find myself invested in the story because it's really well written and very well acted. And it's very just like a nice, nicely crafted action movie that was very, very influential. And also, because this is Retronauts, inspired some really crappy video games. So, guys, what is what is your? history would die hard. Henry, how about you? Oh, well, I didn't see it until I got it on VHS in like 1997, I think. I remember it was like the Fox Selects collection or whatever was on the VHS box. And, but I watched it because my friends who were super into action films are like, it's time for you to grow up and stop watching your PG-13 action films and watch this very dirty one. And, Yeah, I mean, I loved it the first time I saw it, you know, as teen boys, a lot of them would because it's just loud and sweary and blood everywhere and you've got a cool dude is the main character. But, you know, as time went on, I think it wasn't one I celebrated.

I think in definitely an action movie snob kind of way because I'm like, well, if you like this, you should really like Jackie Chan movies. Or actually, you know, hard boiled takes the same kind of story. It makes it even better. like I would have said those things and I still believe those but coming back to it now I'm like wow this is even better than I remembered because I

just remembered the fireworks factory at the end I didn't remember like the kind of hour plus of character building the movie takes to earn that trip to the fireworks factory and I guess one last thing I'd add is to your Indiana Jones thing

I think you're totally right especially in that I remember the scene in Indiana of jones and the raiders where he is just in bed in pain and he's like oh it really hurts to have done he says it's not the it's not the years it's the miles baby like and so that was that was them showing a scene that like james bond did movies up to that point would not have had a moment where he's like how i tore my rotator cuff or whatever and i need some ice and that's what mclean goes through in this, even more than Dr. Jones does. Yeah, his kind of defining vulnerability in the movie is the fact that he took off

shoes because he's afraid of flying, which makes sense in the context of the story. But because of his barefootedness, you know, that's something that the villains are able to use against him and something that he has to overcome and kind of work through. So, Bob, what about you? This is the first time I've seen this movie. What? Yes. And what did you think?

I loved it, of course. It's very good. Yes, I did like it a lot. I can't believe you've never seen Die Hard. It's because of people like you, Henry. No, Die Hard is one of those movies that when you're in your 20s, all of your male friends aggressively proselytize. So I kind of didn't see just to piss them off. It was like, I didn't see Goodfellas until I was 25 because of these people.

Just like, it's for a bad reason. It's for, you know, the fans are annoying. But now I'm getting over that and finally seeing these movies that were pushed on me too hard. And yes, I loved it. It's a great movie. be very economical, very smart. And I had to wonder, like, while watching all of these, like, brutal killings and violence and swearing, all the, you know, concerned parents of the 80s, I wonder how they would think

today, knowing this film is celebrated as, like, a smart intelligence, a piece of cinema. Well, you know, as you mentioned the brutality, I do think that is something worth addressing because we did an episode of what a cartoon about the TV series The Max. and one of the episodes of the Max based on one of the issues of the comic sees the Max being chased by I don't remember, it's like a shark or something. I can't remember exactly what they, because it was a savage dragon character

named Mako, and I can't remember what they changed it to in the cartoon. But anyway, the running dialogue in Max's mind throughout that, it's actually not in Max's mind, sorry, it's Mr. Gons' running dialogue over the action is like, oh, this is the part where the hero gets his back

against the wall, and he finally, gets to, you know, lash out and justified violence. And you're just waiting for this because it's so exciting and he's earned it. It's not just gratuitous. It's something that he deserves because the villain is so bad and he's been just pounded on for so long, right? And I really feel like this is kind of the embodiment of that, that basically built-in media criticism from the max. Because if you watch, you know, at the beginning of the movie, John McLean is a cop, and he tries to play by cop rules, as they say. And, you know, he's trying to subdue armed international terrorists with machine guns and, you know, arrest them or basically prevent them non-lethaly from

carrying out their actions. And the first kill that he causes in the movie is completely accidental. He accidentally knocks one of the terrorists down a stairwell, which breaks the guy's neck. It's not something he deliberately intended to do. But the further you get into the movie, the more pissed off he gets, and the more he's just, like, whipping out his guns and, you know, kicking people off window ledges and stuff like that. And in fact, the kind of big resolution for the movie, sort of like the CODA is that the cop who accidentally killed a kid and doesn't want to use guns is like, I'm finally cool enough and brave enough and sure enough in myself that I can shoot down a man with my own gun. So there is a real celebration of violence

here, but like in a justified way, it's okay to be super violent and mean and, you know, just brutal because they earned it. I definitely saw that too, Jeremy. There's like a sense of karma to the murders in this movie where what really underlines is that the hacker is not murdered at the end of the movie. He's punched out by the limo driver, but not murdered. And everyone that is murdered was trying to murder him. He's not Nathan Draking his way around the building and snapping necks, but people are just

standing around. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think of so many movies. action movies where they have to have some line by a character to let you know that like, oh, this person's a really bad person, so it's okay, you don't have to feel bad at all. But in this movie, the way they talk through like the ethics of his existence is really interesting to me in this viewing. Because I definitely know it was a general trope of 80s action films and going forward

other ones, well, in 70s two, but cop action films in America. A huge part of them, like say even Dirty Harry, are the rules are really holding back cops from taking down the bad guys. Yeah. Death Wish. Yes, death wish. All these ones make it so clear of like if the cops didn't have so many rules, they could do stuff. Like even Robocop had that too. Like, hey, Mr. Cop can't stop me. I got all these rules.

And in this case, too, the first guy he points a gun at, he's like, oh, you're a cop. You have rules. You can't kill me. and then the guy on top of the table who's shooting at him and shooting at him the whole time, he's like, when you have a chance to kill somebody, you should. And then McLean just fucking blasts him. Right in the groin. And he says, good advice, which is just like, yeah, he says, I need to be a terrorist.

I have to be a terrorist to fight terrorists and not give a crap about the rules. Well, now the cops don't have rules in life. How is that working out for everyone? I feel safer than ever. this movie does have some baggage in 2020 well and and also uh i think too i'd forgotten about this scene where after mclean kills another guy uh i think it's the thrown out the window no no it's when the co-cad gets shot the they have to have a scene with reginald val johnson and his boss going like no no no he couldn't have done anything we should not be mad at john mclean

he did his best to save that guy. He didn't kill this guy. Like it's, it's, uh, Reginal as a audience insert. I think he's telling you ethically like you can't blame John McLean. It's not his fault. Right. And yeah, like that's kind of one of my big complaints about the movie, not Sergeant Al Powell, who is great, but the, uh, the fact that for some of this to work and for some of

this exposition to come out, you have to have like the chief of police to just be the stupidest moron on the planner to see the FBI guy. No, the FBI guy is the Fertelli brother. Johnson and Johnson. Yeah, I love Johnson and Johnson. They're like true sociopaths. Oh, for sure. Like, oh, yeah, 20% of the hostages will die.

That's fine. Let's go. Yeah. Wow, that's ripped from the headlines. Yeah, so I do think that there needs to be, like it requires a little bit of suspension of disbelief. Like, would the chief of police really be that stupid? Would the media really be that stupid to like,

immediately rush to the house and give away the identity of the hero cop in there. Like, maybe, but I just feel like, yeah, there's a lot of kind of stupidity piling up. And I feel like I feel like that's all kind of tied to one of the underlying themes that's running throughout the movie. And I don't know if it's deliberate, but there's so much of it that even if it's not an intentional, deliberate message, you know, that the writers put in, it's definitely something baked into their worldview. and that is traditional American masculinity versus, you know, the defeat.

I mean, if you look at John McLean, he is a red-blooded American male. He's a New York East Coast cop. He smokes cigarettes and he drinks whiskey and he doesn't trust airplanes. And he's going out to L.A., California with all the granola and the yoga and the hippies. His wife has moved to L.A., which is just like, you know, the corrupt capital of America, it's the entertainment industry, and she's chasing her own career independently of their home and splitting apart their family to the point that she has taken back her maiden name professionally. And she's working for a Japanese corporation that's bought out not just

real estate in Los Angeles, but actually the executive boardroom is Lloyd Wright's falling water house. Like the iconic piece of American architecture, the idea there was that they bought this house and installed it in the executive boardroom of this skyscraper. Meanwhile, you know, John just wants to go see his kids

and he takes a limo, which, you know, he's never been in a limo before because that's just, that's decadent. And the driver is a young African-American kid and his Christmas music is by Run DMC. It's just crazy. Meanwhile, his wife is being wooed by a cokehead idiot who's all like, let's go have some mold wine and some brie, and I'll do some lines of Coke and give you a Rolex. So, yeah, there's definitely like this whole, you know, we can't let go of the traditional American manhood folks.

