Talking Simpsons - Special Free Version of Iron Giant - What A Cartoon Movie!

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

As we finish a much deserved holiday break, we're taking a week off from Simpsons to give you listeners a special treat: Four HOURS of Iron Giant chat! In case you didn't know, each month we do a premium podcast for our $10 Patreon subscribers, and now we're going to share one of our extra-long eps with you. Why this one? Because Iron Giant is the film that Brad Bird quit The Simpsons to direct, so follow his career path with us and learn the surprisingly deep connections between Iron Giant and The Simpsons! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! Check out our new shirts on TeePublic! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

So she moved me up a grade because I wasn't fitting in, so now I'm even more not fitting in. I was getting good grades, you know, like always. So my mom says, you need stimulation. And I go, no, I'm stimulated enough right now. That's for sure. So she goes, uh-uh, you don't have a challenge. You need a challenge. So now I'm challenged, all right?

I'm challenged to hold on to my lunch money because of all the big mooses who want to pound me because I'm a shrimpy dork who thinks he's smarter than them. But I don't think I'm smarter. I just do the stupid homework. If everyone else just did the stupid homework, they could move up a grade and get pounded too. Is there any more coffee? Ahoy, hoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons? I'm one of your hosts, Bob Mackie, who's here with me today. Hey, it's Henry Gilbert, wearing my Superman ass on my chest.

And you might have noticed this file is much, much larger than what you're used to. And no, listener, you're not seeing things. We're tricking you by taking the week off for the new year and giving you one of our premium-sized podcasts from the Patreon. Yes, happy new year indeed to everybody in 2021. It's, oh boy, what a year. But, yes, so, uh you know we just finished season 11 and we did our community podcast and we're about to begin season 2 and season 12

combo uh that we're going to be doing throughout all of 2021 but before we do that uh we want to take a quick uh week off honestly for the the holidays and i'm in canada while you're listening to this uh and i think though as a special treat we wouldn't just give you like you know a classic crusty uh we'd give you one of our top tippity toppest premium podcasts we have ever recorded well first off me and bob do you have a sister podcast you probably are aware of what a cartoon where we do talking simpsons style analysis of a different animated series each week. And then a level above that for $10 and up patrons at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, we do the What a Cartoon movie.

And so about a year ago, we covered Iron Giant. And when we were thinking of what to offer you guys as a special treat while we took the week off, I think we both thought, what's the most Simpsony, what a cartoon movie we've done. And I think Iron Giant definitely counts. Because of Brad Bird, who was, I mean, you've heard our podcast, I assume. But yes, a major part of just developing the look of The Simpsons and basically left The Simpsons to do this. Yes. Yeah. And took several people with him so not only did he leave at the end of season eight of the simpsons but he took jeff lynch with him as well one of the top directors and lynch

never came back he stayed in hollywood and uh and several others so the start of iron giant actually is an end of an era for the simpsons animation wise too so uh yes in the history section about the iron giant you'll learn about brad bird's involvement with lots of things including the simpsons on his way to uh directing that film and uh yeah it's uh we had a ton of fun talking about it it's over a year ago now feels uh which is i i guess a hundred podcasts ago baby how we close that 2019 but yeah if you enjoy this, you want to hear more of them, head on over to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons.

Sign up at the $10 level. You get all the $5 stuff. Honestly, too many things to talk about up here in this intro, but hundreds of podcasts. But there are 23 other What a Cartoon movies waiting for you. All three hours long or longer. I think our most recent one

might be our longest one to date. Oh, yeah. We don't have the final count in yet. They still tabulating that i demand a recount uh but yeah i think yeah i mean yeah end of evangelion is a very different flavor from the iron giant but but that's the kind of wide range of stuff we cover on there we've we've done akira we've done kiki's delivery service we've also done spider-man into the spider-verse a goofy movie uh beavis and butthead do america that was a fun one with a lot of crossover with king of the hill folks on it uh so many great podcasts uh and i think you guys will enjoy hearing this one if you haven't before and yeah we often go over four hours or even close to five i mean our space jam one was our

longest one until end of it that was our magnum opus. And maybe that'll get you ready for Space Jam 2 coming to, what, HBO Max probably? Oh, yeah. Yes, actually, everything that comes out in theaters this year comes to HBO Max. Whether you like it or not, Space Jam 2 will be in your home. So what better way to prepare for it? Yeah. So I hope you guys enjoyed this week's Talking Simpsons quote about the Iron Giant. And look forward to next week where we're going to be covering

Bark Gets an F with returning guest Casey Green. Always fun to talk with him. And we, I believe, quadrupled the length of our original talk about Bark Gets an F to do that fun. And no second is wasted on this revisit of season two. And then after that, Treehouse of season two and then after that treehouse of horror 11 and so on but uh but yes i guess hope uh you guys had as good a holiday season as possible

and we wish you a happy a much happier new year for 2021 crossing our fingers this year won't be a total fuck up yeah well you know don't don't say something you can't take back. And also don't hold those words against me, but we'll all be fine. But all right, on to the Iron Giant What a Cartoon movie podcast. Cartoons from present and the past. Every week will be an animated bash. What a cartoon. What a cartoon. Maybe a short but mostly shows

We'll talk, we'll analyze, exploring as we go What a Cartoon! What a Cartoon! What a Cartoon! What a Cartoon! Hello everybody and welcome to What a Cartoon Movie, the greatest discovery since television. I'm your host Bob Hog Hug Mackey and this is an audio exploration of every animated movie ever. Who is here with me today?

Henry Gilbert and I'm hip and cool daddy-o. And this month's podcast is The Iron Giant. Blah blah blah like that? Can you do that? Blah, blah, blah? And that was Vin Diesel, which at the time I thought was a made-up name. That name's crazy. A robot is played by a guy named Diesel? Yeah, right. But he's real.

Yeah, he's realer than real now. I just saw him gave a speech at the Video Game Awards about how much he loves games and how important they are. I'm sure at this point he's more bovine growth hormone than human, but yes. He's our greatest artist of this decade, Bob. And it all started here. But yes, thank you and welcome to this month's episode of What a Cartoon You Voted For. And we're talking about the Iron Giant just in time for its 20th anniversary as that door is closing on us.

Yeah, it turned 20 really in August, but let's do it while it's still, at least there's a nine in the year, which by the time you're listening to this barely made it. I think if it's a 2020 shut this podcast off, you have to delete it. But I hope this, you know, I associate this film a little with the holiday fuzzy memories.

So hearing this over the holiday season, I think it's, it's the right timing for the iron giant i don't have that experience at all but i understand why other people do i never lived that marathon experience oh yeah oh you missed out there bob i you know this uh this is a favorite of mine i think it's why i was pretty insistent like let's just do the vote of yes or no let's let us do iron giant because i also did want to do it while it was still the 20th year of the film too so i i didn't want to miss out on this uh the timing of it now i saw this film in uh not in theaters only on dvd like a year later

as word of mouth began to spread on the internet. I hate to even think of this site now because of the owner of it, the former owner maybe, Ain't It Cool News, was where I heard about how good this film was. And it led me to checking it out in the old Snapcase DVDs. I had that DVD.

That Warner put it out on, yeah. I used to have it anyways. I was on the train very, very early as a reader of animation news groups and websites. And I didn't see it in theaters because I was 17. And the friend that would have seen it with me was out of town. And I didn't want to go to a children's movie as a 17-year-old alone. I have no shame about going to movies alone now.

Back then, I did. I mean, as a 17-year-old, you're not that far removed from being an 11 year old and so you're just feeling this like i'm a big boy now yeah i'm a big boy he sees big boy movies like the matrix and six cents and i just seen like south park bigger longer and i'm cut so it was weird to be like should i go see iron drive by myself will i be beaten we had two 20th anniversaries we could have celebrated iron giant or south park and i i i feel good in this choice we'll get around to talking about south park at some point yeah look hey i love the songs in that movie or i listen that soundtrack a million times yeah this one it's uh you know when you compare it

to the late 90s output it's such a weird film it really is with such a uh you know director who's known as like a brilliant and difficult genius yeah i think a real reason it spread with like um the hardcores and the niche fans is for the same reason like they love film fans love ghibli movies uh and that's like their only anime because they're like oh this this aesthetic like this kind of like nostalgic aesthetic and this kind of like, it replaces like Ghibli's love of Europa stuff with Americana instead. And I think that's a big appeal of it to wider audiences too. I will say upfront that I have cooled off on this movie a little. I still like it very much and I won't be that negative throughout this podcast. But I think it's like a solid B on the grading scale.

I liked it a lot when I was younger. Because as a young insufferable nerd. You tend to project yourself onto the media you enjoy. So a lot of the things I like were. I like them because that's underrated. Or nobody watched this. I'm the one who will find the joy in this one. Nobody else.

I'm so smart and everyone else is so stupid. I'm the one who likes this the joy in this one nobody else i'm i'm so smart and everyone else is so stupid i'm the one who likes this i'm not i like that at all anymore and now i can sort of see the flaws in this movie where i didn't before but i i have cooled off a little bit on the movie but i still really enjoyed watching it again for this podcast yeah i agree with that uh to somewhat i i also i think i definitely liked showing off movies as a badge of honor especially of like in from 2000 to 2000 no from 2001 to 2009 i worked at video stores and movie theaters so i loved being that kind of annoying dork who tells you like you didn't see this great movie and i and jane would definitely be one of them. It'd be the one I'd suggest to like families

who'd come into the video store and be like, I want to see a kid's film that my kids haven't heard of before. And I direct them to that. Yeah, I see more flaws in this now than I did before, but I still loved it after watching this. And I think too, what I love about it is that it now feels just like this last of its kind or one of the last of its kind of like no american studio would make a 2d film

with this kind of budget like it would never ever happen again not uh and not from warner not from like princess and the frog that was the last one that really got in with actual 2d kind of lost money right oh yeah it was so expensive it's why the last it's why every future the sad thing is that like we love 2d and we wish it was more successful but as the market bears out and what children want to see and tear their kids parents to that's frozen that's wreck it ralph that's all the pixar movies like that's that's what the kids want to see it doesn't make the money and uh when art has to exist to make money yeah patootie dies at least in a feature format yeah i mean there's a bit of 3d creeping into this movie and then

eventually brad burr would just move into pixar yeah well there was nowhere else for him to go as as we would see but why why don't we go into the history of both brad bird and the making of this film and the interesting situation that led to that so brad bird born september 24th 1957 the year this movie is set in actually uh i still think of him he has like it comes off with such like a useful energy and he's always had this blonde hair like when i see him i i never think of him as a 62 year old man he has like the child in a man's body energy but not the the disgusting version of that that john lasseter has go back to last month's podcast he uh you know yes he is the brighter version of last boyish yeah and uh he was a baby boomer

straight out of montana with a childhood love of animation that would take him very far. The documentary that's on the Blu-ray of Iron Giant is really good, though I found some extra. This is not just me telling people what happens in the Blu-ray. There's a lot more information out there. But a big part of the Blu-ray story in that documentary is he wanted to make cartoons. As a child at 11, he got a studio tour of Disney Animation Studios where he met B. Frank and Ollie of the Nine Old Men and told them he wanted to be an animator. And they challenged him of like, you say that, but until you actually animate things,

you'll see how hard it is and you won't want to do it. He spends two years making his own by himself animated short film he completes it mails it to disney and they love it so much that they are like we have to give him a summer internship this 14 year old boy wow who moves to la over the summer and is uh mentored by disney legend fellow nine old man milt call well so he teaches them a ton of stuff early 70s not a good time for disney very dark time it's come up in many of these uh movie podcasts the darkness of the 70s in early to mid 80s for the company yeah as, as we covered in the Secret of NIMH podcast and the Nightmare Before Christmas, Brad Bird was coming up in Disney at a time where the generation who

grew up on the Disney classics were like, I want to make my own. And then when they start working at Disney, they see that all of those techniques are dying and that the executives barely even want to make feature animation. And Brad Bird would graduate from high school in the mid-70s. He'd go to CalArts like all people have to to work in the animation industry. He would join a class full of many future animation heavyweights, including his future Pixar boss, John Lasseter. Those two, for a long time, were like close buddies. And everybody there looked at brad is

like he's the best animator like he's just a genius of animation and he's also like a very individualistic uh and strong-willed person who really wants his vision seen like that makes him you know both a it could be seen as a brave artist, but also seen as a difficult person to work with. A pushy jerk. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, you know, he does make great art, but well, we'll get to more of that later. But yeah, it's, so he joins Disney in the late seventies, straight out of Cal Arts, and he is really not fitting in, in the oppressive environment where we talked about how tim burton wasn't fitting in either in the nightmare before christmas podcast tim burton

turned inward and got depressed brad burr turned outward and was just very attacking of his executives and was just like i don't he's working on fox in the hat and he's like why are we doing this like this could be better let's let's do this let's do Hat and he's like, why are we doing this? Like, this could be better. Let's, let's do this. Let's do this. And you know, from the executive standpoint, they're seeing this like freshman animator just shouting at them and telling them they're doing a bad job and that they should do a better job. And he's given like some leeway at first because they are like, you're the artistic leader for us. Like you're going to be such an important director for us. But eventually they're just like, you are insubordinate. Get out of here. As Bird tells the story in the documentary, he's about to leave.

And he says, and he's going to say, it's been a, and he doesn't know what to say next. And then the executive who just fired him is like disappointment. And then Brad Bird says, yeah yeah disappointment so brad bird and john laster both fired from disney in the early 80s uh yeah yeah and burton burton quit too like but brad bird didn't follow the folks who quit to join bluth though they they were their own quitters and i mean bird always had an interest in like filmmaking in general too like he he is a screen a screenwriter, like he's really good at, or he is an Oscar winning screenwriter, I think actually are nominated anyway. And so, yeah, Bird is just this very creative guy who enters the 1980s exiting Disney and

trying to make a lot of stuff work, like trying to sell so many different things while doing odds and ends jobs of like uncredited animation on things like the animal olympics oh yeah too sexy for me and also um the black cauldron like he has uncredited animation on that but that could just be like salvaged animation that he finished at the near the end of his tenure in uh at disney you can see that he's like this very creative animator like his animation is so skilled he has great instincts of what presents information well via animated form and in storyboards and he has a real trouble working with executives which you know we hate executives so i'm on his side there it's the kind of individualism that defined Brad Bird.

Some people have compared it to Randian objectivism, too, this kind of belief in the individualist. Now, Brad Bird has been, like, people have noted this a lot in his works, particularly the first Incredibles and Tomorrowland. I think you can see a little of it in this movie too. Yeah. Individualism stuff. Once you're told about it, it's pretty easy to spot. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, Bird this year in an interview is asked directly about it. Like, oh, these Randy and overtones and your stuff. And he said it was lazy criticism to just call him the Rand guy. And he talked about how like his when this film came out the Iron Giant uh he was called by conservatives like oh he's saying the that the Cold War was bad and that we should have been friends with the Russians instead of being afraid of them and when he put out Ratatouille they said like this guy loves France fucking french fry France lover like so he's he says that he's had it from both sides my personal read on it is that I think that Brad Bird read Rand as a kid, as many smart-ass young men have done in their lives.

And I think he was, at the very least, very attracted to the objectivist views on art of like, no compromise, make your art, build your buildings as tall as possible, that kind of stuff. Yeah. I don't see as much of the messages in his films of like the parasites who eat away at the creative people. I do see like society pushing down creatives, but that's a common theme throughout almost all art. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I wouldn't call him a full-on Andrew Ryan objectivist, but I think at the very least his worldview as a youngster was informed by reading the works of Ayn Rand, and then it's something he's changed with over time. I choose to view The Incredibles as we should not hold back billionaires. Yeah. Let them spend their money the way they choose. If they want to build a super suit, like let them. Yeah. But okay.

So 1980, Brad Bird is working on many different projects. His big one he really wants to do. It's him, John Lasseter, John Musker, Jerry Reese, and a lot of other hardcore animators at the time they are pushing hard to create an adaptation of Will Eisner's pioneering comic book The Spirit which uh if you're not a comic book fan most people don't remember but it was a very creatively driven like um the the spirit's not even the main character in it but it's like a detective stories that are really about a way to tell offbeat stories in you know very filmic ways like

will will eisner many people love it and if uh if you can look past some um racial elements of the times in those old spirit comics like the artistry in them is very impressive i mean there's a reason why the most prestigious comic award is named after eisner yeah but i i feel like i have to keep saying will eisner to make it clear we're not not michael it's not his son michael i'm kidding they're not related and and so many artists like if you're a hardcore art nerd who gets into animation you of course love the spirit and so brad bird is uh he even does like a full pencil test of of a trailer of what he thinks the spirit could be and how cool he thinks it could be he sees it as like a pg film adaptation of it that will take animation into a whole new place and and show

people how mature animation can be and he's taking it to the right guy for that too steven spielberg like there's another universe where steven spielberg doesn't work with don bluth but he works with brad bird and buys his spirit idea and makes that i mean from a commercialism standpoint i can see why spielberg chose a mouse movie over a spit over a spirit adaptation it was just released uh four years ago folks out there should definitely check out the pencil test that uh that was made uh like pro bono like by bird and and uh colleagues unfortunately they made a much worse version of that yes a decade ago yikes that's how long development hell can take like they're like poor poor will eisner got jerked around for decades like he was dead by the time that movie came out long i mean better off without having to see that movie direct by frank thing frank miller directed the movie right yep sure i don't

think they let him around people anymore um no he went back to he slunk back to comic books after that he uh that was his uh his real blank check kind of moment there uh so by the mid 80s bird though was still working a lot with steven spielberg he was working on some scripts he's the writer of batteries not included like he wrote that screen i did see that that's crazy uh henry the name is asterisk batteries not included you have to say that out loud the asterisk is silent in my head to me uh but uh he also was working was working on Steven Spielberg's anthology series, Amazing Stories, which is kind of Spielberg's nicer version of Twilight Zone, I guess you'd say. It was even more open. It was just really a way to put short films on television. He wrote one episode in season one, but in season two was really when Brad Bird took off with the 1987 episode of it called Family Dog that he directed.

Oh, yeah. I didn't see this when it originally aired, I don't think. But I remember seeing reruns of this on USA as a kid in the 80s, and I would just glue to the TV because this was pre-Simpsons, the closest you got to the Simpsons. Yeah. the closest you got to the Simpsons. Yeah, the family dog is, you can see a little bit of the roots of the Simpsons there and it explains Bird's career trajectory too, I think. But yeah, the family dog was this idea. He came up like right after Disney and at first he was going to make it as a film short

in the early 80s, but he couldn't get it off the ground. He finally sold it to Spielberg and he got, it was a million dollar episode of tv which like in 87 that's pretty crazy it looks like it too and a brief family dog cameo and i'm the iron giant yeah it's i love that i call i have forgotten that bit in there and and also if you've seen family dog you're like this kind of looks like a tim burton thing tim burton did do character designs on it back when he first thought of it i I can see that very triangular head on the dog being a Tim Burton creation.

I mean, it's Frank and Weenie's brother. That's true. Also, at some point in the 80s, though, tragedy entered Brad Bird's life where his sister Susan was tragically shot and killed by her husband. Oh, I didn't know this. Wow. Yeah, it's a disturbing moment that Brad said hung over his life all through the 80s as he's also trying to finally get to direct a film. You know, and it's just not going.

He has all these projects that on top of that, then he has to like his sister he was very close to killed by a gun, which that would later inform some of his artistic choices on the Iron Giant. After Family Dog is this big word-of-mouth success, everybody's like, oh, the Family Dog, wow, wow, wow. 1989, as Bird is working on a bunch of other projects that are stuck in development hell, including a film I've never seen him talk about, I only know from a variety headline, it's like, 1989, we've got to deal with brad bird to direct a live

action film about a boy who lies to his younger brother that he's adopted i never sounds nothing ever happened to it yes it's not a comedy it's a comedy so in 1989 as he's trying to get a bunch of projects going brad bird is hired by klaski chupo to be the executive consultant on a new show they're working on about some yellow family. It'll never work. But yes, he, as Brad described it from seasons one through eight, he basically worked two to three days a week on The Simpsons as an executive consultant, meaning he was on the animation side working out of both Klaski Chupo and then Film Roman. When animation would come through, he would kind of just, you know, look over it as well, give any notes he had, and generally help with like defining the rules of the Simpsons world. I think probably David

Silverman is probably the most influential artist on Simpsons animation, but I'd say Brad Bird's probably pretty close behind him there. Yeah. I think both those guys leaving around the same time really affected the visual flourishes of the show. And you can hear him on a few commentaries actually on the DVDs. He didn't do a lot of animation, but he always got to do like one Krusty scene whenever he wanted to,

because he loves Krusty and he loves animating Krusty. Yeah. And as Ian Jones-Quartey talked about in our recent podcast uh about simpsons roasting on an open fire that brad bird wrote the guidebook for storyboarding the simpsons like the rules of it he wrote it like that's how much he defined it so like layout imposing and all that that was really defined by him in those early seasons like it's uh and his animation practices like echoed through primetime animation from then on like that's how influential brad birdy was without us even knowing it as executive consultant on the simpsons i have to go check out that family dog tv show they made

with him i really wonder what it looks like i saw a few when it aired as a kid uh i only have any memories of it really outside of one very like distressing episode i watched i i think he actually only has like creator credit on it i don't think he was that creatively involved i know that was a real development hell thing that eventually it aired in like 92 or 93 forever yeah and just made 10 episodes and once it was done like that's what could have happened to the simpsons like they could have just said yeah we made 10 fuck it just put it out we don't care yeah brad bird defined so much of the content of simpsons you'll just hear so many times on commentaries artists will say oh that was brad bird note to do x and y or brad bird really like this bit here and brad bird did this like they they all loved brad bird i think just like like

we talked about in the kiki's delivery service about how miyazaki worked at telecom and tms and was really influential just on all the artists under him i think brad bird had a similar effect uh he only directed fully one episode and that was uh crusty got busted in season one that's right that was from like emergency they're like we need another director here who here's directed hands up and he would co-direct like father like clown yeah he's uh which he did a lot he's on the commentary that it's pretty good he's you can see here his forceful personality there it's also funny to hear them on commentaries like start to grow more respect for brad as he succeeds without them and they're like oh i guess he wasn't just like one of our art slaves who draws our jokes for us post incredibles while working on the simpsons

you know like you said two or three days a week he still has time to uh work on some other stuff so he signed a development deal with turner in turner's slowly growing feature animation business because as we all know by 1990 91 disney has restarted their feature animation boom and all the other animation companies are like why aren't we doing this we could do this and there wouldn't really be a strong competitor until shrek right yeah pretty much dreamworks was the only one that could actually pull it off. But Turner thought they could do it. They did the complete mess that was the Jetsons movie. They did Pagemaster as well in 94. I was just talking about that the other night.

