Talking Simpsons - Talk to the Audience?!? - February 2022 With Nina Matsumoto

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

As we reach the end of the shortest month of the year, we welcome back the fantastic artist Nina Matsumoto (check out her upcoming Sparks! Future Purrfect graphic novel) as our first in-person guest in forever to help us recount it! We chat about many Simpsons anniversaries, the return of Futurama without John DiMaggio, and lots more animation news. We also chat about all the fun we've been getting up to the last few weeks and preview some upcoming podcasts. Finally, we respond to our fave Patreon comments for Simpsons, Futurama, King of the Hill, and What A Cartoon! Listen now to learn how a shrinking serum also shrinks a costume! Support this podcast and get over 100 bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

I heartily endorse this event or product. playing with my little skoey who is here with me today as always hey it's andrew gilbert holding out for john dimaggio to make a signing right at the end of this podcast and this is talk to the audience in case you're not aware of what this podcast is at the end of every month for patreon the beginning of every month for everyone in the free feed we talked about what's happening in the simpsons world and in our world and then we go over your questions and comments on the most recent round of episodes and today we have a special guest. So listen up, you little freaks. This is one guest you're not going to screw with. Please introduce yourself. It's me, Nina Matsumoto. That's right. Nina is here in person. This is our first in-person guest since probably March 16th of 2020. Kat Bailey on, I think, The Crepes of Wrath was the last person in the apartment studio. Yeah, this is crazy. Bob,

you got to see I tidied up a little bit. Yes. Before Nina came over. Yeah, we got a special guest. For feminine sensibilities. And in case you don't know and you should, Nina is not only the artist for a lot of our artwork, she's been a guest on some of our shows before.

She's also my wife. I sure am. You sound very excited about that. And a professional Simpsons an eisner winning that's right professional simpsons artist as well and nina is here uh staying with me for a bit but she'll be uh jumping in talking about some of the new stuff and responding to your questions and comments so welcome to the show nina i think this is your first talk to the audience ever right yeah it's my first time talking to the audience and i haven't been out of vancouver in two years

over two years how does it feel to be be back in America after all this time? It's nice, honestly. I really miss Berkeley. And I miss seeing you, Henry. And I miss Louie as well. Well, Louie missed you. Yeah. I miss you as well.

It's been too long. Louie didn't forget about me. He didn't growl at me. No, he didn't. Henry also didn't growl at me when I stepped in the door. He didn't. Even though you were puffing yourself up to make you look bigger for predators well guess what everybody yabba dabba doo nina's gonna be talking to you this month i think it's good dean is on our community podcast too because

nina is like more active in the community than we are usually oh my god i spend too much time in the discord i talk to the audience all the time actually this isn't anything special nina is our mole also in the discord and she rats on all of you say things about us i don't do that i know i'm kidding i'm kidding i also don't have any mod powers there are no mod powers except for the ones i have so don't piss me off if i were a mod i would have added way more emojis by now okay well we'll get on that that's on the to-do list uh We have a ton of news. This is going to be a very long episode of Talk to the Audience. And the first bit of news is from a Simpsons adjacent show, Futurama, because between recordings, Hulu announced 20 new episodes are coming in 2023.

All the cast, sorry, almost all the cast are coming back, along with David X. Cohen and, of course, Matt Groening. But the voice of Bender and other characters, John DiMaggio, has not signed his contract yet. He's holding out not just for more money for him, but for more money for everyone else. And that was very clear in his message he put out on Twitter. It's not just about me. I want everyone to make more money off of this. Yeah. Yeah. It was, I was so excited by that first headline. And also I think the first images of it that was there was

like it was bender holding a flag that says we're coming back or something like that and then once i saw that almost all the cast i was like wait what this is not a competition of who i think is the most important actor in the show uh they're all irreplaceable in my opinion but if there's one who's the most irreplaceable i think it would be probably john dimaggio as bender because that character just is him absolutely yeah i mean uh go back to our talking futurama episodes uh in the beginning of the show when they were casting they didn't know who to cast as bender it was the hardest nut to crack other people were cast as frying lila before billy west and katie seagal stepped in but yeah bender was the hardest nut to crack and john dimaggio really filled that role it could have been david x cohen yeah bender could have sounded like this

i didn't even think about until you put it out that they used bender to say that they're coming back and yet they don't have bender back yeah it's kind of ironic no i think it's part of them playing hardball the timing doesn't feel so it seemed like based on well this was another thing that like it put such a damper on the futurama news because uh several people i follow on twitter who you know used to work on other shows but it never worked on a graining show before they on the day it got announced they were like yeah and i'm writing on futururama. And I was like, wow, I'm so excited for them. But then it was this extra damper of like, boy, it's too. Apparently they were doing the table read that week.

And so. Yeah, the Monday after the announcement on the Friday previous. I could see with the wheels moving, once you do an in-person table read, it's going to leak anyway. So this is me being on the corporation side here. Like, well read, it's going to leak anyway. So this is me being on the corporation side here. Like, well, it was probably going to leak anyway, but they just shouldn't do it if you can't get DiMaggio for it. Like, you guys remember in 2008 when they were coming back to Comedy Central, like the entire cast held out together because their original offer was not what they wanted.

It seemed like Comedy Central was trying to lowball them on that as well. And in this case, it does seem extra complicated because everybody else accepted whatever the offer was and DiMaggio didn't. But I think DiMaggio wants everybody to get paid better. This isn't him saying like, I'm worth more than Billy West or Katie Segal or whoever, you know? Yeah. It does seem like that streaming networks, they're very interested in animation.

That doesn't mean people are getting paid more now. It means like, oh, we can second rate these losers, you know, and pay them less. And it seems like everyone's getting screwed. And actually, that's what John DiMaggio said on Twitter. Like, I'm sick of, you know, us settling for less all the time when there's another animation boom happening, like which was happening in 1999 when Futurama was made that was like two animation booms ago yeah well no I think no company wants to pay like the Simpsons actors level of money and even they have to take a pay they've taken a pay cut the last couple times and to to just I believe they're at 300,000

an episode which uh you know a very good sum but also, I don't know, though, if they were the stars of a live action show for this long, they wouldn't be. They'd be getting millions an episode. Definitely. And two other notes about this. I saw announced in the Hollywood Reporter article, Rough Draft Studios is coming back to do animation. So presumably it will still look good. I did not see any mention of Christopher Ting, who is the composer for all of Futurama. Notably, in the Comedy Central years, he had to settle for no orchestra in those years.

But the music sounded fine because he's very good at what he does. I'm curious to know if he's coming back to Futurama. It's always about belt tightening with this stuff, though. Every time. And you've said it so many times, Bob. But they all are, Mr. Burns, saying like, this whole place, it's so they all are mr burn saying like ah this old place it's falling apart we just got no money for you and then a crown falls on mr hulu's head from above and and yeah these i mean the animation side of it too everybody thinks animation is just

so much cheaper you know it's just not though at the very least like going to rough draft doesn't feel like too cheap and out they're like oh we we got to do this instead of Rough Draft or whatever. But yeah. Yeah, they better not cheap out on the music like they've done with The Simpsons. Yes. Yeah. Well, funny you mentioned that too. Yes.

Yeah. That's our next news story. My final comment is if you do change the voices, people can tell the diddly difference and they'll be very mad about it. So I hope things happen. Who knows? By the time this goes live on the free free feed maybe they will they will have settled something but you know with animation it's possible one person could come in and lay down the tracks and then nine

months later they could figure things out with dimaggio he can step in and you know redub the episodes it's happened before yeah they they totally could to do that i mean hank azaria did that for mo himself right right yeah it's uh it could happen today pretty easily i guess i'll be keeping an eye we'll be keeping an eye on this till the hulu premiere happens i hope i hope they realize they got to do it without they have to do it with demotion absolutely i will settle for nothing less so yes in other news there was a long-standing battle between alf clausen and fox it's been settled but it seems like there are no winners because both sides just paid their legal fees and no one truly won and of course you know

there are allegations on both sides i'm more likely to side with alf klausen because he's brought more joy to my life than you know heartless suits who want to bleed him dry but we talked about it before he was fired from the Simpsons he's claiming age discrimination he's also claiming that they didn't make accountability for his disabilities like he is he's coming down with Parkinson's disease so he was saying you know they didn't make it a work environment he could actually thrive in and but it seems like again there's nothing good to say about this other than people paid their court fees and nothing happened and the simpsons music will still sound kind of bad to me uh the the hollywood reporter uh seemed to frame it as that the lawsuit he the lawyer the judge was not being too friendly to clausen like multiple decisions in

the suit were like not in favor of clausen and it seemed like they were heading towards an ending where clausen would lose it it was it was more than likely and if that happened clausen and it seemed like they were heading towards an ending where clausen would lose it it was it was more than likely and if that happened clausen would not only be liable to pay the legal fees he's already been paying uh for his suit but also fox's legal fees which would probably be in the millions and so i think maybe fox realized like they didn't want the bad publicity of making this poor old man who they fired then have to pay the legal fees like uh that's publicity they didn't want the bad publicity of making this poor old man who they fired then have to pay the legal fees like uh that's publicity they don't want yeah maybe it was that and al clausen denies their allegations that he was outsourcing some of his composition to other people so uh he says he flat out denies that so hopefully he'll be around for a while but he's never coming back to the

simpsons and that stinks because uh i know how you, Nina. The music is like part of the fabric of the show. And the Hans Zimmer factory that now makes the music, it just is not the same. And I wish they would have at least aped Alice Clausen's style for the show instead of just doing some generic, you know, factory process. Maybe they can make the Simpsons sound like Dune. Dune? Oh, yeah. Hans Zimmer did the soundtrack for Dune, right?

Yeah, I got some bagpipes in there yeah i was surprised i liked the soundtrack to the new dune movie because hon zimmer did that movie well maybe it was one hon zimmer actually did instead of like the hon zimmer uh by you know sounds by hon zimmer and friends speaking of allegations hey now hey i i mean maybe hon zimmer is that prolific and can just write all of this music himself all the time maybe that's how it is maybe they can bring back that

first guy who did the music for The Simpsons that you guys hate so much what's his name again? Gib? Gib yeah well there were three and Gib was the worst I say gib him a chance that's my imitation of his music, by the way. The babysitter band is here.

I don't mind it. You guys are way too mean to me. Hey, go back to the Tracy Allman show, Gib. He's still making music and thriving. He was just wrong for the Simpsons. You know, if they do an Al Freebooth, they better hire Alf Clausen for that. Let him score that at least. Oh, believe me, that Paul Fusco guy is on everybody's Rolodex for the past 30 years trying to get an Al Freeboot to happen.

Up next, there's a lot of oral histories. I don't know what's happening, what's in the air, but so many of these are being written. And the first one is for the Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie show. It's a lot of stories that we've heard before on the commentaries, but it's still nice to see. This is on The Hollywood Reporter. And we hear about the creation of that show, how it was ahead of its time for commenting on fan culture, which no one was really doing on TV in 1997. And some fun stories like we all know that The Simpsons didn't have to take notes from executives, but they still had to meet with them. And we hear the story from Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein that that executives were like we want a teen on the show and i guess the one new thing i pulled from this is that uh roy is named after a friend of david x

cohen so that's all i really got from it because you know uh we're scholars my my favorite bit in it was seeing yardley smith talk about when it was just in the subject of toxic fans and worst episode ever talk uh yardley really she she came uh she was not taking prisoners in that because she was just like oh you say the show sucked forever like well fuck you we work hard on this show yardley uh it's pretty salty in some of these oral histories i know it's uh nancy was a bit more uh friendly yeah but yeah it was it was fun here and it also seemed like bill and josh like we're doing it together like they were replying to each other in the oral history which i like the feel that and uh they talked to the director steven dean moore which you know not everybody in these oral histories reaches out for

the director you know and they did for the next one too right with lisa the greek so there's another oral history about an old episode that just turned 30 and so wait it's just scratching and poochie just turned 25 right 25 okay lisa the greek was 30 and then a week later uh another episode turned 32 as well so yeah this one was on the ringer uh written by alan siegel a listener apparently a listener of ours he follows me on twitter and uh he thanked me for uh retweeting it and I really liked it. And so, yeah, it was... The funniest thing was that I said, the one thing it's missing is that they didn't mention that Lisa picked the Super Bowl winner multiple times.

