Talking Simpsons - Talk to the Audience?!? - August 2023

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

We've reached the beginning of the month, which means it's once again time for another installment of our community podcast! Join us as we ring in the Pacific Northwest era of Talking Simpsons by catching you up on Simpsons news, as well as our very busy last few months. And, as always, we read and respond to your questions and comments from the most recent round of episodes. Here's a tip from us you won't regret: a podcast host's just a friend you haven't met! Support this podcast and get over 150 bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, hoy, everybody, and welcome to Talk to the Audience, where this is always death. I am one of your hosts, the honorary Mountie, Bob Mackey, and who is here with me today, as always, but not in the same room! Seattle Mariners' number one fan, Henry Gilberts. I see, and yes, welcome once again to talk to the audience. In case you're new to the network on this podcast, what we do is we go over Simpsons news, and then we go over our news, our personal news, and then we answer your questions and comments from the last recent round of episodes, and if you're on the free feed, this is at the beginning of the month.

If you're on the Patreon feed, this comes at the end of the month. And we have been having a whirlwind, let's say, six to eight weeks, Henry and I, in case you haven't been following our personal lives. Yeah, and we skipped the talk to the audience last month for that very reason. And, yeah, our posts, well, we've still been posting it up a storm, but this is our first one you're hearing from our new recording studios. And I don't know, do you notice a change in room tone, listener, from our joined up audio across the United States-Canadian border? Yes, our voices have to go through customs every time we talk to each other.

So there's a slight delay. But yes, I am in my new Vancouver condo in the recording studio. I like to call Starship Mackie. That's what I'm calling it from now on. And yeah, if we sound a little different, if there are any technical errors, we will get them ironed out. But this is our first podcast we're doing remotely from our new homes and actually uh from this point on you will still hear a few episodes we recorded uh before the move so uh the timeline is all jumbled up but by mid to late september everything you hear will be remote podcasts from our respective studios yeah it's been it has been a crazy basically like month we've had of of not recording i think our last one was like july july 23rd or 22nd so i think basically a month yeah and you're saying this earlier henry i think this is the first the longest we've each gone without podcasting in our entire podcasting careers for me i've been podcasting i think i'm in my 12th or 13th year and i know you've been podcasting a little bit longer but i don't think either of us have gone on this much of a break in our entire lives i think at least for a decade i have not

gone a whole four weeks without recording something like it is it is a real uh it was a bit of a mental reset for for me it's i it's i'm like i need to stretch my muscles again on this podcast this that's why i'm glad we're not uh we're recording with a guest later in the week uh while we once we're all warmed back up again yes but actually i'm finding it quite easy now i really missed uh doing podcasts and you know i thought i'd have more downtime but it turns out that moving to another country and getting everything set up there is a lot of work. And we can talk more about that later. Yeah, this has, I had a week longer than you in my new place, but still it's, I also have, I'm still just looking at boxes. Looking at boxes that are unpacked, have yet to be unpacked, is still stressing me out just a little bit. I've had to get them out of my eyeline in here.

Me too. We have entertainment centers coming. We have bookcases coming. A bookcase arrived. It was missing a vital piece. It's getting sent back. So Ikea, I'm blaming them for the boxes you see in the background here, Henry. They should not be out. Tsk, tsk. Meanwhile, I have a blank white background behind me because I haven't put up pictures yet. And those I look like one of the celebrities trying to hide their wealth from their home videos during COVID. Well, whatever you do, please don't sing Imagine. But Bob, it is easy if you try, if you just try to imagine. If you have multi millions of dollars, it is very easy.

But yes, you'll hear more about our extravagant, exciting lives very soon. Let's talk about Simpsons news. And lots of things may have happened in the past two months. We're just going to be covering the recent things and the biggest things. Honestly, it feels like it's been very slow because of, you know, all the strikes. Not a lot is moving in the machinery of hollywood which makes our lives a lot easier but some vital news has come out and that simpsons season 35 will begin october 1st with the episode a mid-childhood night's dream and i added a bit of a note here in case you're wondering if the wga and the actors guild strikes will affect the simpsons here's the

thing the show still needs to run seven holdover episodes from production season 34. So they were likely in the back third or back half of production 35 by the time the strikes happened. So likely when you see delays on the Simpsons, you will not see them until 2024 until broadcast 36 happens and uh this strike uh you know as of recently has now gone on longer than the 2007-2008 strike so we're going to see some significant delays in uh content very soon i mean we're okay with that uh we we totally agree with the strikes but it's going to be more of a shake-up than that last strike was. And because this is a double strike too,

because the actors are also on strike. And I think with The Simpsons, I could be wrong on this, but if they saw the strike is coming, they could prepare better than other non-animated sitcoms because the writers are WGA, but if they can get the scripts in, then they get to the actors who are SAG, and then the SAGga but if they can get the scripts in then they get to the actors who are sag and then the sag actors if they can record their stuff they can't re-record

anything or change dialogue or rewrite things so that might complicate it more but the animation guild is not on strike which i believe still just covers the niati that covers the making of the cartoon itself so i guess they could still animate scripts and recordings as long as they got in beforehand but they can't do rewrites and simpsons does rewrites up to the last second so yeah my it still probably complicates it a lot i mean it honestly feels like with all programming we're going to see these delays uh at the very beginning of 2024 um and i don't know if the strike will still be happening then and we don't have any inside sources on the simpsons of course but it does feel like they got a significant chunk of broadcast 35 done uh perhaps the entire broadcast 35 and there's like eight holdovers for broadcast 36

um but yeah we're not really sure but it's going to be interesting to see what happens. Did you see those, one of those headlines of the executives saying dumb things during this whole bit? One was as love the most hated of the evil men in this saying like that. Oh, we're saving. We save like a hundred million dollars or something like by not producing anything.

It's like, oh, then I guess you're great. Like as long as you don't have to make new stuff as a studio then you'll save so much money i became head of a studio because i hate making things i mean him in particular is yeah i think that is his case yeah but no i mean when it comes out though the simpsons we're so used to every new episode comes out is promoted at the very least by like the writers like Matt Selman or Al Jean does an interview saying,

Hey, this is why we did whatever in it, you know, but in this case they can't do that. I don't think, I think show runner in a show runner capacity, you're still supposed to do your job as an executive producer, but you can't write.

But that is one of of the grayest of areas I've been hearing about with the writing thing. So I don't know how much Gene and Selman can do without breaking the strike, which they are very committed to. Yeah, we've seen them on the lines and everything. So yes, more power to the writers and the actors and hopefully something can happen.

Although it feels like the powers that be are really putting their foot down when it comes to budging, and I honestly think this will last the rest of the year, unless a miracle happens. I feel like they are trying to starve the creatives out. I mean, they've said as much, right? It's not even like a secret plan or anything like that. They want people to lose their houses, as that famous quote said.

Yeah, I think, though they are most actors and writers are so used to having a second gig anyway like say podcaster that they if they're like oh well you're not gonna have a job for a whole year they're like well a lot of what the uh lower line writers and actors are saying is like we've gone whole years without a job that covers me anyway so i don't care like oh no i won't have a job for a year that's that's i have that we've actually been poor before and we're resourceful unfortunately ron perlman had to retract a statement about killing executives so i don't know if you remember that run away man that's like i didn't mean to actually kill them but what if yeah well Yeah, well, what if I did?

Good old Hellboy. Only Hellboy can say that. So, I mean, yes, these strikes are good. Presumably they're going to do a lot of good for creatives, but the one thing that they robbed us of is more Dale Gribble, unfortunately. That's the one downside of these strikes because I hate to report this, folks. If you haven't heard it yet, it happened a while ago, but Johnny Hartwick the voice of Dale Gribble a key writer on King of the Hill he passed away recently at the age of 64

and apparently according to some slightly confirmed reports he had recorded some episodes of the King of the Hill reboot before the strikes happened but it really shook me up i love dale so much and johnny basically created that character yes dale had existed before he voiced dale but he kind of shaped dale into someone else uh if you don't remember the story we've gone over on talking of the hill but uh daniel stern was going to voice dale but then there was a contract dispute and johnny hardwick took over and and Johnny Hardwick said on the record, well, Dale was kind of just a stupid character and I wanted to turn him into something more original. So in his mind, Dale thinks he's like Jack Nicholson or Matthew McConaughey.

And that is the spin that Hardwick added to Dale, like thinking he is the coolest guy in the room at all times. I love, yeah, I mean, his portrayal of Dale is the I can't imagine him being replaced like all the cast to me is irreplaceable like they they're great but like he like you said the the that we've watched over the first three seasons Dale's character grow and shift over the years and it is Hardwick's performance that is molding him like that it makes him a more likable character for one thing than he was in the first season while not selling out that he's also like a crazy um nutcase and we're really getting into right now we're on if you're not on the patreon we're in season three of king of the hill we're covering on our podcast series

and hardwick has really figured out the character and the voice. And I think it really gets figured out with Dogdale Afternoon in season three, one of the funniest episodes. And I can't wait to get to that. But yeah, a huge loss. I was looking over Hardwick's career and it's interesting that his story, he was just plucked from the world of stand-up comedy and dropped into the world of primetime animation and that kind of really is his only thing he ever did in Hollywood there's a few like short appearances here and there but King of the Hill and Dale Gribble was his thing and he totally respected and valued that role and was doing Dale things up until he died his YouTube channel popped up recently within the past five years he was doing songs as Dale Gribble he was doing the voices the Dale Gribble voice is not different than Johnny Hartwick's really but yeah Johnny Hartwick seemed like a great guy just like I mean we also had the death of Paul Rubens and just like with Paul Rubens all you heard were nice stories that have not been told yet yeah no the Paul yeah now that you mentioned the Paul Rubens

thing I'm still well I blame the Instagram algorithm of like oh you clicked on one RIP Paul Rubens thing here's 18 more of them but there have been a million posts from celebrities I love saying like you know we oh here's a candid photo of me with with him and what a nice guy and here's all these private things he did all while like secretly struggling with cancer all this time and yeah i mean this is this is not the the peewee podcast but uh it was really heartwarming to see that uh people that were even just like very loosely in his orbit would get texts all the time and he'd tell them happy birthday. And it felt like he really valued all of the friendships he made within the comedy world.

And that's just that was very touching. But yeah, Johnny Hardwick, what a loss. Still still fairly young at 64. They didn't reveal. I mean, I'm sure it's public information if you want to look into it, what the cause of death was. But he seemed to be a heavy smoker. He was not that different from Dale in that that respect so perhaps it was a heart attack or a stroke but i i'm i'm very sad and um i i brought my king of the hill dale gribble in action figure with me and it's going to sit proudly on my podcasting desk once i impact everything so yes uh rip to uh johnny hardwick uh dump some pocket sand on the curb in memory of him. I hope people don't.

I hope there aren't hardcore fans who blame the strike for robbing. As in blaming the writers for stopping the production to prevent him from recording some more episodes. Because they really should be blaming the executives who didn't even talk with them. And the unions to get it going but yeah and i do wonder like i mean i bet they there's lots of great voice actors out there who knows maybe dave herman does a great deal i don't know but it's just he there's really no replacing him you know yeah i don't i mean i honestly don't think they're going to write him off the show it feels like they probably wrote all the scripts already given the production of animation how long it takes it does feel like someone will step in and we'll see who can do a good deal but it seems

so attached to hardwick that uh it's going to take a lot to convince me so as we said up front there's not a lot of simpsons news because the machinery is not functioning right now but uh many simpsons writers and producers have been actively auctioning off things for the WGA. And so far, as of recent news stories, over $170,000 has been raised for the Entertainment Community Fund. And Henry, have you bid on anything yet? You know, it's too popular. It was too successful, honestly.

There was a copy of army man signed by george meyer uh and i was like you know what i'd pay 300 for that even for a good cause and uh i believe the final price it went for was like 1200 and uh i i couldn't justify that much i couldn't justify the price of a a flight toapan for for a copy of arm and man as much as i feel like uh if you want to read them they're probably scanned on archive.org or something there has to be a way to read them and i i don't think i ever have outside of maybe the front page of one of them uh yeah well there's there were tons of other great things in there including like you could get uh i believe it was brian kelly's simpsons crew jacket uh and

you know with multiple seasons of patches on it i think that went for definitely over a thousand and uh there were some uh simpsons siri cells not original cells but siri cells like they make you know 250 of and sell at a 15th season anniversary event stuff stuff like that, that were given by, I think, I believe, definitely John Vitti gave some stuff to it as well. I tried to promote it as well to help out. And that the, oh, definitely one of the big ones was Seth MacFarlane drew Stewie and Brian Griffin on a picket sign, holding picket signs.