As a kid, I was like, I like books and I don't want to see this. I like books and Home Alone. I'm your market for this. That's how much they blew it. But while those films are being made brad bird is trying diligently at turner to sell his film ray gun that's with two n's which is raymond chandler meets buck rogers as he described it sounds great uh it looks there's concept art out there you can find search for brad bird ray gun it does look really cool. Uh, but Turner just wasn't into it probably because

it was pitched as like a PG 13 kind of film that has more adult undertones. And it's about like murder and femme fatales and all these things that like, you know, he loves, and this is also the same kind of spirit that brought him to the spirit, like those same kinds of stories, but he just couldn't sell it to turner that takes us to 1995 where he's still having trouble with ray gun and turner merges with warner brothers effectively killing the project because the new warner execs just aren't into it at all they're not even like oh you can't rework it like yeah it's somehow they did finish catstone dance in that transition and buried it.

It actually, Cats Don't Dance is a very similar path as Iron Giant of just like, it's too far gone. Let's just finish it. And it was being developed for a long time. I think it started as like a Michael Jackson project. I think so. We'll get to that movie at some point. We got to do that one, yes. You can rent it on YouTube. It's the only place to get it.

Soon it'll be on HBO Max, I'm sure. I'm sure it will uh but yes now brad bird was an employee of warner feature animation in 1995 but what is warner feature animation uh well as we've talked a little bit about in it the batman mask of phantasm episode warner in the 80s was their films were pretty much just making compilation films with the remaining were surviving termite terrorist animators like getting Chuck Jones or Freeling to

animate worse looking things around their old shorts and getting a dying mill blank to rasp into a microphone between cigarettes. Yeah, I'm Daffy when they cut between old like 50s Daffy and eight late 80s Daffy, it's astounding. It's shocking.

Oh, yes, people do age. It was sad stuff to watch, though those still were, especially the Bugs Bunny Roadrunner movie. That was a formative viewing experience for me. It might have been one of the first times I really saw Bugs Bunny cartoons. It was my favorite Bugs thing at first.

I'm pretty sure Quack Busters was my favorite, mainly because of the Ghostbusters connection, but also I think there's better new stuff in the framing device. Yes, I would agree with that. I mean, I still, I think as an old animator, Chuck was better than Freeling, but he got all the little nose twinkles.

Twinkles, all the long eyelashes on characters yeah over overdoing it there not everything is ricky ticky tabby okay if i must uh critique a dead man here uh but yeah so that's what warner is up to 1989 little mermaid comes and it's just boom and this is after the bluth films it's just like oh disney and dan bluth have recreated feature animation it can make money warner's looking pretty cheap by comparison now you're seeing in 1990 that they are challenging disney afternoon with you know tiny tunes so they i think there is this feeling among warner exec of like, we have to match Disney in all things. Like we're challenged to defeat them as they still are now with the superhero

movies. And so the next five years of 90 to 95 is a Warner doing the economically safe move of finding animated films from other people and then distributing it, not doing the full budgeting of like paying for it themselves to make it. Uh, that starts with a release thing, absolute dog shit like Rover Dangerfield in 1991, uh, forgettable Bluth work like Thumbelina in 1994, and then transforming a direct to video movie in Batman Mask of the Phantasm into a theatrical release film.

But in all those cases, regardless of quality, it showed that Warner really didn't know how to market an animated film in the way Disney did. Because a lot of times, especially with kids' movies, it's more about marketing than even quality as far as it goes. And they just didn't know how to sell it to kids and get them in the theaters by 95 did warner decides it's time to invest in their own films instead of releasing other people's movies so they start releasing start that with what will be their biggest hit probably ever when you take into account merchandise space jam yep it's uh welcome to the slam and come up and jam are they still making a sequel to space jam i mean they say they are uh lebron and ryan coogler and all these folks they they say it's happening you

really have to read the i believe it's cartoon brew they have an oral history on space jam cluster fudge of a production it um i i can't imagine that a cartoon film that started as a commercial would be that complicated. Oh, it was. Yeah, no. And I mean, it's a weird and clunky film that also really marginalizes animation and shoves it to the side. Like, just try to find out who led the animation on that film. It won't be easy to find out. One of 30 directors.

And so, unfortunately, though, it's hard to argue that it was a big success for warner and compared to all their other ones like it is the standout like so 95 as they're working on space jam they also are working on what's going to be they think they're disney killer quest for camelot their princess movie oh it's bad so bad and uh the production sounds like it's worth its own podcast of mistakes and problems but in general folks blamed the issues with quest for camelot with meddlesome executives and a lack of infrastructure needed to actually copy the disney production pipeline that they were trying to emulate warner just starting up a feature animation studio the way they did that was a shitload of money then they're finding out how expensive animated movies are and you can see why execs

are now second guessing everything we're like it shouldn't cost as much no no no so quest for camelot is becoming a giant boondoggle of losing money it's losing staff and actors multiple directors like it is costing warner tons of cash they also inherit cat's don't dance in 1997 and they just kind of shove it out because they have no clue what to do with it it's a critical darling but with little fanfare a precursor to iron giant for sure so with all that going on in 1997 allison abate a producer at warner she is looking to find a director for another of their stalled projects, an adaptation of the Ted Hughes book, the iron man.

Now I took a look at this because I'd never read it and it is a very different story than this movie. What they have in common in iron man, what they don't have in common, mostly everything else. Yeah. It's set in England. It's about a boy and his father it's about a town that finds out about the giant very early it's it has nothing in common with the eventual product we got uh but when they licensed it

they saw it as a disney style musical that would adapt a stage musical that was done by Pete Townsend of the who that's so weird. They, but they couldn't figure it out. Like they licensed it for Pete Townsend in the early nineties. That's why he's still an executive producer on this film. Uh, but they just can't figure out what they're doing. They're also like, they think it's going to be full CGI because they're working on it post toy story, you know, know, in 95, 96, 97. They're like, we can do this in CGI. On the Blu-ray, there's some test footage of what they thought it would be. And it just, I know it's test footage, but it looks real bad. Like they, they just didn't understand what they wanted it to be. So Alison Abate, she sees that they just

inherited Brad Bird from Turner. She's looking for animators who could take over this film and find a way to get it out of development hell. And Brad Bird really hooks into some of it. He loves the story about a boy and a robot, especially. And partially calling on his family tragedy with gun violence, reimagining it in a childhood not unlike his own. He wants to add in a ton of red scare stuff and ditch the pete townsend music and just make it about a gun with a soul a gun that doesn't want to be a gun i'm really glad this came out in 99 because i think

the door was closing around that time for like a detached look at the 50s an ironic look uh because you know the way nostalgia moves we were ready to look back at other decades with scorn but now was the perfect time because the things that we grew up with as kids like the simpsons and mystery science theater were all about poking fun of the square weird values of the 50s and the paranoia that people had and fear and all the b movies those children of the 50s watched on television which we we didn't we only watched when mystery science theater watched them we had jokes laid on top of them for us for our safety 50s watched on television, which we didn't. We only watched when Mystery Science Theater watched them. We had jokes laid on top of

them for us, for our safety. And when he said to ditch the Pete Townsend music, you would think that's the end of it right there, because I would think if this was adapting a musical by a lot of people, the musician who's highly respected would have said you cannot delete my music,

but Pete Town townsend apparently just had the expression like i got paid apparently that album just exists on its own too yeah yeah it came out in 89 so you can listen to that interpretation of a very different story as like the who's tommy kind of version of it yeah uh so brad bird was hired based on his passion for the project like warner execs were like, wow, he really gets this. Like he's so excited to make this. And so Bird got to work on a script with Tim McCandley's, uh, and the project would get two years of production.

Now, as Brad Bird would explain it, this was with one third the money of a Disney or DreamWorks film and half the production schedule. Yeah. On the commentary, they tell a lot of great stories. One of them is they basically had nine months of pre-production, which sounds like a lot if you're not in animation, but it's no time at all. Usually it's like over a year, 18 months, two years before you actually have to start animating scenes. They had nine months to figure out their entire story and storyboard it. Yes. Fully storyboard and a major motion picture because once that nine months is up then

they're in a huge rush to like assign out scenes to all the animators they hired and get stuff overseas like it's so so much they have on their plates and i think the budget was 48 million and like lion king and things like that were over 100 million easily yeah yeah the the one they compared to in the documentary is tarzan because that was like the contemporary production that they all knew about was happening at disney and like there's a great scene in the documentary filmed during production where brad burn is talking to his crew and he's just like we finished three weeks before tarzan, and they had a whole year more than us in production and 40 more animators. So fuck them, monkeys.

Like, as I've read in many accounts of the folks who loved Working For, I'm like, they compared him to, like, Maximus from Gladiator. Just like this great, inspiring general they all loved working for. Now, if you think about the budget while watching the movie,

it's a very good-looking movie very good looking character animation, but it is sort of an empty movie in terms of the amount of characters you meet. It's usually just a few characters on the screen. There's some random townsfolk, but not very often. It's just like a movie about a few characters. Yeah. It's not a big ensemble movie. It's a really good point. Like you compare that to like the number of characters you see on screen and say Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast. Like it's a less cluttered film, I guess you could say. And I think though they hide that they made that budget work so well for them. Like they hide it so well, like how their limitations.

And you listen to the commentary all they talk about is limitations yeah and how much they had to cut and how they had to simplify scenes it doesn't really come off as that obvious and unless you think of the money and you'd say oh there'd be people here there'd be traffic here there'd be a crowd here things like that yeah you don't think about like these crowd shot one of the first scenes in the movie is a boat with one guy on it they talk about how like this is supposed to be a giant boat full of people but uh they they just had to keep cutting and cutting anywhere they yeah wonder brother said you can't even have water it's too expensive but they figured it out it's uh and the water looks great for how little they've got it still looks good yeah so brad

bird started staffing up one of the first guys he hired was the head of the story department who was overseeing all the boarding of it. Jeffrey Lynch, who is one of the strongest directors from the Simpsons seasons one through seven. Oh yeah. Directed my favorite episode, who shot Mr. Burns part one. And apparently he didn't do any animation on this, but there was so much of him all throughout this movie in terms of the storytelling, both visually in terms of the story that's being told. And also was watching the credits i had no idea he was part of this movie and i saw him as like one of the first people listed uh jeff jeffrey lynch j-e-f-f-e-r-y i'm like uh is that the same simpsons guy they spelled his name wrong and that's never been fixed oh

that's sad instead of r-e-y it's e-r-y in the credits and i'm like oh okay i guess uh sure it's it's uh it's been how many years since the movie came out you can't fix the credits maybe it was a wga thing i don't know i i know on the commentary like bird is so effusive with praise of lynch he's on it too he's there yeah he's just like this one and annie for storytelling and that's all jeffrey lynch heading up the storyboard team he, he executed on him and the rest of the borders executed on the script and story that bird and McAllen's made like perfectly. Like there's so many times on the commentary, they're like,

Oh, this was your idea, Lynch, or you figured this out. We couldn't get this story point figured out till you did it. And like, I mean, you watch his episodes or even just,

uh, before he got to be a director on simpsons just his layouts and some stuff they're just so like filmic actiony like the his last episode the hellfish episode is a big action movie like it's amazing to look at i'm just thinking of the scene in who shot mr burns part one when homer Homer is graffito tagging Mr. Burns' office and the camera pulls out from him up into the ceiling of the room. He did that on his own, that little shot.

Amazing, amazing. That was a real get for Brad Bird. I mean, there weren't as many Simpsons. I looked through the credits of a lot of the major animators, not a ton of Simpsons people, but just losing Brad Bird, Jeffrey Lynch, and a couple other folks I'm going to name.

I think that is a big reason for an animation and also losing David Silverman separate from this movie. That's a big change from season eight to season nine. That really just, it's something Simpsons couldn't really recover from i also think uh where lynch got first worked with bird it was on the do the bart band music video like they worked very closely together on that in estonia or whatever wherever they animated it uh and the head of animation was tony fusilli who uh he was working

with a team of animators smaller than most disney features and he would know because he worked on character animations for aladdin in aladdin musfasa in the lion king esmeralda and hunchback and was coming off of uh running quack pack or like being a lead animator on quack pack you know what uh randomly i put one of those on it looks too good for what it is and then also randomly it'll be a superhero show for no reason they really couldn't find a premise for quack pack i mean after being handed that i could see why tony facilia is like i'm out of here from disney i want to work uh with brad he's making he's finally getting to direct his movie so big get for them too like i think you know you you hear

all those character animations that he headed up i think, you know, you, you hear all those character animations that he headed up. I think that you can really see a lot of that and like the specifics of movements, especially from like Hogarth and Dean and Kent Mansley. Well, I mean, his animation is amazing. Yeah. I enjoyed watching it with the commentary on to just turn off the dialogue of the movie and just stare at the faces because the character animation the facial animation is so good and specific and i love it so much and the film is entirely in 2d save for the titular giant a cg monster who kind of i mean if you look at it metatextually it is 3d invading a 2d world and changing everything i can see that that's cool and that animation was headed up by Steve Markowski.

He was also fresh off of boarding The Simpsons, but Markowski was a longtime animation veteran, came out of the Bakshi 80s studios. He's an alum of that. He also has, I don't know what scene, but he has an animation credit on Stimpy's Invention. Okay. Actually, one of the animators on this is Chris Sauvé, who was an animator at Carbuckle Cartoons doing a lot of Ren Stimpy.

And he was a recent director on one of the Talking Futuramas that we did recently. Oh, yeah, yeah. A lot of people would leave Iron Shite to work on Futurama as well. And the Giants design itself, it was mostly done by film director joe johnson of the rocketeer i read that and i was like what the hell uh but but in the extras you can see his design isn't fully the giant but it really took them like he gave them a new starting point uh definitely like the kind of art deco designs like you can you can tell it comes from the director of rocketeer the yeah especially the eyes you're right but the the design was further refined by

markowski and also designer my mark whiting many other folks worked on this uh too many to name but a few i wanted to point out uh you mentioned uh chris uh so they so they think his name is yeah yeah also there was uh the future creator of My Little Pony Friendship is Magic, Lauren Faust. She was the animator on it. Current Pixar creative lead, Mark Andrews, who I believe he also has a screenwriting credit on John Carpenter. Oh, wait. John Carter.

He wrote the band, John Carpenter. It's a forgettable name so don't worry about it i was confused like is there is there like a biography a biopic on john carpenter i want to see it uh but yes mark andrew like he was he him and lauren faust young director young animators who were brought in like that was another budget thing for iron giant that they couldn't afford to hire off a bunch of dis folks like Disney and also DreamWorks was staffing up to there wasn't a lot of open talent then. So they had to go with younger folks who showed, I mean, that I think also shows Brad and his, uh,

the other creative leads are able, we're able to recognize a lot of talent from, from future folks too. They also got Ron Hugarts of, uh, Ren and Stimpy as well. I heard his name spoken of in the commentary. I'm like, man, there are some Ren and Stimpy as well. Another Ren and Stimpy guy. Yeah, I heard his name spoken of in the commentary. I'm like, man, there are some Ren and Stimpy people working on the Alien Giants. And they should be. They're really good animators.

Yeah, yeah. And also, I mean, talk about boomer nostalgia there. That's Ren and Stimpy as well. For sure, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, Hugart would go on to be a director on many episodes of classic Futurama. I believe is still the supervising director on American Dad. And also Ben Jones was an animator on it who was the director of tons of DC animated projects, including Batman Brave and the Bold, which we talked about.

As for casting, Warner was pushing hard for celebrities. I think he was lucky that this was such a small kind of film of little prestige that if he could have gotten Arnold Schwarzenegger or John Travolta, they would have just said no anyway, because it wasn't famous. The only person that he was pushed on to have by Warner that Brad Bird went with was Jennifer Aniston, who he felt was perfect for the role. And like, that is great casting when she's like super famous as Rachel, getting her to play a single mom. It doesn't feel necessarily the right choice. And it's her voice, but it's not distracting in any way. Like you don't think of Rachel or Jennifer Aniston.

It's a good, it's a good pick. I think. Yeah, she plays, I mean, for the role of Harry, the single mom,

like she plays it really well. And I think takes her part to a lot more unpredictable places that she's more just like uh you just when i watch it now i'm just like boy it sucks you're in such a bad position here you just work to the bone with this overactive dork son also harry connick jr the musician and actor he plays dean the beatnik we've got looks a lot like the actor. Yeah, yeah. I wonder how much they changed him once they hired Harry. We got Christopher McDonald, the villain of many an Adam Sandler film. Yeah, I didn't really know what he's done.

I've only seen Happy Gilmore once. So that's, I guess, his biggest role to date or his most known role to date. But he's the villain in Dirty Work as well. Dirty Work, wow. And he's been a voice in a lot of things. And is so good at playing kent's like pent-up anger he's amazing but i'm like who is this guy he's active so long i just i don't even know who he is and uh relative newcomer to film vin diesel is cast as the giant that's right and again i thought that was a pseudonym for somebody just doing a goofy voice or like the pseudonym for whatever robot program they used to make the voice but no is that his real name vin diesel uh no it's not it's vinny now real name mark sinclair oh come on boring

what are you dude come on you know he reinvented himself like uh all his favorite comic book heroes but uh one of my favorite extras on the 2003 dvd was that they just like i think vin diesel really loved that he did this role even though he says 53 words in it but man he does a great job with his 53 but they put him in front of a green screen like in 2002 2003 he's like hey man wow i love doing the iron giant it was so cool it's like this was nothing to you yeah i feel like he was probably just in the wb stable who's got a deep voice you oh come on come on we can you voice a giant get over here we're working on another project with mark sinclair it's vin i tell if you're gonna go with diesel make yourself like torque diesel or something hey man he's he is one of the most successful film stars of all time now.

So who are we to doubt his name? And in the lead role of Hogarth Hughes, we have child actor Eli Marienthal, who is most famous as like Stifler's younger brother in the American Pie film. Really? He's so good in this. I mean, there's really good voice direction in general, but the entire movie, he needs to be a good actor, and he really delivers because he's the character who speaks the most. I mean, I think also Brad Bird is a very good voice director. Yeah.

And in so much of this, he's essentially talking to himself, so you really need good direction. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he talks about how he's like he told eli no put you need to have a twinkie in your mouth when you're delivering this line or he's like okay i'm gonna shake you with his permission he says i'm going to shake you to get the right uh sound of being shaken in the uh in the car that the giant spins all around uh the composer is michael cayman uh the only time bird worked with him i think the soundtrack's all right like it's nothing too special though

uh but he was definitely uh cayman was in the warner stable he had written the soundtracks for all lethal weapon films all four of them okay and for die hard with a vengeance which is basically a lethal weapon movie yeah i do Yeah, I do like the Giants theme. That's the one that sticks out the most as a memorable theme from this movie. But it's just very nondescript background music for the most part. Not offensive in any way, but also not really a standout soundtrack. Yeah, I mean, you compare that to the soundtrack to The Incredibles. That is a soundtrack.

Such a great James Bond kind of take off the James Bond through superheroes that's that's a great soundtrack and I will say so Eli uh Marienthal that's his name he went to Berkeley High School and graduated so we can see that from our window right now so if you want to dox us that's where we are so we can look into the very classroom that Hogarth Hughes attended oh that's wonderful i didn't know that man uh berkeley alone and he's still in berkeley so as of february 2019 he's a doctoral candidate in geography at the university of california berkeley all right we just need to hunt him down we can have him on this podcast totally good so as uh alice in the she was a producer she was like kind of the go-between between Brad Bird and the executives.

And she says it herself in the extras, working with Brad Bird was like hell. It was because Brad Bird was very uncompromising in what he wanted. And all she was hearing above her was executives who said, cut, cut, cut, cut. Like this needs to be as cheap as possible and here she's having to be the person stuck in between a rock and a hard place and like in the documentary they talk about how animators who were working on it they were seated next to allison's office or brad's office and they would just hear them screaming and they're like this is like hearing mom and dad fight it It's no fun.

But I mean, she had a thankless job. I feel bad for her. Obviously, if it was up to her, he'd have all the money to make whatever film he wanted to make. It'd be four hours long. But her bosses are the ones telling her she has to make cuts. I think it's unfortunate for her that she just has to be the go-between for executives who are saying, cut, cut, cut, this is too expensive. And it's unfortunate for her that she just has to be the go-between for executives who are saying like, cut, cut, cut. This is too expensive.

And it's funny on the commentary. Brad Bird is just remembering all the fights. He's like, oh, this was a fight. This was a fight. They still got away with so much. And I'm sure because they had to fight for it. But I was thinking like they could have easily crammed in like a poop joke or a fart joke or a noise or a character talking to themselves. But they trust the audience with a lot of the silence and a lot of the meaning that's just carried through animation. I think it's Brad Bird's, you know, credit to his forceful personality that he was able to keep away

that kind of stuff that an executive would be like, well, you know, in Disney, they'd have a dumb joke here. They'd have an animal sidekick to be like, really? Or like, let's get Robin Williams in here or whatever. I i mean there are poop jokes in this movie and they're very good it's a it's a quality poop joke in here and yeah brad bird in his videos too he's like he's just swearing all the time and he's like this very passionate guy he has a bit where he says like when he describes how many more resources tarzan had he's then calls them pussies for working that i haven't so easy. Oh, man. So a year into production in 1998, Quest for Camelot is finally finished in release, and it flops hard. It is a

failure with critics and with audiences. It loses tons of money. I never saw it. I just looked at the VHS cover of it or the movie poster. Those two-headed dragon dipshits man who would want to see that movie yeah i i mean you don't know what it's supposed to be like and it's and it doesn't know what it's supposed to be because it went through just like development hell it took forever and sucked away all the money from a winner like iron giant like it's shocking they even made if they didn't have michael jordan pushing to make space jam they probably would have said like no we got to cancel this and just put the money and the resources onto quest for camelot also in june of 1998 right after a month after quest for camelot bombs the president of warner

feature animation max howard leaves for dreamworks oh and so basically everybody at warner feature animations is left the execs are like feature animation doesn't work winding down no more of this and they honestly are close to just killing iron giant and being like let's not finish it bucket we're done with with feature animation there though they have another thing in production too called the king and i uh that animated adaptation and that did come out it did it actually when it came out that it was bundled with the first trailer for iron giants there's in an oral history i read it's a story of the lead animators going to a screening of the king and i to see the iron giant trailer and the first trailer uh trailer was so bad they're like we're just leaving the theater right now.