We're under attack here in the late 80s going into the 90s. We've got to take it back, even if that means killing some Germans along the way. Yeah, I noticed in the beginning of the movie all the California scoffing he does, I thought was very, funny because I live in California. I'm not from here. But also in the movie, he is weakened by California because he follows the Fruit Fruit California guy's advice by taking his shoes off and bawling up his feet. And that's why he has no shoes on for the movie because he followed that weak Californians advice. You're right. He intentionally weakened himself by listening to this California bullshit that this guy was. But his homeopathic remedy did work. He made fist with his

toes. Son of a pitch. It works. You're talking about American masculinity, Jeremy. I think there are some interesting like World War II analogies to be made here because like the access powers are working against Bruce Willis in this movie like the building is working against him that's Japanese and the terrorists are you know German yes for the most part all this German and yeah and then you know the FBI guy who's flying around the helicopter he played a one of the Fratelli brothers in the Goonies that's Italian so you got the whole access right there that's true yeah yeah the I mean the she even says like well it's a Japanese company I needed to change my name. It's like, okay, sure. That's the opposite of how it works, actually. Well, and also,

not only that, but the mother has sold out her motherhood as well by hiring a nanny. Like, someone else is raising her kids, not her. Or just by having a job, yeah, in the first place. Yeah, I mean, it makes it worse in that regard from an American traditional values view of things. I'm not saying personally, I think it makes it worse. But, yeah, that, and he, just John McLean is this force of just orders like I just got this common sense stuff man I I know it all and also I mean he is a love of 50s western stars like that's as traditional American values as you could get there But despite all of this baggage that we've discussed for the past 15 minutes,

I still really love this movie. It is just a masterclass in narrative, in plotting, in just direction. One of the things I love about it is that it's almost what, you know, in television would be called a bottle episode, where it takes place almost entire. in or immediately around a single location. You get the setup on the airplane and LAX and the limo, and you get occasional shots out to like a TV studio or the McLean household for some extra context.

But for the most part, it does take place within this one building. And I think, you know, my love for that sort of thing comes from the same place as my love for Metroidvania games where it's just I love, you know, having this kind of self-contained narrative where there is real geometry or geology or geography or whatever. I don't know, like just a real sense of place, Ms. Insane or something, I don't know. But it feels like they're really making use of the actual internal logistics of this building.

Every place that you see, you understand where it is in relation to the other places, and you understand how everyone is moving around in relationship to one another and how all the parts kind of fit together. And, you know, to me that that is a really great way to tell a story is to make sure that there is kind of this internal logic, this internal consistency to where people are. You know, you lose a lot of that in kind of modern action films. It hasn't been so bad recently, but, you know, in like the early 2000s, 2010s, it was really bad, you know, because of the influence of the born legacy and or born, whatever, the born agenda, whatever, the born movies, basically. where it's just like hyperactive cameras, constant cuts. You know, that replaced actual sort of staging and, you know, real cohesive direction.

And I hate when movies do that. And it's much more interesting to me when you actually get a feel of like, where is everyone? Like, where are all these things happening? Yeah. You know, how are they using this location against each other? And because there's such a cat and mouse element to this movie, especially, I think it's really important. And, you know, because John McLean is so vulnerable, I think, kind of painting a picture and making this place seem real, not only raises the stakes,

but also kind of grounds it and makes you kind of understand like, here's the places he's got to move. Here's the challenges to get in his way. Here's why he has to take the air ducts for this one part, even though it really sucks. And you know, you see him go back to places or, you know, places kind of show up that you've previously seen just in kind of passing. And it's very satisfying. The building, I wouldn't say it the character, but it definitely it really does lend the movie a sense

of, not reality, but authenticity, I guess would be the word. Yeah, even if you don't like the themes of the movie, you could look at them ironically, of course, as we are sort of doing. But I do think the screenplay is very, very good and tight and mechanical in a way,

in a positive way, where you could say, well, this is very artificial because everything pays off. Everybody gets a moment. And it's very, it's like it's Sidfield 101, how to write a screenplay, screenplay. But it's kind of fun to watch a movie-ass movie. If you were a fan of like order and organization, seeing how everything just pays off so cleanly and neatly, just like you said, Jeremy, it's so satisfying to your brain, especially because this weekend we're also recording a podcast about a movie that's very muddy

and not very satisfying and not very clean. You could see how in some cases you can be like, well, you can try to be more experimental, but at times it's fun when people stick to the movie-ass movie. structure. It's so satisfying. Oh, I like looking at it like a Swiss watch or whatever. You're just like, look at all these wheels turning in place. It all goes where it's supposed to. Every line explains something. Like, no, the story, just for example, Breitselville Johnson's story about why he has a desk job now, like that touches you. It makes you care about this character who's just another voice on a line for McLean. But then it pays off in like this gigantic way at the end of the movie and it's just so many lines like

that just explain everything and when everything is just so nonsensical in movies now and I think too the I will say visceralness of the movie like it feels like something I know there's fake shots in this movie and I know they use blue screen and all these things but it does a lot of the shots feel very different from watching a Marvel movie or a a Transformers movie where literally everything feels fake and created around them. Like, it at least feels like, oh, that is a real chain clanging around when he grabs the chain and wraps it around a guy's throat. Yeah, and Bruce Willis, he's in good shape, but not, he's in good 80 shape.

He's not like the giant thumb he is today. Yeah. So it's an attainable body type. Yeah. Die Hard One and John McLean. Right. As opposed to the Kumail Nigeria, you know what they did to me? me to make me in a Marvel movie? It hurts. I don't want to be like this. I miss pizza. I haven't

hit pizza in 18 months. Stop torturing our celebs. You mentioned a clock or Swiss watch like precision and that's spot on, although, you know, they're German, not Swiss. But I do feel like this sort of mechanical, mechanistic nature of the story really reinforces the genius of the villains. like Alan Rickman's character Hans Gruber is an evil genius and he has plotted out this incredibly elaborate scheme to just get rich down to the like the second basically and John McLean is this agent of chaos running around you know the fly in his ointment basically you know the spanner in his works whatever you want to say he's just making a mess of all of Gruber's plans so there is this like push and pull tension between the two of the two of the them who only meet in person twice. It's kind of got a wrath of con sort of thing going on there where, you know, they're basically playing off each other. And Gruber is constantly sort of, you know, you see the wheels spinning in his head as he tries to calculate like, okay, we've lost access to this or this bad thing has happened, but we can still pull this off because I've

accounted for, you know, the possibility of something to go wrong here. And so that's one of interesting things about the script to me is that even though John McLean is badly outnumbered the entire time, he does have the advantage over the villains in that there's only one of him and he's not tied to an organization. He can just be anywhere he wants to be. As long as he's able to get there, he doesn't have to, you know, pull off a plan perfectly. He just has to prevent their plan from being pulled off perfectly. And so he's actually, he gets the upper hand a few times throughout the film. You know, he gets the detonators, which completely undermines their scheme.

And so, yeah, I feel like the sort of very precise nature of the plotting and, you know, the sort of setting really kind of reinforces the sense of, like, there is a master plan here and John McLean is working against that. Well, they show how resourceful McLean is so many times. It's really, in smart ways that you're just like, You know, obviously, no one could stop a group of terrorists in this way, in reality. But at the very least, you're like, well, you know, I could imagine a guy could sit on top of an elevator. And, yeah, he'd find a Sharpie somewhere and he'd write down the names on his arm.