Right. And Alan mentioned to me, he's like, look, I knew that people would bring that up if I didn't bring it up, but it didn't survive the edit. Blame the editor. It's too bad. I understand.

This was kind of cool, though, because, again, it's things that we already know because of the commentary and previous interviews. But you really get a perspective into the world of the seedy underbelly of Gracie Films gambling rings. Yes. Yeah. Which also Tim Kalpak has told us all about, too. He was like, that's how he met.

I think he said he drove to Adam Sandler's place to drop off like right the winnings of one of those things yeah and i like the comments from jay kogan where he grew up a long time la fan because he lived in la but he learned you don't care about the teams you only care about the spread gambling turns into all being about the spread i also like the uh the mention that jeff martin said that he when he got there first, he's like, oh, I'm more of a baseball guy. And then just as Sam Simon was turned off to him. It was most interesting to hear

about the degenerate gamblers of the whole group. And really, Alan Siegel did a really great job in the article. It really just shows how unhealthy the writers' rooms were. Because, I mean, Bill Oakley has said this, where you didn't have a smartphone, so you would either read the dictionary or gamble and eat uh just eat

butterfinger many of the gambling was done over like a pile of butterfinger bb's in front of them but yes check that out on the ringer and uh there was another old history for another episode that turned 30 uh homer at the bat author of that is uh michael uh kovna that's on the washington post and i couldn't read it because there is a paywall and i'm asking you henry this is owned by jeff bezos this paper washington post i have amazon prime they should let me in let me in bezos i never thought of that but that should the prime should get you past that paywall they up the charge every year for that thing it should get you past it but because of that i could not read this article.

Henry, what's going on here? It was good. You know, there were multiple ones. There's also a really good one on The Athletic. But this one talked to the most players and producers and directors on it, though not Schwarzwalder. Al Jean had a lot of funny stuff to say on it. My favorite bit was that I had not heard before was Wade Boggs saying that he should have

been the one turned into a chicken because in the team he was known as the most superstitious and they called him chicken all the time and so he's like i should have been chicken like i should have been the chicken guy and pretty much everybody else talked about how like oh yeah we're most famous for this nobody remembers like if i'm recognized on the street, it's for this, not that. And also, Mattingly mentioned that he has still never watched the episode. Jesus. He's too busy shaving his sideburns. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this episode, I'm sure, I mean, when we cover it in our season three recap, I'm

sure we're going to do a follow-up on every one of these guys. And I assume they're all still alive? I think so. Okay. Yeah, I think so. They were all pretty young. They're probably all, like, 60 around around this time now i i wish i'd listened to it but steve sacks even had al jean on his podcast sacks in the morning talking about the episode for the anniversary i i saw that i mean if your

name is steve sacks that's the pun you got to go with oh yeah sexy boy and he was yeah he was arrested in springfield that was his fate right. He went to jail for every unsolved murder in New York City. I, you know, I think with all of these retrospectives, which are great and honestly do all the work for us when we are going to re-explore these episodes. I think it's because Simpsons articles do big business. Like we, I guess, hey, you're getting a spoiler about an upcoming guest, but our pal Luke Savage, he did a whole article for Jacobin about, you know, the Simpsons and, you know, the degradation of media and all that. And he was like, oh, it did amazing traffic. Like Simpsons content just gets shared around a lot. It's saving, it's saving written media now, the Simpsons.

It really is. These stories need to be told because the DVDs will stop working after a certain point. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, those stories are only 20 years old. That was the stories they felt they could tell when the episodes were 10 years old. Now they've got stories that are like, you know what? It's 30 years. Other people are dead.

I'm telling this story. I'm going to name names. This is not being put on a Fox product that's being sold in stores. So yeah, check out the Sacks in the Morning podcast and all of those oral histories about those last episodes that are all reaching anniversaries. In other news, there are more cool Simpsons figures coming out. And Super 7 is doing a line of McBain figures from the five-part McBain short series sprinkled throughout seasons, what, like two to five, I think it was? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think five was the very late one. But yeah, because I think the shrimp yeah yeah okay yeah i think five was the very late one but yeah the because i think the shrimp puff that one was in five yeah and it's been fun uh recovering season two and three now because you can see like oh you can totally see how this is one story told out of order it was it's even more clear to me than than it was when we covered those episodes like six years ago all four are great figures but i think scoey would be. If I had to pick one, you know, Sanderman does look cool, but Scoey comes with the photograph of the live forever.

Oh, awesome. And he's covered in blood. But I like too that it's, you know, Super 7. It looks to be a slightly lower tier, which I'm cool with because these look like action figures within the world of Simpsons. Like if you lived in Springfield in 1993, you could have bought these action figures

for the McBain film. Yeah, the packaging is super on point. Yeah, man, you're right. I love the logo. It also is cool. I wonder if that whole McBain legal thing about the name had prevented them from selling things that said McBain as a toy.

Yeah, I guess if you bought the playmates figure it would be rainier wolf castle and not mcbain but hey nobody wants to talk about that uh christopher walk-in and uh ernest borgnine movie maybe it's ed asner i've seen the riff tracks it's fine but uh yeah it was a christopher walk-in action movie that didn't have to exist it's a it's a cool set but i really want a mcgarnicle one yeah you know what mcgarnicle that's like that's a layer deeper that i feel i i'd love a mcgarnicle one too comes with his lunch it does he needs that big sandwich i feel like david murkin forgot about mcbain or wasn't informed about him so he made his own character that only appears on screen once that's right and that's

enough yeah do it for me billy do it for mcgarnagel yeah i'll do it for you mcgarnagel like the mcgarnet mcgarnagel so many times yeah you know now you know that's simpsons fans always wanting more you know we get all four mcbain figures now we want mcgarnagel well speaking of merch there's even more merch coming out uh from Levi's. And it's not just jean material, folks. It's all kinds of things. And it's what you think. It's iconic Simpsons images. But I'm also seeing on this merch a new character, which is like a cat in like a cheerleader skirt.

And I have no idea who this character is. It's in the first image on this page at hypebeast.com, where they're showing off all of the new merch and there's like a new character. I don't know if this is a Levi's specific character or what. It does look graining style though. But yeah, it looks, I'm not sure what the deal is with that like pig cat thing in a dress now.

It could be from Anitchie and Scratchie, I don't remember. But yeah, so there's going to be a lot of new Levi stuff. Presumably not as much as the Balenciaga line, but made out of the same materials and in the same sweatshop. So you may as well get these. Don't wait for the counterfeit jeans version, guys. You gotta get this one.

Don't buy these out of anyone's car hole. I love the shirt of the little girl who's left in the gym. Oh, yeah? Yes. She's hanging from the rings. Oh, that's good. Oh, man. Asking for Mrs. Pommel Horse. That's one I get. You that's oh man i miss that one mrs pommel horse

that's the one i get you know first i like that one of the bart the bart with the squishy is pretty great but yeah the the mrs pommel i like to get down now that's a that's a really good one i think wonder if these are like really oh man the hoodie with the the boys with the wigs actually that's my favorite yeah yeah i mean it seems low effort but i kind of like the shirts and the hoodies with just like one square image on them. No, I don't mind that at all. It's definitely trendy right now. And it does seem low effort, like you said, just slapping a screen grab or screenshot

on a shirt. But hey, that's what the fans want, I think. Like Hot Topic's been releasing a lot of shirts like that. And I have one of Marge Crumping. You do, yeah. After you bought that, I was like, well, I got to check this out. I got the one of Homer in the audience full of dead people from Treehouse. Oh, yeah.

They released a really good Treehouse of Horror line. I was so tempted. There was the shot of Homer in the ironic punishment chair with all the donuts. Right, yeah. Very tempted. That was a good one, too. But yeah, everybody's getting in on this. punishment chair with all the donuts right yeah very tempted good one too man but yeah that everybody's getting in on this there's so much like i couldn't even link to like yeah adidas

made another shoe like and nike made a simpson shoe we may stop reporting on these because it's not really notable anymore if it's a new company that's when i thought they're doing it yeah um old navy has been releasing simpson stuff for a while now i just checked old navy once in a while and they almost always have Simpsons shirts. But they're usually for kids, which I think is strange. That's like the new Adidas one I saw. I was like, oh, a Kang. You get a Kang eyeball on the end of the shoe.

But it's a kid's one, just like the Blinky kid's one. I was like, I'm an adult. I want a Blinky shoe. They're for parents to give to their children, millennial parents. For the kids to be confused. The parents go, stop watching the Paw Patrol crap. This is much better. They should stop watching Paw Patrol.

I agree. It's garbage. Let's move on. Wow. Coming out against Paw Patrol, very hard in this episode. So another news item we have here is that there is an adventure game version of Steam Hams, a classic point and click adventure game style of this famous meme made by indie dev neo dement and i watched a video of it online and it is very faithful to this style of game down to the fact that they down sampled the audio so the audio is like the

scratchy cd-rom audio you would hear in an old-timey lucas arts or sierra game it's very well done it's so well done yeah like the animation is is like perfect the way the head bobs while they're talking it's that yeah like great attention to detail i i should have given that a play myself it looks so it looked very cool but i i did watch the second still steamed hams memes multiple good ones a month it feels like there was a lull during covid i feel like 2018 was peak steam hams that's when bill oakley was on our live show in portland and that was like when steam hams mania was sweeping the nation a little bit of a downturn in 2019 throughout covid i think we just forgot about the the miracle of steam hams but now they're back and i love

these reanimated projects where like a ton of different creative animators are assigned different like seconds of animation then they're all slapped together so this is on the youtube account lotus bandicoot you can watch in the entire steam hams reanimated in so many different styles so many different uh types of shows uh the interpretation of this animation i've seen like rocco's modern life and cow and chicken and old hannah barbara so many cool things it's amazing the hannah barbara thing is is the coolest part to me because the user cites which, you know, this second is this. And the ones for Hanna-Barbera, the creator is like,

oh, this is this director from Hanna-Barbera. And then this is this director of Yogi Bear. It even gets that like granular. Chalmers is perfect in that style. Yes, yes. He fits right into that world. And I love the, I won't call it Spumco,

but Ren and Stimpy style animation of him like looking at the burger. Oh yeah, well, no, there's, yeah, actually the person even made a distinction between, well, this is a Spumco second and then the next second is a game second and it's perceptible differences between the two, which, yeah, I mean, that's the kind of extreme granularity

about animation history aimed directly at us and I hope our audience as well. You know, I'm just remembering, I think at some point, like Bill Oakley declared the end of Steamed Hams. He's just like, it's over now. But now, you know, there's a renaissance happening. Yeah. So take that, Oakley. I think he's, I've seen him share, I think he even shared that point and click adventure. So I think even he is recently, it's like it's all over pronouncement

so we have some other news coming up next and that smithers and marge appear in character in the uk uh gay magazine attitude and i believe that there is a interview with smithers is what i saw and he he and his uh new bow well at least for one episode they're on the cover guess what spoilers it doesn't work out i i think they timed it for the, I believe UK airings of Simpson stuff is a little later, like by weeks than us. So I think this was timed for the UK debut of that episode. But yeah, it's like, you know, it's an in-character interview with Smithers about his love life and all that.

And the Marge one is her commenting on on like lgbt film tropes which is uh this you know it is the current thing of marge in the show that she is the most like in touch with gay culture person of the of the family that's true yeah it's funny if you look at her old portrayal where she was just too naive to know about like gay people even existing yes the gore that gore vidal is should be kissing girls according to march but now you know i guess after the the entire gay marriage thing in that episode that's uh best best forgotten i'd say actually yeah yeah i will say also before i pulled this up i was like if i'm wrong about this uh forgive me but i had not heard of this gay

magazine before and of course if i hear about a uk publication i'm like all right wait is this transphobic like okay right you're right you're right to think that and i didn't want to share it if not but i couldn't find anything with with attitude they still love magazines in the uk yeah in fact they call them maggies they don't they don't but you know what they should because they give everything in a diminutive word i get enough uh trouble on these community podcasts for miss saying what british people say i i'm not very good at you were pranked by too many british people so we shouldn't trust them oh yes uh hoovergate the hoovergate i apologize britos i'm sorry they still call resident evil resi yeah and you're wrong for doing that yeah don't do that it's really funny though because

uh in our next news item, the Futurama announcement happened literally like 12 hours later, which feels sus to me where they're like, you don't have to watch this. But Disenchantment, the fourth order of episodes debuted on Netflix. And I've only seen one episode. What annoyed me, and maybe I didn't see it because Nina and I were both looking for it, is that there is no season three recap. Yeah, I really needed that.