Of all the things to remake and all the money to spend on something, a remake of The King and I an animated remake. No kid needed to see that in 1997 or 898. But when you're an 800 year old executive you're like that's a musical everybody loves. People remember Yul Brynner. I mean children don't even know what siam is that's true so yeah it's uh a million bad decisions like iron giant and space jam or like they're only two good uh filmmaking decisions for releases one entirely artist driven one a literal commercial for nike but they both worked out. So they are still going to finish

the film, but they are still making cuts and cuts and cuts, including they cut a fully acted, many fully acted and storyboarded scenes just because Warner's like, we're not paying to animate that. Like it's going to just die here. It'll never happen. Chief among them was the giant's dream, a a sequence which was always planned to be in the movie warner wasn't going to pay to animate it so it was uh the storyboards were just put away and they they didn't complete it even with all the audio ready to just yeah and we'll get to it in our discussion of the movie but two of those scenes are in the definitive edition animated at way after the fact like 17 years later yeah yeah though they blend in pretty well yeah i think so like if you would have told me one of them i didn't

even recognize as a new scene the other one the giant stream i knew that was the new scene so yeah they are pretty much the same style and quality it's the opposite of the george lucas approach to special editions yes it's not like a dancing gremlin in the background uh well yeah so 1999 there's still trouble on the production there's also some buzz though because somebody working on the film leaks a unfinished uh work print of it to ain't it cool news and so uh i believe it was drew uh drew mcweeney moriarty who wrote about how it was the most brilliant animated film he's ever seen this must be released like it worked uh it was a great trick to get uh warner some early buzz for it without that they don't have to pay for like it was somebody understanding the internet way early

and then how it could be used for promotion and that leads warner to even do a test screening where it gets the highest test scores they'd like received in uh forever they they actually start to get a lot of hope in it even though there is a trailer that they put out that completely misunderstands the tone of the movie and spoils the end of the movie like you can see the person who cut together the trailer was like all the actions at the end when he's running through the town and he's flying and all this stuff some of that stuff was even in like commercials for the movie yeah like i remember that line like you can fly you can fly that was in like all the commercials that one in the oral history one of the animators is just like you can fly they ruined it they ruined our film uh like brad bird on the blu-ray there's even a pitched trailer he made where he's the

voice on he's like please use this trailer this is the better trailer but warner didn't listen but the positive test scores actually made warner offered to delay the film into 2000 so they could refine it some more give it some extra polish because they'd seem to believe in it but bird and others turned it down they because i think they were all fearful that it just wasn't going to come out like they're like if they delay it now in 2000 they'll convince themselves to not release it or to put it out on vhs like the only way it was going to come out in theaters which is what they wanted was if it happened in summer of 1999 so they push ahead there released in theaters august 6 1999 almost no promotion for it it doesn't have any toys in

mcdonald's it's got nothing i do remember and i'm not sure where i got this but i still have it i believe it was in a box of corn pops i got a little iron giant figure and the arms just went up and down it's like really tiny maybe like two or three inches tall And I remember that I would always have it next to my big O figure So like little giant and big iron giant next to each other So that's the one thing I remember there being for the entire movie Any marketing at all? I missed out on that

They mentioned in the documentary they also had to deal with Johnny Rockets Because there's like a 50s diner in here. But they didn't really do much. Like you could go there and get a cassette that has a song from the movie in it. One of the 50s songs. Johnny Rockets are regional. Like I only saw them until I came to California. Yeah, yeah.

So not the biggest promotion for the Iron Giant. It opens in eighth place in the box office. It will ultimately make $22 million. Some pegged the cost of the movie, like 55 million or 70 million. I think that's also with like promotion considered in there too, but either way it is considered a giant box office failure. Another one for a Warner feature animation.

And Brad Bird is heartbroken by this. He thought this would finally be the fulfillment of the potential he'd always shown, but it seems like it wouldn't be. Then, though, in 2000, in the age of DVD, it slowly, the word of mouth spreads. Animation nerds are talking about it everybody is excited for uh sharing the we were the dork saying like iron giant is actually the greatest animated film i did show it to a lot of people i brought my snapper case to a lot of dorm rooms and uh strangers houses we were part of uh brad bird's army of nerds like and as we're like he had famous fans of it too like he tells a great story of guillermo del toro

telling him like i love that film the greatest film and they'll finally someday they'll appreciate it and you'll be seen as a genius and so uh it was really it was growing over time bird didn't really know where he is going after the end of iron giant but with his schedule open up his old cal arts alum john lassiter offered him to work at pixar on a film finally for them but that's a story for another day i guess his first hit movie was when he was in his 40s yeah yeah 2004 yeah he'd be uh mid 40s when his first hit film came out and did you see the secret sequel to the iron giant ready player one yes i mean okay let's talk about you did see that okay i thought you

would have seen it just for to be aware uh oh you have the right to have an opinion i'm ignorant i mean that's also why i watched all of watchmen uh this month too but yes in the movie a character in the movie ready player one a character builds an iron giant and fights in it in the big final scene brad bird was asked about this and the the interviewer was like oh you know was it cool when they approached you to put iron giant in there he said no one asked me they just put it in there without me but he did this all paraphrasing but he did approve of it it or he personally wasn't bothered by it because it was by steven spielberg and spielberg gave him one of his first starts in the industry a longtime supporter of his so he's fine with it but in yeah but in the uh the movie he's he's a

weapon and that's the you know defeats the purpose of this entire story yep yeah it's uh it's really stupid i mean it was just warn Warner realizing they had another copywritten character to shove into the corners of a screen. Like, it's what a ridiculous film. All that gunting. Too much gunting for my tastes. But Brad Bird did take many of his Iron Giant compatriots with him to Pixar to work on The Incredibles.

And as time has grown the film iron giant has received a lot more appreciation including uh in 2002 2003 there were 24 hour marathon showings of it on thanksgiving on cartoon network i forgot this movie ends with uh snowfall so it totally makes sense and i can see why people will connect it with those holidays i just wasn't watching that network at this time i was only vaguely aware that they were doing this but i in the back of my head i was like good you know people should see the movie so i i think that helped indoctrinate a whole new generation of people who are now like 30 i wish network was doing it to this day you know i wish uh but i think it at least introduced it to so many kids and uh yeah i think also after incredibles was a

big success like that did get other people to watch it of like oh brad bird directed one other film i should check that out because i love the incredible so much and uh i mean as brad bird started directing more live action stuff too like his mission impossible films real is the best mission possible god he did one of those yeah ghost protocol the fourth one and the best one it sounds like a uh splinter cell game uh pretty much yeah uh and so in 2015 with the film's legacy now fully established and uh a little late for the 15th anniversary warner brothers and Brad bird come together. They say bird says he was talking about doing this for a decade,

but he wanted to do a signature edition of the iron giant, uh, kind of inspired by how much he loved blade runner. There's actually a blade runner cast member in this movie. Uh, but how much he loved blade runner and he really liked how it kept getting new versions and new directors cuts. And he, he wanted to take that new versions and new director's cuts. And he wanted to take that kind of approach to the Iron Giant.

Now, he says his signature edition does not replace the Iron Giant. It's actually both versions are on the Blu-ray. They are. You can get. So it changes like three things he would have wanted in the movie. The biggest was the addition of the giant stream in it. But also a brief moment of dean and annie talking to each other and then adding in a tomorrowland reference which uh made a lot more

sense after he was in 2015 releasing the movie tomorrowland do you know if there are any other like minor cuts or changes or score differences or it's just like those three things as far as i can tell those are the only changes to it yeah i say go with the definitive edition i mean you get the extra scenes one of them i am conflicted about but we could talk more about it later but i think it doesn't subtract from the movie as a whole and at best it's like 90 seconds of new footage yeah it's it uh i don't think it changes any intent in the movie and it all uh really fits in there pretty well but you can yes you can still experience the original version too very easily it's not being taken away from you uh and yes it got a

limited release in theaters and uh and then i bought the blu-ray for six bucks because probably didn't sell that well and warner just dumped it again yeah it's out of print again too so wonderful but i'm sure it'll be a big part of hbo max i believe i saw iron giant in their sizzle reel of hbo max content but so that's the history of iron giant and warner feature animation i mean abate she'd go on to after her struggles with brad bird when warner feature animation was rekindled in the early 2010s like she would be a producer on it including on the lego movie which like it ushered in a whole new decade of warner feature animation i didn't realize that was warner i thought it was sony no no it's a it was warner because warner put out the video games

to the lego yeah you're right okay yeah yeah that was warner i mean especially like the first thing after the lego movie was lego batman movie and that's warner yeah yeah i mean, especially like the first thing after the Lego movie was Lego Batman movie. And that's Warner. Yeah. I mean, he's in the first movie a lot. And this new, I mean, the next Warner animated feature, I believe, is Scoob. Their next approach to Scooby-Doo, which I think is actually the launch of a, it's secretly the launch of an MCU equivalent of Hanna-Barbera because Captain Caveman and Blue Falcon and others are in it. We kind of already did this with Harvey Birdman.

Well, we're doing it again. More earnestly, Bob, to star in feature films. Sure. Make your money. But yes, that's where everybody's at today. But why don't we now take a break? Then travel back to 1999 slash 1957 to go full force into the iron giant Look behind you! The giant!

No one understands him. We've got to help him! The army wants to destroy him. Go to Cobran! Repeat, Cobran! We've got to hide! And only one boy can save him. Where's the giant? He's my friend.

On August 6th... Let's get out of here! one boy can save him. Where's the giant? He's my friend. Oh, God. On August 6th. Let's get out of here! Warner Brothers Family Entertainment presents You can fly? You can fly! The Iron Giant. Rated PG. Starts Friday, August 6th at a theater near you. You're nine years old.

You're watching TV. Darn. A perfectly good brain wasted. When all of a sudden... Come on! Stupid antenna. You go to investigate. Your conclusion? Invaders from Mars.

You do what any kid would do. You go looking for trouble. And sure enough, it finds you. The Iron Giant. Now available on video cassette and DVD. And now, a special presentation of the animated classic, The Iron Giant, on Cartoon Cartoon Fridays. Welcome back to the year 1957. We're Sputniks in the air and the Dick Clark show is top in the charts.

Hey, it's Henry. We're back for the break. Is this American Bandstand? I'm a bandstand. Bam, bam. We only know about that because of VH1 rerunning it, right? In the 90s. Yeah, yeah.

Or I listened to Dick Clark's old radio show. And by old, I mean 90s radio show where he reminisced about American Bandstand. But anyway, yes, it's time to really talk about the iron giant now that we know all the background and history to it uh one of my favorite i'd say in general listeners check out the commentary for it because it is like the inverse of a simpsons commentary oh yeah all animation my only letdown of the commentary is they like they am scray when the credits start rolling like no stay you have so many more stories to tell it's eight damn minutes of

credit yeah there's a lot of credits in this movie i mean i believe the original commentary that's on it is from 2003 so they maybe didn't know any better okay and i think it was from the 2003 dvd when they gave it a good dv DVD release as opposed to the bare bones one it got in 2000. The non-snapper. Yes. Yeah. But yeah, the commentary, it's Bird and Lynch and Murkowski, if he's silly, them all just talking about all the animation nuts and bolts of just scenes over and over again. Like, oh, I think here's the name of that animator for this.

Yeah. bolts of just scenes over and over again like oh i think here's the name of that animator for this yeah just talking about scenes and who animated which scenes and who like if there was like a pass of a torch in a scene like okay he animated this part he animated that part just like learning all those names and like what they did and what they were good at and how certain people like rose uh you know above their rank and became like real forces on the movie uh lots of really good stories animation wise but you're right it is the opposite of a simpsons commentary where it's like you drew that right well anyways back to the funny joke i wrote yeah i remember when uh in the office this silly thing happened in the writer's room or when the genius james o brooks thought of a joke james o brooks said to write this slide now anyway mark and burbank you uh drew that right well actually i directed it with tuck tucker anyway yeah here's the next story.

Conan did a funny thing. Yeah, this is the total opposite of that. And especially like Jeff Lynch, who is such an artistic force. So I'd love to hear more from him on Simpsons commentaries when it's his episodes. He talks a ton in this. Yeah. And I think also it really gives you a sense of like how hard they work to make everything flow so well.

Like this is a very precise movie. There's not an action wasted, like even things that seem like a joke, it leads to another plot point in most cases. There's a lot of fats in the movie. Because they had no money for fats. There was no chance for indulgence. But I think it's something i heard brad bird say about his live action movies too that he still works hard to

storyboard them and have everything planned out because making a film like that is like when you make an animated film you have to make it like three times before you make it like every choice you have to be totally sure on you can't just go uh you know, like Judd Apatow does on a film of saying, just find the scene in the moment. The cameras are rolling. Just go for it. Be three different characters in the scene. Yeah. And we'll figure out in the edit how we want it to work.

Like that's totally the opposite for Ironshine. Though there was, you know, I heard Bird say he learned a lot of this from working on Simpsons 2 of just seeing how much they reworked things from animatic to storyboard, all the choices that they made. And even just like in when they'd have to just rock and roll mouths or say like he said he saw some episodes that would come in like it would be the week it aired and it's something wasn't working and they change one line of dialogue or cut out one thing. And he's like, it works. It works now. Like I think he said he learned quite a lot in his nineties. The majority of the nineties for him was just Simpsons.

Yes. So Iron Giant begins with Sputnik flying overhead. As they say on the commentary, they want to book in the movie with beeping. First it's Sputnik beeping, then it's the giant beeping. I really enjoyed how the sonar circles coming out turn into the WB circles, the classic red Looney Tunes style circles.

I'm so glad it's that instead of just the typical bugs walk out. Chomping on a carrot yeah yeah i mean look tuxedo bugs is classy and it it doesn't feel like an opening to batman the animated series if i don't see tuxedo bugs but i'm glad they got to be more artistic uh in their choice of how to present the warner logo maybe also too since they were killing warner feature animation they were not being too precious about logos they're like it's going to be dead in a month we had to sell bugs tux bring it back to the rental yeah that's why bugs is naked it's just they can't afford clothes for them anymore though speaking of stripped down the iron giant logo that

comes on screen like it's it's just so plain it's not the iron giant logo you see in like marketing and packaging and stuff it's just very uh it's very bare bones very uh very minimalistic i guess it fits with the font of uh you know 1957 or whatever yeah like the the setting i mean they're going for art deco like the the honestly the disney 50s Art Deco that you'll see around. Or I learned from the Disney Imagineering doc that the specific font they use around the Disney Burbank offices is called Mouse Deco. Okay. But, yeah, I guess it fits in that kind of stripped-down style. But you're just so used to like the – I feel like Disney at the same time it was logo first or like setting the logo is one of the first things they ever did on it you know yeah but instead in this case it's

just like white text on a black background and yeah this film uh the year choice is great like it's the year 57 comes up on screen and that's the year brad bird was born yeah but also like sputnik just launched which is a great like lightning rod for the tone of fear and paranoia the film's going for. Sort of starting or accelerating the space race between Russia and America. Which they won. Like we got to the moon. It's funny, America defines it as like, well, by getting to the moon, we won. Russia did everything else first. they were the first to kill a dog in space uh yeah it took us forever to kill a monkey in space keeps asking why uh and then man the

opening shot of the you know a giant falling through a hurricane basically and crashing in the water that's an amazing shot like which looks to use a whole lot of 3d too it's you know the the giant is the only like fully there for the whole film 3d element but they use 3d when they need it yeah like vehicles for the most part are often 3d in this movie it's sort of like futurama where it's just like robots and cars are 3d but nothing else is man that's why all these guys went to futurama because they had all this like skill in interacting 2d with 3d like futurama does and this came out right after futurama so i was constantly thinking about futurama when it came out like oh yeah there's a 3d robot around a 2d you know atmosphere and

people so yeah that's right it was march forurama and then August for this, like just five months separated it. Much like Superman and Goku, the giant is a strange visitor from outer space. And I like to think of this film was set in 2007. The comic books that he'd be sharing with him are of Dragon Ball. And he'd be like, you're just like Goku. Check out my manga. You read it left to right. And yeah yeah we mentioned it earlier about this opening bit with the single boats like it was yeah they have some good laughs about it on the commentary he was scraping barnacles off his dinghy and this guy's emmet walsh this guy there's some like character actors old character actors in these minor minor roles like cloris leachman is the teacher you you hear like one thing from

in this movie maybe after hearing her is mrs glick he's like i gotta hire her like yeah and memet walsh he's just when you see his picture you're like oh it's that guy like he is one of the most character actory character actors around he was usually some guy in some 80s movie saying like hey we can't go in there it's uh he's the villain in blood simple the first coen brothers movie yeah yeah also well and he's from blade runner too he's a bit of a role in that and he's really good at playing this uh old man character like the oh the crazy old man nobody listens to it's a good design i think uh for a lot of the secondary characters there just wasn't enough time to come up with better design so there's a lot of like

hannah barbara e looking background people but he's one of the better ones because he does have like some screen time to him i mean i at least like that with the most of the background characters you meet like they at least have a unique look to them they don't come out of the factory they're just like weirdos like yeah some weird shapes going on with their heads and bodies i mean other beyond hogarth dean and annie every other character has a weird head that really expresses a lot of their character and it has the weirdest head well for emmet he has like just these misshapen teeth too yeah yeah and then when his boat crashes like you do you feel pretty bad for him that he just like plunks in the water and like he's he's very lucky to have not drowned he does survive to tell the

tale they talk about on the commentary how they didn't want the giant to kill anybody and that was really hard sometimes i was thinking about that while watching this movie uh and towards the end i'm like there were people in those tanks they're not unmanned tanks we don't see those people though yeah there's one tank that explodes so you're like well i didn't see anybody get out of that tank but uh i can see their parachutes and same with uh same with earl here mmm walsh's character like he he should have just drowned and the giant didn't know to save him but fortunately he washes up on the rocks and yeah because of the big storm he's the only person that saw him and the the reveal that the giant is the lighthouse like that's really cool just the one light that turns into two as the giant

turns to him that's really cool once the storm is over then we get this really cool just tracking shot of like showing all the damage done to the place at uh rockwell main which that's uh ken will say it later but this is like a perfect like small town like just shitty like nobody thinks of main at all named after norman rockwell just for like the biggest chunk of americana we're sort of tracking uh hogarth on his bike too like throughout the town it's really cool that it like uh first travels all the way to the right but then when it catches up with hogarth and it moves left with him too what more of an americana kid arrival is there of like the young boy on his bike riding home like yeah they also the name of the the sign on the boat docks is bird landing as well i missed that yeah it's uh it's uh and rockwell yes named after norman rockwell to make this even more americana also

though choosing maine as the setting this is a very white movie like i don't think there's any character on screen that isn't white which the 50s is not a very diverse time in america or a very segregated time in america whether legally or just through yeah uh sneakier business practices i don't think the movie's making a commentary on that either uh no there's nothing about race in the movie there's fear of like the uh the outsider fear of the foreign but uh it is a also a very white movie just because of i guess where they are in this uh in this town by choice of setting it makes sense because i mean i i'm no historian for maine but i would think 1957 maine is not a very diverse area um well

you like middle class white people don't want to live there it's maine seems lame it's cold and has it's just like if you're gonna live in a cold place with like a bunch of white people at least live in boston yeah steven king got out of main maybe he's still there i don't know i bet he at least owns parts of main i would bet parts of the entire state then we head into the diner love the design of it it's just this classic kind of mel's diner setting yeah and they have to get you into like the heads of three different characters at once in this scene they do a lot of like a building of these characters who they all are and their relationships with each other yeah the economy of setting up these characters within like three minutes because again they have no time like with

if you take out the new scenes in signature edition it's like a 75 minute movie without the credits. And also dropped in here is the fact that they're renting out a room, which will come up later. So you hear like a little drop of that. Wow, I forgot that. Yes, I forgot that one line is in there. I thought it was just it comes up later when you see it in the sign in the window later. But you're right.

Yeah, they just bring it up there. It's laid in pretty early in the movie. And all the customers to me really look like UPA style weirdos. Like they all read or like clone high characters. Some of them, they just have these crazy heads. And we meet Hogarth Hughes and Annie Hughes. That is not their last. Hogarth and Annie are the characters names in The Iron Man.

But they got the last name of Hughes because that's the name of the author Ted Hughes yeah Hogarth is a weird name also very British so uh it doesn't really work I do like how they make fun of it in the movie like what kind of a name is that yeah yeah I'm glad Kent dunks on it I mean that's really his popularity problem in school anyway having a stupid name like hogarth yeah that's really why do they call him poindexter you think just call him like hobart for whatever yeah homo garth like yeah it's it's right there that's the closest to diversity probably in that main school of like a kid not named chris or matthew uh and i i forgot to mention in ted hughes that he's uh his wife was a sylvia plath all right i believe he wrote it after she

took her life and for their children which uh that's a heavy thing laying on the on the book as well so you have the death of sylvia plath and then in the creation of this partially inspired by the death of brad bird's sister like a lot of a lot of attendant tragedy to this hogarth's design we get to see him full on like it's great american boy with his like chipped or misplaced yeah like funky uh baby teeth happening on him yeah it's like the it's one imperfection in an otherwise like normal looking boy yeah it's a good touch i like like the one like a slightly askew tooth it makes for some fun voice like face acting with him and annie's character at touch. I like the one, like, a slightly askew tooth. It makes for some fun voice, like, face acting with him. And Annie's character, at least for being, like, a single working mom in the 50s,

like, she feels progressive as an invented character just in that way. Like, the plot of The Iron Man is a lot about Hogarth and his father. So to remove a father from it, seemingly his father is dead. There's some hints later on about what his father was. That's true, yeah. And in this movie, Hogarth gets like two dads in a way. Like, well, if you count Kent as a bad stepdad. That's true.

Oh, you're right. My three dads. So Hogarth comes into the diner to meet his mom. He has a box with a squirrel in it. And it's funny, Hogarth describes it as not a pet, a friend, which will apply to the giant later on. I had a real Simpson feel from the line of Annie going like, I remember the raccoon. That's right. A good shudder.

And Aniston does a great delivery on that too. Hogarth is going to show her what's in the box he then sees that the box is empty and i we get to instantly see hogarth's ability to lie there too where he says like i will go get him yeah and uh that leads him to meet dean and one of the other leads in the movie and the second you see him with his all black and asleep in the diner like you know that he is the weirdo of the town for sure yeah he's he should not be in this place he seems uh awfully like resentful of it yeah i mean my theory is that he inherited that junkyard oh okay he he's got nowhere else to go. So he moves into the junkyard. You think he skipped out on the war?

Oh, yeah. I mean, he didn't go to Korea. No way, I think. What about the big one? Oh, I mean, based on his age, he would have been like 14 as the war wrapping up. Does he have a given age in this movie? No, but I mean, okay, the war ended 12 years before this. Yeah, I read him as like 30s.

I guess he could have been. He'd be 18 when the war ended. years before yeah i read him as like 30s i guess he could have been he'd be 18 when the war ended i would think he'd stay i mean uh i wish they'd go into it more in this but he definitely doesn't like authority that's for sure as he's talking to dean and telling dean that the squirrel is under his table he tells him like please don't freak out or i won't get to keep a squirrel and dean is very understanding of like yeah no you should get to have a squirrel kid i'm sorry like he's in support of the few uh weirdos the town has uh yes that's that's when we hear about ufos and weirdos in our first clip hey i saw it too

i rest my case. I believe you. What if it is Sputnik or a flying saucer from Mars? I bet we could find it. Sorry, kid. I didn't really see anything. But if we don't stick up for the kooks, who will? Is my son bothering you, sir?

Yes. No! Call me Dean. Uh, Hogarth, you were going to get your pet, honey? I will, Mom. Right after I finish talking with Dean. Dean. Found your pet.

Where? On my leg, man. Squirrel's in my pants, Hogarth. I'm trying not to wig out here. Don't wig out. Okay. Set north now. I'm sorry, kid.

I'd like to apologize to everyone in advance for this. He unfurls the squirrel from his pants. From his fly, it looks like. He pulls out his fly. You hear the zip. his pants. From his fly, it looks like. He pulls out his fly. You hear the zip. He unzips his fly. I just realized that the whole wig out thing, like Hogarth learns that from Dean. He's very impressionable, Hogarth. He hears like three different things from Dean and just repeats them to the giant.