I wonder, is that the first time? How long had it been since Seth MacFarlane drew those two characters? I had to remember. Oh, right. Seth MacFarlane has drawn before in his life. In fact, he was a storyboarder on several cartoons. He's technically a cartoonist in the broadest sense but yeah there's there have been a lot of great auctions but this was one driven by like comedy nerdery for of for our

fandom and yeah they uh mac reigning drew a drew a uh on a picket sign too and sold that conan o'brien there was there was lots of cool stuff uh it is past now but the very least go to the wga garage sale sale that was online, and you'll see what you missed out on. If they list any new stuff, I'll be sure to retweet it just so folks can know about it. And again, not a lot is happening, but on Twitter, or X as no one calls it, and I refuse to call it X, Josh Weinstein, former Simpsons showrunner, has dropped a few more details

about the potential Springfield Spin-off series that could have happened in the 90s And yeah, it just It boggles my mind to think that None of these spin-offs ever happened And there was such, the ground was very Fertile for Simpsons spin-offs But the Krusty show

Turned into something entirely Different, the Simpsons spinoff never really happened you know the basically expanding the 22 short films about springfield into an entire series uh yeah i just feel like it's so weird they missed the mark on uh on doing that but i guess once matt left to do futurama left in quotes he was on the simpsons still i feel like that's when the the time had passed or something like that yeah I mean it's also once future I I feel like Matt Groening only had the energy to sell that and to sell Futurama at the same time as that if he I think it came to a point where

he probably would have had to choose between do I focus on Futurama or Springfield but it is such a here here we are when where there was too much Simpsons for pretty much anyone to ever watch, and we're saying, I wish they made more Simpsons in the past, but I do wish in 19, we all love Futurama. I don't think I would sacrifice Futurama

for Springfield, but wouldn't it be kind of nice if the Simpsons staff who left to do Futurama instead all went to Springfield. But wouldn't it be kind of nice if the Simpson staff who left to do Futurama instead all went to Springfield and worked on the Springfield show and did like the equivalent number of episodes of that? I'd at least like to visit that parallel world. I don't know if I'd want to stay there, but I'd want to watch, I don't know, the hundred episodes of Springfield they made. I'd be down for that. It could be pretty funny. Now it feels like, you know, and also the Springfield thing, it made sense then because it would be like, no, the family, like it was something Bill and Josh were always bothered by.

Like they say it, for example, on a Milhouse divided. They're like, oh, for the third act, we had to bring it back to the family. We couldn't just focus on the Milhouse's family because, and to me it sounds like because they were told by James O. Brooks, you have to focus on the family. And so Springfield would have given them the option of now we can do stuff. No family, just all the funny Springfield crazies, nothing tied to the Simpsons. But they just do that a lot now in the current season. They don't need a spinoff to do it yeah the uh the show kind of just became uh this spinoff idea especially with episodes like the uh the cincinnati episode and

yeah they're not shy about doing a side character episode and then kind of dropping a joke and like can you believe no simpson had really shown up in this until now though i'm sure for bill and josh they wish they'd have sold a Simpsons spinoff show that ran for like five years. Yes, yes, absolutely. And there is another great oral history that is not just, we listened to the commentary, which I don't like those, but they

actually talked to Bill Oakley, Josh Weinstein and Kathleen Turner about Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy, which is coming up on being 30 years old and it's full of great new and fun information, including how the episode was mispromoted due to some either snafu in the promotions department or just someone being a little stinker and saying,

nobody wants to watch an episode about feminism. Get out of here. I love that the article got the picture of Bart looking up the doll's dress as their complete misfire on the idea of Bart looking up the doll's dress as they're like complete misfire on the idea of it it's it's really good yeah Bill and Josh both had great new things to say about it and also Kathleen Turner you know for her it was like one day of work 30 years ago so there's only so much she remembers but she had fun stories to share too and and they uh they did they uh the writer actually did get a commitment for the interview from yardley but then she couldn't do it because you know sag you can't talk about old tv

uh writers can talk about old tv shows uh actors cannot and uh again i i know it's a it can be a frustrating thing for some actors who have podcasts but but they're working their way around it. I don't blame the union's rules on that. I blame the company's, just to be clear. Yes, you know, it's going to be interesting to revisit that episode in, I don't know, 18 months or whatever, whenever we get to it, because it is very 90s feminism in which the view is like, well, anything very feminine is demeaning and bad and now we're post barbie where the marketing was like climb in the barbie box you're barbie now isn't barbie great we love her so i want to see just like how that uh how that looks in uh 2025 or 2024 or whenever we do

it that that that uh a dated kind of feminism that was still important for the time of course i mean the love for barbie right now is at an all-time high like every time i i live near a movie theater and uh pretty much uh every time i've gone to the movies around here or are walking by it uh to go like my husband and i going shopping i feel like there's a Barbie screening letting out and it's tons of women in pink leaving it and like oh and you're talking about Barbie afterwards like it is still it's been over a month since the release and it is still very popular it really is a moment now for for Barbie and our last bit of news here is another death again slow a couple of months but William Friedkin,

the great director, died, and Mike Reese shared some nice memories about him on Twitter. Apparently, they put a reference to Sorcerer in Mr. Plow. That's the scene in which Homer is driving over the bridge, and he has to turn the needle on the radio to balance out the snow plow, and he was so tickled by that, and they brought him on the show much later. And yeah, Friedkin, great director. I will say, not to disparage a dead man, I don't like Sorcerer that much. I want to give it another chance. I like The Wages of Fear a lot more than Sorcerer,

and I did watch both of them right next to each other. Maybe that was the issue, but maybe now that he's passed, it's time to jump back into Sorcerer. You know, I'd never seen to live and die in la i bought a 4k copy of it now to finally watch it but uh i i've been meaning to yeah he was he was great i mean in our lifetimes he had kind of fallen out of favor like he was making his last movies and then he's kind of spent the last like 15 years just being like a really good

interview of just saying like he just says funny shit and interviews all of the time uh like there there were so many after he passed away of him just going like what are you talking about that shit like i never uh every exorcist movie was garbage like i guess he had uh he had no fucks left to give uh in that time period that's when the best stories come out. I love, I loved all of his mean, angry stories, not playing nice,

but, but when he complimented something, he knew he liked it instead of just being like the, well, everything's nice. Isn't it kind of guy? I'd rather an old grump than that. He,

yeah. One of my favorite clips I saw of him was with the director of drive. And he just is like the director of the Ryan Gosling film Drive. He seems a little pompous in the interview, and William Friedkin's just like, get a doctor for this guy. He's crazy. What are you talking about? Is that like Nicholas Winding Refn or something like that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that. One of those weird names. I like Drive, but I have not followed up on that guy's career very much. But, yeah, it was nice that he liked that he had a referenced movie nobody talked about in the 90s, A Sorcerer on the Simpsons, that he got to hang out with the Simpsons guys. I'm glad Mike Reese had happy memories. So that is all the Simpsons and Simpsons adjacent news for us this month.

But now let's talk about our schedule and personal news. So let's talk about our schedule and a personal news so let's talk about the schedule first coming up in september the what a cartoon episode will be all about daria returning to daria for the first time in five whole years we'll be covering the episode fire which is the point where the series becomes a total fun soap opera and uh it's a lot of fun i believe it's been about a month since we recorded that but i think we almost went for three hours i because it might have been our last podcast we recorded together yeah i think uh yes yeah and it was like broken up in the middle so we kind of the

recording of it was and yeah and and also it's funny now we watched it before we each had to like live in a hotel for a few days in between when we were in between houses uh it was it was great returning to daria and yes so look forward to that in september uh a fun note is that we covered daria in 2018 because the reboot got announced guess what folks that reboot still does not exist so we did look more into that and what's going on i feel like it will never exist if it if it wasn't going to happen now uh if it didn't happen before the belts are tightening so hard now i feel like it's not going to happen yes we'll see a duck man reboot before daria and that makes me sad so let's talk about talking futurama next month it's a very special episode because we're covering the star trek tribute where no fan has

gone before and this time he brought on a special guest andrew jupin from we hate movies will be on it i uploaded it uh recently it's two and a half hours long and of course andrew does the great side show on the patreon uh the nexus with the rest of the guys from we hate movies so he is on the show to drop all the star trek lore and he's actually slightly new to Futurama so it's fun to hear from someone who doesn't know a lot about Futurama but knows a lot about Star Trek and it's a very fun episode we had a great time doing that one we did do it before the new season dropped so no new season talk on that one but it was so fun to yeah like you said it's a fun balance because we're explaining Futurama to him, and he's explaining some of the Star Wars, Star Trek stuff to us.

Some nerd you are. Actually, I think I made the same mistake on that podcast multiple times. It's really hard not to. Look forward to that. I know it's what your mom says. This was, yeah, or they literally did this joke on Mission Hill where Andy says, oh, yeah, it's a character from Star Wars. Star Trek. Star Trek.

And then Kevin goes, did you hear that, everybody? He thinks Star Wars is Star Trek. It's the ultimate nerd test. So that's what's happening on Talking Futurama. And for Talking in the Hill, we're covering more of season three, of course. And we're covering the very fun episode, To Spank With Love, in which Peggy spanks a child out of pure rage as a teacher, and she becomes a hero for corporal punishment,

and it's all about whether or not that's a good thing, and it turns out it's not. It's a fun look at the 90s vision of like, oh, were we wrong to do corporal punishment in the decades beforehand? And I do wonder where, certainly you couldn't spank a kid at schools now, right? But I guess we'll learn.

In the South. Of course. In many southern states you still can. But yes, pretty much nowhere else in America. But yes, I did a little bit of research on that. And our What a Cartoon Movie for September will be Corpse Bride. I thought this movie was called The Corpse Bride, but no, it's just Corpse Bride. And it's something I've always wanted to see.

Obviously, if you've heard our Nightmare Before Christmas episode, I'm a mega fan of that movie. But when this came out, I was in my early 20s and I was surly. And I saw this as just like an excuse to make Hot Topic merchandise. So we're going to see if this movie wins me over. And of course, it'll be launching at the end of september and we're heading into spooky season so it's the perfect movie for that time of the year it uh yeah it definitely did get merchandised a lot back then i saw it in theaters and kind of forgot about it but uh since then but yeah i i remember liking it all right and i i also had thought about it recently because it and Cars were both dedicated to Joe Ranft as well.

Oh, okay. It's a funny combo. I forgot. He did work on that because he was a Nightmare Before Christmas guy, Joe Ranft. Yeah, he's another Tim Burton pal, yes. This will be launching at the end of the month. If you're a patron, you can hear the entire movie podcast. They're normally four to six hours

long if you're on the free feed you'll get a 45 minute ish preview of our history portion of that podcast so if you want to hear the whole thing it's patreon.com slash talking Simpsons and now it's time to talk about what we've been playing and watching in our personal time that might end up being podcast in the future I can't make any

promises so in terms of gaming you know I thought I have a lot more time to game during this move but it turns out no but I did put Pikmin 4 and Tears of the Kingdom on hold to play a game that is pretty obscure it is called Master Detective Archives Rain Code and it is basically the next game from the Danganronpa guy. And just like Danganronpa, it is a murder mystery game. And it's about 50 hours long. And that has been my entire last month. Chipping away at that.

But I finished it recently. Really enjoyed it. Not sure if I like it as much as Danganronpa. But now we are kind of in a murder mystery game renaissance, especially when it comes to Japanese games. So I'm very happy that this can exist with like five other games just in 2023 alone how how merchandisable is it compared to dongan rapa and it's it's monokuma uh you know what uh in this case monokuma is uh both a cute mascot character who transforms into a uh hot goth girl with giant jugs so well i think they're having their cake and eating it too it's like cute mascot but also terrorizing milf in

bondage gear that's where the money's at in both those ways uh the smart to combine and yes uh but yeah i really enjoyed it if you like danganronpa or Ace Attorney, it is an evolution of that. Higher budgets, playing around with some more interesting ideas. I really did enjoy it. Also, just played the Pikmin 4 demo. I know Pikmin 4 rules, and I can't wait to play more of it. I'm sure Henry can talk more about that, but I can't wait to dig more into that. And I know a few friends that have 100%ed the game, done all the post-game content,

and it seems like it's a pretty big game if you go in for the post- stuff oh let me all right i'll just say it now yes it is so big it's crazy i i won't spoil it but they will roll the credits and i swear when those credits roll you have 30 of the game left and i i'm so used to like even pikmin this. Pikmin 3, you feel like the game's really getting going, and then you're like, well, this is the final boss. It's over. Pikmin is like, Pikmin 4 is like three Pikmin games. It's bigger than 1, 2, and 3 combined in, like, scope. It's amazing.

That is a Japanese game trope I love, where you think you finish the game, and it's like, well, no, that was the first third. You really have most of the game to play. It's like, oh, my God, there's a present at the end of this game and it's more game. It reminds me of how when we've talked about Super Mario 3D Land of when you, though I think it's Pikmin 4 is challenging all the way through, but it's when you beat, when you roll the credits on Pikmin 4, it's like in Super Mario 3 Daily Land where they say, all right, you've proven you actually can play games

and we don't need to take this easy on you anymore. So here's the real game, or here are a lot of the old challenges of old Pikmin games being brought back in. It's really great. Yeah, and I know a lot of people were a little alienated by the demo because it's very talky but i i hear the rest of the game is not like that it's just really the beginning of the game where they have to introduce so many uh concepts especially the people who have never

played pikmin before because i mean it feels like most people playing this will be new to the series pikmin's very complex and the demo's got to describe everything. But the nice thing is if you beat that demo, you are straight into the gameplay when you buy the game. Yeah. And on a whim and honestly for potential retronauts, I did replay Portal 1 mostly on the plane and started Portal 2. And it's funny how daunting those games seemed to me when they were new, but now how just intuitive they are because I played so many games that have borrowed concepts from them, including Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild, but

they still really hold up. Even Portal 2 and it's, sorry, even Portal 1 and it's a very bare-bones presentation and concept. Both are very very good and they're always on sale on Steam for like 99 cents. It's fun to return to those and it makes me wish Valve still made games that weren't uh like the last game they made in the past 10 years i think was the half-life vr game which is fine i'm it's great but i want i love these little

experiments i love this time period for that developer and i wish it was still around doing i mean i wish they were still doing these things obviously they're still around and just they're just busy feeding the the the money printing machine. It needs constant, uh, tending that money printing machine. They've gotten to the point where it's, it's, uh,

making games themselves is not, is a poor use of their time and budget compared if, if all you care about is money. Uh, it's, it's, yeah, you're bringing me,

well, you know, two of like portal, portal one and two were such great games, but everything around it plus the fandom of it, all of the Cake is Alive bullshit, and also that there were 8 trillion copycats of Portal after Portal came out. There were so many Portal copies.