Like, I get that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, the film works in a lot of ways because, one, it shows that the villains are diabolical, cruel, but not stupidly cruel. like Gruber is willing to make accommodations for the lady who's been taken hostage and is, you know, pregnant and, you know, send people to the bathroom so they don't pee all over the floor. So, you know, he's not a sociopath. He's just, you know, very greedy and very amoral. But at the same time, you know, he's very, very smart. And John McLean is not smart in the same way. But he has, you know, years of kind of being a street cop under his belt. and is able to sort of improvise and kind of work around and make the most of what he's given. And it makes a very, very satisfying story. Well, there's a, there's a funny thing about in the making of things.

So I, uh, the movies that made us, I'm sourcing that as, uh, it, the Netflix documentary series, which, you know, it's, it is light. It is like a VH1 style documentary. So it's not like the most in depth. But they interviewed a lot of the real people who worked on this, including the director. And there was a funny point he made about how in the script they had originally, it was just terrorists. And he turned it down because he's like, I'm just terrorists. I don't like terrorists. And so he eventually made it convince him like, no, make them robbers who

pretend to be terrorists. Because terrorists bring people down. It's just a bummer. But if they're pretending to be terrorists just to rob stuff, like people like robbers, robbers are cool. So it was a smart move on their part. I love how Hans, when he's calling for all of the freeing of terrorists, he's just like, I read about them in Time magazine. They're all unrelated groups. All right, so we've kind of jumped straight into the discussion of themes and meaning and that sort of thing without giving a lot of setup. But Die Hard, 1987 movie was pretty successful. It was in development for a long time, apparently. And it was actually built around a novel from the 1970s called Nothing Last Forever, which I've never read.

I don't know if you guys know anything about that. I know a bit about that, yeah, from the doc. Yeah, I just know that all of these, all the diehard movies are based on different sources. So there's no consistent like John McLean book series or whatever. So in the 60s, some guy, I forget his name, but he wrote the author of the second book. This is a sequel novel. He did a book called The Detective, which was then, it was, yeah, which was then made into a film starring Frank Sinatra. And the film did well.

And Frank Sinatra wanted to keep. playing this character. So he told that guy to write a sequel novel that then he'd make into a sequel movie. And it took the guy over a decade to write that sequel novel. That's right. And in the book, it's a 60-year-old man stuck in a building trying to save his daughter, who at the end of it, she falls to her death. And you watch like a 60-year-old man drop his 40-year-old daughter to her death, and it's a giant bummer. So, uh, and they, still thought though it would really work as a film but frank sinatra had first right of refusal because it was his movie basically but by the time it was time to start filming he was like 62

and he's like i don't want to do this i i can't imagine john frank sinatra crawling through the ducks i kind of want to see it though i kind of want to see it oh baby this is tough and sammy davis jr as ala wilson or whatever his name is all right so the movie stuck round in development for a long time. Eventually, the script for this, the final script, was written by a guy named Jeb Stewart, who had no credits under his belt, and Stephen DeSuzza, who had, like, every action movie of the 80s under his belt. Forty-eight hours, Commando, Jump and Jack Flash, the Running Man, and he would go on to write Street Fighter. And directs. So he is like the nexus of 80s action scripts. So he wrote this one and did a bang-up job, and then they

tried to cast different leads and like offered this to basically every male in Hollywood including Schwarzenegger Harrison Ford quite like Harry Dean Anderson and finally Oh McGiver

Finally everyone turned it Yeah McGiver Everyone turned it down And so they finally offered it to Bruce Willis And because he was currently starring in the TV series Moonlighting and it was on a hiatus because Sybil Shepard was pregnant

He was like yeah sure why not I'll have a few laughs I'm sure his Bruno album didn't do that well So he was like Yeah I could use some extra scratch And he was advertising A legacy was born He was advertising seagrams to make a little extra money

Oh man Oh that ad That is that is bottom tier right there Yeah I was only six when this movie was happening And I was not aware of all the Hollywood Hubba But in retrospect I've read that He was a controversial choice He was like the sitcomy guy

But in retrospect it was a great choice I mean the movie's great he's great in it It's a great choice because he has to be alone for like 80% of the movie and carry all the scenes alone. And he has enough charisma to do that to just like be able to talk to himself essentially and carry scenes. Yeah, he's great with the quips in this. I mean, yes, the script is strong because they, that's where the quips come from. But he sells them in a totally different way than Schwarzenegger would. Like Schwarzenegger, he just, he doesn't have any self-effacement whatsoever. Whereas a big part of this is McLean kind of like beating himself up for

like, what the hell did you get into? Why are you doing this? you moron you're going to get yourself killed but you know he's just driving forward because there's no other choice it's the right thing to do yeah and yeah it really really makes them a likable sympathetic character you would not see arnold swartzenegger in commando going like oh man i'm so scared of jumping off this building oh god help me like you never you never see that but it just feels so so real for mclean well also de suza yeah it was jeb stewart wrote the script first and And they said they kept all his action beats, but they're like, we need D'Souza to beef this up comedy-wise.

Like, this needs to be funnier. And so he apparently was like rewriting up to the last minute of just new, new lines and one-liners for Willis to say. These are better one-liners than the running man. I like those for how dumb they are, like sub-zero, not plain zero or whatever that was. Well, Running Man and Commando, they both like heavily deliver these lines of like a stand-up comic who's like, well, maybe that's just Arnold's style of delivery, but he's like, I will stand in place and say a silly line. But Bruce Willis plays it much more natural when he's,

when he's doing his silly ass dialogue. Yeah, like the first time he does his Yippikai motherfucker line, which becomes, you know, kind of the iconic line, like the, the line that shows up in every movie, he's kind of smirking to himself, smoking a cigarette, and sort of goofily backing out of a room through a door as he says it. It's not like, you know, stand-up comedy timing. It's not that kind of delivery. It's more like he's making a little joke to himself that just happens to be broadcast to a villain on a CB.

And he's very amused by his own joke. Yeah. But not in like a I am so funny way. It's just like a... Yeah, I would think Arnold in an Arnold movie or a Stallone movie, like they would have had like a zoom in on their face at like shouting into the...

the CB radio, into the walkie-talkie, yippie-kye, motherfucker. But instead, it's like... Yeah, but in this case, he's actually vanishing from the camera's view. Yeah, yeah. I was surprised to see the line in that context. Well, it wasn't like a triumphant line. It was like, but this line might work. Goodbye.

They play it so big in all the other diehards that I'd forgotten how normally and, like, naturally this was played in this scene. Yeah, and it's a culmination of basically, you know, uh, Hans Gruber. being accusatory and trying to take down John McLean to sort of rattle him and undermine his confidence by just saying, oh, you're a stupid American cowboy. And, you know, he leans into that and is like, yep, that's me. I'm Roy Rogers. I like the sequence shirts. Well, you know, in the in the defeat versus the, uh, natural American themes of it, you have like, Hans could be seen as this, you know, European film critic who's just like, you Americans with your stupid John. way in the movies. You do not know Francoisufo and his wonderful... And McLean's just like, actually,

I was more partial to Roller Rogers. Not like that. Shit. How you like that? I think at some point in the movie, the terrorists are called Euro Trash. Yeah. By the Cokehead guy. I forget his name. That's Ellis. Oh, Ellis. Ellis.

Ellis has to toss off some racial lines so you don't feel... Again, it's like, don't feel too bad audience when he dies. Like, he's bad. He's a juror. Yeah, I mean, his big introduction is he's sniffing coke in his office when the president walks in with Holly. So, yeah, like, he's definitely not a bad guy, but also not a good guy. And you don't feel bad about losing him. It's like how they build up the lawyer in Jurassic Parks.

Like, you don't feel too bad the lawyer gets eaten. Right, right. Lawyers. And if he wasn't murdered, he might have killed somebody eventually, like American Psycho style. I would assume that guy has at least like two vehicular men. Slotter. Yeah. On his reputation.