I didn't see one either. Yeah, and a lot of things happen but here's the thing that first episode just resets the status quo so you really don't need it after you watch it but if you don't know what happened in season three you're gonna be confused as to why everybody is where they are it's something i i it feels like it's the netflixification of this type of series but i feel like every season they have to spend one or two episodes putting back together your three leads so they can have adventures together and i'm and every time i'm like really do we have to like can't can't we just have a fun adventure like and it doesn't need but but it's netflix it's you have to lead to uh bingeable stuff yeah i mean i'm a

broken record on this show and why I wish it was a little better. But yeah, it feels like they want their episodic cake, but they also want the serialized cake at the same time.

So there are serialized stories, but inevitably there's a status quo button like pushed and then it's very unsatisfying because none of the storytelling really mattered and everyone has to end up

back together again to start a new season. Yeah, that first episode, it seemed very light on the jokes because they were too busy trying to reset everything yeah yeah i was i kept waiting for like i don't know elfo i i was waiting for he's usually my favorite funny guy and he didn't have too much to do yet and actually his in the first episode i'll only spoil that but that was the most frustrating to me because he starts the episode in a cage escapes the cage and then there's a giant battle and at the end of that he's back in that

cage and i was like oh all right it was just a real cul-de-sac for elfo in this first episode i was kind of frustrated by the first episode i'm gonna watch the rest of them but it's like they were very cavalier about killing characters but now it's implied that they can just come back whenever they want yeah and i'm just like like well then i guess that didn't matter either i i wonder too i'm hoping i haven't watched the whole season but i believe i've heard bean's mermaid girlfriend comes back which that was one of my favorite parts of the part three it would have been uh better for me if they didn't cop out at the end well that's why i'm hoping if she comes back that we can just forget about that whole like was it a dream thing which really like scaled back this you know interesting thing about having you know i don't think they've had openly like queer lead

characters in any grading show before not as a non-joke not yes not as a yes exactly like every everybody's gay is a joke for like i mean you can see Lenny and Carl as, you know, not straight characters, but it's a joke. It's not so much represented. It's wouldn't it be funny if, that kind of a joke. But yes, so that's happening on Netflix now. No news as to whether or not they're making more. I don't know. It's Futurama timing, like you said.

Very suspect. or not they're making more i don't know i like futurama timing like you said very suspect it makes me feel like just like how the timing of it felt like it was to get a john dimaggio it also felt like it was graining's production company going like hey you know what i can work on this guys and take most of the people who work on disenchantment with me yeah and if you don't want to do a part five then we won't do it i I guess like, I don't think that Disenchantment, no, it's not. Oh, I guess it is. I thought, so the Curiosity Company is Matt Groening's production company. They are behind Disenchantment.

They just changed their name. Okay. So now they're the Yululu Company. So I thought they were different production studios, but no. So maybe they would just like move the machinery to make Futurama now. I could see that in that same building that we did get to walk through in the former Bongo Comics office in Santa Monica. What did I say? Man, one of these days we'll be able to see Josh in person again.

He was so nice. We only got a little bit of his time that day. And maybe he'll get to be there next time. Yeah. He recognized your name as do a lot of simpsons writers uh let's move on to uh stupid news in this little stupid category as i call it uh this is something that we don't normally report on because it frustrates us in fact it was going to be the topic of our live show but we never had our live show for for some

reason i forget what it was but uh there's been a lot on the internet lately about false flags. Simpson predicted things about the Super Bowl and the Canadian trucker blockade. Henry, what's going on here? I mean, it was just people sharing things. There's some joke in a season 20s episode where Homer has like go Bengals or like a Bengals score on his stomach. And people said, that simpsons predicting what the score of the super bowl was and like in the context of that episode the bangles

are not in the super bowl it's not about that and then yes some people used the scenes of homer and bart driving the automated truck in that uh in the the big red episode as a way of saying like yeah this is them predicting all the trucker it was also like a simpsons predicted it fake out that seemed to to side with the uh the the asshole truckers in canada no part of that episode was pro trucker actually in a way that i thought was kind of stupid because it's like well they're all lazy and they want the the trucks to drive themselves like any union yep all unions are evil yeah but I it so yeah, I just I feel like yeah We just needed to solve each time I go in there

There were three things in the news and people said Simpsons predicted it they did there of their Yeah, it's just like when someone like drew q and nine stuff over key art of groundskeeper Willie and saying, you know, they predicted the QAnon shaman. Yeah, we don't yeah Yes, so we probably won't be commenting on any of those anymore. And Nina is safe. Yeah, don't worry about me. Ottawa is very far away from Vancouver. Just check on Google Maps.

It's one of four cities in Canada. I think there are almost five now, but she's far away from that one. Also, Bob does not live in Canada. I do not. Not yet. I am here in Berkeley. So we have other cartoon related news about our little favorite green little freak, Gumby. Yeah.

And that's, oh, sorry, Henry. Go ahead. Oh, I would just say I tacked on some other news just because like, well, we did cover a lot of these things in What a Cartoon, so may as well have updates on it. Yeah. A lot of stuff has been happening cartoon announcement wise. It's been kind of crazy between talk to the audiences and yeah, 20th Century Fox TV bought gumby it's a horrible mistake in my opinion but they're gonna make gumby and nfts which i think is like well fine do that with him the most fun thing to do with gumby exists on

twitter for free it's the gumby screenshots account yeah yeah uh there's even if they tried to make those nfts creepy they wouldn't be half as creepy as any like one cell or you know one photo one yeah from any gumby yeah but yeah like you're not going to make gumby work gumby didn't work in the late 80s gumby didn't work for the 1995 movie it was always the the uh the appeal was that of it was it was like a creepy thing made by a rank amateur and even he would say like i don't know how i ended up making gumby i mean go back to our what a cartoon episode he was an experimental filmmaker who fell into children's programming and that was the only thing that he was allowed to do our cloaky yeah my my reaction to this news was the grumpy screenshots account avatar right the gumby staring off into the middle distance

yeah the the the gumby news too i i was curious about it because when we did it, you had mentioned the Cloakie family still owns it, but his son had passed away as well. And it's like, well, I feel like some giant company is going to buy Gumby at that point. As a recognizable IP from the past that was not owned by a giant company, some giant company is going to buy it. The reasoning of it being 20th TV was the most interesting to me because it's like, past that was not owned by a giant company some giant company is going to buy it the reasoning of it being 20th tv was the most interesting to me because it's like i thought 20th tv got all their stuff bought in the disney thing like they don't own any of the stuff that they used to own

on tv so they've started buying things that were open because they still want to make new stuff which is just so weird to me and gumby was one of their biggies god i mean the only value i mean like the only value of gumby is kitsch and they spent that kitsch buck in 1988 when they made a bunch of new episodes yeah yeah that was our parents cared about gumby and gave it to us we don't care about gumby and our generation doesn't want to pass along to our kids no one remembers like oh what was that hilarious gumby episode or like that great joke from Gumby? Nobody is ever talking about these things. I appreciate the artistry and I love stop motion, but it is like just too wholesome.

And go back to our What Occurred in an episode. It stopped being creepy after the first like year and a half. And I love the early creepy Gumby shorts where he's like living in a toy hellscape and things are exactly and things are trying to kill him constantly. Also, when they say it's going to be reimagined, like that says to me, it won't even be stop motion, which is the entire magic of Gumby. If Gumby CGI, what? Why even bother? Like, I know why you bother, because if you made a new thing that CGI who would give a crap? You might give a crap if it's Gumby. Looks like he's on the moon again.

That's my favorite quote from Gumby. Okay, we're going to move on now to other cartoons that are worth bringing back. So Beavis and Butthead, we knew they were coming back, but they're not coming to Comedy Central as planned. They're coming to Paramount Plus, the streaming network with the worst interface I've ever struggled with. But I will keep it around because there's going to be a new movie called Do the Universe. And there's going to be two new seasons coming direct to Paramount+. And I'm excited about this because, you know, Mike Judge is in his 60s now. And I want to see what his new vision for Beefers and Butthead are.

From what I hear, there are teases of artwork in which they are older i do not think that is the premise of the series and i think people were taking that tease a bit too literally i think that's a fake out too yeah and i'm looking forward to too because uh this this is public information on their linkedin but uh simpson's super director one of our favorites suzy deeter is directing on directing on this Beavis and Butthead series. And I mean, we covered the 2011 series, and I feel like it's going to have the same premise in that they never got older. They're just commenting on the world as it changed for us.

So there is no history. Like, Beavis and Butthead should have been born in 1979. Beavis and Butthead are like 43 years old, if you follow the timeline, which you shouldn't. That was part of just like a giant bonanza of Paramount Plus announcements. That was just the most interesting one. Like they also were like, oh, there's going to be a SpongeBob like cinematic universe. Like they say they're planning like two SpongeBob related films that will then lead to a tentpole SpongeBob film. And like all this happened after Steven Hillenburg died.

It sucks. Of of course I hate I hate hearing about this no you know while I'm here I want to see how bad this Paramount Plus interface is but I keep hearing you'll have to see it on my TV I mean I think we have the same like uh by here I mean in Berkeley in the U.S. okay okay well uh I think when we're watching Twin Peaks together uh I was like oh it crashed again it again. It crashed. Hold on. I'm 10 minutes behind. It crashed. Oh, wait. Can you pause?

It crashed for me. So that was my experience. And that's where all the South Park's moving to as well in four years. They also announced that, that they're not going to let HBO Max keep all the South Park. All of South Park is moving to Paramount Plus? Jesus. Yep. By 2024.

It'll be in the international Paramount Plus by the end of this year, I think. But yeah. But Matt and Trace will get to keep all their HBO Max money then. Oh yeah. They, again, there was, Forbes did a list of the richest entertainers or highest paid entertainers the last year. Matt and Trace are like number four. And the only reason Bruce Springsteen is number one is because he sold his entire catalog

for like $500 million last year. Oh my God. Which also I'm like, why would you do that, Bruce Springsteen? Like, I guess he knows the end is coming. is because he sold his entire catalog for like 500 million dollars last year oh my god which also i'm like why would you do that bruce springsteen like i guess he knows the end is coming i guess you know did obama tell him something secret he's spending all that time on like yachts with obama he doesn't have time to count his money anymore but oh he's a podcaster too of course remember and that's where the real money is not in bruce springsteen songs and podcasting uh so moving on this came out and i find it baffling but uh yes there was a movie trailer for the new rescue rangers movie

by the lonely island and in your notes henry you say it's something else and i agree and i don't know if that's something is something i want to see but i appreciate uh just the sheer ambition of pulling in all of these characters but what i don't like about it is the fake 2D animation does not look good. And this is Disney. They could have spent money on it. If you're going to include Roger Rabbit in your thing, spend Roger Rabbit money. Wow. Yes.

Yeah, they're not going to do that. Though Roger Rabbit in his one little second, he looks to be just hand drawn. It's but yeah, it's all the the principal rescue rangers are 3D and then cel shaded, which, you know, looks fine in a video game. But in a movie, you can see the the you can see the the seams a bit more. But yeah, I well, I was also interested in it because I know why I believe Nina isn't aren't the rescue rangers your favorite of the Disney afternoon characters? I think so i i have not seen this trailer though even though i love rescue rangers

and the lonely island i rarely watch trailers that's why and also since i love those two things i'm not sure if i want to watch this trailer it will spoil a lot of the movie for you yeah i don't want spoilers i mean maybe the point of the trailer is to be absurd but i thought the premise is absurd because it's pretending the rescue rangers were like a famous cartoon not just like one group of 65 episodes that were dumped across one year and then forgotten about as they move on to darkwing duck or sorry tailspin yeah yeah we uh you know it's also funny rescue rangers the only disney afternoon when we haven't covered yet on what a cartoon you're there you're our guests i'm calling it now sure uh you know okay there's there's reasons to uh not look forward to it i guess also as well because i feel bad for animation people

who never get directing gigs at disney because they go to people who worked on fucking snl like it doesn't seem doesn't seem fair to all the people who work hard in the actual animation industry you know what i don't like that i have to have an opinion on Seth Rogen now. Before I was like, I don't like him that much, but you know what? It's harmless. Now he's producing everything and I have to think about that guy. You better like his TMNT he's going to do. Oh, good.