I mean, that's a cool idea in the movie, too. Like a person, it's passing on knowledge. Dean teaches Hogartharth hogarth teaches the giant like to the giant's his metal son then he's the day yes yeah well eventually the giant will overtake him and knowledge and uh maturity but yeah man the d i mean one thing that shocked me in in first viewing there's like a couple of dirty words in this you'd never hear in a disney cartoon that's right yeah there's a few uh dams and hell of dirty words in this you'd never hear in a disney cartoon that's right yeah there's a few uh dams and hells thrown around in this movie and also like

specifically calling earl a drunk and bringing up specific alcohols like whiskey or beer that was shocking to hear too like in in first viewing you uh they you get so much humanity out of earl when they're all calling him a drunk and he just looks so ashamed of himself like uh you do feel bad for him and you it's a great character moment for Dean that you see the like he doesn't like to see somebody like picked on or made fun of like that and so he just is like hey I saw him too yeah and Dean and Earl have like another moment together later where it seems like they bonded over this yeah it's pretty sweet how they how they bond later I mean Earl Earl does seem like the kind of loser who's like if you stick up for him and he's like well then we're best friends now yeah thanks my new best buddy oh god it's my boat and uh yeah as the squirrel and now he doesn't have his boat anymore that got smashed in the opening the movie

i'm sure it was insured i i love the squirrel running up his leg and him just like he's at a north oak hearth like he, he's trying his best. And it's also knowing that Dean and Annie end up together, that their meet cute is him going like, you know, I'm Dean. It's very good face acting. Yeah.

He's got to keep it under control while having a squirrel near his genitals. And, and yeah, Connick does it really great too. Like great, great voice direction on him. I think like, I do think Brad Bird is a very good voice director. And, uh, it's funny that he'd go on to have like such a big role in Incredibles as a voice. He's Edna Mode. Oh, really? The fashion designer.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. I totally forgot about that. That's Brad Bird himself. Yeah, but this, I guess he was less, more shy in this time about being a voice actor. But maybe too in the 2000s, it just became way more normalized for your producer, a director on it or an animator to also do a voice in a cartoon. Now it feels weird if the creator of a show isn't at least one voice on it. Yeah, I think a lot of the time it is that people get so used to the temp track voice that they don't want to cast anyone else. And actually his son was the temp track voice for Hogarth. That's right. In this movie. Yeah, that's right.

And I can see why that voice is kind of the one Bird likes. The way Eli plays Hogarth is very similar to me how the um the fast kid in incredibles sounds too that's right yeah very similar his son does show up as a character in the end of the movie one of the kids that's fine looking at the iron giant with the binoculars on the roof of the building yeah i i mean bird is a very family man. Like, the Incredibles is just his family, too. He started with one family dog. And as he grew up, he got more. But yeah, after the squirrel gets unzipped, it's another just, like, great tracking shot of the squirrel running through and just food flying up everywhere.

You don't even see the squirrel. You see, like, the destruction it's causing by people reacting to it. It's just, like, a pan across, a across a bunch of like shocked people and food flying everywhere it's very nice yeah i think you only like full-on see the squirrel for like seconds yeah and that's when it's like under the table with teen's leg and yeah the tracking shot of the destruction that it ends on annie's angry face turn to dean and hogarth. Like, that's a really good one, too. And he's just like, check, please. He doesn't have that kind of delivery.

No, it's not lame at all. Then, very speedily, it goes from that scene to a late night at work for Annie as she calls Hogarth and lets him know the bad news. Hello, this is Hogarth. He is speaking. Who's calling, please? Hogarth and lets him know the bad news. Hello, this is Hogarth Hughes speaking. Who's calling, please? Hogarth, honey, I'm really sorry, but thank you. I need to work late tonight. There's some cold chicken in the icebox.

You can have that and some carrots. I'm way ahead of you, Mom. Good. I'll make it up to you, okay? Okay. I love you, honey. Me too. And Hogarth?

No scary movies, no late snacks, in bed by 8 o'clock. Got it? Come on, Mom. It's me, remember? Why, the porpoise can communicate telepathically, Miss Mellon. If we can transplant at least 15% of their brain matter into ours, we may be able to read minds so a great setup of a classic uh mystery science theater style movie i did enjoy that a lot when i first saw it the uh it's like the crawling eye kind of thing yeah the uh it's funny too that this came out like not too long after angry beaver started which had a very similar joke oh yeah yeah i mean i think it's just that both creators here grew up watching these movies and staying up with them it's just like how in gremlins or weird science they just they all watch these movies like that also kind of like

uh poorly informed their sexual politics i think to the degree too that they had to fight against did you have the like double stuffed twinkie have you tried that i you know i never thought to even try it before i saw it in this movie and i have not tried it since then but it uh it does look compelling i mean i don't buy a free drink twinkie i'd eat it i don't buy it like logically how that where the cream would go in that twinkie twinkies are so solid you know yeah it explodes out of the sides well hey maybe in 57 twinkies were weaker structurally speaking i i mean apparently the these were called turbo twinkies by brad bird and he did make them as a kid wow jeez so he uh and he the the animators like had to try it for themselves to animate it right. And I do like the animation on it, just how flat-faced he is watching the TV as, without looking, puts the whipped cream aerosol can into one of the Twinkie holes and then sprays,

shoves it in his mouth. And wipes it. Wipes it off and then licks the rest of it off. Like, that is so many great little details to it. Also him just groaning at the slight bit of romance in this movie. Oh, yeah. He just wants to see the violence. I mean, that's how it was for me as a kid, too.

I was like, I don't care if these two are going to kiss. Like, I guess that's like from Princess Bride, too. Like, is this a kissing book? And another great delivery, too, is the way when Hogarth, it's a running gag in the movie, delivery too is the way when hogarth it's a running gag in the movie hogarth answering the phone and going like hello he's speaking like great flat delivery of a child who was told how to answer the phone by his mom but hates doing it yeah he's gonna do it in the very proper way but with no enthusiasm yeah the also that annie poor annie she is such a stretch thin mom that she knows he will do this.

But she was just like, please don't just eat something a little healthier than just junk food and watching a bad, scary movie. But you can't stop him. Yeah. The great acting, too, of like the brain of porpoises. Like, yeah, I I love all that. I think, too, when when the noise comes and hogarth starts to be worried like this also shows like how scared everybody is just in general they're like everybody's talking about sputnik at the diner and this is coming to hogarth as well like i think there's this moment where hogarth says do you think it is like sputnik or something scary and

then dean tells him no no don't be scared like dean is showing you know red scare isn't the only way to exist in society i think the paper he's reading something about sputnik in it at the diner too yeah yeah and it's real funny because like hogarth hears the noise on the roof he runs upstairs and then he hears like the scary part of the movie coming on he like tumbles back downstairs like the stair tumble is off screen oh yeah he sort of just like emerges from the stairwell because he hears the scary violence he's been waiting for this whole time happens he's got to run back they they draw a funny image of like a giant octopus brain eating somebody but it is really cool to see but it's like this is too

good for one of these movies they wouldn't have something as cool it's hard to capture the cheesiness of that monster with just a drawn image how cheap that would be it should be more like the uh the killer leeches that are just like garbage bags oh god or like the killer shrews are just collies with carpet samples yeah the carpet collies that makes the uh the pod people character of trumpy seem very impressive trumpy is like high high-tech Italian special effects. I hate even mentioning that character, though. I don't know why. They do make a joke about Donald Trump in that episode.

Of course they do. So Hogarth, he checks on the antenna again because it's a very baby boomer thing. TV's futzing out, so time to go up on the roof and check the antenna. That's a plot of multiple Simpsons shorts, too. on the roof and check the antenna like that's a plot of multiple simpsons shorts too like yeah bart check the antenna go upstairs board uh and yeah it's a real kind of like rambo scene where he finally decides he's gonna investigate what's going on the suiting up scene and like the salute to the mirror well here's the thing that kind of stuck out to me as a flaw in the movie is that like

Hogarth's like hatred of guns seemingly just comes out of nowhere in the movie. And like throughout the movie, he has a gun and is playing with a gun. It's just like, is this your anti-gun character? Like, I think there should have been more anti-gun stuff for Hogarth baked in earlier because it just, there's some contradictions here.

And I mean, I get he's a little boy. I don't think they're saying anything like, yes, we're all hypocrites hypocrites in a way aren't we i just think they weren't thinking of it so i think he befriends a gun later and so maybe that changes his opinion on that or just weapons but also like he's not questioning i mean this was a big thing i was going to get into way later too but there's not really questioning of like does is the military good like they have weapons like the iron giant is a weapon but the military is just painted as just uh just a fact of life like the army is just the army they're not good or bad yeah the military just like uh guys doing their jobs maybe there's a bad apple here and there but uh yeah like the general is

just a a force for status quo really like he's but he's not a malicious force, which seems to be like, yeah, if you're mad at the giant for being a machine of war, I don't know. You could maybe in the future, Hogarth will extend that kind of feel. But you're right. I mean, but also wouldn't feel for a 1957 boy. Of course, he'd have a BB. Oh, yeah. Of course, you want a bb oh yeah of course he'd want to shoot whatever he could the second he saw it and especially if you take into account that presumably his father died in world uh like in korea i would think like he's a pilot the the

helmet he puts on has to be his father oh and the jacket too the jacket's so big it's got to be his dad's jacket yeah so i mean in a way he's just playing the soldier he's heard stories about from his mother you know like assuming he died in in korea that would be like five years before this like he'd he'd have been pretty young when he lost his dad so uh maybe it's just him, you know, as he keeps learning from new father figures, maybe he's first imitating his lost biological father. And soon when he meets cool guy Dean, he's like, no, I'm like an artist and I think about stuff. You'll have to wait for MASH to come around to really figure himself out. That's the children of the Korean War to making those movies. That's true.

Why did my dad do this? Then we go through like a daringly long quiet sequence i was thinking about that when taking notes for this uh watching i don't know like the six or seven time in my life where just like wow i could see why executives would be like what what is this movie you're making this is silence and suspense but like uh an executive should say at this point like no make hogarth talk to himself make like him fall on something like there needs to be some moment here but bradford fought and he got the scene in of just quiet uh searching for whatever's happening in this world i mean for

setting a tone of like for the rest of the film of a scared kid trying to find something it's good and also it like it does show off some really well done like technical animation of it looks like you know it looks natural of light shining on trees but it's really two levels of backgrounds shifting in between one another like it is a a good technical achievement of the animators too yeah it's just so quiet for so long when i'm looking at it it's just an audio track as i'm clipping stuff out i'm like boy i didn't talk for this long like yeah i think another movie would have just had hogarth say like oh man i'm so scared or no keeps it maybe

even make a joke about like i'm gonna just talk to myself like a crazy person i uh it i mean it feels more natural to just have a terrified character. Be silent. Yeah. In case he's trying to find something. He doesn't want to be found first, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. And the, the spooky visuals all around him, they kind of remind me of the Ichabod crane short that we do. Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. Yeah.

All this like scary woods that would normally look, you know, fine in the daytime now become terrifying at night. And also, too, I mean, he learned from Milt Kahl, one of the head animators on that film. It's true. The flashlight stuff is good. I also like he's kind of Doom before Doom of putting a flashlight onto his gun. Like that's 2007 video games right there.

He had the duct tape mod for his gun like that's like that's 2007 he had the uh the duct tape mod first gun though uh if you look closely at it functionally if he shot that bb gun it would hit the flashlight and not anybody else i want to assume it's not loaded uh i don't know he chunks it up a couple times oh you're right yeah i mean honestly he's lucky that gun got busted else like the giant would have just killed him the second he saw him hold that bb cut or even worse he chewed his eye out there's like five scenes in this movie where it's like well hogarth should have just died yeah this thing almost crushed him man the reveal of the giant hiding in the woods and just the lights coming on you get such a great sense of scale

as he walks he goes from the background looking the same size as hogarth and then his foot is taller than him by the time he passes him it's such a great shot that uh they need to explain the scale right up front and that's an important moment and how just like uh hogarth can run as fast as he can but it still can't beat a giant just slowly walking towards him. his face and also i love how like innocent and kind of animalistic he is or maybe more like a baby the way he chomps down on metal of just like metal chop chop chop and and the look on hogarth's face when he realizes that the giant is about to touch a bunch of electricity and get hurt the big the big conductor yeah so this is where hogarth basically saves the giant from uh he's caught in the um he falls back into the wires and gets electrocuted and sort of tangled in them, right?

Yeah, he's tangled, he can't get out, and he's just being zapped and zapped and zapped. Like, who knows? He could get killed. Yeah, there's a good moment when Hogarth runs away. He's like, well, now's my chance to run because this thing is trapped. But then he hears it, like, screaming, and he's like, well, I have to save this thing. I feel bad for it. Yeah, yeah. and he's like well i have to save this thing i feel bad for it yeah yeah that even gets set up that's another bit that gets set up in the diner scene where annie says like uh until you set it

free like you did with the raccoon because you you feel so bad for it in the cage like that that shows that hogarth is a caring kid you know and again they're intercutting this with annie coming home and seeing that hogarth isn't there and it's fun to like we were just seeing hogarth searching through a dark place with a flashlight and now she is doing the same in her house looking for hogarth hogarth is very lucky that there's a giant on and off lever that any child can see and reach to turn it off electronics are much simpler back then substations i watched uh i watched a video that said this scene of the giant destroying the electrical plant is a comment on how like nuclear power replaced electric power but i

i don't really see that i think there's a little stretch that feels a little english major to me speaking as an english major you had to grade papers like that i wrote some of them too and so when hogarth turns off the power the giant gets free he's seemingly unconscious and that lets hogarth get really close to the giant's face which also lets the audience see the details in his jaw or even his like receded teeth and everything it's uh yeah i forgot he had teeth in this movie when i watched it again yeah i had forgotten his smile and everything too they talk about too how it's um tough for them in the design but they just went with it of like

he has a jaw that is functional in you know design for the robot to consume stuff to exist but how does this thing without lips say superman yeah like what yeah what is lipstick for this thing i have to work really hard to make it uh you know effective visually they get and same with his eyes like he has these inner lids like no lid above it just it can squint and get big like the camera shutter almost yeah yeah they they're expressed really well but so well you don't even think about like, well, why would it have this? But I think in one of the extras I watched, they say like, well, it's to stop him from being blinded during an attack. They're eye shields.

Then the giant wakes up and knocks Hogarth off. And Hogarth is like running from him and scared but interested. And that is when Annie comes in, drives up, and she is freaked out and doesn't really have time for Hogarth's stories here. Hogarth? Hogarth! Mom! What do you think you're doing? Don't you know better than to water off at night alone? What if something happened to you? I'm sorry, Mom.

Oh, don't you ever do that to me again, Hogarth. I was so scared. I thought I'd lost you. Mom, you won't believe this. Something ate our TV antenna. Oh, Hogarth. No, no, I'm serious. Oh, but it's not Sputnik like Mr. Star, Hogarth. No, no, I'm serious. Oh, but it's not Sputnik like Mr. Stott.

Hogarth. No, it's a robot. No, really, it is. And the robot is a hundred feet high. Hogarth. It eats metal. Stop it. Just, just, stop. I'm not, I'm not in the mood. I love her just tiredness. I'm not... I'm not in the mood.

I love her just tiredness. I'm like, I'm not in the mood. She's relieved to see her son, but also sick of his bullshit. Yeah. She's like, I'm glad you're not dead, but shut up. I mean, yeah, when you can hear it from her side, she's seeing a kid that's in trouble for running away. And the way he describes it does sound like a child

making something up to not's in trouble for running away and the way he describes it does sound like a child making something up to not get in trouble yeah and it and it was a robot and it was um a hundred feet high yeah yeah also the way there's so much in the way annie says um and that's my nickname for jennifer aniston annie no but that's a character name but the way she says like i thought i'd lost you like i think it does express a little bit of like a widow who's just like yeah i lost my husband i don't want to lose you too i can see that and then he sees the iron giant in the rearview mirror yeah confirming its realness uh yeah that but it stood back and watched him that it also shows like the giant knows to hide sometimes if it has to and yeah

annie's just her like not in the mood she's just sick of it like that's that's great the way she drives away then comes a scene that feels the most like a simpsons scene to me in the whole movie yeah and if you watch the uh there's like a full storyboarded version of this safety short on the dvds it's very simpsons. You only see a little bit of it here, but there's a full song and it's much darker. But have you seen the original thing they're parodying, the Burt the Turtle shorts? Oh, yeah.

Well, I've seen clips of it, but not the full thing. I mean, there's like a minute of animation. The rest is just like an educational film like you'd see on Rift Tracks or Mystery Science Theater. And I don't think they did a lot of those on those programs because they're just very depressing because they're just lies. i like how in this movie the general's like tucking and covering won't do anything it's bullshit like it's just something we well he

doesn't say this but it's something they tell people so they think there's a chance so they don't panic they just sit quietly and die and uh there's a like a really fun like i was just scanning through the educational film and i was just like oh this looks like it'll be fun it's like a little boy riding his bike through the street it's like there's a flash it's like a really fun, like I was just scanning through the educational film and I was just like, oh, this looks like it'll be fun. It's like a little boy riding his bike through the street. It's like there's a flash. It's like that flash means Billy has to act fast. It's like, no, Billy's dead. Billy's vaporized.

If Billy's lucky, otherwise he's like covered in burns and scars and is wishing to die for like a few hours. I mean, like go watch Grave of the Fireflies or whatever. It's not like, oh, this small wall will protect me from nuclear annihilation. Yeah, or barefoot Gant. That's even worse in terms of just the atrocities on display. Yeah, it was all

like theater, like the idea that you could protect yourself from nuclear attack. I think low-key, we were still doing these drills but they were just called tornado drills like oh yeah duck and cover for the tornado wink wink it i mean it instills the same fear and let's it let our generation of teachers just reuse the same playbook but that's true yeah i mean it probably drove them crazy be like the cold war is over how are we gonna scare these children into subservience i i mean in this

parody version of it yeah the turtles replaced with a gopher yeah that also made i mean a turtle as somebody who covers himself and ducks down that makes sense yeah but a gopher digs down it's more effective i think and yeah the the silliest like the most like broad joke in the whole movie, I think is going like, Atomic Holocaust. That sounds so harsh. Yeah, yeah. You don't want to use that Holocaust word lately. And the little girl who gets bombed as well and just her happy look is everything is blown up around her, but she's somehow safe.

Like on a little like precipice above the chasm that has been bombed out around her but she's somehow safe i like on a little lay like on a little like uh precipice yes above the chasm that has been bombed out around her but she was safe from ducking and covering yeah the uh and this scene also we get to hear hogarth's teacher very briefly i can't believe that this is just the credited role in this movie it's crazy yeah actually here let's hear the whole ducking cover song. Also with some Hogarth being bullied mixed into it. A peaceful stay-at-home kind of day

in a town very much like your own. But then, suddenly, without warning, Atomic Holocaust! But how does one survive an atomic attack? Hey, did you hear

about Crazy Mr. Stutz? He says his bow ran into a sea monster. I heard it was sunk by a meteor. No, no, no. It was a metal meteor. It ate his boat. My dad says he's just an old man. It wasn't any of those things.

What would you know about it, Poindexter? Shh. Don't make me come over there. Hands over your head. Keep low to the ground. Time to duck and cover. The bombs are coming down Duck and cover, duck and cover

It's about 50 or 60 feet high, and it only eats magic Shut up, you little spaz It's probably been sent by foreign enemies to take over the country We should bomb it to smithereens before it does Kids alone will cease to be around Yeah, like 20 seconds after her session Good work, Clorisoris uh it's great it's all we need you for uh well so apparently she was a big in the boarded version her character has some more scenes she's got a name the character you see it's like it's like a not a flattering name like this is hagsley

or something oh yeah this is bittersley or something like that that fits with bandsley yeah i yeah i think that that as part of the many cuts they made in animation they're like do we need a scene with it do we really need a scene with a teacher saying something i guess not let's just have this one line from chloris leachman we already paid her what she care like yeah yeah like these tiny bits of you see of hogarth interacting with his peers. They tell you a lot. Also, you hear that in that one scene later, the coffee rant.

You hear like Hogarth's backstory that he got skipped ahead of grade because he was like too overactive of a student in terms of his imagination. And that's why he's being picked on because he was moved ahead of grade. Yeah, he's I mean, that uh that was the fear of my mom that i was the smallest kid in my class so i me too i could have started school in third grade damn it i could have gotten all over two years earlier yeah i look back on it i wish i'd had that one extra year of not being in school but i was bullied anyways it didn't matter you know they you can't outthink the bullies yeah just just because you're not the shrimpiest kid in class doesn't mean they won't bully you. They'll check your age first before they bully you. Oh, I'm very sorry, sir.

You're also 12. I love how ugly those kids in class are. They all just have nasty little fat faces. And they're talking about just bombing and killing and destroying. No, that's great. You see all the bombs on the screen from the video as the one kid said, it's from foreign enemies we should bomb it like and that also shows you that hogarth's different from them

like he's like he's not ready for all this violence he wants to understand this enemy instead of just going like or this outside force to america he's like i want to understand it you know some conservatives when this movie came out, one of their reviews of it was like, this is saying we should have befriended the Russians when they did have secret spies here, and McCarthy was right. This is Michael Medved. This was Rod Dreher.

Oh, God. That truly insane man. A total freak. Poor Cloris Leachman, though. She could have been so much more. I mean, the design of her teacher is really good too i like her as a as a terrible mean teacher she's like if miss graboppel got way older so this next scene is a new scene correct yeah where where is the pass off to the old movie there's a scene with the uh selling dean attractor yes once that's on the old

movie that's the original version so this is just like 20 seconds really i thought so because i did remember the the line like there's a bite taken out of it that's like that that is not new but this little scene like kind of flirty scene of them both talking about hogarth dean and annie yeah it's um it's important setup that when it's in here i understand how it builds in characters for a turn that works less without it in the film, because this sets up the Dean and Annie had a better for a better, not more interactions after the whole squirrel thing.

Yeah. And it also shows any say that Hogarth is lonely and he's like, Oh, like that could explain why he feels bad for hogarth later he's like sure come in let's hang out sure you're a lonely kid yeah and i guess to buy that there are a couple at the end of the movie you need like one more scene of them together like seeing some sparks fly because there's only really one in the original movie yes yeah just her seeing the art and going like hey nice art wink like wink. Like that's, that's kind of it. So

this little scene, and again, this was, they didn't make this fully a new, like this was all boarded out. This is old recordings too. They didn't get Jennifer Aniston, Harry Connick jr. To come back for this. They, they just pulled it out of the, the vaults. That's another great extra on there. Uh, the blu-ray is andrew jimenez uh the production one of the production guys he goes to warner brothers massive salt mines where they store all their stuff i watched that uh extra it's really cool i've totally forgot about the salt mine thing it sounds like a joke but no they're actually buried deep in salt mines deep in the earth like the entire movie history of them to protect

protect from moisture i think mainly the fires yeah yeah as as happened to the universal lot that burned a bunch of masters as uh that comes up a lot on podcast arrive yeah and you see the guy going through all of the old materials and he's wearing gloves like it's very like a very clean operation too i mean just to see him touching physical art that was made like for for a film that came out in 1999 having all these physical uh media like now that wouldn't it would have just all been saved on a computer yeah yeah like one of the boxes just had like you know drawing some artist desks in it like when they clean out all the desks and save all the materials. They just took stuff, which of course Warner owns because they own every single thing you do when you work someplace. Every last doodle is theirs.