I'll admit it was very weird to see the cake is a lie in its original context because i'm used to seeing it on uh t-shirts that phrase kept the think geek company alive for at least eight years and i'm sure they they paid no royalties it's like you can't copyright that sentence i i i have to guess that yeah it's an uncopyrightable sentence so you can just put it on anything and then mash it up with, like, let's say Deadpool. Deadpool says the cake is a lie. Uh-oh.

Well, they're not around anymore. That catchphrase only kept them in business for so long. And the last game I'll mention is I downloaded the demo a while ago. I love the Final Fantasy Rhythm series, Theatrhythm, and I downloaded the Switch demo. The game came out, like, in February, but but I assumed like, oh, this game couldn't really work with traditional controls.

It wouldn't work with touch controls. Then I played the demo and I got sucked in and I bought the full game. And there are over 300 songs in this game to play and so much DLC. And it really is just a Final Fantasy ad because after playing it for so long I'm like oh I forgot how much I like Final Fantasy now I'm going to play 16 so it's a way to enjoy some of the best video game music of all time and it also gets you in the mood to buy

more Final Fantasy things so it's a win-win for Square well man maybe I'll try this one then because I only really played the first one on the DS and my main thought was like yeah it's not enough songs but now it sounds like it is the total opposite of that now with this with this switch release there are almost too many songs it's crazy i think there's between 9 to

14 songs per game and they include a lot of side games and side series and uh right now i've downloaded the chrono trigger uh dlc which is great. Whoa, Chrono Trigger DLC I didn't know this, oh boy Of course, they're not going to feature any of those characters because they have to pay Bird Studio a lot of money, but the songs are there. At least the songs. So yeah,

that's all my gaming. As far as TV, I have been watching Hulu Rama. How am I watching it in Canada? I'll let you figure that out. But I will say, got slow to start, but it didn't turn me off immediately like the Comedy Central episodes did. This feels more in tune with what the original

show was trying to do. And the last episode that went live as of this recording, I think it's called Related to Previous Items You Viewed, it felt like a classic episode. And I can't believe i'd be saying that about a 2023 futurama but there was one joke i was laughing uh embarrassingly loud at and thinking about it the next day it's a joke about diarrhea medicine so it was a pretty low

brow joke but uh it was really good and i feel like oh i was going to watch this uh out of wary obligation but now i'm kind of excited to see more of it. You know, that's good to hear. I watched the first episode and thought it was all right. And then just a bunch of stuff. With all the stuff happening, I've been watching a lot of other things. But I did, I liked the first episode. And I just, you know, I'm trying to adjust to what the voices sound like i can't

we all love billy west he's not a young man anymore but no he's 70 best yeah he's uh katie seagal 69 and i will say that if billy sounding a little hoarse in the first episode threw you off i think he figures out the fry voice again in future episodes. He sounds more like his past self. It's not as extreme as a Julie Kavner situation in which she physically can't get that voice back again, but I feel like it's not too distracting anymore. I also need to check out at least... I need to catch up too because I heard there's an episode

that is a surprising sequel episode to a season three one we've already covered. Or maybe it was, no, it was the first one to season four. Right. Yeah. Well, yeah, they do a sequel to Parasites Lost, kind of. Oh, okay. I was talking about the Smismar episode. Oh, yeah.

That's the season, no, the second episode. Yeah. So they are doing a few sequels in this New season but yeah I recommend it And I honestly feel like and I'm sure This might have been me on the record that Comedy Central made them be a little dirtier And I like that they're back

Within the as dirty as Futurama was on Fox Kind of boundaries it makes it more fun because It was just a little too salacious On Comedy Central a little too salacious on comedy central a little too like try hard in terms of like violent and sexual content that's good because yeah well i also felt that in the in the movies before the comedy central ones too that i was like all right guys they calm it down like that that's the we talked about it with the beavis and butthead

return that like if if you weren't r-rated before if you creep up in content you lose some of that magic with just the you're like no well we can do anything now it's like well you shouldn't maybe you shouldn't do it just because you can that's so that's good to hear yes uh definitely recommend it uh finish the new clone high it uh it kind of peters out by the end although there is a very good episode that's just about the origin of mr butlertron uh i didn't like the finale that much but i am excited for the next 10 whenever they go live uh yeah i i feel like so far in terms of recent reboots the most successful one is the new beavis and butthead which might be funnier than the

original series and that's another thing i can't believe i'm saying but it is really good and it's definitely worth watching if you haven't seen it all people check it out there's uh 24 new episodes and recently on twitter lou morton kind of leaked that there's more to come so uh hopefully after the strike is over beavis and butthead will be returning in like 2025 for more episodes that clone high cliffhanger episode it at least felt like they were enjoying like oh we can do a cliffhanger and actually know we're gonna pay it off because i mean they haven't said there's a second season but we all know that it must have been a a 26 or 20 yeah 26 episode order and they just pretend it's two seasons if you go to the news stories it's like clone high picked up for 20 episodes and then it's like well yeah one order two seasons so

they can get less uh pay the people less money because it's not technically you know uh you know how it works no raise for a new season because it's not really a new season but they can just call it that on the network unofficially but yeah you know and i really like the uh candy the new character she's she's she really grew on me by the end of the season the uh she she was really good and i also really liked the uh cleo's relationship uh i i like that too that it came later in the season but i liked uh the the her and frida callow was a fun i it i do like the new character interactions and the new characters it does feel like uh abe has really nothing to do because his best friend is gone and i hope they figure out more with him in the next uh 10 episodes but so far i mean it looks great it's very funny but uh it is i'll put it on on

par with like futurama as far as like successful reboots but in my heart of hearts uh it's very funny but it is I'll put it on par with like Futurama as far as like successful reboots but in my heart of hearts it's Beavis and Butthead number one so far and movies I've seen I've seen a lot of movies folks because a lot of movies exactly just like Grandpa although I did not just

piss myself and yeah I right now I live right by the amazing rio theater in vancouver please check it out if you're in the area they do so many great screenings of old movies new movies indie movies so i've been really been taking advantage of that but i have like two months of movies worth talking about so i'll try to keep my thoughts brief on on many of these to not belabor the point saw blade runner for the first time in a theater didn't really care for it great production design great music story not interesting

in any way and i want to read the original short story and i want to see the sequel but i can see why it influenced things but blade runner the director's cut without the narration you know the perfect way to see it uh just thought outside of a few you know iconic scenes just didn't really grab me it was way more straightforward and then lacked the subtext i thought it would have i thought there'd be a lot more going on but it's really like guys assigned to kill androids and he does the end see you later folks i mean the but yeah you you you know that it it's about like the context of seeing it then and what a huge impact it had and how like,

I mean, let alone every eighties anime you watched was heavily, heavily influenced by it. Yeah. And I'm, I just played rain code in the, the city you're in is raining constantly and it's, it's run by a corporation.

It looks just like blade runner. I mean, I'll give the movie that, and I know the sequels is seemingly a lot better, but it didn't grab me. And it's funny to see like the yellow panic in quotes in the movie where to the 2023 viewer, you're like, oh, yeah, Harrison Ford is eating noodles. But to the 1982 viewer, you should be thinking, no, he should be eating burger. Where is burger that that is what the thought should be if you are uh in the early 80s and seeing like the awful japanese have taken over although they're there's a lot of chinese

stuff here i don't know if they figured out what they wanted to say i don't think they know what japan and china were uh it's different than i but yeah the geisha drinking coca-cola that's just an ad now like that no one would be like well what's going on so i guess i guess what we're saying is the japanese did eat our lunch where they eat us alive and we're beaten yeah they took over our brains at least and i am planning a retronauts episode on this so you'll hear more thoughts in the future but uh learning that harrison ford uh was not even like on speaking terms with the director during the filming makes a lot of sense because he is so checked out he is not fun to watch in this movie at all he is the wrong choice for this role uh these are my thoughts yeah go

ahead oh i was gonna say it's funny because in 2049 i thought he was much more invested in it than he was in the star wars movies like he actually seemed he seemed not that he didn't seem like a sleepy old man in 2049 but he seemed he was trying a little harder than he did when he replayed when he played Han Solo in Force Awakens absolutely absolutely uh so more movies I did see Across the Spider-Verse really liked it Henry uh I also thought uh this could have been one movie and it could have been Gwen's movie and it should have actually uh but other than that you know visual splendor people shouldn't have to suffer for to make's movie and it should have actually. But other than that, you know, visual splendor. People shouldn't have to suffer to make this movie, but it looks really good.

And, you know, because of certain things that are happening, we're not going to see this next one for a while, I think. I think it's slipping off the schedule, correct? You might live in the same building with some of the artists who are torturing themselves right now to try to get it out. Yeah, no, I mean, it's not. Well, so that movie's two and a half, like the longest animated movie, or one of the longest released animated movies of all time. And it's not finished. Like it's not, it also ends on a cliffhanger in, I wouldn't say totally unnatural way, but it is distracting.

But yeah, you're right. The movie starts with Gwen and it really is Gwen's story. But then they but then they're like no no we still want this to be about miles though and so then it's a mile story it's why it's like two movies shoved together really yeah i mean i was never bored and you know it kept my attention the entire time but when once you walk in knowing that it's not it's not a finished uh story when you get to the point where you think it should end you you're just like all right can you just wrap this up? Because I know nothing will be resolved. And it just kind of keeps going.

And they can't really find a good place to stop things and roll the credits. But I'm not a superhero fan. Obviously, you guys know me. But it did keep my attention. I did like it. Very visually interesting. But I will say recently,

I did see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutant Mayhem. I thought with a much lower budget, more visually inventive and took much bigger risks in terms of character design. And I really did enjoy that movie. Had some story issues. But other than that, I was more entertained than I thought I would be. And I love this new era of animation we're in where we can be a little more visually inventive and visually risky after 25 years of CGI movies and I tweeted about this but the trailer for Disney's Wish came before this movie and to quote Moe it looked like a pile of puke compared to Mutant Mayhem because I feel like people within Disney are like oh we want to do this Spider-Verse thing can you let us and like someone on top is like uh put lines around the characters

but if you go too far people will think you made a mistake so i feel like that's what they're locked into and uh it's uh it's not a good look for it feels like such a compromise look for the for a disney film and i'm sure lots of people are working very hard on it I'm sure people want to be more inventive within the studio system at Disney but it feels like it's just so constrained you know the mutant mayhem it is much more focused than across the spider-verse and I mean it wouldn't exist if if the first spider-verse movie wasn't a huge hit like they'd never I don't think they'd have gotten to sell the movie of like of that idea if Spider-Verse hadn't proven market wise that it could work uh and uh but yeah I I really love Mutant Mayhem a lot too I love the cut the the animation style was great I love that the kids the they felt like actual young people all four of the turtle boys. I love that. And, uh,

and also I really liked the, uh, the, well, I have to say it. I make fun of all of these fucking comedy, 40 year olds who take all the animated movies and get all the gigs. But Seth Rogen,

he did this. He did the invincible TV series. Uh, the animated series is on Amazon prime that I really like and I'm starting to watch The Boys he produced that I think Seth Rogen actually has earned the right to be one of those like comedy guys who gets

to make comic book and cartoon adaptations and do a good job with them you know he does good work but I will say you know before the movies they like run interviews with people they do all the things there's commercials for banks you've been to movies before people and it's an interview with Seth Rogen and his his what he said was basically they call me on the phone and they're like do you have any ideas for Turtles movies and I was like do I and I thought like oh they didn't call an

animation person about that they called Seth Rogen yeah it does seem like Seth Rogen trusts the animators and hires them to do their job and doesn't well I don't know hey maybe there's gonna be a tell-all that says the opposite of this but the stuff he works on it seems like he knows what would be a good project and then when he hires people who know better than him about directing a movie he lets them do their thing and he doesn't just say like nah change this or change that or whatever like but hey i could be wrong maybe he's a jerk you never know but we're gonna find out this is our new focus on talking simpsons is seth rogan a jerk i live in vancouver now i'm very likely to run into mr seth rogan and if so i'll

ask him i bet you you could talk to many people who went to high school with him. When I worked at a video store in Berkeley, California, where Andy Samberg was from, when I put Andy Samberg movies on the TV, at least once every time somebody would come in like, oh, my God, I went to high school with him. And I can't believe he's a movie star now, that kind of thing. Well, former guest and hopefully future guest ian boothby did improv with a teenage seth rogan in vancouver in the past so we can always ask him defer to him yeah uh so more animated movies because my wife nina matsumoto is a big fan of the anime slash manga slam dunk about a high school basketball team popular everywhere but america we saw the film uh the new film called the first slam dunk it essentially tells the quote-unquote entire slam dunk story framed by one important basketball game in the series and just like spider-verse just like mutant

mayhem it is like very well done a cgi animation that is aping aping the flaws and the fun things you can do with 2D animation. It looks great. I knew nothing about the series. I don't really care about sports, but it captured my attention. And it's out of theaters by the time you're hearing this, but somebody's going to be releasing it somewhere. Check it out if you have any interest in this series because it's great. I didn't know what to think and I loved it. Oh, wow. Okay, good.