Yeah. No, I mean, that's what's frustrating that there was a really good DuckTales show that felt like the launching pad for an entire rebooted universe of this stuff. And then it feels like famous people who are funny. I love John Mulaney. I love Lonely Island. They're great. They're funny.

But it's like they got to have the meetings. They said, hey, throw away whatever the crap the animators were doing. We have an idea and we're going to do it. But on the plus side, Rescue Rangersangers the director is akiva from lonely island he just came off directing on the last season of i think you should leave like he's really funny i was just watching again the i've told you before it's actually good the michael bolton valentine's day special like actually is good and akiva directed that it's all these people i like but there is something about that is feels a little wrong to

me that one they take this job from animation people and two a lot of the jokes seem to be about commenting on the animation industry which i'm like but you guys are outsiders who stole this job from animators and now you're saying you ever notice how animation looks like this it's like you guys work on snl you know like yeah you're not cartoon people i mean I do respect a lot of people associated with it and maybe I'll check it out. But yeah, I'm with you. And I wish it's on Disney Plus. You don't pay extra for it anyway. I heard you have to watch it or they take it away.

Yeah. Hey, that's why I watched all a book of Boba Fett. It's it's two shows in one. Yes. So moving on in and less fun news. This hit Cartoon Brew not too long ago, but Daria writer Andy Bernstein passed away. And we have not done a Talking Daria miniseries yet because our listeners are cowards. No, I'm kidding.

We will get around to talking more about Daria because I love the show. But she was a writer of one. She wrote some of the best episodes of the show. She was there to help develop the series. And I found out that in the 80s and early 90s, she was a big part of alternative comics. And she did the first cover for the magazine Drawn and Quarterly, which is a famous comics magazine. That's a great person to work on effed up cartoons on MTV in the 90s then. Absolutely.

In fact, I think she started really within the New York MTV Nickelodeon ecosystem with Nickelodeon magazine because she did their comic section and she pulled in a lot of like sicko underground comic artists to do comics for Nickelodeon magazine but other things I see she's credited for are things that aren't good like video power the cartoon the like acclaim licensed video game character cartoon hey you know it was a payday for yes yes that was one of our first interviews with uh on the patreon was with that paul provenzano who uh you know produced all the uh claim simpsons games and then i went to fox and worked on those simpsons games and his first job was video power as well. That's right. That's how he crossed over from marketing into producing.

And she was also a writer on Welcome Freshman. So that's where she was entering the Nickelodeon MTV ecosystem in New York. And yeah, she was a big part of Daria. She wrote the first Daria book, The Daria Diaries, which I have. And yeah, I think a big part of her career was her saying women are often pigeonholed in animation,

which is exactly what she was. Even though she really enjoyed Daria, she was a big part of MTV's Downtown, that series as well. I love that show. Yeah, I love that. It was one of those things where you're sad that you only find out this person worked on all this great stuff. For me, this person who worked on all this stuff you love, you didn't know their name until after they passed away which is sad yeah i think i believe i read that she wrote a lot of the like key darry episodes

including usually the ones with like darian trent kind of stories yes it's always felt very real to me like it felt like a very real capturing of how it would feel when you're a teenager with a crush on a cool older sibling of a friend of yours. She wrote a lot of great episodes. One of my favorites is Road Warrior in which Daria goes on a road trip with Jane and Trent. Oh, that's so good. And there's lots of awkward moments there. I love that one because it's like, am I cool enough to be on this trip? I don't think so.

I had those moments as a teen. Yeah. But I really want to do more Daria episodes and Duckman too. All the D shows. Well, that's the problem. It usually comes down Daria episodes and Duckman to all the D shows. Well, that's the problem. It usually comes down to Daria and Duckman. And who knows when that next poll comes, which of the glasses-wearing 90s sarcastic characters will win. One is angrier and one is more passive-aggressive.

So you decide at home. I'm team Duckman. You're more of a Daria figure to me. I never got into Dario. Dario? Dario? Dario Argento. D me i i never got into dario dario dario i never got into daria i i watched some episodes when i was a teenager but i don't know i just uh couldn't really get into it well we'll watch some daria and we'll change your mind okay you sound just like her

uh whatever exactly that's what she says That's her favorite catchphrase. Daria's favorite catchphrase is woozle wuzzle. If anyone needs me, I'll be in my room. Actually, Daria never had a catchphrase. Yeah, it's true. Except for like when she would own a normie and the music would go la la la la la. It's more of a smirk was her catchphrase. Exactly.

I liked her dad. I remember finding her dad funny. She was too cool for a catchphrase. Now, this is my corner why I have a nervous breakdown because every six months on Twitter, here we go. Now, Nina had to hear me complain about this in person. So every six months on Twitter, somebody gets 400,000 retweets and like a congressional medal of honor for tweeting out this misinformation that we talked about on our Toy Story 2 podcast

like 18 months ago. And maybe you didn't hear that podcast, but the false story is this. out this misinformation that we talked about on our toy story 2 podcast like 18 months ago and maybe you didn't hear that podcast but the false story is this did you know that toy story 2 the movie we all love was almost thrown away it was almost accidentally deleted and some person saved it and you know great that's a great story that is disney propaganda and the actual story is much darker and i will restate it here so you could tell all your friends and like i said you will ruin any party if you tell this at your parties because people love telling this story.

But the story is Disney and Pixar did not get along. They gave Pixar a terrible contract. They were making a Toy Story 2 without Pixar. That movie was being made by people who made the Toy Story CD-ROM games. That is the movie

that almost got deleted. After that movie was saved, Pixar came in immediately after Bugs Life Press and they thought that movie was so bad they needed to save Toy Story and make their own. So the movie that was thrown away was a movie that never would have been released in the first place. So that is the true bad story. And the moral of the story is a company can just throw away all of your work if they want to. It's not as fun as like,ay somebody saved the day yeah i i

shut up shut up no i we don't want to hear it that's what all the haters say no i uh bob i appreciate that you remove the scales from my eyes as well on this because i've been one of those people i was also one sorry before i did the research i'm like what this this information is right here and the thing is i'm gonna my heart rate is rising right now the thing is when I would respond to people with that article so the article that I talked about in that what a cartoon movie episode is like well here's what happened here's quotes on the record and I would you know reply to people with that article saying well here's what really happened and their takeaway was like uh I read the article actually I think Pixar still made that movie so the story is so good they want to believe Pixar made the movie I I don't uh Actually, I think Pixar still made that movie. So the story is so good.

They want to believe Pixar made the movie. I don't blame them because the messaging was so good on Disney's part. They don't want you to remember that they were at odds with Pixar for the first almost decade of their existence. Yeah, I get why people want to believe the lie or like, or the myth, like print the myth is famously said in the man who shot Liberty Valance. But yeah, what bugs me about it is I think people even rejected when you share with them, no, here's the real timeline. Here's the source article. And they reject that, I think, because they want to believe it for good reasons because you know the moral of the story in the myth version is this was saved by you know underappreciated woman

at pixar which is full of underappreciated women so this uplifts a a woman who did a great job who still works on pixar films to this day uh galen sussman yeah it came out because she's a producer on the new buzz lightyear movie yeah and and secondly like she did it while working from home on maternity leave so it's like a pro maternity leave pro work from home kind of story so you can see why people are sharing now like so or also just people like a funny story always back up your work always back it up but it's like yes it when the truth you know is well they deleted all that stuff anyway and and this story of of sussman working very hard to like and i drove it back over the place i said here it is we reclaimed it all that stuff if then at the end of the story is just a toilet flushing

all of that way again that it's not a fun story people don't want to know that and i mean pixar people were overseeing this process but they were so busy on a bug's life and it was literally being made across the like railroad tracks from pixar in a different studio that was formed by disney but yeah it's it's a it's a sad story but i i want people to know the actual truth because it is covering up a lot of disney's misdeeds and their mistreatment of pixar before they absorbed it like they absorb everything and uh yeah so let everyone know the truth about that uh that the toy story 2 that was deleted was the bad version that never got made and no part of it was salvaged uh in the article it says we had to throw away almost everything maybe they were able to keep so much that they

were able to release the movie one month earlier than you know they originally did but it based on what they're saying in the interviews it sounds like they couldn't salvage anything of that original project they could say it's like well the character models pretty much stayed the same like that's but yeah that's it i i also just hate that it goes viral every time like people don't go like i read this six months ago yeah it's such a softball thing like aren't you constantly online always reading this story yeah i suppose i suppose people aren't as online as us i guess no no but i mean i don't blame you in fact if you go to the toy story 2 dvd or blu-ray or disney extras they tell the story with like uh in an animated short they make like an animatic or whatever and they don't tell the real story yeah the real story

eventually came out but they're telling the like oh no pixar was making toy story 2 this happened and then pixar saved it and then they finished toy story 2 they're not telling the actual story that happened and it's so confusing that i don't blame people for not understanding why there were two different versions of the movie. That Disney and Pixar were different companies. It's just all been lost to time. But there. That's one thing that makes me furious. And I'm seeing lots of professionals about it.

This is your Han Sprungfeld. It really is. It really is. You would have told everyone. And the sniper would have taken me out. Exactly. We're lucky we have

the windows, the blinds closed so the Disney sniper can't take Bob out. It's more like if Lisa told everyone about Hans Sprungfeld and people were still like,

actually, I think he was, he wasn't a murderous pirate. Yeah, I think you're wrong about that. I'm not wrong. Look at this quote. I think you're wrong. I read all that.

I read it all too, Bob, and I think you're still wrong. Hey's like well i'm wrong look at this quote i think you're wrong i read all that i read it all too bob and i think you're still yeah hey that's uh that's fake news is what i'll say you can use facts to prove anything it is true uh but yes uh please excuse my little rant there but uh it's gonna happen again in like six months did you know yeah it's the new uh it's the new like did you know nobody's ever died in disneyland thing like that was uh our pal jason sheridan yeah or like oh walt disney's head is frozen it's the new like did you know nobody's ever died in disneyland thing like that was uh our pal jason sheridan yeah or like oh walt is his head is frozen it's one of those urban legends that if i hear it at a gathering i have to like calm myself down and say you know don't correct anyone just let them believe this it's going to be fine do people claim that no one's ever died disneyland

that's one of the things yeah that the urban legend was that they took the person if you are about to die at disneyland they take your body off the premises so you officially die or are uh said to be dead there which it's not true people have been decapitated and rides that sounds crazy and i want people to know i'm sorry if you're annoyed that i went over this but this is why i'm a podcaster yes this obsession with uh details facts. I cannot let these lies slip through, especially if they're corporate propaganda. You know, the most angry I got on a thing like that at a party was when somebody, this is when the Spider-Man 2 had just come out and somebody said Harry Osborn was going to become the Hobgoblin like he was in the comics.

And I just had to go like, no, Harry Osborn becomes the Green Goblin. The Hobgoblin was he was in the comics and i just had to go like no harry osborn becomes the green goblin the hobgoblin was jason mackindale and at the time that was the only hobgoblin they were they then retroactively made it it had been ned leeds and then before that what you know me and bob also have an april no may what a cartoon that is going to cover why we are so uh pedantic about these things oh absolutely absolutely i will Absolutely. I will say, though, whenever we're at a party and Bob hears bad information about cartoons, he doesn't go over to correct people.