All right. All right. So the premise is of this movie. Now that we've discussed it in depth, we can actually explain what it's about. John McLean, a New York cop, is heading to L.A. for Christmas to visit his semi-estranged wife and see his children. There is the question of whether he's going to be able to stay at his wife's house. And, you know, when the possibility comes up, that's actually kind of like pleasant surprise. And, you know, they get back together. She's, she's moved to L.A. to work for

this multinational Japanese Zibatsu. And, you know, she's risen up the ranks. She's clearly very powerful in this company. She's basically second to the boss. So, you know, she's probably making a lot of money. So you can definitely respect the fact that she's there. But it's breaking up their home. And, you know, once they actually get back together, they talk warmly for a few minutes and then they have a big argument. And so the wife's name is Holly, Holly Gennaro, formerly Holly McLean, still technically Holly McLean. But she doesn't, she's not willing to reclaim that until John McLean has murdered a few Germans. She realizes he's a great man then and yeah right also i have to say the last name genero feels like a screenwritery joke that she has

no real identity without her husband's name like we need a generic name uh genero how about that you're right good call uh so she's working for the um nakatomi corporation apparently the the corporate logo for that was originally a manji but uh the director was like yeah that looks too much like a swastika so instead it's like the stylized samurai helmet which is way way way worse, honestly. Like, Amonji is actually used in Japanese culture, not necessarily for this, but come on, a samurai helmet, really? Anyway, whatever.

I mean, it's America's view of Japan in the 80s. That guy's got like samurai armor in his vault. Yeah, yeah. He's got everything in his vault. He's a big samurai fan, it seems. Yeah. No, I mean, it's just how the Japanese are expressed in 80s movies. It's, uh, yeah.

On the whole, I think it actually treats the Japanese a lot more fairly than a lot of American movies in the 80s. Because even though Takagi, I think, is the first to die in the movie, he is at least seen as a very reasonable man, very kindly, and he is willing to take a bullet for his team. Like, he basically does the I'm Spartagas thing. And he's like, you know, leave them alone. You're looking for me. I'm Takagi. I'm the boss.

Well, and you even, you see he's not a full stereotype either because, like, Hans reads his entire Wikipedia page out loud. And you hear that he's like, yeah, he's like, yeah. he was inter, like they mentioned internment in, uh, in an American film. Yeah. That was shocking to me to hear. Yeah. And he goes by Joseph Takagi. So he's, you know, he's been kind of naturalized over here. He's not, he's not one of the bad ones. He's one of the good ones. Yes. That's why they, again, they, it's about how they portray victims right before their death. It tells you how they want you to feel. And, you know, they mention like his background that he's a father of five, I believe. And you, you want to, they want you. They want you.

to feel bad about his death much worse than you do about Ellis's death. Yeah, Ellis is another executive at the company working alongside Holly. He's unctuous and slimy and does cocaine. One of the best jokes in the game is that he wants some Coke when the terrorists or the villains take him in and they get him a can of Coke. Oh, I didn't know. So, like when he dies, he's drinking Coke because he's a Cokehead. And I think they don't understand that he means he wants. cocaine i just got that now that's that's actually a very subtle and very funny joke um so those are

those are kind of the people inside nakatomi plaza outside you have uh argyle that's just his name argyll he is a limo driver very young uh very fresh-faced first time doing a limo driving he used to be a taxi driver he's good salt of the earth i love argyle like he's great he's every he's funny he's that's why they want you to care about limo driver too he's like well it's my first day on the job, so you have to like him, you feel bad for him. And then when he's told, like, sit in a car for eight hours, he's like, well, fine, I'm going to drink everything in here and just call in sick to work. I like this character, but there's a joke with him that I've seen in a lot of 80s movies,

often with like a person of color where, like, they're listening to their rap music so loud, they don't notice that Freddie Krueger's on the loose or Jason's on the loose. It's such a weird joke that popped up a thousand times. Yeah. On the other hand, if I, you know, my first day, on the job in a limo. It's Christmas Eve. And a dude is like sit here in the parking garage for a few hours and I had access to the mini bar. I'd be listening to my music pretty loud too. I'd be blasting run DMC as well. Maybe not run DMC for me. But what a great, it's so great hearing Christmas

and Hollis in this too. Yeah. No, it's become a, it's become a standard. Like that it was like, can you believe this? You don't even know what. Yeah. It was this is Christmas music. Well, I think for like the majority of, um, middle America folks watching it in 80s, In the 80s, they're like, I don't, this is just, this is just the rap sound to me. I don't know what this is. Now 50-year-old mom singing at Christmas on karaoke machines. So there's another guy down in the ground, Sergeant Al Powell, which is, who was played by Reginald Val Johnson, who was a pretty big comedy star in the 80s. I mean, Family Matters was basically supposed to be his show until Urkel took over.

Yeah. Erkel took it in the 90. I think it would be eight. That show started in 89. and I was looking at his, like, resume. He played a ton of cops. Like, he's in Ghostbuster playing a cop. After this, he'll be in Turner and Hooch playing a cop.

He played a ton of cops. And I have a real Pavlovian response of seeing him on the screen because I watch a lot of family matters. Just like I immediately like him. It's just like, oh, it's the friendly dad. Boy, that Steve Urkel's a pain to my ass too. I'll tell you what, buddy. I mean, you see him with, as you know, he's balding.

He's got a mustache. And he just has this, like, friendly authority demeanor that does, like, when he's a cop, you're like, like, oh, I'll listen to this cop. This is a nice cop. He's a cop and family matters too. That's his death. I was retconning this ending. The thing you find out about him killing a kid is like, no, he shot Steve Irkle and cold blood. Yeah. And it was a frame up. And he was 31. 31 when he got cast in this. Yeah. He's he's looked the same forever. In the movies that made us, he's one of their key actors they got and talked to him.

They even taken by the old set. And he's like, wow, I remember this. These trees weren't here if these trees weren't here then and he reprises this role in the 2002 game he's like the one person to come back um so yeah one of the one of the feelings of the latter day die hard movies i think is that howl as a character would not exist could not exist in those movies like there's just no place for him and to me that's that's a big part of why they fail like you've got to have this good salt-of-the-earth family man to really make it work and incidentally his dark backstory about accidentally shooting a child was extremely ripped from the headlines. This is something that I was kind of recently reminded of

when I put together an NES works episode on the game, Gotcha. Like, you know, now we have toy guns have to have safety orange on them. But back in the late 70s, early 80s, people were manufacturing extremely realistic toy weapons, like semi-automatic weapons and Uzi's and pistols and six shooters and things like that. And kids were running around playing with them. And there were a few incidents where policemen did shoot children who were playing with toy guns. And so that caused a huge, it was a huge problem in the U.S. like a huge point of debate. And that's why we have safety orange on guns now because they were like, you know, you guys can't keep making toys that look like the

real thing because we just have too much of a problem here. Even though we haven't actually addressed the actual problem. We did at least, you know, do what we could to keep children from getting shot because they were holding guns. Well, it's all about the symptom, not the disease. Now children get shot because they go to school and people bring guns into school, but that's, you know, a different story altogether. But, but I will say that at the time, his backstory was extremely like, oh, yes, okay, I've heard about this on the news. Like, it really, really grounded the character and put kind of a human face on this this tragic rip from the headlines thing yeah yeah it humanizes him in so many ways like you really you you love him honestly yeah he's a big he's a big teddy bear

isn't he folks yeah not different from the actual big teddy bear we see the start oh it's true there are two teddy bears in this movie but i i think you made a great point about what fails a lot of the later uh diehards other than the only other one directed by john mctyernan which is the vengeance but it's that they are ensemble films like this is an ensemble film like he means a great supporting cast of characters who can carry scenes without Bruce Willis and because they're all these scenes just he's not in them and when when Bruce Willis has to be in all the scenes and every later one it's like well it's kind of or they or they cast like Dennis Franz who I like he's just no fun and yeah I haven't seen two and I think I saw a lot of three on TV that it was on TV a lot for

some reason. I know Reginald Bell Johnson's in two, and Samuel L. Jackson is his sort of like friend on the street in, uh, oh my God. Vengeance is a great film. Like it is, uh, it's also was I would say it's the one real sequel to this movie. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, like Samuel Jackson, Zeus, like he rules. He is the greatest. And I think why it's also the only sequel is that like they have a taunting Euro trash villain in that one as well, which is also cute. to die hard. villain Hans Gruber is played by Alan Rickman his very first cinematic role

he is English but he's playing a German very convincingly there's a part where he does an American accent very unconvincingly that they actually wrote in because they were like oh he can do an American accent let's put this in but it's a great scene that adds so much to the movie where he and McLean meet face to face and McLean has no idea who it is but he's savvy enough that he doesn't set himself up to be quite as vulnerable as they

seems. As the audience is going, like, don't hand of the gun. Don't hand of the gun. Yeah, it's a great like scream at the screen kind of moment. And both of the characters really live up to their, you know, their personalities there.