As Tim Burton would learn about Disney in Nightmare Before Christmas when he thought he could just make it himself. Yeah, but I'm glad they reestablished this scene. It's a cute little scene between the two of them, even though, like, yes, it doesn't really move anything forward. Plus, I can see why they'd make a choice budget-wise of, this is a film for kids. We don't need a scene without Hogarth. Yeah.

Yeah. Especially if it doesn't set up like the villain of the movie. So, yes. Then we go back to what was in the original film of just outside earl earl with another old man selling his bitten tractor to dean and uh that's when there's a great scene of like earl telling him i called up the government and then dean says who the hell would the government send i do like ear Earl's brief moment of getting to be like a full of himself. Like I called the government about this.

They're going to get it done. Yeah. And like Dean is also right of like, I don't want the government up my ass in here, which I suppose is kind of a Randian statement. Definitely. Like, oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, Kent is an interfering government agent.

Like, uh, there's definitely a type of villain Ayn Rand would approve of, I think. And in the scene where they introduced him, he's got to have like a turn in his character. It's very interesting how they do this and it works, but it's, it's interesting that they have to do it immediately because they have no time.

So Kent is a guy who is just like sort of like a low level G man sent in all these like wild goose chases. Just be like, it's going to be nothing. It's going to be bullshit. I hate being here. I hate you small-town people. I want to climb the ladder and I'll never do it doing this podunk

crap. But the second he can escalate this to something and the second it feeds into his paranoia as well, he's willing to believe. Yeah, he jumps on it instantly and his turn from being like, big things happen in big towns. Nothing happens here.

I was like, is the way he says, like, probably the biggest thing in this town is the homecoming queen. But he gets cut off like homecoming queen. Oh, my God. Great acting on Chris McDonald there, too. And it helps that, like, Kent is sort of a freakish looking character. His giant chin and pointy nose like he's like so many uh right angles like a lot of like he's a very angular character he's like a shoveled face or something yeah yeah just very very straight laced but it's funny because he

he is the person who comes undone the most like it's all off the side yeah and that he he's a great villain for the movie too because not only only because he is paranoia personified, like in paranoia added to a war machine is bad. They're definitely saying that with Kent. But also he can be a joke. Like sometimes they can just have him be like the butt of a joke for a scene. He's flexible enough to be both of those. And you can hurt him too. Like you can't really hurt Hog butt of a joke for a scene he's he's flexible enough to be both of those and you can hurt him too like you can't really hurt hogarth for a joke but you can hurt him yeah yeah i i and

i love how pompous he is too like the way he walks around with his pipe like he thinks he's the guy in the b movie that uh that hogarth was watching earlier yeah like i'm sort of like pointing with the other end of his pipe, like very authoritatively. It's all just an act. Like, that's so great. And just the, yeah, how condescending he is at first to Marv. And then once he sees that, like, oh, you know what? No, this is, this actually is important.

And they bring it up to you on the commentary, how tough it was for them to find out what would be the evidence for him. Because he can't have anything he can show somebody else. So it's perfect that it is his car with a bite taken out of it. And then the car is fully eaten. So he has no evidence, but he knows it exists. And this thing that can take a bite exists there.

That's true. A lot of this first part of the movie is like this, just the search for evidence. Yeah. Every people know something weird is going on and they're getting scared like though i think that's another thing that gets hurt by their lack of time you don't really get to see how the rest of the town is paranoid too like which they should be lots of yeah people sell dean they're eating trucks or whatever, but,

but they just mostly like darn this thing, huh? Instead of like, I'm worried. Could it be the Russians invading? Did China come here? Yeah. We kind of lose the times people after this for the most part,

pretty much the end of the movie when they don't really speak, but they do see the giant have to react to him. Yeah. Yeah. Which I mean, it's like a town of like 20 people too. And yeah. So Mansley walks away. I also do like the, uh, how the, it's like a town of like 20 people, too. And yeah, so Mansley walks away.

I also do like how Marv says, like, Mr. Manley. That's pretty good. On the commentary, they said that was a mistake in the booth. But Brad Bird didn't want to correct it because he thought it'd be like a funny, like the guy really doesn't respect Mansley enough to remember his name. So even by these podunk people, he's being disrespected. And also how crazy he looks when he's pulling Marvin like come on come on like his overly animated hand motions as he's he's pulling him forward to see the bitten out car like there's there's fantastic animation

throughout with kent like i i think kent is the best animated character in the movie, just because he gets to have so many extremes as both the joke character and the villain. And this is when we see the famous hog hug gun. Hog hug. Hogarth Hughes. That's such a clever idea too. Of course, the little boy would write his name on his own BB gun so he wouldn't lose lose it or i guess get it mixed up with all the other boys who have to own the same red rider gun uh but then that hogarth hughes could fit up with hog hug which just like confuses the crap out of you if you don't have the context for it's fun to say hog hug hog hug uh but yes they they then in the next scene set up this bit of hogarth trying to capture the or at least photograph the giant and setting down a bunch of sheet metal there and uh it really reminds me of i think maybe it was even intentional in spongebob there's a bit of spongebob trying to

get this missing seahorse oh yeah an early episode right yeah and it's just him staring at this flower that then he turns away from for a second and it gets eaten and then he turns back uh in general this feels like a brief like daffy duck cartoon of him trying to catch a monster but hogarth does take a plot important selfie yeah i when that little selfie happened i was like oh that's funny a selfie you don't even think of like that i think another film would have said later when that photo got caught he's like oh from when i saw the monster when i first met the giant they don't even bother with that they just let you assume can you remember an hour ago uh i mean a lot of movies frozen doesn't trust of course not no i mean that's

asking a lot of an audience uh mainstream audience though this film also is guilty of that later on of just like we already heard hogarth say you are what you choose to be do you need to play it over him flying into space it was like two minutes ago, but, uh, mostly this film really respects its audience with, uh, with not too many like flashbacks or things explaining things.

Then the giant reveals he was hiding the whole time. I got to like how playful he is of that. When Hogarth fell asleep, he just silently picked up the little piece of sheet metal and put it behind him he's getting to be less uh more more animalistic but less robotic yeah and soon soon he'll take on like more human qualities he finally confronts hogarth hogarth is still terrified as he should be because this thing could easily crush him and almost did then like he he starts to he starts to see that the the giant is more relaxed

than he thought the way he just like plops down on his butt and yeah i do love that uh crisscross applesauce pose he's got just like falls backwards on his uh bony ass his shiny metal ass i'm sorry and also the uh the way when he falls on that shiny metal ass, the way the trees all bounce up, like it's rather cartoony. Cartoonier than most action is in the film, but I really like it. I know Bird, in the commentary, I believe it is, he talks about how like there's a tough line where, you know, if you go too silly with cartoon violence in your animated film and then want to care later about

a character falling to seemingly their death you if you go too far with cartoony violence early on the people like well he's not gonna die i already saw him fall for a joke earlier that's true like hogarth when running away from the giant he gets hit in the face of the branch that what that's what knocks him out they add a little trickle of blood to his nose you could be like oh that wasn't a cartoony like pratfall like he hurt himself i like that i i like i gasp like whoa the blood just like how i was shocked when dean says who the hell is the government gonna send i was like wow just like relaxed swearing by the town beatnik some light cursing that's where the opening bit of the like you know talk blah blah blah like uh it's fun to hear bin is like that's that's cute that's uh and that's when

hogarth notices the dent in his head which i say makes him more goku than superman because as uh as was revealed in the start of the saiyan saga goku was is a uh a saiyan who crash landed on earth with the plan of conquering it but he fell and hit his head as a baby and that's why he didn't kill everybody and also is kind of dumb he's too stupid for mass genocide so the giant is much more like goku than superman which yes i i know that goku's uh origin story when they've made it up for the saiyan saga is a tribute to superman because tributes total ripoff whatever the case they made it better i mean toriyama loves superman i think oh for sure yeah i mean that's why we get the great say a man one of my favorite characters supper man from uh dr slum that's right he was just superman just yeah except with like kent mansley's head too yeah i wonder if that's why his name's

kent too because he does look a little like classic kent clark kent there uh yeah the the giant is slowly learning from him i i too love you can see the way the jaw like wiggles around when he tries to talk i love that and that's when hogarth makes the pronouncement that he's like i'm the luckiest i am now the luckiest kid in america that's a real like trailer scene there oh yeah like i i remember some of these in commercials because they really try to portray the movie as like fun boy and robot movie yeah yeah not i mean if it's about like a rumination on life death and and fear like that that's not so exciting a cold war parable for our times i mean they're already hamstrung that this like doesn't have a pop song in it or anything either like i i saw another of those trailers earlier where they're just like there have a pop song in it or anything either like i i saw another of those

trailers earlier where they're just like there's a new name in heavy metal it's like no no no no they play uh iron man by black sabbath during any trailers no but i think they did like have like something guitar-y to it though it's it feels wrong i'm surprised they got away with not having a track by like in sync at the end like uh you've you've melted my metal heart or whatever i don't know yeah it's like even the peanuts movie had to have some one new pop song in it that was totally out of place but didn't ruin the movie for me yeah i gotta think that it's not from lack of wanting but from lack of effort yeah yeah that's i maybe they were thinking like we worked hard to get some stupid songs

in quest for camelot and look what that got us why should we spend the time and effort hooking up with like some warner musician that they know to get them to do a new song for it like why why even call mariah carey or uh or the but i think this this movie could only get 98 degrees they couldn't get the in sync of the battle town or maybe like a solo song by nick carter they're like well we could get chris kirkpatrick but just him but he'll sing it joy fatone will do one verse and we've got him for an afternoon so let's so let's get all we can out of fatone yeah uh i mean i think that also shows the forcefulness of brad bird that he wouldn't want that anyway and would have turned it down but i think too if uh warner feature animation

is like yeah we're done anyway we're not going for an oscar with this maybe i would have gotten more behind this film too if like the feature animation uh division existed for oscar back then you know yeah yeah i guess you would have to uh you could win technical oscars right i guess or screenwriting screenwriting but you'd have to have a really good movie to break into best uh picture or whatever music was pretty much the only chance they had at oscar yeah that's right yeah i wasn't even thinking of that i mean this also talk about a dark era for adult uh attempts at uh making mainstream animation that's not for children. Like 1999 in the US was also the year that Princess Mononoke was put in theaters.

Are we also at Titanite AE in 99 or 98? I believe that's 2000, but it's coming. Yeah, we're around that time. That was the one that killed Don Bluth's company. That was the last one. But yeah, I think, I mean, I remember seeing Mononoke in a theater with me, my mom, brother, and two guys in Dragon Ball t-shirts. Yeah, as Hogarth is reflecting on how cool it is to have his new giant friend, he also

clearly is well-versed in B-movies because he's like, wait, no, everybody freaks out when they see a giant monster. I can't tell anybody about this. That's why when it's just a fun moment of seeing a B-movie, it actually was a character setup moment, too. That is true, yeah. He's well-versed in sci-fi lore. And it's also that is where he says to the giant way is she oh she totally wig out you know wig out like he learned that from dean he's trying to act cool like he knows what wig out means then it cuts uh briefly to kent presenting his plan to the mayor and everybody

else who are all silent and kind of don't move yeah Yeah. But they're all real bystanders in this. I like how they sort of like, they match cut to Hogarth pacing around and giving a similar, having a similar like mania about the giants. Yeah, yeah. But they both have different aims and different energies,

but they have the same mania about it. Kent and Hogarth are more alike than they'd admit, I think. Yeah, that, and kent just takes over and he's like and we're all very worried and i definitely represent the government and i'm in charge of this town now like he even he he really takes over for the mayor he like steals the mayor's car later yeah just from this like silent nobody mayor they designed to i can't really thinks he's like a military strong man,

which makes it even funnier in a little bit when you see him call a general and the general laughs at him. Yeah, yeah. He's just a joke. He's employed by them, but they send him out on these nothing cases because they hate him. Yeah. He's probably somebody's nephew or something. That sounds about right. But yes, as Hogarth reflects on how excited he is, he also knows that they can't just hang out all day. He'll be missed. And so he wants to say goodbye to the giant. So we can't call Ripley's believe it or not because they wouldn't believe it. And it's getting dark.

And if I don't get home soon, Mom's going to wonder where I am. And if she comes looking for me and sees you, then we got the screaming problem again. So for now, you know, just stay here, okay? I'll come back tomorrow. Wow. Well, goodbye. Wow. Well, goodbye. No, no.

Migo, you stay. No following. Good. I told you! I'll come back tomorrow now stay hey at this point he is just a big dog yeah yeah I love that, like the posing on him, all of that. It's just telling a dog, like, don't follow me, which that if you've, you know, meet a dog, like a lost dog in the wild, I think I've had that at least a couple times in my life of like, no, dog, I don't want to

take care of you, please. Like, just like just stay stay don't follow me that dog saw mark fortunately i think in both those cases the dog he like found their owner pretty soon after but uh the posing on how hogarth says now stay the way he points at the ground that's really great like all his acting even is like me go you stay no following like that's just a fun line in the moment that will come back so forcefully in a real tear-jerking scene later in the movie and yeah now hogarth like you said he's got a dog now with a dog his mom wouldn't let him have now he's cursed with one who won't listen to him he got his wish fit in the house luckily they have an iron giant size barn at home yeah pretty lucky there yeah i i gotta think like uh i they're trying i think annie has that job

to try to pay off the mortgage so they don't lose the farm but they can't they don't have the kind of money to run a farm they got a pretty nice place i gotta say on the country i like it i gotta think they inherited it too. Like it all. A lot of inherited wealth, I'm assuming. But that's Eisenhower's America. Yes. All wealth is stolen. I'm just saying an MSD3K joke now. So as they're walking back, they then cross the train tracks and the giant starts to chew on some train tracks.

And it's so like the intensity and the panic of that sequence of just like. As the train starts coming. Yeah, so good. This is when he fully becomes human because Hogarth is trying to get him to repair the train tracks. And he's taking too long because he's being super meticulous, like trying to match them up perfectly before he's hit by the train. So he's gone from like robot to sort of like ape to dog to human over the course of these four scenes we see him in he's literally a perfectionist by that point yeah he's very anal retentive i love the yeah hogarth is like good enough come on let's run and he on. Yeah. Uh, and the way he just gets smashed to like, it's,

it's a fun scene that makes you think like the giant is dead, but it also is very important in setting up that the giant can repair himself to like, that's incredibly necessary for where the story is going to go. And when the train hits it, like you, you don't see it hit, which that is like the economic choice to do. Yeah. I mean, I like that. It's just in your imagination. Like what happened to the train? How did the giant break? I think it was a budget decision, but also I like that it's off screen. I think in pretty much every case where you can tell if you investigate enough and you can tell that it was a budget choice, they at least artistically express it well enough that you're not like missing something and thinking like, I wish they'd drawn that.

And this time you don't think like, how did these two 85-year-old men survive this? That's true. Yeah. But yes, the train smashes at him. That's when the mayor's office gets a call, which that's where Kent is. So he takes the mayor's car, which he will drive around for a while in that movie. Then Hogarth, meanwhile, sees the giant get up and slowly start to put himself back together as they go to hide in his convenient giant barn. And yeah, I love seeing the,

you even get to see the very important little screw that'll go back into his jaw. Even have time for like a great joke of like when Hogarth walks away, giant puts up his hand to wave goodbye and then he sees he has no hand. Which sets up the next sort of comedy set piece. Oh yeah.

The dog is in the house now. Uh, mom can't know. Uh, but, oh, but right before that is the big cameo of the movie too, though.

Oh yeah. Frank and Ollie, uh, the famous, uh, two of the nine old men still alive as of, uh, that time in the history.

I believe both make an appearance in the Incredibles as well but i think at least one of them had passed by the time the film came out i mean as animation dork at the time i asked my friends like do you know who that is uh when we can't name the all any uh too many other nine old men but you can always name frank and ollie yeah i mean they live the longest yeah and they got to have a documentary about them that's true it is on is on the Disney plus had to mention Disney plus on this podcast. One of them was super into trains, which is why I think that they're the train people. They had like, like a little like mini train that would run around their yard or something like that. Like something crazy like that. It's either Frank or Ollie. No, one of the parting shots of the, um, the one with hair, let's say that I think that's

Frank. Uh, but honestly honestly they they're just the uh they say this in the documentary of just like no they're they're one name frank and ollie like that and so you just think of them these two men as one person because they worked together so much the uh the documentary is great because they also you never get to see this in anything produced by Disney about animation where they just take one specific scene and they're like, this was him. Or they take another shot like, oh, you remember that scene in I Want to Be Like You where the trumpet monkey is like dancing in place with his elbows up high? Then they show Frank or ollie acting out how he drew that and they are like that's the kind of thing disney never wants you know who even like directed their damn movies let alone who the singular animator was yeah single shots that's

great yeah you only get that through commentaries usually like especially this one yeah i mean it's a it's a nice it's obviously all about disney on it too because it's a disney documentary but it's it's really fun you get to hear about the old days and frank and ollie are just such like warm old grandpa characters it's fun to hear them and and also yeah uh frank or ollie who is the train maniac he even mentions like he was into trains before walt was and he's like i told walt about trains and how cool they were you gotta ride that disneyland train gotta take it to the secret dinosaur tunnel i love that dinosaur tunnel i hope it never turns into some star wars tunnel or something friend of the show maddie uh took me to the dinosaur tunnel i'd never seen it before oh

really yeah i i hadn't heard about it until i uh took that train for the first time too i mean i wasn't gonna leave my first trip to disney Disneyland and not take a full ride of that train. You can't miss it. But yes, Frank and Ollie even drawn in funny caricature of their faces. They're very nice caricatures. And this is when they point out like the one place can use the phone is Hogarth's house. So all of these forces are descending upon Hogarth destructive forces you're right you know what even this you know kind of indulgent moment of brad bird putting in two of his animation mentors into his film it also services for why kent would

go to the hughes residence for i mean if this scene wasn't there it would still kind of make sense that kent would show up and be like hey can i use your phone but yeah this explains it way better i like that they justify it he doesn't just appear out of nowhere uh but yes yeah the dog is in the house this uh this left hand walking around which they say it's the only time the giant is drawn 2d because he just interacts with too many physical things. Yeah. So the hand is 2D for a lot of it? Yes.

Okay. Interesting. It makes things a lot easier for them. And it's just such like a great comedy short, really, like in the middle of this movie. And this leads to one of the funniest bits of a prayer. Oh, yeah. This is the funniest part of the movie. Oh, my god.

Oh my god. We thank you for the food that mom has put in front of us and stop! The devil!

From doing bad things and get out of here. Satan. Go, go, you soul, that we may live in peace. Amen. Amen. That was really unusual, Hogarth. I forgot to wash my hands. Well, okay.

The little resentful eye roll when she asks him to say grace, I do like that too. Like she's trying to reign this crazy kid in with these like little rituals, like how to answer the phone and how to say grace and everything like that. And he's just like, God, you're binding me in. He wants to be free this kid but i mean when they show hogarth like drawing at his desk and these moments too like this is this is bradbury's oh yeah coming through here for sure yeah i'm like but just all the great just facial acting on hogarth and just stop the devil when he's like leaning down on the table just look in

the kitchen and uh yeah yeah what you're missing if you haven't seen this yet is just all the great like uh face acting in these characters uh the smile and nodding he's doing and then just how how perplexed annie is and i like to she's she's at least happy he's washing his hands so she's not fully questioning it she's like at least he's washing his hands before dinner but but it's great in that uh the scene really escalates you're right it's like a classic cartoon short because at first he's got to hide this uh robot dog hand from his mom and then there's another person he's got to hide it from too so it's like it escalates and what he has to do to uh keep this a secret yeah and you just wonder like how how's he gonna do it like it's so uh there's so little margin for error he has.

Like, it's Brad Bird, and this is true for, like, The Incredibles and also really for his Mission Impossible movie. He's so good at building these just, you know, tension factories of just, like, how are they going to get away with this? Oh, they're so close to getting caught. It's so dangerous. Like, that's what I loved about Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol. Like there's, there's a great bit after the first of the movie is everything works fine for them and they're able to do it with no problem. And that's the end of that chapter. Every other scene in the movie is them saying like, all right, time to do this. Well, the machine broke.

What are we supposed to do? Like everything breaks every moment. We need to follow ghost protocol, gentlemen. Boy, do they. They ghost and follow that protocol. I mean, like Alec Baldwin literally says in the movie what ghost protocol is, and I assume they do it. And then comes another of the alterations for the Signature Edition, one of the more subtle ones. So in the original movie, the robot hand is watching the Maypo commercial like, I want my Maypo.

But that was only because Brad Bird couldn't get what he wanted in the first place, which was a commercial for Tomorrowland. That's right. I guess the Maypo thing was a compromise because it was directed by Bill Hubley, like a classic Disney animator. So it still mattered to him, but not as much as Tomorrowland, obviously. Everyone remembers Tomorrowland. I'm wearing the t-shirt right now. We love that movie. Yeah, we all got our special pins that were very important in the movie i if i recall the

trailer correctly uh like i'm sure i maybe that film's okay i don't know i think uh what friend of the show nina i think is not a fan of it i don't think uh not to throw her under the bus i don't think she's a tomorrowland fan yeah yeah i mean look i'm such a i talk about how i love all these brad bird movies and i have never seen it and feel no need to. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, as anyone, if you're out there and you're a fan of Tomorrowland, let us know because I have not heard anyone talk about that movie. And of course, I mean, that's one of the biggest exhibit A or B in Brad Bird is a Randian thing because... For sure. That's the commentary I heard the most about. I mean, I did hear about the movie when it came out and that was it that was the commentary i heard because atlas shrugged is

about uh what if all the rich industrialists who obviously lead society and are the most brilliant people because they own a steel factory what if those people left society and left it to all the parasites who certainly couldn't do any work of their own because they're just lazy people looking for handouts so when tomorrowland uh from what i've read is about george clooney's character and all these other smart people leaving a society that doesn't appreciate them hard not to see atlas shrugged in that yeah yeah yeah i mean uh we'll get to a quote in this movie that uh has a lot of meanings for me oh sure later so i don't want to talk about that but yes it's funny that obviously in 1999 warner asking disney can we license something i for our movie why would disney say yes to that i think the only reason in 2015

they did it is because by that point he'd made disney bradburn had made disney at like billions of dollars and so if he said like hey this will also advertise that tomorrowland movie i'm doing this year yeah okay sure put it in the movie so i guess thematically it makes more sense for the robot to watch a commercial for a futuristic land as opposed to a cereal commercial. Can you even get Maypo? I had to stop existing alongside of that. It went the way of Quisp. Although I haven't been in a cereal island, I don't know how long,

that wasn't at Trader Joe's. I remember seeing Quisp fairly recently when I was at some grocery store at some point in my life in the past decade are you more of a uh multi-grain trailer trader joe owes guy uh I I just eat a very boring protein bar in the morning uh man you're missing that well now I had quit cereal for the longest time but then when I got uh got into soy milk and it's low actually almond milk and it's low, well, actually almond milk and it's low-calorie stuff. Almond milk is great. But this isn't about cereal anyway. So yes, as Hogarth is already going through a lot of trouble trying to hide the hand from his mom,

then he gets a knock on the door and Kent Mansley is there. And it's just so funny that the first moment between the two characters, this is the door slamming in his face. He doesn't care who he is. Like, well, you can't see this either. But he's the last person that should see it. Yeah we find out you as a viewer goes like oh my god he's right here when the when the hand is right there but yeah when he slams the door and

then reopens it and kent has to like hey i was saying i'm ken mansley oh and then he takes off his hat and puts it on hogarth's head and says, pretend to be a gangster. Immediately just like patronizing up front. Yeah. It's very smart kid. Yeah. Hogarth, it's a good setup for why Hogarth instantly doesn't like Kent, who will be his nemesis the whole movie. And I mean, also Kent has, I never caught it until this close viewing of it, but Kent has a very creepy reaction when he first meets Annie.