I had been considering it but now I'll wait until the digital release. But yeah, I've heard everybody say if you've not experienced Slam Dunk before, it's a good entry point. Yes, and I'm sorry, I have a lot of movies so I'll

try to keep this quick wrap it up real quick so uh really recommend a movie on Amazon Prime you can watch a Japanese movie called Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes it is a time loop movie about a two minute time loop uh the premise is so complicated they take about 35 minutes to set it up but once they do they have a lot of fun with it and it is like a 70 minute movie a very low budget film to look like it was all done in one take but it wasn't but if you watch this movie you will appreciate the sheer amount of planning that went into the the mechanics of the story and how convoluted it is it feels like doc brown should come in and pull out a blackboard halfway through the movie to explain things to you but but very, very good. Totally recommend it.

Also, Henry, I saw for the first time in 20 years a Wes Anderson movie, and my thoughts were, eh, and I saw Asteroid City. Well, all right. Okay, and it's funny because I kind of checked out of Wes Anderson after Royal Tenenbaums, thinking this is not for me. I'm not going to become the Wes Anderson white guy. I'm going to do the other stereotypical white guy path perhaps Quentin Tarantino I don't know Kevin Smith who

cares so yeah it's funny because um I know the jokes about about uh Wes Anderson and I was seeing them all on the screen it's like oh yeah he's just like all the jokes people make about him but at the same time I respect that he has a style and is able to do it is not doing the marvel movie in that style but at the same time uh i i felt no emotional connection to anything in the movie because there was just so much artifice and this is not a spoiler but there is a sort of framing device to that movie that i think is wholly unnecessary it makes you completely disinvested in any characters you see within the core story of the movie. But like production design, amazing. I want to go to that little rest stop full of bungalows.

Great. I love all the actors, but I wish I could get emotionally connected to the story. Maybe he should stop co-writing his own movies. I don't know. Maybe I'm a Philistine. Who knows? Maybe he needs to write it with somebody other than roman coppola or no bomb back maybe he needs a new friend to write things with i yeah well look i

i i understand that extra layer yeah i don't want to spoil it either there is there's a a layer that is not shown in the trailers that um is i get it it it seems like it's him complicating things structurally in a way that he likes to, that like, oh, it'd be boring to him to just tell this story more straightforward. Like, let's add another layer. Like the French Dispatch, which I actually liked a lot less than Asteroid City,

that it's like, oh, it's like a magazine. And so it's a collection of short stories. But I will say that I think that layer for Asteroid City, it makes the main story artifice. It explains it more. It's like, oh, well, this is why these characters are like this, or this is why maybe actors are playing roles in a certain way. Though there's a couple actors that I was like,

you know, I'd have picked a different person there's there's some people that vibe with him and some people that don't i didn't think that cranston brian cranston was the i think he plays it too jokey i don't know there's it's like when i saw ben stiller in royal tenenbaums i was like no you're you're too comedy you're too jeffrey wright meanwhile i think it's perfect for wes anderson movie yeah i mean maybe i'll give another chance but um i i was not really bored i just i'm the i'm the biggest simp for uh emotional you know connections in movies like i cried because of chicken run uh but i felt nothing and i wanted to feel something and i felt nothing and i was like am i broken am i just too tired from moving uh but no i i just didn't connect with it anyway uh other movies really quick really really quick

because Paul Reubens died I watched Pee Wee's Big Holiday and I thought it was just kind of meh I I did like it when it was uh new seven years ago believe it or not but I think the charm of a new movie on netflix kind of uh made some of the flaws of the movie less apparent and now i like the people in it but now it just seems kind of flat and cheap and rubens is great but it feels like he's not really in it enough and the joe manginello stuff is now even more inexplicable seven years later because his career is kind of in the toilets he he really blew it joe manginello did he had his he he had one of those blank checks as our friends talk about in entertainment and then messed it up i think but yeah it's like i feel like the movie's like wow can you believe

we got this guy for a netflix movie and now they make original things with arnold schwarzenegger and ryan reynolds and gal gadot and every huge star but I think in 2016 it was like we got Manganiello one of the magic mics he's here but uh not so much anymore but I say give it another watch like I mean there's only so much Pee Wee content and I'm even willing to re-watch Big Top Pee Wee a movie I saw a ton on HBO as a kid but it was one of those moments where as a kid I was thinking well I like Pee Wee Herman what's wrong? So I really want to experience that as an adult. I had the same reaction to Big Top Pee Wee as a child,

and I've never given it another shot. I watched a few TV things with Paul Reubens in it, but didn't turn on any of his movies to help remember him. I did download a big fat torrent of every peewee's playhouse and there's like not as many episodes as you would think there are i think there are maybe like 50 or 60 so uh i might leave those on in the background while i'm doing stuff just for a moral support uh but very sad about paul rubens last couple things here uh i saw cape fear uh the scorsese movie once again so much fun so great so fun to see it in the theater with a great crowd

definitely we'll be covering Cape Fear the Simpsons episode very very soon I think pretty within a year or so and I can't wait to and I can't wait to talk about it because even though that episode I've seen it more than the Scorsese movie I forgot about

it completely once the movie started rolling it's just so good and it's just Scorsese making schlock and in a very fun way I feel like before he made that movie he saw Evil Dead 2 because there are so many push-ins in this movie it is crazy I forgot

about all of the crazy push-ins he did man I haven't watched that in forever I need to I'll definitely watch it before we do cape fear with an e soon enough yeah yeah last movie i also saw in theater saw for the first time uh castle in the sky the me uh the miyazaki movie technically the first studio ghibli movie i thought it was uh merely okay uh there was not much going on under the hood it was just a very pretty very basic adventure story where they don't even stick with the most fun characters the boy and the girl that are at the

center of the story are just kind of bland and I wanted the story about the pirates because they were a lot of fun and I now warrant to watching dubs when it comes to very extravagant animated movies from Japan and the dub for this one is pretty good uh because it was made in the early aughts james vanderbeek is uh ponsu uh the main character but the lead air

pirate is uh chloris leachman and she is so good uh i did not expect her to do she's like in her 70s doing a dub for an anime she is giving it her all she is so good if you have not heard the dub for castle in the sky it is great yeah yeah i i do really like the dub i i think it's also uh andy dick is one of the goofy sidekicks in it too and yes it was part of the andy dick has a deal with disney for some reason era of his life yeah i i remember liking that uh that uh by uh you know now i haven't re-watched castle in the sky since seeing future boy conan and definitely my thought of watching future boy conan was like oh castle in the sky was kind of like him remaking future boy conan but like renaming the characters yes yes actually watching this made me want to watch future boy conan because i believe was it discotheque who

released that uh yes uh no no sorry it's g kids it's g kids g kids uh they generously sent us some copies of that for for covering it on what a cartoon so I need to watch my uh my gifted copy because it was released on blu-ray we did that episode of what a cartoon and then it was announced right like yeah yeah fortunately I was able to record a quick thing and put it in there. But if you have never listened to that one, folks, please do. We had Ian Jones Cordy and Rebecca Sugar, the Steven Universe people, and we talked to them a ton about how their love of Future Boy Conan, deep, deep love of Future Boy Conan,

and how it influenced all their animation work. So, yeah, please, please check that out. And, yes, that is my very long uh spiel about what i've been doing for two months oh yeah and putting things in boxes and then taking them out yeah that's that's just a small part of it no but i mean i mean come on bob how how how did it go like the the trip to canada now i will say i am incredibly grateful i get to live in canada i love canada so much uh and becoming a permanent resident was a very long process and very expensive. Moving here, I think it might have been one of the most difficult things I've ever done in my life because I'm 41 years old.

When I was 20, I would just move at the drop of a hat to get a new job and just put everything in a box over a weekend, drive out to the next apartment, set up there, get laid off after six months, drive to another place. I simply don't have that energy anymore. I think a good, I mean, I was slowly getting rid of things, slowly boxing up things over the course of two months. But once we stopped recording,

it was like two weeks of 12 hour days of cleaning and donating and packing and constant Ubers, constant lifts. I don't have a car, which makes a lot of that stuff very, very hard to do. And yes, it was all for the wonder and the majesty of living in Vancouver. But I am very glad it's over because as soon as I got here, I got very sick for five days because my body is just like, that's it. You're not going anywhere. You're not doing anything.

You're laying on this couch. You're raincoat it wasn't COVID thank god but yeah I I knew I pushed myself too far um because I just could not do anything for five days afterwards but uh it was really nice to uh be in my little hotel and uh watch after my 12-hour moving day was done uh I would watch an hour of American Dad, an hour of Golden Girls, and then off to bed. That's a nice evening. That's good. But, yeah, I mean, my life right now has been, after getting sick, got back on my feet, just reestablishing myself, opening bank accounts. I traded in my California driver's license for a British Columbia driver's license.

Just doing all of the fun uh bureaucratic stuff uh opening loyalty card accounts with different businesses around here but uh yeah I've been uh had very little downtime since uh we stopped recording but I'm glad to get back into it because I dearly missed podcasting yeah yeah I I feel you there but I mean, definitely there's something about like your body when I had I had that a little bit. But just that feeling of once you're actually like here, like, well, you're here. It's like then it is mind over matter type thing where your brain goes, all right. Hey, you're here. I can now tell you how tired you are and just hit you all at once with it.

That's true. Now, I told my wife this and she thought it was funny and i know i was being melodramatic but at some point towards the end of my uh constant preparation i was just so tired and i thought can this kill me can i die and i realized it was ridiculous but i was just deliriously uh fatigued from all of that stuff and like uh it was just me and moving a pet is very hard especially when you have to move a pet across a border thankfully that all went very well louis he's actually being very quiet while we're recording this is my first recording here and i was wondering

like what would louis do will he be upset because he can hear me but can't see me but i i don't hear a peep out of him so that's good but yes very grateful to be here uh but boy it was tough and i want to thank everybody out there for understanding our schedule change because even with the schedule change we recorded until the last possible day we did not take any breaks and uh we we totally appreciate you guys understanding a slightly later schedule and we're going to be back to normal in september and hopefully from that point on forever but we really needed that extra time and honestly we probably should have taken more time off to get things done but uh we uh definitely wanted to make sure there weren't too many absences on the schedule yeah it was it's uh funny to think that I I was thinking like oh

we we could probably get back to it on the 15th and then it's like we were insane to think that yes we we probably should have taken two months off for all of this instead of yes one it's uh but now this feels good like i was worried um i'm i i've done so many remote recordings uh even just by myself uh but henry and i are so used to being in the same room but this feels really natural uh the acoustics in this podcasting room are very nice i've said this before but in my 13 years of podcasting i've never had a dedicated podcasting room for myself and i finally do and it's great and um it's like i just feel like oh i'm finally a real podcaster it took over a decade but i'm here now yeah yeah, yeah. It feels I mirror that sentiment, too, with my my dedicated podcasting room that I've been setting up to that.

I have all my books and DVDs and stuff here, though. I still need to buy a couple more bookcases. But but yeah, but well, I guess I go into my stuff. Please do. So for video games, I talked about I played so much Pikmin. I still haven't 100%ed it, though. That's just how much there is in it. But also, I have become a Street Fighter player.

I did not expect this at all. I really like Street Fighter VI a lot, and it's because they finally made it for Smash fans. Smash fans, that's the only fighting game i really ever played a lot was smash brothers and some fighting game jerk also so it's not even a fighting game but now this new street fighter is they took out the thing that made me feel stupid and why i didn't like playing street fighter which is if i have to do inputs for a special move and i get it wrong once and it's i am just pissed off the whole time. Like, no, I did the move.

So now it's just like Smash Bros. Direction, button. That's all you do to do a special move if you set it to modern controls. And I'm really loving it. I am maining Marissa who is my main if you're curious out there. And I got to watch

Evo with my husband and also my old friend uh from uh many jobs ago Michael Grimm who maybe long-time listeners uh know about uh he came over we watched Evo together and this was the first time I could watch Street Fighter on Evo and really understand what the commentators were saying like and I could actually follow it it was it was really funny uh and a new experience yeah when you were tweeting about Evo I thought you know this isn't dissimilar to wrestling and I understand why Henry likes it yes yes the commentating the bigger personalities the music yes the the and

and for once now I was one of the people who's seeing all the tweets and eat the Evo tweets in my feed and seeing like, Oh wow. Like I know what they're talking about now. I'm part of this group now. It's it's a, yeah, I really like street fighter six. I'm playing it on Xbox as well,

which is nice that it's cross platform with everything too. So, uh, and, the only other game I've been playing, I've taken up duo lingo. I have returned to my Japanese studies, uh, as I hope to return to japan

in the next year at some point oh yes i'm doing that after pax and by the way when you're done when you're done with your uh what you've been doing henry i do want to mention our pax thing again because i left that out of our notes it's very right yes yeah okay but yes i've been doing a lot of duolingo uh i'm also uh nina my friend in Duolingo, so I'm keeping my street going to try to even approach her. She has quite a street going in Duolingo. I've got to work hard to catch up with her. And yeah, for watching stuff, I mentioned a lot of it already, the Mutant Mayhem and the Boys in Invincible. There was a new episode of Invincible. I did do the Barbenheimer challenge. i watched them both in a

24-hour period not the same day but one day and then the next they both are good movies they're they're really good they're barbie is a fun movie about like but also is feeling the constraints of being a uh owned by mattel it's a mattel movie but they're making they're making what they can with it and you can tell that the're making what they can with it, and you can tell that the people making it really cared about it. Also, I know it's not really for me, but it's full of these references that are like, oh, if you're a Barbie superfan, if you're Waylon Smithers,

you'd get every reference in it, you know? But I was not. And Oppenheimer, meanwhile, yeah, it's like, it is a great, it is exactly what I knew it would be. It is a big, important Christopher Nolan movie, and it's filmed beautifully and full of 800 great actors. And it's it's really good. And of course, I knew there was a sex scene in ahead of time. So I was mentally prepared and I shut my eyes before anybody had sex.