Gruber says he's going to count a three before shooting and then pulls the trigger after one, but the gun is empty because Bruce Will or John McLean is no idiot. So, yeah, great, great scene. And, you know, this movie made Rickman a star like oh yeah he was so so calm and collected and so menacing despite being you know not that imposing a figure on the screen he just he's so smart and so ruthless

you're really really yeah he's just a great villain a great screen villain this is where the filmmaker Kevin Smith fell in love with Alan Rickman because he put him in dogma and for the clerk's animated series the villain of that series is just Alan Rickman but he didn't want to come back and do Hans Gruber voice for Kevin Smith. So that's why it's Alec Baldwin in the clerk's cartoon. Well, then it turned full circle because Kevin Smith is in the fourth diehard movie. That's right. Yeah, I forgot about that.

Truly live free or diehard? I think that's the Jai Courtney one. Yeah. And then, but yeah, no, Hans Gruber, like a million villains were just copies of him. Like he's, he is a villain archetype that everyone ripped off. Like there's a critic episode where it's just this plot. Like Homer in a Simpsons dream sequence, he's fighting a Hans Gruber type. John McTiernan, in his parody of these films, Last Action Hero, he creates a Hans Gruber

in that that is so smart he can discover he is in a movie and can leave that movie. That's awesome. Yeah, which Star Trek ripped off for Moriarty. Yes, yeah, it's that holodeck, Moriarty, this dangerous criminal mind. Was this the turning point in which they were moving away from the sort of Middle Eastern terrorist stereotype to, like, British-like and European terrorists in movies? You know, I think it was being seen as more problematic than to do it, though, not like, I mean, for example, in all the Golan and Globus films, they had very Arab villains in most of their movies, but I think it was starting to be seen as like, well, you know, let's have international terrorists. have a collective of terrorists, you know? It's like they all work together kind of thing.

So diehard, in conclusion, as the film, there's, you know, definitely some undertones where you're kind of like, hmm, I don't know about that in the year 2020, but on the whole as just like a piece of beautifully crafted cinema. I really like it. Well, part of Hans Gruber's plan was to blow up the building to make it seem like he died in the building and presumably the hostages were all going to die too, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. He's, I mean, he's, there's so many, like Hans Gruber's plot, too, I love how he comes in and gives a speech of like the almost like a socialist speech of just like your riches have made you evil. And now it's coming back to get you, Mr. Takagi. And then when he's alone in the elevator, he was like, hey, that's a nice suit. I've got two of the same ones. He's, he's very, he's showing how rich he is. But I guess, I mean, one other thing I wanted to say. just about the film itself that really struck me

when I rewatched it last night was just how many swears there are in it? It's so, we're used to this. It's a cussy kind of movie. We're used to this kind of thing now, but I do feel like you compare it to other 80s films and they're just like, fuck you, motherfucker.

I'm going to fuck you up. Like, they say it so much. It was shocking to me watching it now. Yeah, the R rating was fairly new when this was made too. Yeah, I think I, I blame. R had been around for a while. It was PG-13 that was pretty new. Oh, that's right. That's what I meant. Sorry.

But this was way saltier than PG-13. I think in terms of violence, I think this would work, I think this would have flown as PG-13, but it had so, so much language and just a little bit of titty. But mostly it was the language that they had to do in R. You know, that's another great scene in the movie that's about the characters where when he's having a fight with his wife in the beginning and they're like very cold and distant, then in come the year. young lovers in between them. And it shows even in more stark relief how messed up their relationship is. And I'd also, oh, this film does hate sensationalist media and like literally punches it in the face. Yeah.

And that's, that's Holly's big moment. She gets to punch the media in the face. John doesn't do it. It's, it's her job. I have to say, this is a very tightly written script. I think we could have lost the like storyline with the news guy. It just felt like it showed up in the middle of the movie and there is a resolution, like, But we could have cut that a little.

Yeah, but I mean, the point of that was to give away, you know, John's relationship with Holly. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's kind of like the domino that tips at the end. It's really great, too, because you get a little of that tension with Ellis's character. You think he's revealed that Holly's his wife. And then it lets you know fully the stakes. And then once he finally finds out, like, it's near the end and that.

And also, he's played by the asshole from the dickless asshole. For Ghostbusters. Yeah. I didn't realize that. Okay. He has a beard in Ghostbusters. There was some comedy there with him and the newscaster who hated him. I did enjoy that. Yeah, eat it. Yeah. Tell me you got that. On the making of thing, the actor says he was the one who came up. Tell me you got that. All right. So final thoughts on the film. I think we've pretty much covered it, actually. Yeah, no. I think a perfect action film. It's not the. I think there actually are smart themes or deeper things to, to dig into with what it says about certain viewpoints. But it's not, if people remember on the Robocop one, if they've listened to that, Retronauts, I loved it on such a deep level with the themes it was discussing.

This is not that deep a film, but like if I'm watching an action movie, this is one of the best I could possibly watch. Yeah, it's very satisfying. it's never boring and don't sleep on it like I did I regret so many things now in my life yeah I agree it's just a like it's a very satisfying film and there aren't a lot of movies

that I feel work on the same level as this I am a big fan of 2006's Casino Royale because it kind of does the same thing as John McLean for James Bond but none of the sequels really lived up to that but yeah you don't you don't come across movies that work on this level too often. So they're worth cherishing and celebrating.

Oh boy, I can't wait for future history 101 today. I hear Prof. Timesworth is going to teach us about World War Six. Gather around, students. It is time to learn. Podford University, where history and history and future are the same class. Available on iTunes, Spotify, and everywhere you get podcasts. Retrograde amnesia is a comprehensive podcast where we relive a classic Japanese RPG. Season one covers the cult classic Xenogers.

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podcast network. So one thing that they are not worth doing these fine films is making video games about. Yeah, it's because this was a big media property in the 1980s, late 1980s to the NES era. And because this is a video game podcast, we are talking about the video game is based on diehard. And what we can say about all of them is that they're not that great. And definitely none of them really capture the qualities of the movie that make the movie great. Like you definitely have settings and characters that you will say, oh, yes, like in the movie. But I just don't think that the, I don't think the industry was really there.

I don't think it was prepared to make a movie that worked on the level that die hard, or make a video game that works on the level the die hard did as a film. And, you know, maybe that's just a difference in the medium. But have you guys spent much time with any of the diehard games? Not until the late 90s in the Segaverse. I did not touch this one. There you go. Diehard Arcade was the one I would like run to without even knowing.

the movie. It just was such a fun, like, way crazier than Final Fight, Brawler. Yeah. Well, because in the late 80s, in early 90s, when I would rent an NES game, and I definitely rented my fair share of poor NES games that were based on a movie, I didn't know die hard as a film, so I wouldn't rent it.

Like, I rented Freddy and Jason and Robocop and every Turtle's game I could touch. The Roger Rabbit piece of crap. Like, I rented all of those, but because I didn't care about diehard when I would have rented a bad diehard video game for my Nintendo, I did not touch this game. Yeah. So I feel like, you know, you're talking about diehard arcade by Sega. That is by far the best of the diehard video games, but it's also by far the worst adaptation of diehard as a concept in film. Oh, yeah.

So it's an interesting, interesting balance. Maybe die hard is just video game proof. But yeah, the NES version is one that I passed on because even at that tender young age, I had learned that movies based on video games were probably not going to be very good and that I should not bother. And so I was really surprised when I sat down to the game to research for this episode because it was not what I thought it was. I thought it was an ocean developed game, you know, from the British studio Ocean,

best known for their work on ZX Spectrum. and many sort of mediocre to terrible NES games in the 90s. And I thought it had, you know, Bruce Willis with a giant head. No, that was Hudson Hawk. Oh, yeah. Oof. The NES diehard game is totally different and totally weird. And it's actually really ambitious.