Even when they're talking to him and they bring up bad information, he doesn't correct them. He's very polite about that. I just break a few windows on the way out. You just complain about it after the fact. Can you believe that? Yeah, Bob is not that guy at the party exactly

thank you thank you for vouching for me i don't want people to think this is what you rant about at gatherings no i only rant about it to you uh i have to hear about it as you humor me yes yes bob uh did pixar didn't make that version of toy story 2 you're right that's that's marriage for you it is uh thank you for being supportive. Moving on to news about us. So in case you missed our big post about it, a free post on the Patreon, starting with the beginning of March, we are going to be doing seasons three and season 13 alternating, just like we did with two and 12. So yes, we are doing a season three revisit.

And yes, we are starting with Stark Raving Dead, the missing episode. We are. Yes. It's where we next week is Treehouse 13 week after that is stark raving dead we're not we're not going by the disney plus order i mean it would be obviously you know content warnings and we we don't blame you if you don't want to hear about you know michael jackson and his crimes i i get it. Yeah. But it's one of the most like important and also like newsworthy Simpsons episodes of the last five years. So absolutely.

And we're doing it with the context of the 2019 events and documentary and everything like that. And we have a great guest on it as well. Oh, yes. And if you're wondering, people have asked me, you know, where do I find this? You know, it's not a Disney plus, you know, you can always Google for a pirate stream of it. Also, this DVD set came out in 2003. So they made tens of millions of them.

Check out your half price books. Check out even your library. They might have a copy. But these DVDs are well circulated. They weren't like printed in 2015 or whatever in very limited amounts. Yeah, you can still find that despite having a band episode, uh, you can find them for a very reasonable rate on eBay right now,

at least, at least in the United States territories. I can't speak for other territories, but, uh, but moving on to our schedule of content coming up. So, uh,

for what a cartoon in March, we're starting off the month with berserk the 1997 adaptation of kintaro miura's famous manga he recently passed away in 2021 and thanks to our patron devin who's on the episode we're covering episode two band of the hawk and now henry and i are really uh i'm rereading the manga i think you're reading it for the first time yeah for the first time i'm in uh volume three of the giant books, which I believe puts me in normal collection volume 12 or 11, I think. I'm digging through them.

It's really great. It's one of those things just like, you'll hear me say this on the podcast, but it's one of those things just like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure that once I finally experienced it, I then noticed how every video game I ever played of the last 30 years was inspired by it. And that episode ended up being two and a half hours long. Yes. Unexpectedly. Devin was a lot of fun.

Yes. That was a good one. So thanks again to Devin. Look forward to us covering Berserk very soon. And so for $5 and up patrons, as always, we have a regular episode of Talking Futurama and Talking of the Hill so the second Monday of the month is going to be the Talking Futurama episode I dated a robot full of commentary about Napster

and Lucy Liu right after Charlie's Angels the first movie yeah the Napster talk we had a good time a good long chat about Napster that was fun to remember our early days of Napster and how special it was. And the last Friday of the month is going to be the Talking of the Hill episode

all about season two's Three Days of the Condo, a fun trip to Mexico with some interesting commentary on immigration. Yeah, yeah. Very well, I guess, you know, America hasn't updated its hate of immigrants in the last 30 years, so it works about the same. And our What a Cartoon

movie for March is going to be Pinocchio. Pinocchio. Because you voted for it and Nina and I just did a casual watch of it. Nina, how'd you feel about Pinocchio? It was my first time watching it and it was okay. Okay.

Really amazing animation for sure, but I don't know. It was weird pacing. Story-wise, it is very interesting style of storytelling. What I took away from it is that Charles Martin, is it Martinette?

I always ask you this question. Yeah, yeah. I feel like he took Luigi's voice from Geppetto because like, oh, Pinocchio, we're going to make you a real boy.

Mario. I don't want to spoil all my thoughts. I did a casual rewatch on it too. And yeah, it's, I forgot how many

multiple times in it they're just like well how do we get to the next act well a magic thing appears yeah like moves them to the next thing it's more about like uh interesting set pieces than uh storytelling that makes sense oh i mean to even see it from i think i'm gonna rewatch or give a watch to snow white as well white before and just to see like how much they grew technique and and and ability wise in feature animation from snow white to pinocchio like to know that is their second feature like that is amazing and then war were declared yeah i and things changed also now i realize like oh jupetto with his house full of toys and and things that is his childless life i uh well i i feel more

in touch with jppetto than i ever did do you do you dance around with them uh you know i should pick up my lupin figure sometime and dance i'll make him and spider-man dance at the same time it's oh go ahead i will say whenever there's like a major transformation of a character at the end of a disney animated film i'm always like oh i liked it before me that's how i thought about pinocchio it was a downgrade and i will say i'll call nina out for falling asleep during movies which she did during pinocchio but the beginning of the movie like there's 20 minutes of like i'm so tired let's fall asleep and it's like it's like 15 minutes of them getting cozy in bed i'm like wow if i was in movie theater i

would fall asleep we walked like over 20 000 steps that day in the sun and we had a lot of beer it's true that man figaro is the cutest kitty cat in the world though i love that i forgot how well he's animated that see we're so excited to talk about this little wooden boy i love him i'm least interested in him of all of them actually like lampwick's a badass i love that lampwick yeah so with pinocchio or what a cartoon movie about, if you're on the $5 level or on the free feed, you'll hear our preview of that podcast. But if you're on the $10 and up feed, you'll get to hear the entire thing. It's probably going to be like four or five hours as normal.

So if you want to hear that and the rest of the What a Cartoon Movie catalog over three years worth at this point, check out that $10 level. It's totally worth it. And yes, we have also a ton of cool guests coming up on the coming weeks of podcast we're working uh way ahead so please be on the lookout for so many cool guests coming up in fact many people i still need to ask and i hope they say yes so uh no promises yet but hey anything can happen and then we've recorded the march folks are all really cool i think you're gonna like them oh and also you know the april a Cartoon movie. We're going back to a yes-no poll on this one.

Right. I'm sorry I skipped over that because, yes, because of his appearance in the Rescue Rangers movie, we are finally, with your permission, going to cover Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It's been a long time coming. I think we were afraid of just the scope of the podcast. It may be our first six hour podcast i don't i can't make any promises but it's going to be a yes no vote on whether or not you want us to finally cover roger rabbit but it's about damn time i think yeah you know we we covered space jam

we covered cool world it's time to cover the film it wouldn't exist without it and like that that led to the new boom in animation that you know defined our childhoods the best childhoods ours yeah of course yes uh and yeah i i can't wait to cover roger rabbit there's uh eight million things to talk about with it i think we also in like eight different podcasts have talked about like oh this person who created say capital critters they were writing the roger rabbit sequel that never got made or this co-director of lion king was going to direct roger rabbit there's already a lot of roger rabbit info in the bonkers podcast yeah yeah and uh and yes it seems like we're the the rescue rangers movie

seems to be positioning himself itself as roger rabbit-y as well so which and seemingly it must have some like handshake deal with amblin to even do that and a couple other things that are in that trailer yeah yeah i guess they would need spielberg's approval because he's the one who executed roger rabbit you know it could be him just like oh you guys in lonely island are cool or my you know son who i put in charge of things he he likes you guys i'm not mad at michael eisner anymore yeah exactly we're We're all so old now. Who cares? Yeah. I still think you guys

should make Roger Rabbit like an annual thing. Like every year cover 15 minutes of the film. That sounds like a way to string our listeners along. So I like it. Moving on though,

this is when we talk about we've been playing and watching outside of, you know, doing homework for the podcast. So mine, not a lot to talk about because I'm playing the same stuff as last month. I'm praying uh playing breath of the wild i have uh

i have felled two of the four divine beasts which is two more than i ever did before so i've taken down two of those guys playing once trying to rise for the pc i've been playing with a few people in the discord a few nights that was fun so thanks if you were playing with me any of those nights and i got the first credit roll on that game which means you've just done the tutorial basically just like well this is like uh training wheels mode so now it's hard mode wait first credit roll yes it's like a japanese game where it's like well here's the baby credit roll now play 400 more hours that's uh yeah i learned that the first uh when i beat monster hunter world the first beat i mean first credits roll uh i was like bob i got the credits and that's that's when i found out like oh my journey was only beginning yes now you're on the high rank so not to skip ahead too much

but it's kind of like drive my car then yes exactly yes exactly we'll talk about it soon and then uh so elden ring as of this recording comes out in a few days uh nina by no sorry it's total coincidence nina that nina leaves the same night Elden Ring comes out. I did not plan this at all, but I have that pre-ordered on PS5. Obviously, big Souls fan. This is the first one of these I'm not covering in the press. You know, it's cool to get early access, but it's also fun to play when people actually are online and you have some sort of knowledge base to access when it comes to, I'm stuck.

What do I do? Or like, can someone help me? And also, you're not doing it up against an embargo. That too. And giving up your weekend. How hard all those embargoed games, having to review them, and even when I was loving them, I was just like, boy,

I feel some anger that my entire weekend has been erased by this thing and I'm not getting paid extra for it. Well, Bob, how about while you play Elden Ring, I'll play Horizon Forbidden West and we won't talk for a week yeah okay deal tell me all about alloy although she is in monster hunter world oh really yes yes it's not surprising yeah there's what there's an aloy skin and like uh some some of the robot-y dudes yeah i think what you can turn your you can turn your little kitty into one of the robots in Monster Hunter World Oh cool. Yeah, you know I played the first one

I am looking forward to it, but it just it's coming out at a time I was like I just can't I I got it I got to clean the plate a table for for Elden Ring this this is video game chat But it's funny that the first of the first Horizon Zero Dawn game that came out like the same day or week as Breath of the Wild This one is coming out the same day or week as breath of the wild this one is coming out the same day or week as um elven ring yeah so weird timing why are they doing that i remember people comparing the two games a lot when it came out breath of the wild horizon it's impossible not to i mean like and horizon looks so good and it plays i i played the first one i i thought it played really well too but i i still uh i it

could just be i'm a nintendo simp but i i preferred breath of the wild at that time not that it's a competition oh if i could plug something i've done oh yes fan gamer um who i work for we are releasing horizon merch and the first wave um everything is done by me so far pin set uh aloy plush and a t-shirt with a tall neck on it now see i i don't like a horizon zero dawn as much as breath of the wild but i do like the merch more than breath of the wild merch it's pretty cool henry did you see the tall neck lego set that's coming out no it's really cool it does sound cool i don't really i don't buy lego sets like the only one i have is the double decker couch from Lego movie because it's like small and other way. But I'm kind of tempted to get the tall neck.

You know, if I had a bigger space to put it, I was the one that tempted me the most was a full Daily Bugle, like a five story tall Daily Bugle. They came with like two dozen Spider-Man figures that related figures that all battle around the daily. You know, i regret not buying the simpsons house lego set and i could have bought it i could have afforded it but at the same time i don't know where it would have exactly i'm like where i put it once it's built like the building plan is fun but then it's like well what do i do with this it's just going to collect dust i really want that seinfeld set too yeah it's really cool yeah our pal dan hausen built that seinfeld set on a video i was like wow that looks so neat man but yeah

Elden Ring on PS5 I can't wait to play it uh I mean I didn't like Sekiro I respect it but the last Souls game for me was Dark Souls 3 and that was six years ago so I can't wait to play another Souls game and moving on to what we've been watching so Nina can comment on these because we watch things together that's right and the first one was a movie I didn't enjoy that much but I know Nina likes it uh Doctor Strange and for me this was not a bad movie but I don't like origin stories especially when they take up an entire movie and that's kind of what this was and I was waiting for them to get to the strange factory for a long time well I wanted to show it to you because we just watched Darkman together that's a Sam Raimi film and i just with some other friends of mine i watched drag me to hell another ramey film which was um good goofy fun so i wanted to show uh bob dr

strange i don't want to re-watch it again just to like prepare for the next dr strange film which ramey is doing yeah i'm looking forward to that even uh they that multiverse of madness now after the spider-man movie i feel like they're really uh can't the rumors are a lot of cameos coming our way oh really i i like i said i don't watch trailers very often i did watch this one though because i figured i'll probably see like end up seeing it eventually even if i try to avoid it but i really hope they let him keep his style because i can't really tell from the trailer how raimy it is it's hard to tell that's the you know some guys i uh james gunn i think did maintain his style pretty well but there's other directors who like uh like the original director of dr strange

two who directed dr strange one he quit the thing because he was like oh i it seemed like he couldn't keep his vision of dr strange like he and then sam ramey is the second director of the doctor strange 2 the the sequel oh and uh bob asked me if uh the origin is the same in the comics for doctor strange and i couldn't answer that it's relatively the same i mean an accident that breaks his hands uh though he's an alcoholic in the comic i don't think he was like drunk drunk i don't think he was he was he was texting and driving oh he was he was in the comic he was drunk driving i don't think he was he was he was texting and driving oh he was he was in the comic he was drunk driving i believe so yes okay i believe he has a history of alcoholism uh yeah no i mean so it was good uh in some ways i like some of the set pieces but i realize

my expectations for a movie are different than what marvel movies provide because this movie was like if you watch this you can now watch other things that will follow me i like to have a like complete experience within a movie, but this is part of the Marvel subscription plan where it's like, well, now you know who he is. You can see him in other things, and you will. Doctor Strange's job is to be an accessory to other heroes usually. I love the character Doctor Strange.