So that's the best way to do it. Now, I only realized until uh recently that uh oppenheimer i almost called it barbenheimer oppenheimer was filming at uc berkeley because i i walk up there often or i did when i lived in berkeley uh because there's an amazon mailbox center there and also it's a beautiful campus and you're allowed to walk there because you pay taxes to pay for the college and uh one day it was all police taped off, and I couldn't go anywhere, and I thought, like, was there a spree shooting?

Because we lived in America, or I mean, I lived in America then, so it's a natural thought. So I had no idea what happened until I read, oh, they were filming Oppenheimer that day. Yeah, yeah, I never noticed any filming around there. It was, afterwards, I was seeing articles about, like, oh, you can go to this house

if you see in the scene in the movie where somebody visits a house for a party that's this house on this street and i didn't realize how much um uh berkeley was a part of the atomic holocaust that we all live in fear of these days yeah i mean all the superstars are from berkeley kamala harris oppenheimer uh the unabomber uh the guy well who's the comedian again uh that you were talking about earlier well adrian tomine was also from there but now the tomine but yeah actually it was fun to watch oppenheimer right before going to leaving berkeley because it is i'd say 25 of it's set in berkeley and uh and yeah it's yeah it's a good is a good movie it was my favorite Nolan one I didn't I liked Interstellar fine and I skipped Tenet but I like this one and though of

course yes I would say you should probably watch I've heard lots of people say oh you want to hear more from the the side that got the bomb dropped on them that the film kind of overlooks or doesn't deal with enough and I would tell people to check out Barefoot Gen the 86 I believe it's 85 and 86 for the two movies the adaptation of the comic the comic also just read the comic it's great but those if you want to see the side of say a hiroshima resident and and what it was like and what the fallout of it was i think that's an important perspective if you're looking for one yes in fact uh i've read online that uh a lot of japanese folks don't think barbenheimer is that cute as americans do it turns out and uh Warner Brothers Japan had to issue a statement

like oh you know the Warner Brothers social media that's pre-tweeting this Barbenheimer stuff we're not associated with that in fact we think it's insulting so uh yeah yeah I I mean in the movie itself you know it's there's been many articles about it I I won't weigh too much into it but definitely the movie is still steeped in the argument of well the Japanese would have never surrendered if we didn't blah blah blah and I don't it interrogates that a little but not enough and I mean uh definitely it shows like oh America we are pretty evil but uh anyway I'll leave it to the historians to talk about that actually I recommend the uh they did this recently I I think, you know, in accordance with Oppenheimer.

It's timed out so it would be out around the time of Oppenheimer. That last podcast on the left did a Manhattan Project series. I think it was like five or six parts. And they do kind of argue against the we had, we simply had to argument. And I check out the Reddit. A lot of people got really mad to hear that so but it was a very well researched uh and funny uh five-part series on the manhattan project if you don't want to see oppenheimer there's a there's a comedy version it turns out on the podcast

i've been watching the new season of the harley quinn it's a good show but it seems lesser to me because i watched the venture brothers movie because it's like watching B plus Venture Brothers knockoff Harley Quinn looks worse when you watch the real thing in a 90 minute movie. I'd call it B minus. Just me. All right. I'll say, you know, sometimes it's B. Don't agree with me. You don't have to agree with me.

I just think it's like I haven't caught up a Venture Brothers I don't want to watch Harley Quinn because I feel like it's a lesser Venture Brothers and I don't think it's bad but it feels a little too derivative of the Venture Brothers and it's cool if you enjoy it but yeah the Baboon Heart Venture Brothers movie fucking rules

if they never make more it's a perfect finale but they could make more it's a perfect finale but they could make more it's not like um not it doesn't end with everybody dead and there's no stories left to tell i mean you wouldn't expect that to happen but uh and get the uh the disc version if you can because they have two two different commentaries and an hour-long interview with john hodgman where they it is all the fan servicey questions you can want asked oh great yeah i'm glad it actually got a physical release that seems to not be happening in fact i'm glad it was actually made out of all the things warner

brothers was just shoving into a fire uh it really dodged a bullet maybe it was just well no what am i saying saying it was too far along finished things have been thrown into the fire so yeah yeah i guess the adult swim department didn't get fully gutted and could still put out things and uh and i think it's been shown i hope that they sold a lot of physical copies because it deserved a physical release they wouldn't have done those cool extras if it wasn't a physical release though i would bet like in the past jackson public and doc hammer uh did it at a loss of money like they probably paid to do all these things all these extras themselves and gave it away for free and worked 20 hours a day i didn't know uh this was on the commentary i didn't know doc hammer i think he's doing good now but he had a lot of health problems in the last five years. Like he, for one thing, he describes in detail how he had to learn to walk again.

Oh, Lord. I had no idea. Yeah. But he seems to be doing better now. I wish nothing but the best to Doc Hammer. Yeah, those guys are getting old. They can't make an animated series themselves anymore. I hope they've stopped smoking.

I hope because they seem to be smoking all of the time they are true Gen Xers in that respect uh and uh let me say that Twisted Metal show I thought it was pretty all right I thought it was good I it's they're 30 minute episodes and they fly right by it's not one of those shows where it's like I was I feared it'd be an hour-long show but it's a totally all right show if you like Mike Mitchell he's he's great in it i love mike mitchell in it he's very funny the mitch man uh and they maybe if you're a twisted metal super fan you'll be a little bothered at some of the ways they they uh adapted a couple characters but also it's full of these i needed my husband there who he was like the Twisted Metal fan.

He's like, oh, that character is actually this character. And then it made it better when in the last episode they say, well, time for me to grab my car. And they reveal the car that they drive in the video game. And like, whoa.

They also, though, could not afford three episodes have actual car combat in it i think that's where the budget was at it's uh they don't know you wanted cars in there so shit we didn't budget for that uh but if you're looking for a fine comedy post-apocalyptic thing that's full of funny actors and it's a good little time you could do worse than twisted metal on peacock hey you know that that uh fallout series apparently was filmed that i feel like uh strikes are keeping it from coming out or something but uh that's going to be coming out at some point on amazon prime i think i forgot about that show that's right man there's the every video the the sony ones are so funny

because they just sony doesn't have a dedicated streaming thing like Peacock or Paramount, so they're just selling it to everybody. So that's why Twisted Metal's on this and Last of Us is on HBO and God of War is going to Prime. They're just selling it all around town. They had Crackle, right? Yes, yeah, but I guess they didn't want, Twisted Metal could have been a Crackle original,

but they instead sold it to Peacock. The Joe Dirt sequel and the Dead Rising movies weren't doing much for Crackle. And the last movie I saw, I've also been watching the Miyazaki films getting re-released in theaters. I'm guessing also to prime us up for The Boy and the Heron,

slash How Do You Live, all that. But I saw Mononoke uh princess mononoke or mononoke hime in theaters it's actually boku no hero academia uh but i but i saw mononoke in theaters and it was really good the movie the more i learn about it uh I am like, oh, yeah, this is, it has the pacing of a guy who's writing it as he goes. Like, this did not have a complete storyboard before they animated it. And you can tell it meanders a little bit. I get why people get bored in the middle of it. But it is gorgeous.

Like, it is probably the maximum amount of animation anything can ever be to to the point of like it killed it killed people like it pushed people too far but it is amazing to look at can't can't lie yeah i saw it in theaters about a decade ago and you know my previous experiences i actually didn't like it that much but when i was in a theater i think i just took in all of the splendor and it made me like it a lot more and i like the story more so it does feel like that's the best way to experience a movie like this I think like ever basically every animated movie honestly but especially something like this yeah it's especially the you just get so used to seeing it in your home and and taking in the anime especially I do think also the big screen if you're seeing something subtitled and it's in a language you don't understand at the very least

on the big screen the subtitles aren't distracting you as much from the visuals it also though i saw it the first time in 1999 dubbed and so even seeing it in japanese i'm hearing a lot of the lines in my head especially like billy bob thornton is the monk is just i just keep hearing in my head when the monk is talking yeah actually I think they're playing it at the Rio soon because we saw something there recently I think for Castle in the Sky they played the Mononoke trailer and they played the dub trailer and I just thought boy he is awful in this this has to be a Harvey Weinstein favor right oh yeah I mean I believe they released one of his films uh or i think they were the

sling blade people i think so they were in there and actually this reminded me that uh another person that passed away the the background artist uh nizu nizo yamamoto uh he just passed away who did a lot of the great backgrounds for for castle in the sky as well yeah i think we saw the news as soon as we got back from castle in the sky as well yeah i think we saw the news as soon as we got back from castle in the sky uh and after taking in all of his gorgeous art so yeah that was pretty shocking to see i got one of his art books uh japanese art books but you get it to look at the pictures i got it on the shelf there we i talked a bit about him too in the uh whisper in the heart uh movie dv uh commentary uh movie podcast uh and uh so my move uh to seattle went a bit

easier than bob's also because we we had a little help from uh my my husband's employer yes they covered it so yeah now i feel like i'm a good friend henry but i was resenting you every second of my move yes yeah i'm sorry i was trying to every time i was like man the movers are coming and then it's all free and they're packing everything for me and actually i was getting a bit grumpy during the process because i was playing games with my normal gaming friends and i was like god i'm just so tired from moving and my friend said uh seems like you don't have much stuff why is it taking you so long and i I thought in my head, I'll kill you. I'm going to kill you. And my mouth said, well, I actually have more stuff than you would think, and I'm only one person.

But in my head, I was like, murder. But I'm better now. I'm better now. I've evened out. As I'm unpacking the things everybody packed up, that is also when I was like, oh, wow, this is a lot of things. This is a whole lot of stuff that I have.

And I didn't realize I have like eight different Simpsons board games. I'm looking at them over here. As I unpacked it, I was like, wow, how did I end up? It's because my mom or other people say like, hey, you like the Simpsons? Here's Simpsons Jeopardy. Give that a play. I imagined every box for you

was like christmas like oh my gosh a little bit yeah i a christmas a christmas gift to yourself from past henry i also uh well actually i'll have a christmas gift for you and nino when you come here if you want to um uh because i have a box of duplicate ds, uh, that, uh, if you guys want to go through them, or I bought a new Blu-ray. And so there's somebody, if you guys want to take any home with you, uh, you're free to do so I have them all set aside. So, uh, but yeah, my, my move, uh, also involved, uh, getting settled in here. Then I was like, you know what i'm gonna go to a seattle mariners game which was a good deal of fun the team won i got to see them hit a home run even it was a it was a great first game to go to though though a helpful listener uh on twitter said oh go go eat at this one pizza place in the the stadium and i said but it's on the other side of the stadium they're

like it's worth it i walk over there i say one one pizza please and they say we're sold out no pizza i was like oh it was a real heartbreak this guy he wants a pizza oh yeah let me get that for you yeah no i did feel like the new rube in town there but just because I was wearing my brand new bought that day Seattle Mariners hat they seemed to think I was a phony or some new fan but yeah it was it was a good time it was it was a fun time it was a very full stadium much more full than the regular night of baseball I've seen of the of say the Giants or the Oakland A's I think the Oakland A's game I went to at like 10 percent of the of the arena field and uh and then lastly I just did this I just came back last night from it I went to Super Nintendo World in Hollywood California you know

Henry it was very weird timing you go to Super nintendo world and then charles martinette retires are these two things connected he fight he uh well it's when okay i was secretly auditioning for his role that's why i was there okay so he's an ambassador now you're mario i've seen you have the hat i know i probably am too expensive for them now they they want i whoever they hired to replace him I bet you is a cheap actor every some people joke that it's going to be like Chris Pratt like yeah fucking right Chris Pratt's gonna record for a video game like no way yeah I think people have this is Mario chat now people are wondering why does Mario sound five percent different in the Super Mario Wonder trailer and I think it was least uh unofficially confirmed that's not the mar the mario voice we know doing mario in that game yeah it's whoever

the new guy is i believe it was uh the the great uh video game reporter steven titillo who got a quote from nintendo saying the name of the actor is in the credits for mario wonder and you can learn it then and that's like they they are not officially announcing who the actor is in the credits for mario wonder and you can learn it then and that's like they they are not officially announcing who the person is but also the rollout of it has just been insane like the maybe the video is out by now but when they announced it they said in the future we'll have a video with miyamoto and martin a talking about why this is happening and or and all that i was like how about you announce this with the fucking video instead of just a wall of text like what the hell like he died with I thought he was dead

yes like what what happened okay he's an ambassador he's not a ghost Charles Martin yeah when it starts with Charles Martinet has been a huge part of this for so long I was like what the fuck like but he is still present as a voice in Super Nintendo World which is

good I'm glad at least they didn't replace him before that yeah and i will let people know uh if you check out the episode of retronauts henry and i did like four or five years ago it's called the many voices of mario uh we cover all the mario voices to date at that point and talk about how uh is it martinet or martinet i always forget i believe i've heard him use the French pronunciation of Martinette. Yeah, I think so. We do cover how he rose to the ranks of Mario official voice by starting as the guy doing the Mario CGI puppet at trade shows.