And it's almost good, except it's really not fun to play. But it's a top-down game in that sort of skewed 3D perspective that you see. in the later Ultima's, like Ultima 6, Ultima 7. It's like everything is just at a really awkward, weird angle. But it all take place in the Nakatomi Plaza, in the Nakatomi building. And you play as John McLean. And there are a lot of kind of structural design elements that really mirror the movie. It's all very abstract.

If you don't know the movie, it makes no sense whatsoever. But they've really kind of assumed that, you know, the audience of 11-year-olds who renting this game or buying this game in 1988, 1989, had somehow seen this incredibly violent and dirty language-filled R-rated movie, which is kind of a little bit strange credulity, I think. But it's a very interesting game. Did you guys spend any time with this at all? No.

In fact, I wasn't really sure what Die Hard was until I was really, until I think, with a vengeance came out when I was in high school. And I was like, oh, that's what Die Hard was. I thought it was about car batteries. Just watching the long play of it now, it is pretty interesting looking. I get real Hotline Miami vibes, honestly. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, except it's nowhere near as fast-paced as Hotline, Miami. It's much more structured than Hotline Miami. So, okay, the way this game works is, yeah, it is a top-down view action game, sort of, like I said, that kind of weird skewed perspective that makes it hard to play. and it takes place across five floors of the Nakatomi buildings. It's like floor 31 through 35 in the roof.

And you can move freely between the floors. And you are John McLean, of course. You have a health meter. And you also have a foot health meter. So you don't want to walk across too many dangerous damage tiles. But there are 40 villains, 40 terrorists, you know, Germans, basically, in the building with you. and they'll drop ammunition. You can move around kind of freely between the floors,

including using the ductwork. And basically every, I think, four minutes, Theo unlocks one of the other locks. So you have kind of this countdown that's running and you have to basically complete all your tasks before Theo breaks the seventh and final lock. Although you can, like, shoot out the supercomputer, the main computer to the building to slow him down.

But time is constantly ticking forward and you're constantly being hunting. And it's really interesting because little windows will pop up where either Hans will, you know, tell people move to this floor. He's, you know, this in this place or this other place. Or Powell will later call it and say, I think I see movement, you know, on the windows on this floor. Because after like the second lock, I think, Gruber says, ah, he's listening to us on the CBs. Don't talk on the CBs anymore. So then you have to get your messages from Powell. But basically it's kind of telling you like, here's where the guys are going to be. Here's where people like the heaviest forces will be. So you're kind of moving around trying to find the key elements that you need on the proper places and the proper floors in the proper order, including, you know, eventually like you can you can go up to the roof and pull the fire hose down. But if you go too early, McLean will just say, I'd have to be crazy to try to jump down on this thing. But then, you know, when you're escaping before it explodes,

then yeah, that's what you have to do. There's kind of this internal architecture to the building where you know it's broken into rooms and there's a fog of war effect you know like a line of sight element where you can't see on the other side of walls so you know when you're walking through a room anything that's on kind of the other side of a wall from you is just black so there can be villains there and you may not realize it well that that's really good because in the when i was watching it now with the view eyes of a modern day gamer the movie uh like there's cover mechanics in the movie but be like he he is doing the gears of war you know a cover line fire yeah blind fire yeah yeah you don't have that in this game it's much too simple or it i guess primitive would be a better word but i i do think that there is something here that could be worked you know with refinement and modern sensibilities into a really good adaptation of diehard this is not that uh but you know kind of like with the game that they did based on Rambo, like pack in video,

they weren't good at making video games, but I really feel like the people who worked there were like, let's do something interesting. And they failed colossally, but spectacularly. And so that's how I would define this game. It is a spectacular failure that really tries to capture a lot of the movie

and the tech and the design just isn't there, but you can really see what they were trying to do. And, you know, I don't think this game is fun to play. I did not enjoy playing it, but it's really fascinating. And so, you know, from that perspective, it's very interesting and one of the more ambitious film adaptations I've seen on an Apit system. Also, Coke cans are a power up, which is very funny. That's, you know, that helps pay those bills, too. You get Coca-Cola to advertise in your game.

You know, I meant to mention this earlier when we talked about the actors, too, that the, that is not Huey Lewis in the movie. That is the actor Dennis Hayden, who just looks exactly like Huey Lewis. Did we say he was Huey Lewis? No, no. I wanted to, in case people still think, like, yeah, and Huey Lewis is in the movie. Well, he was in Back to the Future, so he was just in all the movies, right? Yeah.

And I wouldn't say people should watch the Cleveland show, but when they... Not an endorsement, please. But when they did their diehard parody, one of the funniest things they did was they recast that guy as Huey Lewis and Huey Lewis does play that character. All right. So Huey Lewis is not in that video game no matter what. No one

who looks like Huey Lewis is in that video game. But at least that video game did attempt to be faithful to die hard. Not so much the PC engine game, which never came to the U.S. It was only released in Japan. It was also by pack-in video, but it is nothing like

the NES game. It is kind of a top-down shooter, but it's more like Commando. except you have, instead of just scrolling up, you can scroll in lots of different directions, kind of moving your way around the scenery. You can also jump, you can pick up different weapons. It's a very chunky game, and it's very weird, because it doesn't take place entirely in the Nakatomi building.

It takes place, like, you have to kind of work your way there, and you'd like fight through a jungle. Yeah, yeah. Have you guys ever been to L.A.? Like, this is not L.A. I guess we flew over the jungle on the way to E3 at some point. But, yeah, like, I was watching this video of the play-thru, and it starts with one of those, like, Castlevania-style world maps, like, a side view of, like, your progress you're making. And, like, there's, like, a jungle on a river before the Nakatomi building.

That's so weird. Yeah, there are no jungles in L.A. I mean, I guess technically... It's an urban jungle. It's a forest, but he's like, oh, there must be a way through this garden. Which feels like a translation thing, but... No, that's insane. I, though Bob and me have been very near the real Nakatomi Plaza because we, at our Simpsons table read, it's on the same property.

It is a building Fox owns that if you just go to a meeting at the Fox 20th Century Fox lot, you will drive by the, the Nakasobi Plaza still there to this day. And I guess Disney owns it now, I guess. I thought they blew it up. No, no. It survived. It survived. Okay. So, yeah, anyway, the goal of the PC engine game is to fight your way up through the skyscraper and then gunned down a helicopter.

So you're killing the FBI guys at the end of the game. So backtracking a little bit, there was a Commodore 64 adaptation of Die Hard, which was developed by Activision, but it feels kind of spiritually similar to the NES game. It's not a top-down viewpoint. It's more of a final fight viewpoint where it's kind of that three-quarters perspective. and you can go around in, you know, on two axes. It has an entire system that takes up the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, I feel like this game is really constrained by the technology because the actual playable space is like a quarter of the screen.

And then there's a huge inventory and a huge display at the top. So it kind of becomes almost abstract. But you are kind of working your way through the hallways of the office complex and trying to, you know, perform different tasks taken from the movie. but again like the NES game if you haven't seen the movie it doesn't make a lot of sense so you really have to

kind of know the material in which case like you know kind of spoils the surprises I wasn't able to play this one because I don't have a working C64 but it doesn't feel like I missed much of anything I hope you at least jump off the building

at the end of this one too I could not say like I said I wasn't able to play it just watch some sample videos what I like about this one is again I don't have one of these Commodore's either, so I couldn't play it, is that there's a running kind of commentary at the top of the screen where people talk to you, like Hans Gruber or Al on the street. Like, it's sort of like

kind of like very primitive metal gear kind of thing, although it's happening within the UI of the game itself. Now, that's cool. That's cool. But yeah, it sounds, it sounds far more ambitious than you could ever do on a C-64, but I applaud any C-64 game that did not do three-quarters viewpoint. All right. So we mentioned this earlier. And again, we mentioned this earlier, and again, it's the best diehard game, but the worst adaptation. Dynamites. That is Sega AM-1's die-hard arcade and its sequel Dynamite Cop. In Japan, this was not a die-hard licensed game. It was called Dynamite Deca. And it does take some weird liberties with the source material. It's a two-player brawler.