Oh, because he's looking down at Hogarth and then like Annie appears, he looks at her breasts almost. Like he sees her breasts first. He's looking at her torso and then says, oh, hello. Like, yeah, he's, I mean, he's hoping he can make some time with this this single mom uh while he's there like uh again another scene they could have kept in is kent trying to ask her out on a date or something or or take more of a uh romantic position he would have seen more like tension with him living there not just like there will only see like a montage really yeah of that and uh so kent gets to use the phone and that's when we get to hear papa frazier or papa crane i said recently departed john relatively recently within the past couple of years yeah

yeah yeah r.i.p such a great actor another like until he was in frazier he was one of those character actor guys or just like a confirmed bachelor broadway actor that's what i thought yeah yeah he's look he was just a confirmed bachelor he lived a private life it's with his roommates of 40 years when you when you read profiles of actors that just say like and he lives a private life you're just like okay you get you get their gay like i think uh did you did you know Kevin Conroy is gay? Kevin Conroy. No, no, no, absolutely not. I hadn't heard it until, this is a real tangent, but I hadn't heard that. And you would think I would know.

My husband and I, neither of us had heard it until like a couple weeks ago. We just were like, oh, let's look at his personalized section of his wiki page. And there was a profile of him in the New York Times a couple years ago. And it talks about how important it was for him to play some gay character early in his Broadway career. And it says, like, Kevin Conroy, a gay man himself. I was like, wait, what? Huh. I didn't realize that.

So it's a, this is the paper record saying it. I was just looking at uh john mahoney's age and i just remembered that when he started playing uh frazier's dad what was his name uh boy martin crane martin crane he was only 53 wow yeah but he played it much older he was playing like a character 20 years older than that with his like hobbling around with his cane and everything so acting yeah i mean he is a great actor like that's truly i uh it's it's funny to think of fraser crane surrounded by all these gay men pretending to be straight for their character that's right the notoriously straight uh kelsey grammar so many wives it's fine he he stole the

heterosexuality from all these other men around him to make him too straight even bulldog oh wow it's another one yeah it's him i i wasn't even thinking a bulldog when i was naming a character i was thinking of the uh the fastidious food critic but yeah bulldog he was he was the only actor on that show who was out at that's true yeah i do remember that which i think is why he appears in the show less because because I think they were punishing him. But anyway, yes, Kent is on the phone with John Mahoney playing a very straight part in this next clip. Hey there, Scout. Kent Mansley.

I work for the government. Hogarth? Hogarth? Hey there, Scout. Kent Mansley. Work for the government your parents home or eating boy oh hello there do you have a telephone i could use yes there's one in the kitchen well thank you thank you very much here pretend you're a gangster, Mansley, you call me at home for this? You don't understand, sir. It... it ate my car. And you saw this happen.

I didn't actually see it. It went off into the woods. So you don't have any evidence. But, sir, I've got an eyewitness. An eyewitness with a concussion. This thing... this thing is a menace. It tore up a power station. It caused a train wreck. What did?

Tell me again, Mansley, and this time, listen to yourself. A giant metal monster. Please, sir. I've got a feeling about this one. So when the general starts laughing at him, he sees the family dog potholder and turns it around so it's not facing him anymore. Yeah, how much it destroys him to be laughed at.

That really shows you what fuels Kent. It's not even fear of the unknown, though he definitely is xenophobic in that way. But it's more than just like he wants power and respect and no one gives it to him yeah and i think they're playing the military as like you know guys sort of just doing their jobs they're not invested in the uh the philosophy of this stuff which is like i'm sure some people would be on board obviously kent is but the general's like what is it now yeah yeah i think i mean to portray the general's like, what is it now? Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, to portray the

general, like, I guess this is a general in the cold war, but he's not at war. And I mean, he definitely is more of the Eisenhower era view of like, he's a general, he gets things done. He's the boss of the military, not, you know, our view of the military now and in the 90s of like, well, yeah, they choose to invade places. They are the bosses of a war machine like that. Yeah. That's what the military is like. In general, the portrayal of the military is that they are like a benign defensive force that can be tricked by a bad actor, which that is, listen to the Citations Needed podcast about politics, but often they talk about on that how you remove agency from things that it's like,

oh, America stumbled into war. We didn't want to do these things. This feels similar tone here. Of that sort of narrative. And also uh i don't think they underline it very much but you get a taste of just the innocence of this time period because like a strange man appears at night in this uh single woman's house and he's like can i use your phone oh sure come into my home you're definitely an agent of the government because you said you were and so you showed up here nobody could yeah i I think Kent takes advantage of a lot of that trust throughout this. You know, I mentioned Guillermo del Toro earlier.

Uh, if you've seen the shape of water, Michael Shannon's character in it is, is a lot like Kent. Okay. Okay. Like he's, I still need to see that movie.

He's like another clean cut kind of, he is in the style of the clean cut lead of a fifties movie, except he's the real version of him. is like a murderous, sad man. Like he's it's I mean, Michael Shannon is like one of the best actors, period. He's great. Yeah, I get the sense that like we only really hear the perspectives of two military people in this movie. But like Kent has bought into the propaganda machine and the general has not yeah he seems pretty cool-headed of just like yeah that he's when later you hear kent's big speech about how terrified everyone is in washington it's like

well the general is relaxing at home watching cowboy movies on his massive 13-inch tv with some bourbon or something oh yes yeah he's got like a high ball that's true he's uh that's not that's not very g-rated of him i do enjoy that it's a nice touch uh but yes the laughter and the pain on kent's face when he gets laughed at and then his rage at trying to hang up the phone the way he hangs up angry once it just like slips off like he he owes them a new phone he broke it i do like the mask slipping with kent whenever he's just like no i'm an authority figure i know what's happening but he he flips out the most in this movie he loses his cool the

most in the movie yeah and that uh and the way everybody just kind of has to stare at him most characters he meets just kind of look at him sideways like, okay. But again, they're all in 50s America that tells them like, well, you trust this man. He's the government, you know? But yes, after using the phone, Kent is going to leave. But then he stumbles upon a clue. Well, thank you for the use of your phone, Mrs. Yeah, hog hug. hug hug hug hug hug hug hug like that's it's so funny how he says that and uh when there's several times in this movie where coincidence happens that hurts uh that like brings kent closer to the truth and it's usually caused inadvertently by hogarth and that's it right there if hogarth hadn't been so like you know passive if he hadn't said and corrected my name's

hogarth oh yeah like then he wouldn't have been thinking on the name and seeing the coincidence there on the bb gun he should be anti-gun because he brought this gun with him it was the smoking gun that the iron giant exists yeah yeah he's uh i mean he died he can't think that far ahead i do like when kent comes back he does uh make a point to get his name right like see anything unusual hogarth oh yeah that's even more fun animation i like the lip sync on the hogarth and also how uh hogarth thinks he's going to just repeat his thing again. He's like, I wasn't going to say that. And then we get some bathroom comedy. High quality poop jokes

in this movie. Strange, he's so tight-lipped now. And the other night he couldn't stop talking. I mean, 100-foot robots and whatnot. A 100-foot robot? That's nutty. What else did he say? No, wait, stop!

Excuse me. Hogarth? What is going on in there? Are you all right? I'm fine. You know, this sort of thing is why it's so important to really chew your food i love uh just the look that she gives that guy just uh she's not on his side or anything yeah she's like this isn't the time come on like yeah great justgers, staring daggers at him. And yeah, the comedy, I mean, Kent makes it even more clear. But even without that funny comment, hearing the sounds like I'm fine coming painful bowel movement and uh then very smart on hogarth's

part to like pretend he is going to the bathroom just to scare off them like that that's funny after like getting the hand out the window even though like he's sitting in front of an unrolled toilet paper uh tube because the uh the dog the dog can when he goes to the bathroom to see where it went it's like unrolling the toilet paper tube. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's so funny. Another like pet-like motion by him. With like a wagging wrist stub or whatever is happening there, like a tail.

You know, he reminds me of the terrifying banana hand or hand banana from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Oh, you're right. Yeah. Let's not talk about yeah that's a not a great episode uh but i also like how kent's like oh that's crazy what else did he say like that again great he's like immediately a creep and overbearing over hogarth the second he knows hogarth knows something and uh yeah also great animation on kent's face being smashed in the door when they run out of there it does look painful and as uh kent leaves you can see in the window the room

for rent signs so you know he can see it and it sets up how he'll be there later yeah i do like how they at least have one drop line in the beginning of the movie where it's just like yes we are running out of room otherwise that sign would feel kind of cheap like oh yeah now suddenly they need a tenant that's true that's true yeah yeah they uh yeah it's pretty rare bird just pulls something out of his butt in this he sets it up pretty well so the hand gets away and uh then we get my favorite scene of the movie comic book talk i thought you'd like you know a bedtime story or something i've got some really cool ones mad magazine very funny the spirit very cool boys life man oh here this guy is superman sure he's famous now but he started off just like you.

Crash landed on Earth, didn't know what he was doing, but he only uses his powers for good, never for evil. Remember that. Oh, that's a tom of the metal menace. He's not the hero. He's the villain. He's not like you. You're a good guy. Like Superman. Superman.

Thankfully, those are all Warner Brothers properties. Yes. At least Mad Magazine and Superman, I don't know about the spirit. I believe Eisner just owns the spirit. Like, so it, I mean, Bird was friends with Eisner, so he was able to use it. But I still think it took, it wasn't just like instantaneous that they could use Superman. You still have to ask DC for permission in that. I mean, I can't imagine this movie without Superman in it.

It's kind of essential to the plot. It's so pivotal and and they didn't stumble upon it until the planning of the movie. It wasn't made from the beginning, this decision. Which it's just like perfection. I like even that Hogarth knows the thematic similarities between the two of them and just says it out loud like, you know, you're a lot like Superman. I just noticed this about you. And also, Otomo is not real i didn't think so no though he's very similar to ec or even pre spider-man marvel comics like in the 50s marvel like followed every trend they could that wasn't superheroes trying to find something that works so a lot of like the work jack kirby

and dicko did in the 50s was monster comics like that's why strange tales are amazing fantasy okay that's why they were called that and so atomo fits more into that style of comic but uh he's he's made up i mean that it's almost too on the nose of like, yeah, a Tomo, the atomic monster. Like that's, that's what you think you are. And I do like the thematic thing too, of like, he giant thinks he's a Tomo.

And then Hogarth puts the comic book over and he's like, no, no, no, you're Superman. There's like a little dark musical sting when he sees the Otomo thing. And so after their little comic book chat, Hogarth and the giant go for a little walk around

in the nighttime. And man, it's like the E.T. riding the bike scene. It's just so magical seeing the little boy get carried around there. And when you see like the sort of cityscape of the small town, you can't see Sputnik in the sky. Oh, yeah. It was like a nice little touch. You have to look very, very close. I didn you can't see sputnik in the sky oh yeah it's like a nice

little touch it looked very very close i didn't know that until they said it in the commentary like you can't you can't catch it i didn't see it anywhere they all said in the commentary you have to kind of forget that hogarth could just fall to his death at any moment yes yeah so uh don't worry about that yeah he just he has to hold on to those fingers pretty tightly it's uh it's not very safe he's he'd be now if they were making this now they'd say like no seat belts on this kid that's dangerous give him like a little like a chair to sit in or something on the shoulder uh but you can feel the physics of it of like the g-force he's feeling as he's lifted up yeah the air too yeah yeah the giant after some

really great uh just art there uh like the giant even walks towards rockwell there's a bunch of cows that don't give a shit about it at all i did like that part and uh yeah they they do set up the ending there too of saying like people just aren't ready for you yet as they they approach rockwell and i also uh speaking of comic books i kind of identify with the Galactus comics, which are about the Silver Surfer trying to lead Galactus to eat uninhabited planets.

That's what Hogarth is doing with the giant here, trying to find metal for him to eat somewhere that's safe. And they finally find a deserted car. He's about to eat it. Dean shows up out of nowhere. And another classic like cartoon comedy of giant posing in front of the burgers billboard.

And there are so few characters in this movie, but it does make sense that they show up where they need to show up. Like there's a reason why he and the giant both want this car. Yeah. Yeah. And even with a few bystanders in it it at least fits for like a small town yeah yeah uh yeah the and the how sad the giant is like holding out his hand like kind of grasping for it yeah because he's just so hungry and he wants to eat something and uh yeah when you see it's mcpoppin yards i think that's that's where i thought that like

oh dean inherited this like this is the family business yeah yeah i mean that is his last name i don't think he opened a scrap yard yeah what if his his older brother inherited it from his dad and then his older brother like died in the war and now he's just left with it like it could be that you get a feeling he would have left this town for like new york he wants to yeah he's a bohemian artist. Like he's, I kind of wish he never gets directly called a beat Nick in the movie, but if it's who calls him a beat.

Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, he's everything about him screams beat Nick. He's the weirdo in town that everybody, like no, no jazz cigarettes though. I got to think he's stubbed them out.

Like when he pops out of his house uh with the crowbar right before that he's like ah i gotta hide there flushes it down the toilet because he's like what if it's the cops smells funny in here though man who's hooking him up i would think it's hard for him to find the the grass he's growing his own of course he's got all this space yeah you're right uh the giant Hale Garth head to the junkyard. There's a great another comedy scene of biting the car. Then it's setting off the horn. He doesn't know what to do with it.

Yeah. So he just chucks it. Yeah. I like first he sits on it and it still doesn't silence it. So he just throws it to nowhere. Hopefully he doesn't fall on anybody wherever that car was flung to. That's when Dean is alerted to their presence and when you now in the past have that scene of dean and annie talking to each other it makes more sense

that dean would take pity on hogarth uh as this just strange kid in the middle of the night showing up in his junkyard yeah that scene is very meaningful uh and yes then we get uh the very funny scene of a child on caffeine uh it reminds me of the dexters where they drink dexter's laboratory where they drink coffee right and they're overstimulated and the parents are like you children don't need this adults needed to simply function to survive yeah and this scene the only scene animated by brad bird uh yeah he said he was very stupid to take on this scene because it required so much work because the actor is speaking so fast and there's just so much animation going on here yeah so so many poses just going between them all now i think he just animated hogarth not hogarth and dean like that's a whole

other level of of activity there but yeah i believe it was that obviously this stopped when he got into 3D film. But for Family Dog or The Simpsons he directed, when he directed something, he wanted to at least animate one scene per episode. I believe, say, in Krusty Got Busted, the heart attack that Krusty has, that is Brad Bird. And so he wanted to, for his first bird and so he wanted to for his first feature film he wanted to do that too which yes he bit off way more than he could chew having to animate this very complicated scene in addition to doing every single other thing on the movie but it looks really great yeah all the popping and Obviously, he dropped that when it got to The Incredibles because he doesn't have the skills to animate in 3D, and he's kind of too old to learn them at this point.

Different tool set for him. Yeah, yeah. But yes, it's all sequenced with Eli, the actor playing Hogarth. He does a really great job here, too. I'm going to have some coffee. What do you want? Some milk? What, milk? Or what? Milk?

Coffee's fine. Yeah, I'd drink it. I'm hip. I don't know. This is espresso, you know? It's like coffee-zilla. I said I'm hip. So she moved me up a grade because I wasn't fitting in, so now I'm even more non-fitting. I was getting good grades, you know, like always. So my mom says, you need stimulation. And I go, no, I'm stimulated enough right now.

That's for sure. So she goes, uh-uh, you don't have a challenge. You need a challenge. So now I'm challenged, all right? I'm challenged to hold on to my lunch money because of all the big mooses who want to pound me because I'm a shrimpy dork who thinks he's smarter than them. But I don't think I'm smarter. I just do the stupid homework. If everyone else just did the stupid homework, they could up and get pounded too is there any more coffee

look it's really none of my business kid but um who cares what these creeps think you know they don't decide who you are you do you are who you choose to be that's uh i guess they're listening to coltrane there too i mean if that, if that's not an original composition, I don't know what it's from. Yeah, I don't know from jazz. But I mean, he's got jazz to go with his jazz cigarettes there. That's true. They weren't passing one of those around. No, no, no.

Not for children. I mean, he'd be very different. He'd be in a different state. He's in a weed state, Dean. And Hogarth is in a caffeine state. Yeah, you're right. But that you are who you choose to be. It has so much meaning in this movie. Dean and Hogarth is in a caffeine state. Yeah, you're right. But that you are who you choose to be.

It has so much meaning in this movie, but I could also see it coming from the very Randian, self-made person. I decide who I am. But I can also see that being used for evil purposes where it's just like, oh no, you're poor because you don't work hard enough. You want to be poor, so fuck off. Things like that.

There are two sides to that coin in this movie. you're poor because you don't work hard enough. You want to be poor. So fuck off. Things like that. It does. It has like, there are two sides to that coin in this, in this movie. They're obviously presenting in a positive light, but that's such a broad statement that it can have many uses. I think. Yeah.

Yeah. Which I mean, that's also why like, um, Ayn Rand can be attracted to people who aren't pieces of shit as well as, as well as pieces of shit. But I, you know, it's so open. The statement of you are who you choose to be like that that feels like the kind of easy message you can put

in a kid's film yeah yeah but you're right yes it can be like you chose to be poor you could have worked harder which uh from an adult perspective of just like especially for brad bird it's like well brad bird can choose to be an artist but he can't choose how he gets to make movies because every at every turn it's a money man who chooses to let him make movies yeah like it's always an executive and like these stories of him even getting to the story of him getting to do this movie it's because alison abate and some other executives decided to let him do it which like that's an unfortunate truth of all movies pretty much and the only reason he got to do incredibles was because

his buddy john lassiter got enough power that he could hire him to direct a movie which was the right move to do because he'd make a good movie but yeah brad bird can choose to be an artist but he can't choose how his art gets to be made because it involves too many money men around it who like they're who they chose to be too. They chose to be an executive who gets to make calls on arts and say what art is good or not. Pretty sweet. Except for all the meetings. Yeah, the you are you choose to be like it's it's a nice message to have like, you know, if you're saying morally, you can choose what you want to be. Like,

I do like that self-determination, but it can be extended in a very Randian way, which given all the other works in his career, like it, it's can be a little suspect. Yeah. Yeah. If you follow that to its logical conclusion,

it can lead to some pretty bad things that, uh, that statement, but it, it does work here. It's like, it's one of those things that we tell children, like, like uh but that doesn't really pan out in the real world like you should share or things should be fair it's just like you're not preparing them for like

actual reality no that's why people who like are in their jobs and saying like why did i get promotion that's not fair it's like you're a child yeah it's it's depressing it should be that way but it's not it took us a long time to learn yes yeah and now we're just bitter from that knowledge i we hope to pass it on to you the listener i think another thing that makes it not feel randy into me at least in context here is that like dean does not feel like a reader of ayn rand like he feels like the opposite she'd she'd probably call him a useless layabout who's probably like on social security or whatever yeah and I'm sure everyone in the town thinks he's a weirdo he's like no I'm an artist yeah yeah so again that makes me still feel like I think Bird

agrees with Ayn Rand's view of an unencumbered artist but less so on parasites who take from you. But this also could just be the heavily workshop and declawed version of his Randian beliefs through a bunch of other people's visions. So I don't know. Can anyone truly know what's in another person's hearts? You know, if you cut it open, then you see atlas shrugged inside of his heart a little tiny copy uh but yes the they're hanging out together it's a very funny scene of him talking about how smart he is but he's not smart if only they do the homework which i like uh that line by hogarth it shows that he's modest like he's not full of himself like duh i'm smarter than all those other clods in the classroom like he's just like no i just do the homework like it's not full of himself like dove smarter than all those other clods in the classroom like he's

just like no i just do the homework like it's not that you just do the homework you are smarter than other kids yeah dean is distracted for a little bit as he has some espresso but then he hears the sound outside and dean sees the giant freaks out and we also get to see that the giant is already protective of hogarth like he thinks dean is going to hurt him when Dean's just trying to protect Hogarth from it. I love the acting on Dean as he's just so freaked out hearing all the details about the robot. He's the one who's jittery now with coffee. Yeah, yeah, that's so right. As Hogarth is done explaining it, like I love that Hogarth just gets to the end of his thing of like,

and you know, he needs a place with metal to hide the way dean just gently dumps his coffee out and walks away is great and we get the uh the comedy number 37 oh yeah it's later it's not just the clerk's thing for some reason people have found that like 37 is using a lot of comedy things just because it's like a funny number it's a funny number it's not if he just said 30 minutes that's too round like i'm pretty sure it's a prime number too i believe it is yes yeah so it can't break it down it's uh and they were doing it years before the spongebob meme that made it so popular spongebob 37 too yeah yeah it just well and also just like blank late uh oh yeah by jacques custeau it's also, you know, a nice thing about Dean.

He calls the giant it, and then Hogarth says it's he. And then he's like, Dean respects the giant's pronouns instantly. I forgot the giant was gendered, but I guess, yeah. Well, I mean, Hogarth, of course, as a 50s boy is going to say, it's obviously a boy robot. So, yes, Dean eventually just gets so tired after being like bothered all night by Hogarth. He Hogarth has his young exuberance overcome Dean's insistence that he is not going to take care of a giant robot. And they've been up all night, but at least dean gets to go back to bed hogarth i love the the just the tragedy of him coming back to his room and then

about to climb into bed but his mom's like what are you doing up this early oh she's like oh you're making your bed how good he's like yep sure i am i think the animators are calling from some real life experience there i think uh but yeah he's so exhausted and then i also love that as annie sets it up she's just like uh oh i've got great news well this guy moved in and he's here now just the reveal behind the newspaper of kip like hey sport like yeah such a creep all the patronizing uh names he's calling him yeah he's trying to just gently dig for information. Yeah, and then as at the worst possible time as Hogarth is now just trying to figure out

how he's going to keep this a secret from Kent, then he gets a call all about the robot. Hello, this is Hogarth. He is speaking. Who's calling, please? I think it's day. The night, kid. It's morning now. Look, I'm trying to come home.