And I think he even started as Donkey Kong, actually. There's older videos of him as Donkey Kong. And he loved doing the role I one of my favorite E3 memories was they they basically set up a sequel version of that of like hey we have a digital Mario you were at that same E3 and he just is like talking through him yeah I it was a much better CGI puppet though but uh I got to see it in person I got to see him do it live and I saw some behind the scenes pictures of him back in the day with a keyboard in front of him

and the security footage of people talking to the Mario head and him doing the actual thing in a booth somewhere. Yeah, I don't know. If he still wants to do it and can do it, I feel like why replace him now? Wait for the Grim Reaper to replace him, you know? If he can still do it but but yeah so super nintendo world though it was great uh we had planned it for like oh we'll do it right

before in the new recording start while we still have a little time so we flew down to burbank went to it uh i'll also say that if you can afford to pay double the ticket price to get the vip version of it that lets you go through the mario line without waiting yeah like fast pass there doesn't get you to the it doesn't work on mario kart you have to be a vip uh and pay for the extra fancy uh it was basically a 400 ticket instead of a 200 ticket okay i was gonna ask you i actually i assumed in my head it was 400 so i am correct yes yeah it's well that's the thing fancy at universal is a universal is is a more attainable fancy than a disneyland uh fancy like that's like a thousand dollar thing at disneyland but but i was also seeing henry not to steal your fire

you have to do a similar thing that you do at Disneyland you have to get up very early and like get in a virtual queue to basically do anything you don't need to do that to get into the VIP line but if you want to eat your Nintendo food yes you do yeah yeah so so we were up at 7 a.m., we got to the property, and then joined the virtual queue to eat at the Mushroom Cafe, which, or Toad, yeah, no, Toadstool Cafe. What am I saying, Mushroom? But yeah, we ate there. The food is totally fine.

The presentation, though, very good. I liked being greeted by Chef Toad, who does sound like this! Great. Which is great. Talk without his voice. Did you eat the $20 meat that bowser made for you uh no a friend did a friend we got to see their 20 meatball it's the spicy uh uh bowser challenge yeah it was and they let us keep our friends who

bought it they're like we don't need the bowser. So we got to keep the big Bowser bowl. So that was fun. But yeah, I had the mushroom soup, which was fine. I'm not much of a soup guy. And then they have like, oh, garlic knots shaped like one-up mushrooms. It was like, they're okay garlic knots. And it's like the Mario burger. It's an okay burger. The tiramisu was good.

I did think the tiramisu was good. Well, unlike real one-up mushrooms, they actually take your life away. Garlic knots. They do. burger it's an okay burger the tiramisu was good i did think the tiramisu was good yeah well unlike real one-up mushrooms they actually take your life away garlic knots they do i i only had one i i will say i'm gonna be working off about five pounds of of nintendo world fun this week uh but yeah so we but the ride itself it's totally good but don't think it is rise of the resistance it is a shooting gallery it's a it's an arcadey shooting gallery i won't spoil too much the experience it is fun as long as you calibrate properly this is not an e-ticket ride in in uh in that way in you know ride speak well i have been holding off on listening to the podcast, the ride episodes about this because I don't want to be spoiled.

But honestly, I might end up going to the Japan version first when I go to Japan, Universal Studios Japan. They have a pretty cool park with lots of one-piece stuff. If you can get down to Osaka to see it, I would say, from what I've heard too, space-wise, it is much more spread out in in the Osaka one than the Hollywood one like they they have it crammed so tight in the Hollywood one and they don't have space for the Yoshi ride like they have a little Yoshi ride there

and not in Hollywood by the way did you drop by uh the the very faded Simpsons land to see how it's doing you know we walked through it but there really was no time to go to Simpsons Land on our heavily regimented guided tour day. We walked through it. And also, I would normally never pass up the Big Pink Donut, but I was so stuffed with Mushroom Kingdom food. I was like, no, I can't. No Big Pink for me today. You know what? That's a great donut.

And also speaking of Podcast the Ride, they had on a baker from Universal Studios. Those donuts are made fresh every day. Oh, I didn't. I haven't heard this one with the baker. I got to hear this. They're not like made in China four months ago, frozen and then stuck in a cargo plane and then shipped over here. They're actually made on the premises every day i would say after going to totesul cafe the next time i go to universal and it's not about trying something new

uh sims springfield is my number one place to eat still there but uh but yeah the when i will say there was a real wow factor when you walk into it like you know if you've been playing the games your whole life and then you're there is a real feeling of like whoa that's the castle there's the bowser cat like here's everything it's it is a real amazing thing all the children there were born after super mario odyssey released yes yeah also we went on a saturday because that's when the vip thing was open and that's when our friends could join us there. I would say don't go there on a Saturday of all if you can, especially if you don't have the VIP thing to get you through. And during summer when all the kids are off school, right? Yes.

Yeah, it was. But because there was a hurricane the next day, the weather was amazing. It was like 80 degrees all day in Hollywood and overcast. Like it was really great weather. Was there really a hurricane, or was it just tropical storms? Well, yes. Okay. It was weekend.

It's fun to say hurricane, but yes. Yeah. Hillary was a Category 5 hurricane when it hit, like, Baja and Mexico, and it caused a lot of damage. By the time it got up, and it hurt San Diego more, and definitely the more desert regions of southern california like palm springs those and the co uh coachella valley those are getting some bad flooding because it's way more rain than they get in a year they got in a day

la meanwhile in my experience when i was in there on this sunday it was a moderate rainstorm like not even that bad. I mean, I lived in Southern California outside of LA for about a year, and I can tell people that everything shuts down when it rains just a little. Nobody knows what to do. Nobody knows how to drive in it

because they're just not used to it. So even a little bit of rain, a little bit of tropical storms could just jack up your schedule and mess everything up for you. But one other cool thing about my Super Nintendo World Day was not about the Mario stuff, which was a lot of fun, but also then there was the trolley tour for very dedicated movie history,

and it was like the supersized version of the Universal Tour. Our guides were amazing. These were like the best guides who were really breaking script and who both were talking about how they're also SAG actors who when they're not working in Universal they're picketing Universal and they're talking about like the union stuff which was really cool and uh and our our guide his name was John he, for the last 20 years, his main job has been, I think, a stand-in on films for Tom Hanks. And he acts in Tom Hanks films, too. So he's worked with Tom Hanks a ton since basically Lady Killers.

He knows Tom Hanks very well and had lots of funny Tom Hanks stories. And though he didn't work on Elvis, me and my husband theorize it's because he couldn't be a body double of Tom Hanks in a fat suit because he could be normal Tom Hanks, but not fat suit Tom Hanks. Maybe there's an Australian Tom Hanks that does his Baz Luhrmann stand-ins. But we got to see, we got to walk through and take photos of real Hill Valley. We got to do the whole, like in the clock tower we got to take a walk through there and look around and also we couldn't take pictures they said no pictures but we got to walk through the prop department where they have a an et from the destroyed et ride that was there and this especially bob you'll love this we got to see he's like guys i'm gonna do a special thing for you today i'm gonna

show you grandpa's organ and it was grandpa al lewis's organ that he played on the monsters like it was the one he played from the show it was so amazing oh cool yeah that's universal it was really cool to see and uh yeah there was uh oh and last also podcast right story i told scott gerner about this our friends who we saw it with they're like marriott plus plus members or whatever so they got this free upgrade to a suite at the sheridan marriott that we did not stay in that and but they showed us the room they're like oh look how nice it is they didn't notice i did there was a shrine to telly savalas in that room. It was a tribute to Sloppy Telly, who lived at the Sheridan Universal for 20 years.

That's right. It was that one. It was that Sheridan then. It was that Sheridan. It was not the room he died in. We checked with the concierge. Are they staying in the room he died in? They said no.

He lived on a different floor. But I think just all the suites have, like, in the corner, a photograph of Telly Savalas as a way to celebrate the spirit of the Sheridan Universal. I hope you all had a sucker in his honor. Did he have suckers? Is that Kojak's thing? Yeah, that was his thing. Who loves your baby in a lollipop?

Yeah, that was his deal. And, yeah, that was, so, yeah yeah super nintendo world a lot of fun it was a nice wrap up basically the a reward for us after our our own long long uh moving thing though we still we haven't even made our ikea trip yet to like buy a new couch and all that so we've still got moving stuff out of us but that's going to be after uh the stuff we have planned at the start of september yes that's right so if you're listening to this on the patreon there is still time to see us live at pax west 2023 because we'll be doing a panel on mortal combat the journey begins it's our official 28th anniversary mortal combat the journey begins panel because nobody

else is doing a 20th anniversary panel as far as I know. So that makes it official. So if you want to see us, we're going to be at PAX Saturday, September 2nd at 7 o'clock p.m. in the Monarch Theater. And we have an ad for that show in the Patreon feed and in the free feed. So if you haven't heard it, it's in your feed

right now. But please check it out. If you didn't see us there, you missed it, folks. And in case you're wondering, like, didn't see us there uh you missed it folks and in case you're wondering like did didn't you guys cover this before yes we did are we going to print out what we said last time and read it on stage if there's no time to prepare maybe i'm kidding of course we're going to be saying all new things there's going to be a video component it's going to be a lot of fun and um in the past i have uh basically i've taken retronauts episodes i've done in the past and turn them into video panels at conventions and they're all big hits and I think this is going to be the same way.

Yes, yeah, and we also have a very cool poster by Nina that looks really great. I actually, just before recording I forgot to even tell Bob about this, I got them in. He is reaching off screen, folks. Hey, there it is. I'm showing it to Bob. Listen, folks. That's paper you hear right there, yes. But there it is i'm showing it to bob listen folks that's paper you hear right there yes but there there it is awesome we need silver silver sharpies to sign those okay that's uh i i'll get i'll get right on that it's it's a plush saturday night spot and if you can't make it there actually if you're on the patreon listening to this you can still watch it live

stream on the pax twitch channel uh if you just search PAX Twitch, you'll find it. And then on that channel, it'll let you know how to go to individual rooms and see what's being streamed. That's the most instructions I can give you. But I have found my own panels via the Twitch streams, and it's very easy to do, so you can do it yourself. It's going to be a whole lot of fun.

Yes. Looking forward to going to PAX, although I really want to stay home and build bookcases, but I'm looking forward to going to PAX although I really want to stay home and build bookcases but I'm looking forward to seeing everybody and it's gonna be great to go to Seattle again this will not unlike the the previous move this will be another one where it's easier on

me because I it's in where I live so I get to sleep in my own bed after the show and I'm taking a train to Seattle will there be a murder on board maybe will I solve it I hope so will it be a murder on board maybe will I solve it I hope so will it be me murdered I really hope not I gotta do this panel you have to solve the mystery before the panel though do it quick that's how every train ride works in America all right so now we're going to move on to questions and comments from the last round of

episodes and because we have a lot to cover I have curated this so that we'll be reading one comment per episode so if you are one of those comments you stood out above all of the rest and you are the king of commenters for this month at the very least so we're going to start with bart versus lisa versus the third grade and f shackleford says uh the current battle bots of today is at least visually more exciting than the comedy Central era, since having had the experience of watching their competition devolve into a wedge-based arms race, the creators of BattleBots have mandated a rule that robots must have active weapons. In most cases, in the current show, these are spinning blades. And they use a selection process to determine the field, unlike the Comedy Central seasons,

where they filmed at open tournaments, so you get very well-constructed robots delivering some huge damage to each other but ironically wedges are still very key in today's competition as a way of teeing up robots for weapon hits that was one sentence everybody that was just one sentence uh so congrats on those many clauses uh moving on although it has its share of growing pains and there are concerns about the future of the competition the nice takeaway is that even in its current incarnation, BattleBots remains an unscripted program driven by a community of participants

who are, with very few exceptions, unfailingly supportive of each other in the style of British Bake Off. And in case you're wondering, this is Bob by the way, in case you're wondering where this is coming from, there was a very, very tiny BattleBots parody called Robot Rumble in Bart vs. Lisa vs. the third grade.

So they they at some point the producers understand, like, we don't want to make this the wedge robot show. We got to we got to juice it up a bit, though. It's funny to hear that even then they're like, well, now it's just a wedge that sets you up good to be hit by the weapon. But I'm glad they have that active weapons rule, because when you see the I remember on old BattleBots, when you'd see like somebody had like, oh, wow, a cool hammer or a spinning blade that's gonna be neat but then a wedge would just flip them over and it'd just be like boring so now at least everybody has to have one of those silly uh like weapons on them to hit it and and hey i like this uh the supportiveness too that they're getting in more of the like, the competition lets you know about the people in it and not just that they're wedge-shaped robots.

Now we know when the robots take over, we can just use wedges against them and they're just, they'll just fall. A doorstop is going to take them down. Our next comment is from a streetcar named Marge and Joe Hodgson says I find it amusing that this was the last Klasky Chupo episode of the Simpsons and it features a segment based on The Great Escape in what Nickelodeon calls the second season they essentially do the same thing on Rugrats with Tommy in a daycare the big house just minus the I just minus the Ayn Rand stuff. They're so similar, I even get some of the shots mixed up between the two shows. The Great Escape really was everything in the 90s.