He's a Ditko creation, one of my faves. But he usually, to me, my favorite Doctor Strange comic books are when he is part of a group dynamic. The Venture Brothers parodied it perfectly. So he's like, just call Dr. O. He's magic. That's the job for Doctor Strange. It's exactly what they did with, sorry, it's what they did with him in No Way Home.

I think it hurts Strange in that I like Dr. Orpheus more when he's the parody. He's more fun. But you know what? I'm going to see the second movie because of Raimi. And so I finally saw Streets of Fire with Nina, a movie that I believe came out the same day as like Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. So it made no money, but it was much more popular in Japan. So it had a big influence on like games and other media and anime and things like that.

It was fun. And the movie, the story is very, very light. But the action was fun. And I enjoyed seeing Rick Moranis as an assertive nerd and not a passive nerd. He was like a tough guy nerd. Yeah. And I enjoyed seeing a young, smooth Willem Dafoe. Oh, he's so smooth, but no less creepy, man.

Yeah. The shirtless leather overalls look very scary it really is so yeah streets of fire it's like a slim 90 minutes it's great it's great i can see why too the style of it just so permeated like influence people uh in a lot of japanese game developers and yeah when i i didn't watch this film for the longest time, and it was actually like, I'd say I think it was 2009 or 10. I went to the Midnight's for Maniacs film festival thing they would do at the Castor Theater, which is now not a thing anymore. It was bought by apes. Anyway, the Castor Theater, they did it, and the guy, you know, it wasn't the film, but the guy also was the programmer would show these great trailers.

Streets of Fire has one of the greatest trailers ever. And once I saw it, I was like, how has I never heard of this? Especially the music. It's the Jim Steinman music I love. Absolutely. I love that music. Yeah, and I grew up thinking Rick Moranis was the biggest movie star because he was in all the early comedies I saw.

So it was fun to see him. It was like a second movie and a lot of fun, a lot of fun, you know, action scenes and a lot of great music. And when I went to Tokyo, that was the only place

I've seen a karaoke machine that could, that had Streets of Fire songs. I'm going to look next time for Tonight is What It Means to Be Young because that's on my Spotify liked list.

And Nina and I also watched the 2009 movie Dune directed by Duncan Jones. That's Davey Bowie's son, Duncan Jones. You mean Moon. What did I say? You got Dune on the brain. Whatever, Moon, Dune.

They're all the same. Yeah, I mean, I saw it before and I knew what it was about, which is kind of a spoilery twist, but I still enjoy it. It's fun, like melancholy body horror in sort of like a bottle style episode format. I had also seen it before, but since I showed Bob Sunshine recently, I wanted to then follow it up with Moon. And watching it after the pandemic really puts a a different feel to it yes he's like all isolated and talking to a robot yes voiced by kevin spacey which adds an extra sinister twist to it yeah uh it's totally worth seeing and it's like less than 90 minutes it's great it's really

good also benedict wong is in doctor strange and moon oh right okay uh who is the guy uh jesus christ uh the the larger vampire from what we do in the shadows uh british guy matt perry he's in moon too but you see him in benedict one at like in like footage where they're sitting far away at a table talking to the main character in moon and uh we just watched an episode of what we do in the shadows with benedict wong in it yes oh wait which who was he in it i can't remember he was the uh guy who brought the familiars back to life he was like a necromancer right uh right man sorry i i just watched the third season and again like i i love that show we finally finished the first season we were watching it uh before the pandemic started and then we haven't watched it

since so we finally wrapped that up and then then we started watching the second season. Guillermo is like my celebrity crush right now. I like the actor a lot. Yes. I've never seen anything else, but he's really good in that show. And we just saw in theaters, it's a three-hour movie. And it's called Drive My Car. And I didn't know what it was about. But it's a Japanese movie.

I believe the first Japanese film nominated for Best Picture. Is that correct? Yes, ever. Finally, Japan made a good movie yes it's about damn time yeah I I don't keep up much with uh with Japan's live action output uh for a while but it's it's been a long time since there was even like a nomination like the foreign language Oscar category uh for a Japanese film I think it's based on a Haruki Murakami short story. And I've never read his stuff, but I kind of vaguely know what kind of things he writes about.

And watching it, I'm like, yeah, this feels like a Haruki Murakami thing. I've read a few. I've read one full novel of his and a few of his short stories. And they're great. And I can also see why, yeah, it's... This is one of those things where I let other people ruin things for me and i know it's a problem i need to get over it but when i entered the games press uh people in the games press read uh three books it was uh ready player one and it was also the road and also i think i believe the wind-up bird chronicle right and those

are the only three books they could name that they read i understand that yeah but it's totally i totally understand but he's he's a cool and. And it's totally, I totally understand. But he's a cool, he's a really good writer. I gained a lot of appreciation for him where I read this article about why he, there was an interesting English language article about Japan's love for the Great Gatsby book and how he is, Murakami himself loves the Great Gatsby. And he said that to train himself as a writer he re like he did a fan translation of great scat of great gatsby i believe oh nice he wrote he wrote the fan sub yeah

uh no i mean i did like it i think i want to read some of his stuff but it's fun to see a movie that's just like oh a movie can just be people having long talky scenes and a movie can explore characters doesn't have to be anything related to genre and i kind of forgot that because everything is genre now and uh i really enjoyed it a lot of a lot of scenes of cars driving also the car was driven yes yeah it was it was nice seeing a very very slow introspective movie that gives you a lot to chew on and uh like i mentioned before this there's a credit roll like 40 minutes into the movie yeah it, it's like a 45 minute cold open. Yeah. That's interesting.

Yeah. I want to check this out. Yeah. It was just it was cool to watch after especially after I watched like while Bob was like getting ready in the apartment and stuff. Like sometimes I would like watch a movie and I watched Moulin Rouge for the first time ever. Even though I've had the soundtrack for a long time because there's a Beck song on there so I was very familiar with the song I was like I'm finally gonna watch this thing to put these songs into context and then I realized oh I don't need to know the context is this this movie is crazy it doesn't stop it's very hard to watch I didn't

like it oh man I look I agree with all those things except the not liking a part it made me like I think I had a hangover. Yeah. Like Bob looked up the Roger Ebert review later and Ebert seemed to like it. But all the things he was bringing up as a positive were negatives to us. Like it's being inside of an elevator with a circus. Yeah. Being trapped in an elevator with a circus.

Trapped. Yes. Yes. Trapped. And he says that's a good thing, I guess. But yeah, that's a good way to describe it. I don't think it's good. Yeah.

Well, I still like it. So, Drive My car was like the anti moulin rouge where like a shot would last for over a minute yeah and there's like no music almost no music yeah it was interesting yeah definitely check it out also way different than drive my car you saw this too henry you can comment on it because i know it's on your list uh smiling friends oh yeah i finally saw it and it actually reminds me of what it's not a kid's cartoon by any respect but it reminds me of what kids cartoons were in the 90s that i really enjoyed like right in snippy where it's like two characters with different personalities in a nightmare world and the episode ends on like a gut punch yeah and i think it's uh because i tweeted

about this but i think i've been watching a lot of kids cartoons and even the good ones they all have to end with people saying you know what I was wrong about this and I learned something and maybe we're the same you know there's always like a hug and a I'm sorry this one it's just like I love the gut punch endings and I love the characters and when I saw the trailer for this I thought it was the same sort of like

asset based animation where it's like we've drawn four things this character can do like in Aqua Teen and they're gonna do them no there is some glorious, some grotesque close ups. Oh, man. Some really great inspired pieces of animation, especially like in the Halloween episode, which is just the guy being chased by a monster for half of it. That is an intense episode. Yeah.

No, I love Smiling Friends. It makes me feel old that I was one of those people like i'm not gonna turn on adult swim to watch this i'll wait till it's on the streamer and it finally came to hbo max and yeah i mean also it's like mike from red letter media should just be a professional voice actor i think so he's he's i he him in the first episode i was like why isn't he in the whole series he's so funny i always say he should be the next voice of garfield i think he'd be perfect oh my god yeah yeah so right uh frank welker retired now but yeah and garfield should always have a gun to his head but but yeah the smiling friends i also loved how they i mean there's it's just so like mean like i miss but not like cruel

and especially like i i think my favorite might have been the hobbity one like the yeah with pym and mip like in pym and just pym is such the nicest person in the world i think he does never swear on this dirty filthy show he's a very like almost butter style character which i think helps the show from being too mean and yeah like i think uh i think it could be like a new rick and morty and it doesn't have the same like uh you know we're going to talk about your dark emotions kind of feeling of rick and morty it's just about like having fun and showing you fucked up things and drawings and things like that and also not about like dealing with depression or what i mean it sort of is that but not about like bojack horseman wallowing in

it it's kind of its own version of like, yeah, depression. Depression is just like feeling unhappy all the time. No, no, like montages with an indie song over it. Not yet. Yeah, not yet. And I also watched all of Saturday Morning All-Star Hits. I was a little bit late to that, but I really enjoyed it. I know Nina has watched a lot of it.

So no spoilers for Nina. Yeah, I'm two episodes away from watching the whole thing. I have to admit, after watching the first two episodes, I thought, well, this is it's pretty funny. But the premise is already kind of starting to wear thin. But then someone in the Discord told me it gets interesting after episode four. So I hung in there and I'm glad I did. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think I think it really helps that they switch it up.

I like the sketches pretty much like none of none of the parodies stick around long enough to get old i think i just didn't like randy uh but that was my least favorite part randy's so realistic so i've heard like if you were an awkward white guy i went to college you might you might be able to identify with randy i didn't go to college so i don't have that experience i've also never been a white guy oh well you know it's uh you know not worth writing home about in my opinion uh well as for me with playing did all the pikmin bloom as well i've been up to i'm here with my two postcard friends and in yeah we should do a mushroom challenge together we should i'm about to hit level 42 on pikmin bloom it's pretty insane how much stuff you get around berkeley

and pikmin bloom like i'm getting way more stuff than I do in Vancouver. So that's where we're kind of living in a cheat code here. Yeah, I'm in level, I'm almost at level 56. I'm working. I just got to plant some more. Oh no, I didn't even turn off my planting flowers this morning. That happens to me all the time. I actually reached level 43 as I was stepping into this building.

Oh wow, man, that's nice. Now you can get the postcard I sent you off. Other than that, I played, believe it or not, I played that South Park RPG, The Fractured Butthole. I beat it. I finished that game. Did you play the first one? I played it a little bit, but I was like, you know what? I'm going to just skip straight to the newer one.

Well, that one's more about superheroes, right? It's superheroes and gameplay. I heard there's a lot of gameplay improvements in the second one. i i played and like the first one i haven't played this one at all it's really good i really i mean every now and then there's still some modern south parky stuff in it that makes me uh grab my collar but the interesting thing in it is i feel like it feels like a joke about being overly sensitive but it's actually a thing i wish every video game did where it's like well okay what's your gender are you cis are you what's your sexuality and like the joke is mr mackie says like wow okay you're a cis you're a cis gay male all right well that's cool you know there's other

homos in town too or whatever i was like i but i was like wow that's cool that a game let you do that but it also felt like that was the joke that they were overcompensating or something. Is PC principal in this one? Oh, yes. Yeah. I guess he was invented at that point. Okay. There's a mini game of microaggressions in this as well.