There's this weird guy here watching me. It's morning now. Look, I'm trying to come home, okay? There's this weird guy here watching me. What's that supposed to mean? I got this big giant thing out here. I can't talk right now, okay? Bye. Who was that, sport? Friend of yours? Yeah, he's a new kid. What?

Hey, stop! Stop that! Stop it! Hey, mind! Stop that! Stop it! Hey, mind if I ask you a few questions there, buckaroo? Now, why would you tell your mom about a giant robot, Slugger? Try what you see at the power station. Hot tiger? You tell anyone else about this, buddy? How big is this thing, Ranger?

Been in the forest lately, Skye. Hey, where you going, champ? Slugger? Hey, cowboy! Where you going? Where you going? I'm going home! Why don't you take Mr. Mansley with you? Show him the sights.

Oh, Mom, the sights! Hey, I'd love that. Give us a chance to get acquainted. Swap some stories, huh, Chief? There are two kinds of metal in this yard. Scrap and art. If you gotta eat one of them, eat the scrap. What you currently have in your mouth is art!

You get the sense that Hogarth's mom never liked Kent, but they just need money so bad that he's a guy that can give them that money. Yeah, totally. He's got a steady government paycheck. I bet she hopes he stays there for at least a few months.

Yeah, and she's just like, well, I can get rid of both of these guys from my house. And then have a moment of peace in my life as a single mother probably under like one day off a week like she has to oh man annie has to spend all day serving jerks at the diner and then when she comes home it's like well you better make breakfast and dinner for your son or you're a failure as a mom and your tenants too oh and your tenant yes yeah it's like make your own damn food kent like but she's already serving him god all the that whole

sequence of him like either chief a slugger he champ a like that's so funny yeah brad bird is like these scenes are funny but every time there's a new cut it's a new background we have to paint so uh these things can be expensive i love that that. It's very, very funny. On the commentary, I never thought of that. I'm just like, these are just fun hypercuts, just a bunch of scenes. But no, these are just full setups and backgrounds and everything for a scene that's over in under a second. Yeah. Also, there's another Simpsons bit I noticed here that in the kitchen, there is a silhouette painting of hogarth on the wall like uh yeah i think i did spot that i i can't uh i mean it was age appropriate then in the 50s

with mother uh but yes kent is i also love the the acting on Hogarth as he is just turned all around, like talking on the phone, but also seeing Kent. You can see he gets wrapped up in the cord and he has to lift the cord over him to hang it back up. Like, yeah, that's great. And also when he's one of the scenes where he's being bothered, I love that he's eating Cosmo nuts cereal. The design on that cereal is great. It is like the space age cereal. And yes, the,

the giant has already become a better artist than Dean too. I think. Yeah. When he plants that metal tree back in the ground, he's like, Oh, it's not bad. It's,

it's clear that Dean is not a good artist. He's a, I like, he describes himself as like, am I an artist who sells junk or a junk man who makes art like yeah he's uh he's dealing with a lot of stuff i like at the end of the movie when they see his big statue she says it's the best work he's ever done because it's like the only realistic thing he's ever done he's uh he's too abstract this dean but the posing on him saying like that is arts. I saw you posted a gift for that the other day.

It's so funny. Yeah. Yeah. Just I mean, it's this kind of anger you don't normally see on chillaxed. That is true. Yeah. His composure that often in the movie. Yeah.

But for arts, he does. So when they arrive at the soda fountain here, you actually do see a choco lax uh thing right in the front i noticed it on my second watch of this reason viewing and also the not a lot of a lot of fun poop jokes coming up he's showing uh ken how to make a landslide so uh kind of code for pooping we get it yeah that to give him his uh laxative infused chocolate which uh it must be a test market for it in rockwell i think uh and this scene really captures the two sides of kent he's a poop joke monkey and a paranoid government agent like terrifyingly paranoid this is the first scene where he is uh like a real threat where he like just like uh he's a force he's a villain in this scene it's like a hint of what you'll see later

but it's like oh no he's scary he's a scary guy oh man when villain in this scene. It's like a hint of what you'll see later, but it's like, oh, no, he's scary. He's a scary guy. Oh, man, when he talks, you can see the white of the ice cream in his mouth. But then when it's time to get scary, the joke ice cream is just gone from his mouth. And yeah, the acting, the voice work here by Christopher McDonald is great. But also all the posing on it, it just rules, too. I don't feel safe, Hogarth. Do you? What are you talking about?

What am I talking about? What am I talking about? I'm talking about your gold-armed security, Hogarth. While you're snoozing in your wooded jammies back in Washington, we're wide awake and worried. Why? Because everyone wants what we have, Hogarth. Everyone.

You think this metal man is fun, but who built it? The Russians? The Chinese? Martians? Canadians? I don't care! All I know is we didn't build it, and that's reason enough to assume the worst and blow it to cain of gum! Now, you are going to tell me about this thing, you are going to lead me to it, and we are going to destroy it before it destroys us! Just hold that thought and stay right there! Great stomach noise, by the way. Yeah, I'm disgusted in here.

But yeah, he does this entire super intense speech at him about how pure xenophobia, like everyone wants what we have. And just is like, the important thing is we didn't make it so we have to blow it up and uh as he's saying this he's like basically cornering hogarth in the corner of this drugstore yeah and also just the great shot of like hogarth the the swinging door after like ken says stay right there but hogarth is already gone like that's that's great too yeah the and also i'm saying like there's a dark side to progress which he actually means like enemies can have what we have too i mean he definitely also is like a fort he wants american dominance i think as well though uh they show that even that is just all all part of his game to want respect because later on he will say screw the country yeah well when it comes to uh the threat of death

he's like i'll sell out anyone even when i'm supposed to believe it yeah that's true yeah he i also like his uh i think his angry speech loosened his bowels that's why he got too animated not to get too uh too in the bathroom here but that's where the film takes us yes several times uh so hogarth heads back over to the junkyard and he sees that uh dean has him doing arts and crafts yeah it's uh it's funny how he just rejects it and gets uh the giant to basically invent a disneyland a fun carnival ride yeah uh that is very dangerous again they'd be like oh where's the seatbelts? But it's 57. There's no seatbelts. Ralph Nader didn't impose that on the world.

That cruel man. See, people, Ralph needs to know that you are who you choose to be. And if you choose to be a person who doesn't wear seatbelts, it shouldn't be Ralph Nader who tells you you can't. I choose to be decapitated whenever I want by my windshield. That's freedom. But there's a cute little scene afterwards of Dean and Hogarth interacting and Hogarth showing how much more of Dean's character he's taken on.

Say, can you guys cool yourselves a little? I feel like we're pressing our luck here. Hey, baby, we are cool. Welcome to downtown Coolsville. Population? Us. Well, can you move Coolsville to someplace less conspicuous? How about the lake?

Okay. Oh, come with us. It'll be fun. Yeah, I just love his acting on downtown coolsville like that's that's uh it's kid it's fun kid i think that was also in the in the commercials and trailers and stuff oh yes yeah yeah i uh and i think you know dean has a job though hogarth let him let him do his job but then again if he inherited it from him i guess he doesn't uh if it's an inherited junkyard then he doesn't uh if it's an inherited

junkyard then he doesn't have a boss he can just quit in the middle of the day so then we go to kent's searching sequence searching and pooping yes yeah uh which uh you can spot the classic a113 license plate in there yeah that's right but it's got a bite out of it. So it's like one, one, three. But at least according to Wikipedia, I believe Family Dog, they cite Family Dog is the first time a one, one, three was put in something as an Easter egg. We put it in every podcast. Try to find it. It's it's we say it backwards sometimes. So you got to play every podcast backwards.

I do feel bad for Kent, at least in the one scene where he's emerging from the bushes and just like fanning himself with his hat. I i'm so sick of shitting uh he's just destroyed like everything makes him more and more sad you can just feel sweaty and just uh yeah you can smell him too like he's he's like he must have this constant stink about him but then he finds a hogarth's camera which uh hogarth didn't take with him because he was scared yeah it left it there you as a viewer have forgotten about that camera you just figure as the thing dropped that's all that he finds the camera and will then develop it like that's exciting and also much like hogarth correcting him causing him to double back. Hogarth making him shit is why he was in those bushes to see the camera. So in a way,

Hogarth led him closer to the giant by trying to push him away. It's, it's just fate folks. There's no getting around it. Then we go to the old swimming hole. Uh, it should be, it's like,

it's old. It's OL. Lots of, uh, I'm cold in the water acting very very good and well observed and very well acted by the uh by eli yeah yeah you chicken yeah it's uh and dean is a very good he's already getting into his parental figure role by pretending to watch a kid jump while like uh sitting and just reading a paper with With his coffee canteen too, because he can't be far away from coffee then.

He's a man after my own heart. Though this is, yeah, this is 62 years ago from now that he's that into coffee. That also makes him an outsider. Like you just drink bad diner coffee. You definitely don't know what espresso is. It's like subfolders. It's been sitting on the burner all day no one's washed that pot in years that's where the flavor comes from right uh and yes the the giant is

dared to dive into the water it seems like he's not coming but instead he takes a giant cannonball which causes a tidal wave and uh you know you talk about things he kills he kills all those fish they're dead well were they ever really alive i guess so uh i will say i really love how uh we see that one shot of just sort of like the water like rushing across the screen and then like dean is still like grabbing onto the chair yeah and i love how like when the water goes down he's just like the chair like rocks back into place and he's still like in the same position he was before like he just was clinging onto the chair for dear life as he was washed away uh and as he pulls up the paper for defense as he sees the tidal wave coming that's all he can do and and also just great

acting on the guy saying like you know you're sitting in the middle of the road yeah okay he just drives around him because that's how folks are in the, in the middle of nowhere. They just live and let live. I do like hearing people interrupt each other in animation because it rarely happens. Yeah. It's usually still planned out in animation, including interruptions, but that's why it rarely happens.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a, I mean, that's the kind of like, uh, again, good voice direction from bird there,

I think. And, uh, yeah. Then Dean says, okay, fun's over. Let's stop having fun,

which is, is when fun stops in the movie. Like, and they go back to Kent, like all the silly fun times that him in the, that the giant have kind of don't happen anymore. This is all the, like the most Bonnie has with the giant as an actual, like human, like thing. This is basically four days he spends with the giant. You know what? It might not even be that.

It might be just three days he spends with the giant. I guess in the time cuts for Kent, maybe that is like four days of Kent bothering him. Four days of pooping. Yeah. But he does discover he's developing the photos in the bathroom, and we have the tail end of the poop jokes where Hogarth's mom is like, do you want another roll of toilet paper? He like nope i'm fine now uh it's very smart of him to like set up the dark room in the bathroom so he doesn't have to like leave the dark room at any time he

can he can probably just keep developing those while on the toilet and so another flaw in this movie i think is that um it cribs from stuff I've seen before. And this is one of the scenes where it would have more of an effect on me. And I usually am really emotional about animals dying and animals getting hurt. But just like, yeah, I've seen Bambi. It's fine. It's just Bambi. To have it be a deer that dies from a hunter and then they're sad, it's more like, you know, this scene could have worked almost the same if they just watched Bambi together at a drive-in theater.

Yeah, yeah. I guess you could have seen that. But if you're going to, yeah, I feel like they knew. They knew they were referencing Bambi. They could not know. But it just feels like, well, I've seen this moment before. It affected me then. And now I'm just thinking of that and how you're being very manipulative with this scene. Frank and Ollie worked on Bambi. They talk about how they're remembered as guys who animated the death of Bambi's mom and how that destroyed a generation

of kids. Like they, they say that's the was for a long time. Frank and Ollie, they'd meet a person and they'd say like if they found out their job, they'd be like, oh, Bambi's mom destroyed me. So, yeah, of course, Brad Bird knows what this is reminding people of. Another part of this has the whole like anti-gun thing, which I personally am anti-gun, but I don't really buy Hogarth this at. Like put something else in the movie that hogarth maybe is like an early vegetarian or something like that something about like how he doesn't like violence like he's a pacifist kid but just like the anti-gun stuff it just doesn't feel like it feels like very uh tacked on and important for story reasons but not really tracking with his character well especially for the 50s americana setting for him to be outside the norm of thinking hunting rifles are fine. Like there

should be some explanation for that. I've just like, I read a book and I know that guns are bad or, or not everybody should have guns or guns are at least dangerous. Like there's, there's no real setup to that. Now I will say there's a big chunk of the documentary on the Blu-ray that covers something they don't really cover in the commentary, which is this was big chunk of the documentary on the blu-ray that covers something they don't really cover in the commentary which is this was like one of the biggest problems they had in the whole movie was figuring out this sequence because jeffrey lynch talks a ton about this in the boarding sequence they originally had it that the giant accidentally puts his hand down and kills the deer without knowing and they wanted originally giant to kill it without intention but knowing he killed it and so then if you lift out the

the hunter stuff and it's just he kills it then the reaction afterwards of killing the deer that all is there and his reaction to that but i basically i think they felt that there was no coming back from that with the giant they didn't want to get even accidental blood on the giant's hands i i kind of really like the idea but i'm also thinking how you could lose an audience with that idea and i also i don't want to see the character do but i can understand why it would be more effective if he kills an animal and then realize like oh i can i can kill and killing is wrong yeah i mean well from from the standpoint of making this a child yeah yeah things like that if you're writing the giant that way there are moments for kids like you know kids not kids don't

accidentally kill animals all the time but i do think there's a moment for children who are just like, they find out they actually can hurt someone without meaning to. And they understand what pain is and that they have the capacity to do that. That would be important for him to learn. just they as as it was playing out in their storyboards and animatics they're like it's they can't put the blame of the death of this innocent beautiful creature like a deer onto the giants so they instead just they take the scene from bambi and just have hunters who never appear in the movie again kill it yeah yeah the the only way it works to me is because you do get the tease of him seeing the gun and his eyes going red you at least get that but yes otherwise it's kind of cheap uh to just do a bambi's mom moment but it does lead to a pretty sweet scene of explaining death to a robot. I know you feel bad about

the deer, but it's not your fault. Things die. It's part of life. It's bad to kill, but it's not bad to die. You die? Well,

yes, someday. I die? Well, yes, someday. I don't know. You're made of metal, but you have feelings, and you think about things, and that means you have a soul. And souls don't die. Soul? don't die. Mom says it's something inside of all good things and that it goes on forever and ever. You can also tell that Hogarth

is trying to think of these things for the first time, really. He's like, well, what am I telling this thing? Well, my mom says this. So he's deferring to other authority figures. You know, maybe this is really more fanfic, this statement I'm about to make. But what if he's recalling to how his mom explained how his dad died?

Yeah. This is how when she said a soul never dies, the reason she was explaining that is because she has to tell him his father is gone and not coming back. I could see that. He's just recalling like what he heard, what he was told to be comforted. Yeah. But i like the line like it's bad to kill but it's not bad to die like that's that's a good little line and i i think you know this is one of those moments they've been working towards for the whole movie of just a child explaining death

to a robot that's just that's an easy just pitch of like that sounds magical and yeah they wanted to pull on your heartstrings i mean maybe that's also why they brought in the bambi element that they're like well bambi pulled on people's heartstrings so that's the same direction we're going it was like the notable like uh all the boomers were called crying over bambi when it was like re-released a thousand times in theaters and uh not only can his soul not die but it's seemingly the giant can't die either he's fine if you can survive a front nuke to the face then you are unkillable i think uh which also is true about superman so another thing they have in common uh but yes so then we get to the biggest new scene in the signature edition the giant stream sequence if they had kept

it in the original film it does give real context to the giant's background i think yeah i i like it and i don't like it i like it because it's like oh kind of cool that we see a little tiny tiny uh you know glimpse of like what this thing is or where it came from or what it was part of but also i do like the mystery of you'll never know yeah because hogarth doesn't know yeah well and also where he comes from doesn't really matter it's who he becomes anyway so yeah yeah backstory and origins this film doesn't care as much about it but i guess they did want to tease it a little bit more with this sequence and i mean all you know is that like he is one of many of these things and the planet exploded in whatever

conflict this was yeah well they invade other planets too yeah they can't i i like that again it does make him very saiyan like two of this thing that just goes to places where the technology can't possibly match him and just kills everything. And the dream is sort of broadcast to Dean's TV. Yeah, from his little antenna head. I love that. His Bender-style antenna. He's the older brother of Bender.

He really is, yeah. They both emerged in 99. They both, though, he actually has a jaw, unlike Bender, who just has waveforms for his mouth. And they did do an iron giant parody in futurama that was great yeah he crushes uh hansen in that one that one they bothered to pay for a pop song that's true uh yeah the the giant's backstory is very mysterious but i i like that we get a little a little more tease it works better as a second time you see the movie kind of thing i'm glad i i'm glad i didn't see it the first time in the movie and it's just like extra

context i can get 20 years later now and also yeah they license real jack par audio too i was wondering if that was like an actual tonight show okay like he's shut like the inventor of the polaroid camera is showing it off sort of also set this this uh in time period yeah yeah and why and also i looked it up like jack parr took over in 57 so he is the new host of the tonight show after steve allen yes yeah yeah it's it's par from 57 to 62 then old johnny takes. Here's Johnny, he would say. Another thing I do like about the dream sequence is that you get to see some previous shots from the giant's vision. That is a nice touch. Yeah. And then you can't really tell this is new footage. Yeah. Yeah. It's very well done. I like that he sees that Hogarth, you get to see how he saw Hogarth turned off the power and saved him and his vision of the, the Terminator vision on it too.

I really liked that. Hogarth comes home and he's instantly confronted by Kent. They mentioned on the commentary, they were worried about how scary do they make Kent? How creepy does he seem? I guess he had originally like tied Hogarth up. They didn't want him to look like a serial killer, like a,

you know, potential like a person who was not nice to children. Let's say. Yes. Yeah. But I do like that. killer like you know potential like a person who is not nice to children let's say yes yeah but i do like that he's using all the interrogation techniques he was trained with like turns off all the lights shines a bright light in his face and this is you know hogarth's own home but it doesn't look anything like it like it's so alien to him i like how he just emerges from blackness with hogarth cast in the foreground in this harsh light like kent comes out from the blackness it's really nice like almost supernatural and all his

threats are you know terrifying he knows it but you can see him making it up as he goes but hogarth just believes that because he still he doesn't like kent but he still trusts the government in a way so when kent says uh and your mom you know we could make things hard for her like you you know where he's you know he's just making it up but uh hogarth does believe him and he's he's so defeated by it too then yeah comes the creepiest moment in the film like where it's a great tracking shot is that is like the table moves with kent walking behind yeah yeah it's hard to tell if it's like a 3d element or not it's just so well done yeah and and also then knocking out hogarth like

chloroforming him this was during the chloroform era of the simpsons 2 what won't that rag do i mean knock out a kid knock out marge uh even handling the animation of hogarth experiencing unconsciousness and then coming back awake to yeah like sort of like floating from the table to into his bed in a very like abstract way it's neat yeah yeah that's uh it's it's some of the most artistic like flourishes abstractly that they do in the film hogarth wakes up kent doesn't realize he's awake yet so hogarth is getting information that kent doesn't share with him just how the army is coming in the morning and they've got a ticking clock now. And I also like to that this doesn't the film doesn't take it easy when it could like other kid films would have done something else.

But like they show that Kent is not a complete moron that he's like, you have run away from me so many times. So I'm going to open your door and open my door and i'm going to stare at you all night and you're not going anywhere like in in other kids film they would have just been like i'm gonna lock this door and there's no escape i'm gonna leave you alone now that makes it even more impressive yeah that hogarth gets away he has to go from like goofball to competent villain but it's believable that he's much more competent now because he's got his eyes on the prize, what he's been waiting for his entire life.

It's some respect. He's finally going to get that respect. And we get to see the ticking clock even, and that's where the photograph of a pilot is right by the clock. I would assume that's Hogarth's dad. They basically confirm it on the commentary. Yeah, Brad Bird was like, we thought, would anyone ever see this?

And everybody saw it. And yes, Hogarth puts on the pilot helmet, pretends to fall asleep, and then Kent finally relaxes and he passes out too. And then it's so great that like, Kent has been surprising Hogarth over and over again by popping into frame, like, Hey champ. But this time Hogarth gets to shock him. It's really great. He walks by seemingly himself in bed and we find out just the helmet was propped up.

That, and when you see the reveal of the helmet, it's such a great thing of like, Oh, Hogarth put on that helmet planning to use that as his fake head later i really like that so then uh we find out that the army is in our front yard uh mr mansley is as annie says it and so they come the army is driving to dean's place you get to see that the plan is already beginning as dean just is fully comfortable he's like okay yeah and it's uh it does make sense it's like well yeah the metal man you saw is this thing i'm working on this guy metal man uh and also that he's so happy like he likes lying to the government i like that too he's like i'm tricking these stupid soldiers

there's only like two scenes where kent and dean interact uh even though they're so great frictiony characters you think they'd you know they'd be better to seen together but it's funny the first one dean is lying to kent about what the giant is and then the next time it'll be kent lying to dean that he's going to tell them that the giant has hogarth so it's a very distrustful relationship between them. As Dean is going to show them the monster or his giant, he slowly is pulling up the keys and just giving this long speech. Like he's enjoying himself. Yeah, he's just like, well, I thought up a story to make up about this. I'll tell you the entire thing about this rich industrialist who wanted this thing for a lobby of a new building.

And he's got a part with it. You just made it. That also feels very randy into the the rich industrialist thing uh but yes they then fool the military which in a lesser film this would just be the end of it like if this were as a tv special it'd be like we fooled the military yeah this is like a fun uh i mean i've seen this movie a bunch so i know it's not the end but it's like what if the movie ended here yeah and that was it this is this could be an ending but it's like no uh let's throw a wrench in the works here a lesser film or an episode of alf would have just ended with this

like this this is like an end of an episode of alf here it would be alf pretending to be a statue yes or like a giant stuffed animal or whatever but yeah, you see Kent is not like they're tricking me. He's like, I fucked up so bad. I'm such an idiot. You could see just the pain wash across his face. Like it worked on him. This trick worked on him completely. It's so great.

And the way he gets yelled at too, just like you just blew millions of Uncle Sam's dollars at your butt. Great line. But also that is a very like the taxpayers dollars were spent kind of stance towards military action. I would pay for more giant

investigations if there was choice between that and more. Yeah, if it was that or, you know, invading Afghanistan and lying for decades like I'd pick. I'd pick investigating Bigfoot. Find me that metal man there's got to be one out there then we do get the really meet cute scene between annie and dean

where she's appreciating his art like yeah and you wouldn't think of this like woman so focused on her like uh her diner job to even know about art, but she surprises him. This dumb broad, she wouldn't know it. She's too busy slinging hash. I like that even he's surprised, which I hope he's examining his biases there. Oh, yeah, I just expected you didn't know this. But also, she doesn't love all his art, too. I like that. It's discerning, yeah.