Yeah, totally. I forgot, Rugrats did the same episode. Yes, and I just remembered this, and it's a show that we should cover. The show Recess was basically like, what if The Great Escape was at a school? Oh, yeah, and it's every episode is really The Great Escape. It's every episode yes that's the entire premise but I remember liking that when I was like 15 and 16

I thought it was a pretty good show. Yeah actually even the lead guy is like acting with his coat all the time just like Steve McQueen does in The Great Escape as well. Yeah I mean all those 70s kids grew up to make great escape things in the 90s it's just like how all the 80s kids grew up to make back to the future things in in the in the 2000s the 90s was the all of the great escape stuff it got me to watch the movie and i did really like it i want to watch it again it's been I'd say 17 or 18 years but it's also three hours long so that's a big commitment and uh I don't know I want to see more movies that I haven't seen first

before I re-watch a three-hour movie I've been thinking about The Great Escape as well because I just watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood on the airplane on the way there I'd seen it before but I wanted to watch it because I was gonna go to the sets where they film all the western stuff they film it on the universal lot in the movie and so I was like oh if I'm gonna go see that stuff I should see the movie again and there's a whole weird scene in it where uh DiCaprio's character Rick Dalton explains how he almost got to appear in the great escape and they basically show you a fantasy scene of like what if he was the lead of it instead of Steve McQueen and it's it's really

weird it's meant to feel weird but yeah so it's basically there's there's two minutes of The Great Escape in the movie except uh they CGI in uh Leonardo Diaprio into the scene okay so he's forrest gumped into the movie very much so yes there's several things i want to see that movie too that's a movie i haven't seen that's three hours long it's great i i love it i actually i was thinking about it too because our guide was super nice and he when i said i wanted to see the western street he made sure we did and i told him it's because i really enjoyed Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He's like, oh, I love that movie too. And afterwards it hit me, I wonder how much he sees himself in that movie

because Brad Pitt's character plays the stunt double for Rick Dalton's character, Leonardo DiCaprio's character. So I'm like, like oh was our tour guide that does he see himself as that for tom hanks is he like oh i'm tom hanks's double on things i i'm i'm just like brad pitt in this movie well we know that many of those tour guides go on to become famous podcasters and showrunners it's true it's true uh moving on to large marge and rob mcbride says a friend of mine who i refer to as g is a moderately famey mount reactor who is in turn friends with cliff curtis a more moderately famey mount reactor and once told me a story where the two of them were hanging around with

danny devito after a night of partying they returned steaming drunk to danny's malibu mansion to chill circa 2001 when only the rich knew about and could afford to buy segways apparently Danny told them both he had something really cool to show them disappeared upstairs and returned riding his brand new segway which he proceeded to ride down the staircase the assumption here being that segways are new and Danny may have overestimated what they are capable of slash was steaming drunk he fell very dramatically all the way to the bottom with the segway and G slash Cliff immediately shit themselves

as they were standing in Danny DeVito's lobby with his lifeless body and they were two brown men who were intoxicated. A moment later he came to and they exhaled and called him an ambo. I assume that means ambulance. True story. Interesting. There was a Segway joke

in Large Marge margin i completely forgot about oh yeah it was something about a segway accident and so we even talked about how the guy who bought right segue company died yeah can you believe we could have lost danny devito in 2001 in a segway accident oh that would be so sad i mean yeah i'd be i would be so terrified like we just killed danny devito like we're screwed screwed. Like, yeah, I that. Yeah. What a dumb way to lose Danny DeVito. I am surprised there were more celebrities who died in Segway accidents like that. It's it's hardly as cool as the motorcycle accidents that kill some celebrities.

Most Segway accidents happen in the home. So take that thing outside. Keep it away from cliffs uh we learned that from the owner of the company i was worried to hear that there was a man named cliff in the room that maybe that's what caused it too it's dangerous around men named cliff as well the cpu freaks out uh and then on homer the heretic uh kaiser beams says and by the way Kaiser beams does great videos on the Kyoto video Channel on YouTube. I'm a real big fan of theirs But on home of the heretic they say regarding the Johnny Calhoun joke It made me wonder if it was a reference to seals and Crofts

1974 Unborn child while the proto yacht rockers were riding high with their hit songs Summer Breeze and Diamond Girls, they decided to release a concept album centered around the perspective of an aborted fetus and how the mother should have chosen life. This is, of course, around the time of Roe v. Wade and the height of the feminist movement gaining mainstream penetration, so to say that they were misreading the moment is an understatement Warner Brothers begged them not to release this album and either Seals nor Croft cared about the money and stated that they were making the record to save lives the record tank obviously and it was a delicious target among feminist groups that year alongside Paul Anka's classic you're having my baby and while Seals and Crofts did have some minor hits afterwards, they never got the same attention as their work before 1974.

That totally feels like all the kids who grew up in the 70s, the original Simpsons writers would have remembered something obscure like that about a light soft rock band doing some weird conservative album. Yeah, I'm shocked i'd never heard about this before either especially because like they it shows you seals and crofts made at least a comeback as a as a funny song to put in stuff because summer breeze you do hear all around uh you know you you hear it in things all the time it's used in commercials it's yeah them being a pro-choice pro-life or anti-choice band uh has not haunted them i also never even considered that paul anka song as

anti-choice though obviously it is like yeah yeah actually it made me think uh there was an orange juke's uh spokesperson uh orange juice rather who was also a famous singer but then in the late 70s she became anti-gay rights and it destroyed her career it was anita bryant and guess what folks the slogan for her campaign was save the children this shit has been happening forever yeah it's uh i could go on a whole tangent about this but yeah the this thing if you're seeing this happening now on the trans side of things of how people are using that as a wedge issue to say i've seen some people on online say like we were totally cool with gay people but now these trans people they want to fuck up all our kids

it's like no you said the exact same thing about gay people and if you couldn't scapegoat trans people you'd still be saying this about gay people like optics wise they know it doesn't work on cis uh cis gay men anymore mainly as the the big target so they've just shifted it over to trans people the main brunt of it but it's all the same hate mongers like it's all the same thing i think a lot of them are like you know actually we never really like gay people and now it's cool to say that so we're taking that back too but we're extra mad at trans people is what their statement is it was fun by the way it was fun on our VIP trip because it was like it was me and my husband and then the two friends we went with they're also a

married gay couple or they're they're a gay couple and so it was us and then like a family from new zealand in our v like a family of five from new zealand and i was like oh they didn't sign up for this with the with the homosexuals on their thing but our we had two tour guides i uh the john who i mentioned he was a straight as far as i know straight but the other tour guide kyle was so fun and he was flaming as homer would say my homosexuals flaming that's how i liked him and he was i think because he saw us on the tour uh he was being extra like he was pulling out all of the gay jokes he had in his uh tour guide petter he was camping it up. Really camping it up. That's what I like to see.

Yeah. So, yes, moving on to Helter Shelter, Drew Mackey says, David Lander, a.k.a. Squiggy, his daughter Natalie is also an actor, by the way, and I produced an episode of a podcast she was on and could not figure out why her voice sounded so familiar. Turns out she is the voice of Terra

in modern Final Fantasy adaptations where Terra talks. Also, she is the voice of tara in modern final fantasy adaptations where tara talks also she is lovely so yes the the lander uh voice acting legacy lives on with natalie lander who apparently uh plays tara from final fantasy 6 in in modern uh games where she has voice acting that's great that's amazing and i i you know i did play the dissidia game where i know like tara is as speaking lines in it but i i i have forgotten what tara sounds like in those and i haven't played the i don't know if they're those recent remakes the pixel remasters are voiced or not i have not played them they are not but i feel like there's more places where uh those old characters talk but i just

can't think of them i mean mostly the crossover stuff right like that yeah yeah or or card games perhaps there's probably a ton of mobile games i'm not thinking of for sure for sure uh now let's move on to the what a cartoon comments we got and uh let's start off with the incredibles and uh blake r says i know henry kept bringing up the bonus features on the blu-ray but he's right to do so i've often told friends that the second disc of the original two-disc set is the holy grail of special features that was, and still is, unprecedented for an animated film. Everything he touched on is amazing and worth checking out, but I'll also mention a feature that really fleshed out the world of supers in a way that blew my mind as a 12 year old you could listen to the audio files of interviews of all the various supers voiced by animators alongside data about their powers but each one felt unique and honed in to their abilities while some audio files were missing and instead

had rick dicker speaking with something like that stratagale's file was damaged by insert horrible incident which really set the tone for oh all of these were people in this world and are dead now we didn't know how good we had it in the early aughts with the dvd boom in terms of special features that's absolutely true it was a time to be alive folks it was time to be in your early 20s and buying uh dvds every week for no reason and sitting down and even with the most mediocre movies you would rent or buy you would say I'm going to hear both commentaries watch every behind the scenes feature

the deleted scenes the special effects features it was glorious and now thankfully so many people have archived that stuff online I know that if I don't feel like putting in a DVD I'll just type in like Bugs Life special features and it'll just be everything that was on the old DVDs

unfortunately they're not getting taken down by the rights holders in a lot of those cases which is good yeah I that's what I loved about that Venture Brothers D Blu-ray of the new movie that it actually did have a good amount of special features not I mean not a ton but definitely way more than I thought would be there. And I think the only way you get special features now is if the creators of it want to do a lot of free work and love special features. Like the Russo brothers on their Avengers movies. They did a full commentary and tons of behind-the-scenes stuff because they are movie geeks who love feature commentaries and DVD commentaries. They're big fans of those special features,

but these days, no company wants to make even the content, let alone then the ancillary content that enhances it. They don't want to let you know people made it. Yeah, that too. No, no. Marvel made this.ney made this uh

let's forget about this whole director thing oh i mean too a commentary they might say one thing that the the company disagrees with and then they're then they're in trouble you were not constantly having a good time filming this studio movie that's wrong yeah i i i'm glad yeah if you if you get the physical blu-ray version of of incredibles one it has all i believe everything that was on those 2005 dvds and then saw a little bit of new stuff for the blu-ray version too which so i'm glad those are still intact so moving on to a bug's life and yancy senior says on an unrelated note you guys seem to seriously underestimate the complexity of minionees uh this is bob speaking we mentioned that uh tuck and roll the little pill bug acrobats sound like minions and that's

why this comment is being brought up so moving back to yancy senior they say i used to think it was gibberish with the odd english spanish word thrown in but one day i got curious and i found out the guy who invented the language went all out he loved the indonesian language there's lots of that mixed in with arabic korean japanese filipino and of course french spanish italian and english it is also apparently a tonal language according to pierre cofan the creator i don't know if the guy is really passionate about his job or full of it. Another I think cool thing about this is that as seen in the Minions, they are older than humanity itself, so it stands

to reason that all human language is derived from Minionese in that universe. I'm not insane, I promise. I just got bored one day when my kids were watching Minions. Thank you Yancy Senior. I didn't know so much went into minionese and i wonder if people in the future will be taking those classes like they take klingon classes

today the kids who grew up watching minions are adult now so they can start investing in that i i appreciate that too i also thought they were just the guys who would say banana and then occasionally say like maybe it's also i only recognize the spanish words that they say in there when they even when they're throwing in other other borrowed language words and i didn't realize the this greater minion universe theory that the minionese is the core language of all language in the world and it all grew out from that one one of these days we will cover one of the five or six minion movies on our podcast we can't ignore it at this point i drove by the minion sign on my tour and uh we also ate

uh we got to have uh part of the vip is also you do get like two meals as part of it so which you know theme park meals are like you're spending a hundred bucks anyway so factor that in with how much you're spending on the vip tickets but uh it was in the french street of universal hollywood and it was which is connected to the two illumination rides and my first thought was like wait why why is that feels random that it's by france and i i completely forgot illumination is of a french company like yes yeah that's why the minions and the rabbits are the same style of goofy french toilet comedy and the inventor of the language is pierre colfang so there you go yeah uh and on regular wetter cartoon uh duck man the once and future duck joe hodgson once more in here says i feel like the success of Seinfeld robbed us of more Jason

Alexander as a voice actor I was watching dinosaurs the other night and was reminded that he did some voice work on that show and he was great at it there must be another universe out there where NBC gave up on Seinfeld and Alexander became synonymous with animation in the same manner as Billy West Tress McNeil and Jim Cumm You know, it really did seem like Jason Alexander was branching out as a voice actor right as Seinfeld was on the brink of becoming a very, very big show, which is probably around season three. So like in the very early 90s, you can hear him in a bunch of stuff, and he would still do that stuff.

But I think he signed on to be Duckman right before Seinfeld would be one of the biggest shows on Thursday nights for NBC and it seemed like he'd work around his duck man schedule of availability and it was a thing he loved doing but yeah he I mean after that his Seinfeld money he doesn't have to do anything for the rest of his life with that Seinfeld money like his his grandchildren are going to be living off Seinfeld money but uh yeah I I also would compare it to Hank Azaria in a way. Hank Azaria also thought he'd be a live-action sitcom star and was doing animation voices as a side gig.

But now he does live-action stuff. It's not like he doesn't, but he still does quite a lot of voice work, Hank Azaria. Yeah, what if Hollywood Dog was that decade Simpsons and Simpsons was canceled we'll never know but Hank Azaria could be a much bigger star uh and also Hank Azaria couldn't have uh had the freedom to act on the uh he would have had more freedom to act on more episodes of the Spider-Man animated series as well and Herman's Head Herman's Head could still be running today that's right herman's head what was the closest he got to a seinfeld the or maybe his recurring gig on mad about you but i wouldn't say that that was that was more

of a gift from his uh girlfriend i feel like he was in more episodes of herman's head which should be made available we should not be ashamed of our 90s experimental high-concept sitcoms, folks. I wonder how many things in it would give us pause now. More or less than your average 90s sitcom, I wonder. Just have a content warning. It's like, Herman is from 1992, obviously. He'd be canceled today. And so would everyone in his head.