So you're fighting a lot of terrorists. Most of them are wearing like 1980s colorful tropical jams and things like that. Or I think there's like a cyborg spider the have to fight it goes a little wild yeah uh you also have a second character you can fight as a fight alongside of chris thompson i don't know who that is but she's there uh in japan because this was not a diehard game the the main playable character is not john mclean his name is bruno which is a nice little insider reference that's his jazz persona yes exactly so um definitely i feel like this was made by people who really loved die hard and really were into it but also we're we're like, you know, let's not let the constraints of this film tie us down.

Let's just make a fun as hell brawler, cooperative brawler in polygons. Like, you know, by that, by the time this was made, it was like 96 or 97. Like that, that style of game was really fading. And it feels like they kind of just said, who cares? Let's do it in polygons and make it just like over the top and hilarious. And they even put in a little touch of movie love in that as you fight and play through the game, your costumes become more and more degraded because John's outfit takes a beating

like he starts out in a white wife beater and by the end of the movie it's like brown because he's been in the ducks and crawling around in soot and it's all bloody that comes through in here like by the end of the game you're just like you've got shredded pants

like high waters and your shirt is all destroyed I love in the just quickly about his costume in the movie I meant to say that it's another thing I love about it is like you if you see a screenshot from the film, you know at what point of it is in his life because he changes throughout the whole film, like by the end of the movie, he is shirtless barefoot covered in blood and

smoke and fire everywhere. Like, it's beautiful. The how they let you know what point you are in the film because of how Bruce Willis is costumed. I want a continuity department really got there. They earned their paycheck on that one. About this game, Die Hard Arcade or Dynamite Deca, whatever, some very important early roots of both Shenmu and Yaksa are in this game. And it's, so there are QTs in this game before Shenmoo. And there are also, it has all of the crazy, pick up any weapon you see on the screen thing of Yaxa. That's like, that was the most fun part of this game for me.

It's like you can pick up brooms. You can pick up everything on the screen because they're all polygons. You can just whack people with them. It's great. I love this game so much. I played this game to death. like because we had the Saturn version my you know in my family it was for that 32 bit generation I could pick a system I'd get for my birthday my brother picks the system he gets for

his birthday we were upper middle class kids who got these spoiled I know but he picked the Saturn I picked the N64 it was years before we got a PlayStation but the Saturn we were kind of stuck for games but when we got Die Hard Arcade We played it a million times because me and my brother, like, it was honestly, we were nostalgic while he was 10 and I was 15 because we wanted to play a new streets of rage. And his streets of rage as hell, like, so you just play it over and over and over again. And just, God, the brawling action of it, it showed me what brawlers could be when things get polygonal, but it's also why

like brawlers, Sega couldn't keep making awesome brawlers in this style, because it's way too short and arcades are dying, so they couldn't make him anymore, which is really too bad. And I mean, do you get, uh, if you spent $50 on this Saturn game, do you get a lot of

time for your money? No, not really. It's about a 20 minute game. Yeah, but oh man, we played that 20 minutes a million times. Like, yeah, I, I, I, all the QTEs, all the terrible dialogue. Like, it also reminds me of the House of the Dead games with their terrible dialogue in it. And also, yeah, the, I mean, I love the character so much in it, like in my line, uh, if anybody else uses

line at the, uh, the messaging app, there are dynamite cop sticker sets you can get. Oh, wow. I've sent many a dynamite cop sticker to, uh, to friends and loved ones. Uh, I love that game. And there is a sequel for Dreamcast. I wasn't able to play Die Hard. arcade because my Saturn recently died, but I did dig around with Dynamite Cop a little bit, and it's just dumb fun. And I feel like you mentioned Yakuza

and Shenmu, as kind of successors of this. I also think spike out in a way. Wasn't that Sega also? Well, Sega was doing weird, fun brawlers in this era. Like, zombie revenge is one of those two? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now, I played a shitload of

dynamite cop as well, because I had become more of a hardcore online. line video game nerd so I knew it was a diehard arcade sequel which you know got to be an annoying fun fact I could tell my friends like you know actually this is a hard arcade but but yeah

I played I played that one to death too that that big fight on a boat at the very end with all the missiles and the God good times good time but but that also was I didn't think the diehard arcade was too shallow to be a home console game

but when I played dynamite cop on my Like, they really can't charge $50 for this. This is wrong. But yeah, you're so right. Yakuza in the same way as Dynamite Cop, like, it's the evolution of the Sega brawlers that Sega was so good at. And they kind of lost that technology in a way. And we're able to rediscover it in the Auxa games because they couldn't make quarter-munching brawlers anymore like the Dynamite Cop series. Yeah, I just looked up Spike Out.

and I was right. It was a Sega game and it has very much the same visual aesthetic, like the same colorfulness and just overall vibe as the diehard arcade series. I should have played. And it was led by Nagoshi. It's like a more

of a kind of almost arena style brawler, like a blend between arena and traditional final fight style brawler, streets of rage style brawler. So it's kind of in between there. So I feel like there's kind of this natural progression. You have like Streets of Rage, Die Hard Arcade, Spike Out, Yakuza.

Yeah, like, you were saying Henry in an earlier episode we done Yakuza that Sega doesn't make 30 games a year now. They just put those games into Yaksa. Like, the fighting element is this, is, was it well, like an evolve version of this, rather? Yeah, you're right. They used to make a darts game. Now the darts game is just a segment of Yaxa. And same with, same with these brawlers.

I just miss quarter-munching brawlers so much, but specifically, Sega's ones like we, I play Streets of Rage endlessly but never touched Final Fight as a kid and so I miss these types of games and diehard arcade was a wonderful

32 bit encapsulation of it I was I love it so much that when I played I mainly played Project Cross Zone and Project Cross Zone too so Bruno would join my team and I could see Bruno

and he's in it yeah and there's a lot of great localization jokes about Bruno in there that got to give thumbs up to whoever wrote that game. That's why I wanted to play that, like, Namco, Capcom strategy RPG that I heard was terrible that ever came here. I'm like, it's all my friends. All my friends are here. I don't

care if their game is bad. Project Crossone is the same thing, but also with Sega. Well, that's, okay. The Project Crossone games, the quick aside about them, they are ridiculous. They are bad. They're not fun to play. Like, they're as a tactical game, as a tactics RPG game, it's not that fun to me, honestly. But getting to see the scenes of the characters are also just like, The themed, okay, the combat even sucks, but when you put different mixes of characters together, they do cool cinematic fights together too. And then plus they just have the funniest of like, well, what if Chun Li met Pai from Virtual Fighter? What if all these are like these same archetypes from multiple different fighting games all hung out with each other. And they're all like, oh yeah, we all are Chinese stereotypes, aren't we? Or what if? Um, Majima met Jin Kizuya. Like, uh, what, what happens then and the, the writers have a ton of fun with it or even when weirdo characters that have never been, haven't been in a video game in 20 years meet each other. Their music comes in and you're just like, oh, the, the lead girl from soccer awards is meeting, um, the ninja from virtual fighter. Like it's you kind of, for me, I suffered through. tactical RPG that I didn't particularly like just to see more and more of the fan service. And really, I guess you should just watch a playthrough of it on YouTube and just skip

every combat sequence. And you'll get the same feel. Yeah, that's not a bad idea. Speaking of games that aren't fun to play, there's also Die Hard trilogy for PlayStation. You know, By Probe Entertainment. In your notes, Jeremy, you said you don't want to talk about it, but I have no experience with this game, but I've known people of my generation who really like this game, even though it's just like three kind of bad mini games.