And that, I mean, could she be based on brad's wife or uh other artists wives who work on the show i wonder uh also you know i caught the shot behind annie's hair when she's looking at the giant like one where she's like hmm like she's not fully fooled well yeah she said about the giant she's like well it looks like he just pasted a bunch of stuff on something yeah yeah uh and i also caught she has kind of like a spiral in her hair bun which i wonder if that's a vertigo reference yeah yeah i know brad bird is a big hitchcock fan so i i wouldn't be surprised so the film seemingly is over and uh foolish hogarth is just deciding to act out a tomo bullshit yeah famous gun hater hogarth is like hey check out my gun i'm gonna shoot you with my gun yeah i mean he's

got a cool ray gun he needs to show that off it is neat uh but yes as as play gets serious very quickly here get back i said get back i mean it it was an accident he's our friend he's a piece of hardware hogarth why do you think the army was here he's a weapon a big gun that that walks I'm not done. Yeah? What's that, huh? You almost did that to Hogarth! No. Come back!

Hogarth! Hey, stop! Giant, come back! It was defensive. He reacted to the gun. I don't know if we need that line of dialogue in there, but maybe Dean needs to think it out himself. Yeah, yeah.

People repeat things out loud to themselves sometimes. Henry's right. People do repeat things out loud to themselves sometimes. Henry's right. People do repeat things to themselves. I think they want the deer scene to be the saddest scene in the movie, but I feel saddest for how heartbroken the giant is that he's like, no, I would never do that. Yeah, we're talking about how when you're a kid and you realize you can cause pain and it could be scary sometimes. You hurt someone and you run away because you're like, oh, no, what have I done?

I feel so bad. That's exactly what is happening here. Yeah, yeah. Also, I like he rejects being a Tomo and he wants to be Superman. And his little S on his chest is very cute, too. And after Dean pulls up and grabs Hogarth to find the giant, we see he's abandoned the S. He tore it off so he's like no I am a Tomo and it was just from seeing the fake laser gun that made him just

instinctively reactivate though he's also playing Superman very well because he does have laser eyes Superman does it's true heat vision to be specific and yeah Dean for a second there I was like Dean you just let Hogarth run off but then he does the responsible thing he gets on his motorcycle and gets hogarth this is when it starts snowing in the movie i think i might have yeah yeah they mentioned that in the commentary too they're just like you don't fully notice it the first time but like color gradually fades away as they get away from the happier moments and they enter this uh dramatic sequence here then when i looked at the clock of how much time was left in this movie he's like oh this movie goes on super speed i forgot so much drama

in this last like uh giant escape set piece here yeah he because they need to get him to the city they need the town to see him they need the army to arrive they need to attack him they need for him to learn how to fly they need for him to save uh to think hogarth is dead they need hogarth to confront him like that has to happen in like kind of 10 minutes of the movie which i also get from a budget standpoint it's like that action's way more expensive than talking so yeah that's true and that's also why the trailers uh reveal all this stuff because it's the only real action in the film it's the most action outside of that cannonball scene yes which was in trailers and commercials and stuff which yeah i mean it's a funny scene that that tells

you this uh this goofy monster knows how to have fun i want to pay to see this movie the two innocent kids i i love uh i like their designs It's a real save the cat moment Two of them being held up by the binoculars And being caught by him And one of them is Brad Bird's kid And I swear to God that When the giant hears them So they're looking at the giant

They fall off the building Like in their excitement to look at the giant And the giant hears them scream for help And he turns his head like dramatically I think it's like right out of one of those fleischer superman cartoons yes yeah the way he turns his head so like with so much flair totally totally i 100 well and also that thank you for mentioning that because one of the superman music cues when they mention superman is taken directly from a fleischer superman cartoon too like it's his theme song from that

okay which is fortunately public domain, I believe. So they can use it. Oh, yeah. All those cartoons are. We should just do that one. I'm seeing a Superman Fleischer one in our future. Let's do the non-racist one. Well, yes.

I'm going to do the one that Miyazaki just ripped off for his robots. Oh, good, good, good. That one's really good. But, yeah, you're so right. That is totally a Superman-like turn. Like, like i'm gonna save these kids because he is superman that's what this film is shouting at you all is this film is being made the same time as they were failing to make a nick cage superman oh like this was the real only superman film of the 90s like released in theater basically yeah it's about a guy with an s it saves people what do you want

and vin diesel is a better superman than nick cage i'll say that's a terrifying statement but it's correct like i don't want either of them to be superman you know the rumor soon is this gonna be michael b jordan is superman i'll do it fine but directed by jj abrams put him in movie jail yeah i hate he could be after this we're recording this before we've seen the rise of skywalker so you know what he could be a movie jail by the time you're hearing this but anyway the giant saves the kids uh though i would think catching them in his hands would break their legs anyway it's not much softer than they find i think he like fought like moves the hand down with them and like to sort of like match the acceleration.

Okay. I don't know. I believe that they figure it out. But it's funny that the people like immediately catch on. They're not like running away and shooting themselves. They're like, oh, this thing saves us. This thing we're seeing for the first time. This thing that has never existed ever.

That is just should be blowing our minds. We just saw him save children. So he's definitely good. Yeah. All know this and to assume it has like sentience and not just like being controlled by something or has a man inside of it or something they put together a lot very quickly yeah well again there's no time but they have to set up that the town loves him so they will celebrate him in the epilogue you know and

kent once again gets very lucky that they're just about out of sight and then he just looks backwards for a second he's like there's a giant oh my god well like first uh Hogarth and Dean ride by on the motorcycle he's like oh great these guys fuck these guys and then he looks out the other side the giants there so yeah that's great yeah actually again you're right Hogarth causes him to see the giant again he leads him to the giant one more time and also his car gets smashed again so i love him like again no seatbelt just smashing into the windshield like he's breaking he broke it with a skull as the windshield that's great getting sandwiched between the two trucks his car that's the two of three cars he

totals in this movie so yes then he finally though gets the general to listen to him and turn around and it's all shit is going down here uh so hogarth dean annie they all see the giant uh there's a cute moment of annie looking at dean of like oh you knew about this huh didn't you and uh and also the giant says i am not a gun so there fully says that uh and then speaking of things moving fast they instantly yeah he gets shot in the back the instant after everybody's like we all know who the giant is now bloom oh it's over he's getting shot it's like the second fake out ending it's like finally they caught up with the giant he's he's fine he's everyone's okay with the giant now oh now it's another twist in the story uh and the giant is like forced into a monster movie basically while he's holding

hogarth like he's he just had hogarth in his hands to prove that everything's fine and i like how he even waves his mom like hi mom that's cute but uh then the army attacks the giant is on a run and this is when, uh, Dean makes a very stupid choice of trusting Kent. Yeah. Kent, he only reacts defensively. If you don't shoot, he's harmless. You gotta tell the general. This is all your fault, beatnik. If you hadn't, would you shut up and listen?

You gotta make them stop. The giant's got the kid with him. I'll take care of it. Listen, you've got to make them stop. The giant's got the kid with him. I'll take care of it. He says the monster's killed the kid. Sir, we must stop it at all costs. Go to Code Red. Repeat, Code Red.

Mr. President, we have a situation, sir. You need to see the back eyes and hours head there. I like that. They could not get enough money for the clearance. But again, let's get busy. Again, though, I'm not the biggest fan of the army needing to be lied to, to the attack, the giant. And not immediately being like, well, let's use our power for evil. Yeah, exactly.

Like, well, we need to be told to kill the kid because otherwise we definitely wouldn't shoot at this giant we wouldn't if there's one thing he army wouldn't do it's in danger innocent lives in the pursuit of their goals never it's never been happening on record uh and it's also fun though as the the planes are getting off there the the runway they also cut to annie getting in her truck. Like it's a good cross cut there. She's like springing into action. Action mom. You're on the same page. And yeah, they,

they chase the giant to the edge of a cliff and he falls off and then he realized he can fly much like in the rise of Skywalker. They fly now. Yep. Or in the trailer for this movie yeah yeah as as ruined by the trailer but i i like to to further set up the superman ending like so quickly hogarth is like oh since you can fly get in a superman pose right now there you go hey that's a superman flies hey what's those things blue and then i mean these are great moments but

yeah it all just feels on fast yeah like the pacing of the movie, like goes triple speed in this last act. Yeah. So many things happen. My notes like expand by so much just in this last like 10 minutes of the movie. I like how Hogarth also says like, oh, that was close. And then a missile hits them and they falter. The flight animation of the giant is really fun. Yeah.

Yeah. You can, which, you know, with a 3D metal object flying around, I would think that's probably hard at first to express motion in, but they handle it really well here with this, like, dog fight. And also the giant is fighting his natural inclination to just blow up all these planes, too, as they're shooting at him. And so he endangers Hogarth this is really kent's like ultimate villain mo this is the way he fully becomes a villain he's like i will definitely get

hogarth killed to kill the giants like i don't i do not care so it's at this point where the giant thinks he the hogarth is dead yeah he falls to earth hogarth is knocked? Yeah, he falls to earth. Hogarth is knocked away. And when he touches Hogarth, he thinks he is as dead as the deer was. So it's an echo of the deer scene. Yeah. And some of Vin Diesel's best voice acting in this is his like scream of anger.

Yeah. Oh, like going full like Transformer beast mode of like all the, like the two hands changing into guns, his head going down into his body the chest plate revealing a cannon in the center and then these like scorpion things coming up from his back oh so cool yeah i mean this is an instrument of war i think i say this on the commentary it's like it's sad he becomes this instrument of war but man what cool stuff he's got it looks neat

sell me that figure i one of my favorite things is a real war of the worlds thing where it's like this this spinny little thing that comes out of his wrist these two little fingers like touch it over and over and it zaps it that like shoots out lasers yeah it's so cool it's hard to describe but it's so cool when it emerges it's very like it's almost like a horror movie you're like where what is this thing where did it come from all the designs are so great it's so alien yeah yeah the one really uh spooky touch is like when it fires like this energy at a tank and it just disappears. Like, where did it go?

Yeah. I like to the Kent. Kent has been demanding a fight to the death with a giant the whole movie. And now that the giant wants to fight back because Kent is a coward, he's like, go away, go away right now. Like I he like a classic uh american warmonger he's like i wanted to fight peaceful people not not somebody with an equal a more outclassed me with weapons i wanted to conquer damn it uh dean finds hogarth uh and

they realize like he's just unconscious and he's fine which is like what where did you get your doctorate dean i don't know if you can assume that. His spine is a little bruised. Yeah, this is on the commentary where they talk about like, again, how violent do they want the giant to be? Other than that one tank. That was unmanned. Yes. They make it clear that no person dies from it, which, you know, the giant's defending himself.

I wouldn't have been bothered it's like these army guys shot at him first i think he's in the right but i told this is even pre-911 they make this movie but i get the like well the hero of your movie can't kill a soldier yes yeah it doesn't that seems wrong you know so but it it would have and as they put it on the commentary they're like these guys are just doing their jobs you know so but it it would have and as they put it on the commentary they're like these guys are just doing their jobs you know nobody wants to see these guys dies like yeah they were just following orders i've heard that before at mcdonald's when they shorted me on fries it's a long story uh so yes nothing he's taking out of the giant now kent then suggests going nuclear yes uh and we're

willing to see how far like his paranoia and fear will take him when even the general's like you scare me i love his like it's just it's not a joke line it's a sober reaction like you scare me mansley like because he's even a guy whose job is war like the three-star general even he's like you never use nukes like you don't do that you got again you have the one guy in the army in this movie that is a true believer that just will eat all the propaganda and internalize it like and the general's like no no you're an idiot so like don't believe in these things he's just like we got nukes let's use them that's basically the feeling i yeah the the shot of him just calling for it. And then also, this is why they set up the atomic holocaust stuff at the start of the movie, I think, because for kids watching it in 1999, they couldn't, maybe they were like, maybe they don't know about the threat of nuclear death. This is a peaceful time here in the 90s. So by setting it up with the duck and cover video at the start, then you can understand the threat they're under from nukes there. Also, the danger of Kent having eaten all this propaganda is he, again, sincerely believes like, oh, we'll just duck and cover.

It'll be safe. It's just like, no, of course not. Like, that was the lie fed to you. You're operating on all these lies. It's so so so stupid but uh but yes then comes like another amazing like visual of the film which is hogarth wakes up tells him to take him to the giant and this the the giant is about to kill everything and hogarth with only love in his heart is facing down this giant gun and convinces the giant to step back from the edge

and not kill everybody that's very good acting because you can tell he's not sure if he could do it he's also afraid to at the same time but though his speech of like you are you choose to be choose like how different is that from andrew ryan's speech That's true. But look, it's a sweet, it's still a sweet moment. Like that it is about, you know, learning to listen to other people instead of just shooting at them, which I, that's a message I can agree with. And also it fit with the libertarian views on non-engagement, like military de-escalation. I would say, I would say that, uh, that fits too. Yeah, I think so.

And yes, then the general finally realizes the kid isn't dead and that he's been lied to. There's another great tense scene of like Dean on one side and Kent on the other telling the general what to do. There's a lot of things being communicated in that scene. It's very complicated, but it works very well. Yeah. Now again, I really believe that a 1957 three-star general would have the thought of bombing and we'll figure it out later i'll listen to this beat nick yeah he knows the score this shaggy haired goateed man in black he must know what's going on he just well it's also

like he should be thinking this guy just lied to me about this robot why should i trust him just to execute him on sites yeah he's a traitor to the country yeah i mean also like you would figure a vindictive army man after this would be like you're going to military prison forever dean like i guess we didn't have guantanamo bay then i suppose we had a deeper hole in the ground the general decides he's not going to launch the nuke kent grabs the phone and calls in the nuclear strike anyway and i do love the way the general explains to him like uh where where's the giant mansley i guess the original strategy was we'll lure him out of town and then nuke him but uh kent's got a little too trigger happy yep yeah and then he's not only does

he suggest ducking covering but then he says the screw the country i want to live and the giant stops his car is like no you're dying too yep yeah and he's got his uh third car wrecked since they all survive i have to expect that kent was hung for treason oh yeah he was executed summarily like he put his big weird skull on the ground i I hear they hang you for treason, don't they? A great end to this film about the atomic age to just have to spend a little time with a town full of people staring at this cloud of a missile going up in the sky that's about to crash back down. Death is inevitable for them. It's just the way the family hugs each other. Just like Dean saying, it wouldn't matter. We can't get away.

It's over. Yeah, it's inevitable. But the giant knows what he must do. And so he has to say goodbye because his planet needs him. Oh, God. Oh, God. You stay. I go.

No. No following. I love you Okay I gotta say The end of the movie Gets me choked up The giant flying off Into space

This They push it too far And I've always thought this Having Hogarth say I love you I don't I don't like it at all I think it's too much He would I mean He had four good days With love you i don't i don't like it at all i think it's too much he would i

mean he had four good days with the giant i don't think he has the emotional intelligence to be like i love this thing just like i think maybe like thank you or just like a hug or something yeah but like that's that's it's too it's too much for this scene and i know they're trying to make it effective but it just it's it strikes me as artificial. They're just trying to push it too much. I'm sorry for filibustering on this. I agree. I agree to an extent. I also wrote down a little too on the nose for Hogarth to just say, I love you.

Yeah. And I get some E.T. vibes with the finger. I mean, to be fair, it's the one thing Hogarth can interact with on the giant that is just his size, but also just pointing to the child's heart before you leave it's just like ET and this is also a strange visitor from another planet you're talking about here yeah I think him bringing back the statement of like you know I go no following like that is the heartfelt moment I mean it's gilding the lily to say, I love you.

I would have left it at that. Not even like, thank you. Or any kind of, kind of statement, just Hogarth realizing like he, he's going to do this on his own. He,

this is his decision. Or him saying goodbye. Yeah. Like if, if Hogarth has to say something, I love you is just to, and also like people, I don't know.

It doesn't feel like a very 1950s kind of statement either. No, I know he's like a nuke was just launched but uh it just feels off to me like they're they they really want to wring the tears out of your brain with this one but everything up to that i love you like you get there's so much emotionality in it as hogarth fully understands what the giant is going to do when he looks up in the sky and makes his choice like that and telling him he can't follow like also that's just a great reversal of roles yeah shows the giant has matured so much and no one is there to explain what his decision is and it just said they make it very obvious teens like he's not gonna go up in the sky oh no yes yeah yeah a stupider movie or a less trusting movie would have characters like sort

of fill in the blanks there and so the giant flies into the sky to meet his end sacrificing himself like his favorite character yeah that part does got still gets me uh even though he closes his eyes as he you know accepts death yeah yeah the acceptance of it all is what is great and uh yeah that part does get me it's a very powerful moment and the nuke looks really good like as well executed this also a 3d element it looks like yeah and the way it like pulls back to the town they're all lit by the explosion and color returns too it's no longer white and gray that nuke took out the snowfall uh and then we get to the epilogue the town is built much like the superman statues i've seen in comic books they they build a statue celebrating the giant it's made by dean and dean and annie are much closer now they seem to just be formally dating.

I read it as a couple. They're a couple now. And again, this is another bit. It's okay. But like they show, oh, Hogarth has friends his own age. He's learned to socialize. Like I guess it at least shows the bullies accept him now. But I don't know.

It's a beat they chose to hit, but they didn't need to. No, no. I mean, he controlled a giant robot. They probably fear him now but i don't know it's a it's a beat they chose to hit but they didn't need to no no i mean he controlled a giant robot they probably fear him now or something oh i bet yeah maybe that's why they're like oh you have your own robot cool let's hang out i got i've got my own uh fishing pole and then hogarth is given uh he is shipped the only piece they could find which again i'm like the government would never give up a piece of alien hardware let alone send it to a child my take was they already tested it and couldn't do anything with it or couldn't find a way to uh turn into anything so they're like i give it to the kid who cares i can't make a gun out of this yeah just send that dumb kid yeah getting the screw back that's it's very sweet and you could also talk about where you

think a movie could end you can think the movie ends there i'm just like oh this is all i have left of him but then comes the all the warm and fuzzy yeah as we see the screw move like a more tragic film maybe would have just kept him dead and just have his sacrifice you know be what you think about like this robot sacrifice himself he truly learned how to live in his time on earth but i like that he reforms himself and it is set up earlier in the movie yeah uh i would end the movie like one scene earlier i think honestly now the movie as much as i used to like that last scene i think the movie should end with the screw like rolling out Of his window and away into the wilderness

And then just like credits It was a nice moment at the end but I think It's a little again a little too much that Like you see all the parts hopping towards the Drive then you see his head then like the head smiles at the Camera like it should just fucking Wink before the credits like oh come on It's again a little too much I

Get it they want you to feel good about just like I didn't Need this much maybe the smile Is too much I think the it. They want you to feel good about it. Just like, I didn't need this much. Maybe the smile is too much. I think the smile, if it was just the eyes opening, it would have been enough for me, but they're like a fucking smile. Now I do like the musical sting of here. I'm like the way the music just rises as you, the camera pans through different parts of him hopping around. I do like the giants theme in this movie. Yeah. The smile is a little too much again but i do like the fact that he

i agree that they should uh have ended the movie with his return just uh just hinting at it would have been smarter i think and we get the i love you and the smiling giant head like a minute or two apart it's just too much for me in this movie you know wink would have been better because 1950s superman comics often ended with a wing okay also fleischer superman cartoons would in that way where lois would say like man that's you think superman ever found out about this and then clark would go like maybe lois wink that was before the Hays Code. Too sexually suggestive, that wink. The Fleishers were really getting away with something there. Yeah, I like to do the last line of dialogue in the movie,

see you later. Yeah. And so that says that to the giant. At least it's a hopeful note for the kids. But yes, the smile might be too much. And then it goes to the credits, which are like seven minutes long, because a lot of people worked on this yeah the the runtime is deceiving but just white text on black background like i don't know it's just it again feels too simple it feels like at the last minute they ran out of like design budget or something well i think it was of the time to have this like now and for the past

like 15 years like well the credits are running here's a smaller movie we made with different character designs based on the movie that's true that's like a very uh sort of a new idea in our history that's how incredibles ends yeah credibles ends with a 2d film about the incredibles it's like if we could still afford 2d animation here's what it might look like again uh this ending here it actually does feel like it leaves open a sequel, especially like he reforms himself in the remote place of Iceland, so he can be found when he wants to. But Brad Bird has been pretty clear. He's never wanted to do a sequel to this.

Yeah, I don't see what other story you could tell. I mean, it's pretty much over in that Hogarth. Everyone, their lives all improved except for Kent. Yeah. Who's dead now. Yeah. So the only other time we see the giant in anything is what a bad end yeah i hate to leave you guys with that message there

but uh yeah i think you know i still love this film after watching it i used to say it was my favorite brad bird film i actually think now incredibles or honestly ghost protocol is really i really love ghost protocol you Ghost Protocol. This is not a negative on this film. It's a positive on Ghost Protocol. The emotionality still gets me, but now that I know about how sped up it feels, it really does feel like sped up to me and wanting, they stretched their budget as far as they could, but there's still stuff that's like, boy, this happens too fast. I'd like just another second to breathe here.

Yeah, my criticisms of the movie, I think, they're made understanding like they didn't have enough money or time. Most of them are just story things, though, the ones I don't like where it's like, well, this could have been a change line or this could have been cut. But I do feel like I used to be so into this movie uh mainly because it was an underdog but also because it was you know a very good movie i had a poster for the movie in my room i don't think i mentioned that i had a big like i did not i never had a poster with uh so long wise right a rectangular poster of like the hogarth laying next to the giant at night sort of the an echo of like the bedtime story scene or whatever oh that's sweet i don't know where it came from i think it was made after like way after the fact they're just selling merch so

i had that in my room for a while merch in 1999 you're right yeah there wasn't even like an original uh movie poster that was just like the teaser poster was the final poster that's right yeah i heard bird complain about that it's funny to go through the timeline of being a fan of this film to when i first got into it brad bird was just like just negative about it and now now he is a much more positive like i read an interview with him recently where he's like i'm not even mad at warner execs anymore they were doing their job yeah there he i guess he was just sort of lucky to be able to make it it didn't get shut down but yeah i again i'm not as hot in this movie as I once was, but I really enjoyed re-watching it, and I feel like

it is a classic. I just wish people would acknowledge the flaws a little more. It is often treated as like this saintly movie that did no wrong and failed because it was, you know, sent to fail. And it was in many ways, but I feel like I want to hear a more honest discussion about it and its problems, as I think that we did

here. I think we were very fair in pointing out, you know, the pacing issues, some of the story issues, some of the things that feel a little more forced emotionally, but ultimately it is a very fun movie to watch with really good animation. And I have to say, yes, I had a great time doing this podcast. Thanks again for listening to another episode of What a Cartoon Movie. If you're listening to this podcast, that means you give us 10 bucks a month and we appreciate that so much. So, so much. And we try to deliver the longest, most thorough podcast we can every month for you.

So we really hope you enjoyed our treatment of the Iron Giant. And we will see you again next month for another super long What a Cartoon Movie podcast. We'll see you then. Bye. You are who you choose to be you are who you choose to be