Great, great. Yes. And there's a Black Lives Matter stuff in it. There's lots of stuff. But yeah, what I really, my biggest takeaway from it was, though, this is a video game made by people who who love video games like they know what a video game is i mean like trey parker's literally said he played earthbound in his youth and that was his youth in his i mean his late teens no that game came out when he was like 27 okay well then well still he played earthbound and uh and he this was kind of his earthbound he wanted

to make yeah when i played the the first south park game not the very first one the uh the other one was called again stick of truth yeah uh i i did think like oh they did a better job at parodying uh video games than the simpsons movie game did yes yeah that's the it really comes from a place of like these people really know games and i wish especially as I'm walking around the town and just seeing references everywhere. And I'm somebody who thinks of South Park, an episode of 2011 of South Park. I'm like, wow, what a recent episode of South Park. But it was full of references. I was like, oh, I get this.

I get this. I get this. Well, the Simpsons movie game was like, we don't have to make a good game. We can make fun of bad games. But South Park, from what I hear, it's like we can also make a good game yeah it's like cool mechanics if you like paper mario and stuff it's good at being one of those and i wish and exploring the city and all that stuff was really cool it's good at what paper mario stopped being 18 years ago that's true yes yeah bring back the old style it's been long enough and also it's only 20 hours so unlike

a paper mario game it doesn't uh last too long that is perfect and uh then i started up ratchet and clank rift apart uh because honestly i wanted to play a pretty story tube and it is a really pretty story tube you know those are fine i mean there's 10 of them they're all the same but they get prettier with every installment and i have no like i wasn't a jack and daxter fan uh sly cooper i fell off of after a few and they stopped making those ratchet and clank always pretty reliable yeah oh yeah and it's and again gorgeous looking and and yep just like bob waiting for that elden ring at the end of the week as for shows other than smiling friends we talked about and i also because we're doing south park i watched

a ton of old south park but i watched that peacemaker show pretty good pretty good i think uh john cena you know people are finally seeing that john cena is actually like might be the best uh wrestler actor he's a better wrestler actor than the rock rock's more famous and bob bastick but john cena there's john cena has a couple scenes in that they're just like are you thinking you're gonna get nominated for an emmy john cena oh really okay like a single tier kind of scene from John Cena. It's fun. It's a good little show.

And the opening, you should just watch it just to see the opening because the opening is really great. I watched all of the Book of Boba Fett. Yeah, it's all right. I recommend the We Hate Movies podcast miniseries about it because I love here. I mean, I'm not a Star Wars super fan or whatever. I think some of the movies are okay, but these are all like Star Wars nerds for the most part. And you can see their reasons

for why they're furious about their show. And I'm furious for a lot of those same reasons. I really am. Atlanta, I'm finally watching that show. I'm like six episodes in. It's really good. It's really, it's really good. And yeah, I also, animation wise,

that Cuphead show has debuted on Netflix. I'm three episodes in there. It's an 11 minute show. I actually barely played the Cuphead game, but it's not really about the Cuphead show has debuted on Netflix. I'm three episodes in there. It's an 11 minute show. I actually barely played the Cuphead game, but it's not really about the Cuphead like lore. It really is in stark contrast to Disenchantment. Every episode is just like a wacky adventure that has no bearing on the next episode.

It really is like a kind of throwback-y Splicer style show that's just a fun, a wacky rubber arm show and i think finally they're they're the dlc for the game is coming out oh yes yeah the final one yeah yeah uh and also you know it's on peacock classic iron chef og iron chef is on there which i've been watching a few of those like off of youtube uploads and this is finally like the only negative on them watching classic Iron Chef is it was filmed for TV like it can't be HD-ified. Yeah it's all like four by three on video. Which when it's supposed to be gorgeous food and then it's like grainy and it does hurt it a little bit.

I'm sure if I watch those now it'd be more interesting because it's like oh I've actually had some of this food before. Oh yes now I've I have much more of an expanded palate than I used to. I feel like Chopped took Iron Chef and enhanced it. Other than American Iron Chef, I never really watched any other of those baking competition shows or cooking competition shows. Oh, you should watch Chopped. It's fun.

Okay. Or you have to make the most out of very little. It's like you have dog food, green jello, and aspirin. Yeah, yeah. Well, I just, going back to Old Iron Chef, I just love the pageantry of it, just like the bigness of it also. You like to bite into a bell pepper?

Yeah, no, not so much that, but yeah. And it also, like, I remember the shock it was. I guess we'll talk about this in that Futurama episode too, but for a lot of Americans watching it for the first time, obviously, there was a lot of like those wacky Japanese things out of it. We're going to hear Dave Herman doing a great accent. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. But but also just seeing like them just kill an octopus live on screen. Like I was like shocking to see the time. Yes. Don't want to see that. And lastly, movie wise, i actually did watch movies for grown ups this month not just uh comic book movies i i watch power of the dog or the power of the dog which is on netflix and is like the the oscar front runner stars benedict cumberbatch and jesse

plemmons and kirsten dunst and it's really great like it is such a throwback of an Oscar movie. Like it is a period drama about, about gorgeous settings and big actor moments and people going like, how dare you? But it's, it's also really, really great. It's just a view.

And it, I guess it's a Western I'd call it more of a ranch film than a Western. But if that, if the Western vibe of it gets you, Nina, I'd, I'd give it a shot. It's, it's really good. the western vibe of it gets you nina i'd give it a shot it's it's really good it's full of really great acting and uh it's a real movie like i feel like it probably will win oscars because it feels it feels like the type of film that used to win

oscars did you say it was the best picture nominee yeah it's okay and it's the front runner of most nominations too like i think all three actors uh benedict kirsten and plemons are all nominated it's a benedict heavy uh talk to the audience episode it's true yeah it's uh he's he couldn't be more well he in both movies he does an american accent but in all other ways he's very different uh is from dr yeah bob doesn't like his american accent uh it could be better you could hear his western his montana version of that accent. Hey, partner. Yeah, we call him Cumbie on this podcast network. Old Cumbie.

You should watch that new animated Grinch with him doing the voice of the Grinch. It does a nasally high-pitched voice for some reason. I mean, I know where they hired him. Watch that new Nightmare Alley. It's on HBO Max. And that was great. Like, man, was it good. I knew a bit about Nightmare Alley as a concept.

I actually never seen the original. But I know quotes from it and stuff. So it was great. It's the perfect film for Del Toro. Like, it's full of great actors. Like, every actor in it rules and it is it is a noir ass noir and i think i was thinking the whole time if bob hasn't seen this yet bob's got to see this movie like i was thinking it's a real bobber it's a real bobber what makes it a bobber

well it's it's very noir it's it's uh it's dark it's about uh man's inhumanity to man. And also like old timey things too. And the carnival. I'm into it. I'm into it. HBO Max, eh? On HBO Max, yeah. Nice.

A brisk two and a half hours. It did not feel long. I just wish, I love the carnival stuff in it so much. I wish it was like all the movies in the carnival, but it's not entirely in the carnival. You're into carnival stuff in it so much. I wish it was like all the movies in the carnival, but it's not entirely in the carnival. You're into carnival stuff? Well, as long as it's ugly and bad. And then Willem Dafoe is the carnival barker

as the leader of the carnival. Lastly, I got the Blu-ray of the Project Aco and it's insane to see it in HD. It's crazy to see it in HDd that's a discotheque right yeah yeah they stumbled upon like a pristine print of it like in some warehouse or something right it's it's amazing to look at it i mean there is some stuff in it that i was like oh yeah this is the 80s all right like as in there's a whole lot of uh what if a woman had a man's voice comedy in it that i was like that didn't age so great well i mean it is like the panty shot anime right it's also that yeah

made by the people who first did like some of the first like hentai like the cream lemon series they then did they then did project echo and we're like well what if we just had the we gave panty shots and fighting but no actual like sex what if we did that? But the fights are still awesome and the comedy is great. And Seiko is still like the most annoying character that ever was made to be annoying. But that's it. That's all I've been enjoying this last month. So now we're moving on to questions and comments from our most recent episodes. And Nina has offered to read them on this podcast.

So thank you, Nina. You're welcome. So Nina, please start us off with the first comment on here. And I should point out that this is a clarification on our last episode because someone used the word gringo in a response and they used the at symbol. So we weren't sure if that was them censoring themselves to not get screened by Patreon,

but apparently it's for a different reason altogether. Emily M says, Oh fun, you read my comment, party face emoji. For the record, the at symbol in G-R-I-N-G at symbol is a neologistic symbol sometimes used in informal written Spanish to indicate gender neutrality since it includes both an O, masculine ending, and an A, feminine ending, put together. And I like to think other genders as well since it's a unique symbol in its own right gringo refers to a man gringa refers to a woman and g-r-i-n-g at symbol could

refer to someone who's either both other or neither okay so yeah i was we thought it was to get around perhaps uh it being recorded as a slur or something but no no i've never seen this before it's really interesting. Yeah. I, I love to hear that. You know, I, uh, Spanish language has a lot of very gendered terms too.

So to, yeah, I didn't even think of it being a gender neutral term for gringo or gringa. Like, so that, that's, uh, that was very interesting to learn.

So thank, thank you for clarifying Emily. Up next, we have comments for, uh, three men in a comic book and dan haslam was our big guest and uh rising uh in fame once again as soon as our episode came out i know yeah we we recorded with him back in october when he was available but we felt that

episode would be the best and then who would have thought that first uh within weeks of that episode he has an unfortunate accident in the ring and breaks his left leg and then while he is recovering ring of honor the company he was working for when we were talking with him shuts down and lays off everybody and then the week we're about to publish it he then makes this huge big popular debut in all elite wrestling and dynamite it's so. Like we just had him on the show and I'm hearing his name chanted on regular, regularly on television. I'd like to believe he's so nice. He planned it all out for our favor.

It was very nice of him. But Nina, please read the first comments. Darren says, nah, it's the rumpus room. It's not really confounding as much as not a very interesting space to put characters in when there's already a TV room and a den that can serve the same purpose. For the layout of the house, like that matters, it made sense to use a rumpus room since it would directly view this treehouse out the window, but they could have easily done the same shot setup with Homer sitting in the TV room and cheating the treehouse over to be visible through the window next to the back door. Honestly, for McGaggy's birthday, I feel like it's only the

rumpus room and not the TV room, so Maggie could point to that credenza you never see again. Virtually any time the room has ever been used, they were pretty arbitrary. They were scenes that easily could have been the TV room again. The only time I've seen where the rumpus room was used to good effect was season 28's A Father's Watch, where Bart, from the backyard, can see Homer and Marge in the garage through the rumpus room window. Would have been too confusing of a cheat to have it be the kitchen or TV room window that time. Dang it, I wrote so much about the rumpus room. This is a serious rumpus room lore. And yeah, that's where Homer was watching,

well, not watching the boys, but watching TV in that room, which is kind of strange. And it feels to me like in terms of, you know, setting up, you know, shots in the room, which is kind of strange. And it feels to me like in terms of, you know, setting up, you know, shots in the show, it feels like the rumpus room is barely used because there's no traffic through it. If you're like in the kitchen or the living room or the TV room or the dining room, there's like traffic that can go through,

characters can enter, but really the rumpus room is just like one of the bedrooms kind of. Yeah, I now feel silly though for thinking it was Maggie's room just because it was in the mcgaggy's birthday episode because uh obviously they wouldn't have a credenza in the babies or it's unlikely the baby's bedroom would have a credenza makes much more sense to be in the rumpus room and we'll see it again uh in for like three more years sorry like two more years episodes we'll call it out do you recall much drawing the rumpus room in any of the simpsons comics i never got to draw that room i wish i could have that would

have been cool man that's a rare beast i never thought of it like you had to know the house's layout and stuff right uh yeah i think i don't think i got a proper layout though like i got reference shots of every room and that includes the rumpus room, but I don't think it like places it in the house anywhere. But probably just from watching the show, you know how the rooms are connected on the first floor. I kind of have to know that. Yeah. So moving on to Chris Tarr. Chris Tarr says, in the same vein as Henry and his Spider-Man 33, a few months ago, I finally bought a good graded copy of Action Comics 188, the one from the Iron Giant off eBay.