For some reason, there's a lot of love for it. I guess just from the PlayStation generation. Yeah, I think it's those PlayStation Dopes who didn't know they were good Japanese games. But seriously. PlayStation Dopes. No, I, but I do think, yeah, the, the title took it a long way. And I knew some friends who liked it, too. I was one of those, you know, Japanophiles who was telling him, like,

Diart Arcades, way better than this one. But I know that this came from the Fox Entertainment Publishing era of, like, when they made the video games themselves. So that's where DiArt Trilogy comes from. There were some bad. Well, no, it was by Probe Entertainment. They, you know, they recruited. Probe who did lots of really bad

licensed movie games around the mid-90s. Well, like Fox Fox Entertainment was run by X Acclaim guys, so they know the bad people to hire. Yeah, that explains a lot. Yeah, because Probe worked with Acclaim a lot, so yeah. Yeah. No, we... I haven't played this in like 25 years,

and it was only briefly then, but it sucked then and going back and looking at it now. It is one of the ugliest games I've ever seen. It is just unjustified. i cannot believe how bad it looks it's uh i'm wondering if they're even textures in this game looking at it now i think you know uh maybe it tricked kids with like the value proposition they're like by calling so by calling a diehard trilogy it's like i'm buying three games at once yeah now that now that i know about this and now that i'm remembering how bad this was

i'm wondering if all the people who think alien trilogy on a playstation are also completely wrong oh i think I think I know why this is so popular. It came out in 1996. There was nothing huge for the PlayStation in 1996 yet. I mean, that was the year. Resident Evil and like Crash Bandicoot. That's when it was first starting to take off. So like if you wanted to play like one of the five like interesting looking games at the time, this is probably one of them.

Unfortunately, we've come a long way since then. And I want to end this podcast talking about one last diehard game that I've never actually been able to play. But I spent, you know, probably half an hour watching. videos of it and just kind of reading about it and digging into it. And it seems like something I'd probably still enjoy. And that's diehard Nakatomi Plaza by Piranha Games released in 2002. It is a very 2002-ass first-person shooter, but built around the die-hard license. And so it just has that vibe of kind of a generic first-person shooter from 2002, which I kind of like. Like, I miss those games and wouldn't mind playing this again.

It seems like it does an okay job with the license. It seems pretty short, too, like three or four hours long, so it doesn't overstay its welcome, which is nice. I don't know. It seems, it seems a feeling. Yeah, no, it does sound, but it's funny to think how few years separated and Diehardt trilogy and how much better it could be. And they actually, you know, it doesn't sound like it was comparable to say how

Activision hired everybody. that worked on Spider-Man to be in the Spider-Man movie game or how EA would hire every actor and be able to say, like, it's like you're playing the movie. Every actor's here. But they did go to the effort of hiring some of the people, the more affordable actors in it. I don't know. Reginald Val Johnson, he's got to have almost as much money as Bruce Willis. If you're on a sitcom in the 90s for a decade, I feel like you're living in like a mega mansion or something. That's true. Yeah, I think he can, he just takes whatever jobs. please him, I guess.

First of all, famously easy to work with, too, right? Everybody loves him. He's a great guy. I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not. Oh, no, no. He's notoriously awful to work with and just a huge prick. A supreme prick known for being very difficult.

And I, though, man, isn't he great in Paul Fiction? He's really great. I love him. As soon as he lost all of his hair, that's when you can write him off. Yes, yeah. He did the reverse comb over. Like, he was one of the first guys I knew who were just like, I remember. right around when vengeance came out

he was on David Letterman and Letterman's like oh he just shaved it all off he's like yeah I held on to it for too long so anyway Nakatomi Plaza seems really short but I appreciate the fact that it seems to have lots of sort of non-combat goals although it is way more combat heavy

you know gunplay heavy than a diehard game really should be there are a lot of things you can do beyond that like you have a lot of objectives cutting wires and things like that it has you know the ability to kind of crawl through ducks with a lighter and sneak around behind the scenes. And there's some fun stuff like there's an escort mission of sorts with Argyle. So it seems like they had fun, took a few liberties with the property, but still try to retain the spirit of it. So yeah, I'm sad I missed out on this

one. It was just a PC shooter. And as far as I can tell, it's never been reissued. I'm sure the license is too expensive. It'll never show up again. So it's kind of one of those like blink and you miss a things. But, you know, as as games, of this era go, it seems very much like a product of its time and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Well, now that Disney owns diehard, you know, I can see those licenses anywhere

for a while, I think. Oh, yeah, what are we going to get Disney Infinity rebooted with a diehard module? I mean, they are definitely going to make a new diehard movie at Disney like there. And Bruce Willis will be doing these movies as long as he can. I have a feeling.

As long as there is HGH in the world. Oh, come on. That's all. Oh, that's not a cast. Every 63-year-old man looks like that. Yeah, exactly. He just lives in the gym. He works so hard. All right.

So that's it. That's Die Hard. The movie and the games. Just the movie. We're not talking about the sequels because most of them are bad. And anyway, Die Hard was the one that was really influential. The others were just kind of, hey, let's do the diehard thing again with Bruce Willis instead of with some other cast. And, yeah, this was one of those really sort of monumental

films of the late 80s. I don't think it really was a huge hit at first, but it's just one of those that's kind of got caught in the collective craw of pop culture. And it's just kind of stayed there. You know, it kind of resurges every Christmas, basically.

Well, yeah, I don't want to talk about that aspect of it, but... Yeah, it's a little tiresome. But they make a great point on that documentary that I had not considered in a while, but for like, after this movie, it was basically 10 years of action films that were all pitched as die hard on a boat die hard on a bus die hard on a like under siege a

perfectly cromulent action film it's just die hard on a boat speed a really really great action film yeah that's just die hard on a bus you know i was also thinking um like did die hard influence uh cojima and then i'm like all right there's a guy in death stranding named die hard man or die hardman whatever you want to call him yeah yeah no i mean the the shadow this cast on video games it's I guess it's um it's probably as much as any other action film the running man I'd say probably more because it has like full on boss fights but like the I mean like there's also like an ammo gauge in this and picking up guns and yeah everything he picks up is useful like it will play off later in the movie or pay off later yeah and collectibles to pick up all these

things so yeah I think uh I I can definitely see how this heavily influenced video games as well as all of those movies. And I said it before, but I just, I love the cultural exchange of that American movie companies, for the most part, produced all these incredibly influential action films that all these Japanese game developers super got into. Then they make games heavily influenced by that. And then that comes to America. And then Americans develop games that are influenced by those games. Like, it's just a really interesting cultural exchange to me. It's the great circle of life.

All right, guys, I'm signing off here from Nakatomi Plaza. So if you wouldn't mind Radio and where we can find you on the internet. Oh, I guess I'll go first. Hey, I'm Henry Gilbert. Follow me on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. And, you know, if you liked hearing me and Bob talking about media and histories of them, well, boy, do I have a couple podcasts for you. There's Talking Simpsons where me and Bob talk about a different episode.

episode of The Simpsons in chronological order once a week. And also our weekly podcast, What a Cartoon, where me and Bob and cool guests talk about a different animated series once a week. If you like Jeremy, he's been on several episodes, including our bubblegum crisis, our G.I. Joe and our Max one. Those were all fun and those are all supported. Well, you can hear them for free on the wherever you find podcast, Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon.

But if you'd like to get even more stuff and cool bonuses and support us doing it, go to patreon.com slash talking Simpsons to find out more. So thanks to Henry for doing all of that work for me. I could have done some of it. It's fine. I'm just on Twitter as Bob Serbo. You can also find me on these podcasts as well all over the place. And finally, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite.

You can find me doing stuff every day at limited run games, although a lot of that's not public-facing, at least not yet. but I do work there, and that's my thing that I do. And the other thing that I do is this, the show, Retronauts, which you can find on podcatchers everywhere. And you can also support us through Patreon, patreon.com slash Retronauts. If you support us, it helps us, Bob and I, pay our bills. It helps me pay people who contribute to our social media,

do editing and cover art and run the website and so forth. We're kind of a multimedia empire. Yeah, it's true. and your support helps make that possible. So check us out, patreon.com slash retronauts. If you subscribe at $5 a month or more, you also get exclusive content,

including biweekly bonus episodes and weekly columns, written columns by Diamond Fight. And there's some other stuff that we're doing in there, some giveaways and some drawings and things like that. So check us out. Again, patreon.com slash retronauts.

And I think that's it. So guys, I'm going to blow this building and shimmy down on a fire hose. So catch you later. You know,