Especially Lust. Well, isn't that how it is today? We're canceling people for their thoughts in their head even herman's all the thought police are out for herman's head now we just need to arrest lust and bring him to bring him to justice um sensitivity she can be in charge uh moving on see i know every fucking herman's head character we need to talk about herman's head yeah um moving on to uh mut Revenge, the Spider-Man cartoon we covered for What a Cartoon

and Christmas Ape says, I'm not really sure when I began to understand the idea of an interconnected universe like Marvel, although it was almost certainly this Spider-Man series that introduced me to characters like Blade, Doctor Strange, The Punisher, and Daredevil. In any case, I think this two-parter was probably one of the first times I saw characters

from one cartoon I watched appear in another cartoon I watched, complete with the proper voices and designs, and that blew my mind at the time. I really didn't know that a thing like this was possible, and I was always excited when something like it happened in other shows. Like, for example, when Homer Simpson appeared at the end of an episode of Duckman.

And this is Bob speaking. Yes, it used to be special. Remember when it was special when Universal was crossover? Now we just want want can I just have a movie starring one guy yeah can that compare Spider-Verse maybe that's also why you like meet may have more than Spider-Verse because it's like it wasn't every turtle meeting every turtle it was just it was hey it's a new universe of turtles get to know these guys yeah it wasn it wasn't like, oh, SpongeBob is here. Well, there actually is a SpongeBob joke, but it's based on like a weird Times Square SpongeBob.

But it's not like they got every paramount property to come in and have fun with the turtles. It's like, no, we're going to just do turtles, do all the fun villains, not even Shredder. Believe it or not, not even Shredder. Yeah, yeah, they hold off on all that stuff. But yeah, that was the reason I wanted us to do Mutant's Revenge as well is because it did feel magical of Spider-Man meeting the X-Men

and it was the X-Men from the other cartoon. Like it did feel special. Now everybody meets everybody and you're just used to such a baseline of crossovers that I think we need to, if you had a moratorium on crossovers for a decade you'd love them again you'd be like especially I I swear I I somewhat anticipated this feeling when they when they tease the multiverse stuff in the second uh MCU Spider-Man movie like that's when they say like oh we're part of a multiverse I was like no god no like it cheapens it cheapens your real characters when they can meet eight other versions of themselves in the same movie and it's also I mean we talked about the Flash but it's like yeah

the Flash is fine what about eight Batman what does that do for you yeah you want to see more well also in the Flash it's like hey this hey, this actor is very controversial and also annoying. What if there's three of this guy in the movie? What if you had to hear him three different times? And now on to the miniseries. Now to the Patreon exclusive show comments. On Talking Futurama, Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles, Thad Kom Komorowski always good for reply has says thanks for the smile goopy gear was April 1932 Mickey's review the first

cartoon with the character that originally christened a dippy dog then goofy was May 1932 the name goofy didn't stick until very late 1935 so is a big coincidence so wow I cannot believe when i i i read this before but the goopy gear who definitely seems like how everybody was ripping off disney at uh in in their new shorts in the 30s goopy is actually older than goofy goopy yeah by the way this is because uh in in the very like in the two seconds of public domain cartoon before the show starts, there is a Mary Melodies cartoon with Goofy gear. And we question, like, how does this fit into the world of Goofy? Who came first?

But Thad answered. And I think later Thad said or somebody said that if on the new Futurama they brought back the cartoons but they're not public domain so either they bought the rights to them or they use so little of them that it qualifies as fair use or free use or whatever they're doing interesting and I it's really clever yeah I this also this talk of old Disney stuff

in all the other stuff I did I did I forgot to mention I finally went to the Walt Disney Family Museum that you went to a few months ago. And it was great. It was really great. It was there so much amazing like animation history there. And I also not to just repeat everything you said, but when you went there. But I really do love the layout of it, how it's it's rooms that just get bigger and bigger and bigger as you experience his life through like different periods of it. It's really cool just to travel through the museum as like a singular experience.

You wouldn't think it would be in San Francisco, but there it is. Yeah, it's right. I am like one of the most beautiful parts of San Francisco that I so rarely ever go to because it's basically from Berkeley. It's a 40 minute BART ride. And then you either get on a bus for 90 minutes or you take a 30 minute car ride there. It's technically San Francisco, but not that accessible. They're trying to keep it from mass transit scum like us. Exactly. If you want to get to the Presidio, you're going to work for it.

You have to prove you have the right to be around the nice beach. Moving on to the Y of Fry, and Kat Hagueberg says, I love this comment, by the way, 2023 dog shit updates. Pup date, if you will. I, too, grew up in the Midwest,

and no one really picked it up. Gross. I live in Los Angeles today and don't have a dog, but dogs sit sit often almost everyone in my neighborhood has a dog and everyone uses the little baggies but also like everyone has a sign on their lawn saying dogs aren't allowed to go there even if you pick it up even if it's just pee like okay tell that to the dog it's truly a no-win situation there's a lot of panic no no you're not allowed to poop there as if the dog understood or cared and yes this is based on me saying oh yeah when i grew up dogs just would shit everywhere

and owners would not pick it up it's like yeah it's a dog it's gonna shit what i it's nature what am i gonna do how can i intervene in this and like my hands on dog shit wait wait you're a weirdo and friends that had dogs their backyards would just be full of landmines. Like, yeah, you watch where you're stepping. We have a dog. What do you want us to do? Honestly, there's no answer to this. You know, there's some dog owners in my new building, and somebody, and it's not like they do it all the time,

but I think I've seen it twice where they picked up the poop in a little baggie and instead of bringing the poop up to their apartment to put in a trash can or putting it in a trash can like on their walk they instead put it in in the trash can in the lobby of my apartment complex like i've walked by some some green baggies uh that are special delivery in the lobby uh but yeah the uh that i guess people uh i wonder if uh if that's more of an la or a california thing if in if in other states people are just like now the dog just shits like just it drops where it goes and and you deal only the west coast elites will touch dog shit uh and then uh talk king of the hill comments here on pretty, pretty dresses. We have Purple Comet saying,

How did Hank find a dress that fit him? We never see Lenore at the time of the airing, so it's believable that Bill would fit in her dress, but no way would Hank fit into one of Peggy's or Luann's dresses. Not the most important detail, but something that jumped out at me. I thought Bill complaining about not receiving a Dear John letter was a reference to the Judd Hirsch sitcom from the late 80s, but just now I learned that phrase predates the show.

Per Wikipedia, it originated around World War II to describe letters from women sent to their partners, usually military men, letting them know their relationship was over in retrospect it makes sense that term had a deeper history but since i heard it as a kid i'd never investigated it i i didn't even hear about this judd hearst show before oh yeah yeah i mean as a kid i would watch any sitcom but the theme song was so depressing that i kind of just turned the channel but I can remember the theme song to Dear John oh wow I I mean I definitely knew it is Dear John is just like a kiss-off letter like oh the girl broke up with me sent me a Dear John letter I I think probably

from just reading old comics from the 60s that's the type of terminology that Stan Lee would use all the time of having a character complain. Like, I'm specifically thinking of the thing who was a very sensitive individual and who thought, like, she broke up with me. She didn't even send me a Dear John letter. But why not? I'm a monster. All that classic thing dialogue. If I can promote something I wrote uh a decade ago there's something awful

article that i'm really proud of called dear john slash al and it's a woman breaking up with her uh boyfriend and writing a fan letter to al yankovic in the same letter okay sure so please check that out on something awful uh if you just google dear john slash al something awful you'll find some of the best bob mackie comedy out there I forgot about that I I think I read that one back in the day but yeah that was a classic that that was a classic it also I mean Bob you're you as a comedy writer one of my favorite things is how you mash up you know standard tropes or or classic writing tropes and then find a new way to to bring in a weird thing to or or unusual thing to shake it up i i've said it a million times but you're uh you're detective who's bad at doing similes uh one uh or however i'm butchering the title but that's one of my

favorite pieces of writing i've read like comedy writing if you thank you thank you very much henry if you don't know that about me I have like 500 comedy articles on something awful that you can read and keep in mind look at the date when you read them if certain words are used yes moving on to a firefighting we will go and by the way that's going that has gone live as of this posting I believe

and we're gonna cover the death of Johnny Harwick a bit in to spank with love in September although we pretty much said everything we're going to cover the death of johnny harwick a bit in to spank with love in september although we pretty much said everything we're going to say here in this podcast but just let everyone know if you haven't heard that one yet we recorded that about a month before he died so we didn't know uh but uh steven says on this episode uh i have never thought bill was really eating the pizza's face first with his hands behind his back. Like, it's a double joke. Dale's recollection has Bill being disgusting, burying his face in the pizzas. And then Bill, having such low self-esteem, also sees himself the same way in his flashback, plus balder and fatter.

And my response is, like, I think you can read it both ways. But I think the funnier reveal is, like, that Bill was actually doing that. And that nothing was different in the flashback outside of what people looked like I like uh yeah I kind of prefer that it's like the joke is Bill really was doing that and Dale wasn't embellishing though this suggestion that Bill is so part of his poor self-esteem is that Dale making up that Bill was shoving his face into pizza then makes Bill think, oh, I guess I was doing that, wasn't I? And then he imagines it differently than it was.

I could see that as a joke too, but I prefer, and it feels more like the Greg Daniels kind of reveal, like The Office did these things all the time of like, oh, this sounds like a ridiculous heightening of something. And then it's like, no, Dwight actually did do this or actually Dwight was even crazier or Kevin did a more disgusting thing on The Office. Like I feel like it fits more the pattern of the Greg Daniels style of comedy writing, too. Either way, it reflects poorly on Bill. And I think that's ultimately the point. So I think you can just read it either way. I thought of another joke like that too from the office i was just another classic one that was it's where michael scott goes out to lunch with the other ladies and he's talking about his bad

relationship he was in at the time and he says that is his girlfriend is you know into weird stuff and he's like like she's into this school girl thing as is that your guys's experience too and they get like no that's a pretty standard one and then michael scott goes like yeah but i'm just not comfortable in the dress it doesn't feel right and then of course you know uh pam looks right at the camera of just like oh my god kind of look but i mean there's a simpsons joke where i think it's in maggie makes three where homer embellishes earlier in the story and it's not true but then later bart and lisa are like mom make him tell the story the right way and she goes he is

oh yeah i think it's i think it's your bowling here yeah yes yes uh and uh a little more from steven here uh steven says this is one of my favorite king of the hill episodes the only thing i found truly outrageous within the king of the hill universe is pantsing ched in the funeral scene i remember when king of the hill was in regular rotation on i think spike tv about a decade ago they ran an online poll a few times asking people to choose their top five favorite episodes that would be then played in a countdown from five to one in this episode one each poll it may not be the best overall episode but it's definitely the most fun uh and yeah it is it is one that i forget about when thinking about the great moments because usually it's not so much the slapstick and wackiness it's like the great

character moments but this one was a lot of fun to record and re-watch i i think i forgot it too uh because it's right after pretty pretty, one of my all-time favorites, that I kind of, it overshadowed firefighting for me, but now having rewatched it and can really appreciate it as a tribute to the Three Stooges in their own way. And also, I mean, now that he's passed, I'm even more appreciating the way he sings the alphabet song in, in the episode. That's why I used it as the clip in the tweet about it too. I mean, I really don't want a King talking and he'll become the Johnny Hardwick Memorial podcast.

But now I just appreciate every Dale line reading more after his passing. Like we won't get this anymore. And he was so good. And this is kind of all he did in Hollywood. And he's like just a singular talent that was born to become Dale Gribble. I guess it'll shake things up more that at least that now it won't just be Brittany Murphy when we think she does good and go like, oh, I'm sad.

Like now we can do it for Johnny Hardwick. So it'll be for two actors. Hey, and Tom Petty. Oh, God. Right. Yeah. Well, it's a big old funeral party for King of the Hill. Sorry, Henry, go ahead.

Well, and who knows who's going to be dead by then when we get to the lucky episodes, too. We're currently on Death Watch for King of the Hill. But yes, that's been another episode of Talk to the Audience. Thanks again, people, for tolerating a slightly later schedule for the past few months. But now we are back, baby. We're recording remotely.

There'll be in-person recordings in the future, and it feels right. I'm happy to be podcasting again i'm happy to be doing podcast research again uh it was nice to shift gears and focus on other stuff briefly but i am where i belong in starship mackie podcasting all around the world while staying in safe in canada yes i am really excited to start our new era here too. It feels like another lifetime ago, and we took that last photo of our last day of recording in the Berkeley studio slash apartment.

And now having a dedicated workspace, I also just love to like, my living room is my living room again. And meanwhile, like this bedroom is now the computer room, as the classic song goes. It was once a child's bedroom presumably and you turn it into the computer room right yes and i love that i love that uh i mean our our metaphorical child will never be born because this computer room in here but no i know the podcast is the is the baby that's right yeah i and we love our baby.

And it's got to be fed. I'm loving getting back into the feel of my pattern of watching, preparing, working on edits, planning stuff. Like, yeah, I am happy for things to get back to normal again. But also, since we spent the month before, or more than the month before the move working at like double speed i i am also looking forward to normal recordings again and not having to be that far ahead so i i that's also why i'm excited for our current schedule here so and i hope all of you are excited too yes uh please stick with us for the rest of 2023 we've got a lot of fun stuff planned another pax panel I'm guessing we're going to be at Sketchfest again everything

will be going according to the normal Talking Simpsons playbook we just had to take a lighter few months but now it feels right once again but thanks for listening to another episode of Talk to the Audience we'll see you again next time take care Wow. Infotainment.