I probably paid too much for it, but screw it. I got lucky on something and was able to sell it to cover the cost. Recently on the Heritage Auction site, I saw the best ever graded copy of Action 188. I was desperate, like Bart looking for what I could sell. How many weeks of doing DoorDash will be worth it? When the live auction started and it went to $7,200, I was like, nope, I'm not that crazy. Yes, that money should be going towards Patreons. Yes. I appreciate that a similar person loves

the love of a specific old comic book as well. But yeah, those comic books especially or Heritage Auctions is where you hear about the somebody bought an old NES game for a million dollars. Like that's on heritage auctions. Like I've, I've bought things on heritage auctions as well. Uh, but often I'm outbid like you, you can definitely assume that it's real as opposed to when you go on eBay, you can probably guess that it's real, but you are rolling the dice

more, but on heritage auctions, you can count on it being real, but that also will lead to a lot more, uh, higher bids on stuff i think yeah i've been tempted but i'm saving money and uh when we live together nina and i will buy a cell right yeah i'm just waiting for like the one i gotta have one of these days maybe a space coyote one who knows yeah i've seen very few of those though no i haven't i haven't come across any space coyote in my time i mean it's uh tree houses are especially hard to get as well our fantasy sequences i absolutely want anything with skinner and i think we both want a skinner and chalmers if we can do it but that's got to be really hard to do but uh anything with

just skinner or just burns i would love for me and i i tried to get uh the the most recent one where i got outbid to a ridiculous degree was it was the original garfield comic strip as in the one that jim davis drew that ends with garfield being thrown out the window like oh it was that meme and i was like man i would pay eight hundred dollars for this and it went for like i think three thousand was its final amount. Once our Patreon hits $20,000, we can finally afford Garfield smoking the pipe. And we could frame it over the recording table. Jim Davis will never sell that.

He'll never sell it. I think I saw the person who bought the Garfield out the window one on Twitter. Oh, really? I think they were tweeting about it. Oh, man. There was another one of like, He-Man. It was for internal use only at the Filmation offices. It was He-Man at a typewriter writing a script for a He-Man episode.

That's how those episodes were written. It was such a perfect drawing. But again, it just was like, it always gets too rich for my body. That's the problem with Heritage's auctions. They have the cooler stuff that won't be on eBay, but it's where people want it. If you want to sell from, they have this amazing Akira cell that's not finished yet. It's already $20,000 when I checked in on it.

Unless I'm forgetting, I think the only cells I have are the one you got me, Henry, of Hermit Wren from that episode of Ren and Stimpy and also a Lena Inverse from one of the Slayer series. And that cell was only like $15 when I got it 21 years ago. I have a couple of Slayer cells as well. I have Rezzo and Copy Rezzo. We could like stick them on top of each other and make a scene.

And I got you that Beavis and Butthead one too. Right, right. I'm going to get you that. Sorry, all my cells are put away, but I do remember the Beavis and Butthead one. I apologize. No, I just got in a new Simpsons cell. I haven't been able to frame yet, but. I lived in my apartment for eight years now and I haven't hung anything up.

You know, our pal Ian Jones-Courty, he was just framing his cells. He shared it on Twitter because of the Sonic episode we did. He's like, here's that cell I talked about in it, which is of Ketella straddling Robotnik. I don't have that many cells myself. The most expensive one I've gotten is one from Jubei Chen, the secret, the lovely iPad. I love that series. I love that series too. And I paid $125 for that.

So not very much compared to like say a Simpsons cell. You know, since all cartoons went digital like two decades ago, now it's like they're not making new cells, anything you'd like. So you can only get old cells. Or like production drawings. Yeah, production. Yeah, I've been tempted by a couple like, oh, that's not a bad production drawing from Futurama, but it just doesn't feel the same as a cell.

You have to color it yourself. Get out your crayons and color on that $300 drawing of Fry. Moving on, we have Simpsons Tall Tales. Mike Carlson, great guest on that. Please check out our appearance on Podcast The Ride if you haven't yet. We talked all about The Simpsons Ride and just general Simpsons Tall Tales, Mike Carlson. Great guests on that. Please check out our appearance on Podcast The Ride if you haven't yet. We talked all about The Simpsons The Ride and just general Simpsons topics. It went over two hours, I believe, that episode.

With amazing art by Nina. Yes, thank you, Nina. Oh, yeah, that was fun. I kind of went overboard on it because I haven't gotten a chance to draw you guys much at all because of the lack of live events. We have like half a poster drawn for that live show that got canceled. Yeah, but by the time you guys will be able to do that, there's going to be so much material for you guys to cover.

Absolutely. It'll be a three night event when we finally do our Simpsons predicted. So Sean Riley, what does he say, Nina? Former Iowan here, Iowan, I don't know how to pronounce that. I've been to the Hobo Festival a few years ago. There are no actual hobos there, but people are dressed like them. The highlight of the festival is the Hobo Stew,

where the whole town has giant kettles and gives free stew to everyone. Locals bring big containers and fill up. The stew isn't great, but for the price, it's fine. Needed way more hobo spices. And I just moved to Wilmington last year. It seems pretty nice here, and it's boring as its reputation. It is a thousand times a better place to live than Iowa,

which is just miserable. So a diss to all of our Iowa listeners, which there's got to be 23 of them out there, I believe. We can look at the stats. We can look at the stats.

Iowa, it's so easy to forget about all tucked away down there. I don't even know where it is. Illinois? It's in that melange melange of states like in the midwest with like idaho it's not as far it's not as far east as illinois it's

hard for me to name all the states in there yeah but i'm glad to hear the delaware is better i there was another comment i or maybe it was in the discord somebody had mentioned like you know you say nobody talks about delaware but uh the steven universe series is set in a delaware style it's called delmarva in the show because it's like delaware plus maryland plus virginia i believe it is so it's del delmarva but uh it's that it's taken from a love of delaware so there's at least one cartoon that loves delaware and we are Bay Area elitists and Nina's a Vancouver elitist, but Henry and I grew up in real America. Not in some fancy city.

You're real salt of the earth. I am. So moving on to, oh, Drew Mackey. We know this guy. What does he have to say? I am posting this because I would have nowhere else to share this information

because college was a long time ago. But after having read Huck Finn in high school and not being impressed by it as being significantly different from Tom Sawyer, I had to read it again for a college class called The American Novel, which began with Huck Finn and ended with Blade Runner, which is to say the movie and not the Philip K. Dick novel that inspired it. Not only did my professor find thematic linkages between Huck Finn and Blade Runner, but she taught Huck Finn so thoroughly that afterward, I felt I had never read it before. It's not a book for kids the way Tom Sawyer is. It's a spinoff using a character from the book to tell stories about America that are really deep and also funny in a way I didn't understand in high school. I wrote a paper about Huck Finn and the Simpsons as a satire of specific American

conventions. I don't remember what exactly. And to this day, I will sing its praises as a really good book, but you might not ever appreciate it in full if you don't get Candace Way to teach it to you. College was dumb, but that one professor is a good argument for why it's worth it. With that out of my system, I will never speak kindly about college again. That's fair. And yeah, I agree with Drew in that like a lot of books are wasted on

high school students whose brains have not finished developing or you know are just starting to develop you know reading them as quickly as possible to like pass a test and retain no information or reading the spark notes because uh when i was a um uh in grad school i read i took a class called like literature for social justice and there were a few things that i had read in high school like uh uncle tom's cabin and to kill a few things that I had read in high school, like Uncle Tom's Cabin and To Kill a Mockingbird. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I know the point of these books. And then when I read them, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm an adult now. And these books are way more nuanced than I ever knew as a kid.

So, yeah, it is worth revisiting these like high school reading list books because you get so much more out of them as an adult. I only really appreciated Mark Twain when a teacher taught it to me as well in my late teens and i'm just like oh this guy is much deeper than than i thought in in a great american satirist like he's not just a a ride at disneyland you can see him uh we talked about the riverboat right oh yes we talked about that yeah when they all step on it uh up next we have blood feud uh steven sadek from we hate movies was on that. We love Steven Sadek and We Hate Movies. Nina, what did Kat Hayberg say? Regarding children giving blood, I think weight might be one issue.

I know you have to weigh at least 110 pounds because I don't, and that's why I can't give blood. I've asked if it's one of those things like putting your phone on airplane mode that doesn't really matter, and if I could just lie about it, and said no it kind of does matter because the amount of blood volume loss for a typical donation is greater than I could tolerate compared to my overall mass. I have no idea what children weigh but according to the very trusted source Livestrong.com the average weight of a 10 year old boy is around 70 pounds. I know Bart is supposed to be quote-unquote chubby but he's also quite short so probably wouldn't weigh that much so blood donation would at least at the very least be kind of risky for him also hoon sir pointed out one thing they got wrongish about blood types in this episode is kids usually have the same blood

type as her mom so marge also should have had the same blood type as bart interesting okay you know that would have hurt the story the the tension of the story it would be like marge just goes like well fine bart if you're not going to i'll do it you know bart's blood type is so rare it's made up so we have that going for us at least march march should say like you know what i ruined his uh governor campaign and i painted him naked but it's time for me to give him some blood that's uh i i gave plasma once i might i may have told the story before but it was such a long and depressing experience and i got so little money that i never did it again but i did spend that money on mario and luigi superstar saga so that places when i gave blood in 2003 did you do it for the money i did it to buy mario and luigi superstar saga

wow yeah i see so if if only it would have been timed the perfect timing would have been for bowser's inside story because that's right in the year inside by that time i was freelancing for like ten dollars an article i was living it up uh the yeah i would guess bart is probably around 70 or 80 pounds you know the joke in south park was that cartman weighs 98 pounds and that's how heavy he is but most most kids are under 100 i don't know when that karate episode bart's drawing like he could be 100 i was thinking they fattened him up for that episode yes yeah uh his homework was eat a stick of butter i think that that week uh moving on shane h what does he have to say hi guys overworked mailman here just want to reinforce being nice to us male people i've been a city carrier for over six years now i've worked in a

small town that's part of the houston district my post office has been understaffed since before covid even started and not just my office, the entire Houston district. Every postmaster is constantly asking every other office for help. The post office has this problem that only got worse when COVID started, in which it takes about two months at least just to get a new hire into orientation. There are a ton of oil plants and other high-paying jobs in the area. So expecting someone to wait two months for a job that isn't even fully competitively priced for the area means that by that time, most people have already found a different job. Then once they come in, they immediately get used by all the postmasters to fill in

and are immediately burnt out and either quit or get fired. Every time I hear a podcast talk about corporations that treat their employees badly, I hate the fact that even the post office falls among these criteria. Every carrier I know down here works on overtime, and I specifically haven't gotten my non-Sunday off in over two years. I'm thankful for the Sunday, but come on. TLDR, I know it sucks to use the post office right now, but thank you for being nice to us when we inevitably get something wrong. Also, extra fun note, most people don't know this. The post office gets no funding from taxes, although there is a bill going through the Senate right now, I think.

That one might help a little bit, but the post office is generally run by profit, even though the internet basically killed profits for the last decade or two. Yes, we stan our post office heroes. They're braver than cops and soldiers. I'm not being sarcastic. No, they die more than cops, soldiers i'm not being sarcastic no they've they die more than cops i think or more at risk no i feel that they're attacked by dogs and harassed by strangers they get things stolen from them i always say hi to my mailman i always open the door for them

uh yeah and like you say henry like uh they make the service frustrating on purpose so you hate the post office yeah no and i feel bad you know every time we talk about how much we dislike going to our local post office i think both of us try to at least say like well you know we know that you guys are given no money and no support and you're stretched super thin and it's not your fault you don't you can't help us but it doesn't make it less frustrating but yeah i feel bad for and to hear the inside like that no sundays off and for no things that aren't a sunday off in two years that's bonkers like that's so wrong i mean i know i mean again i know that's being starved to the point of uselessness which is what the government does to program so you hate them and you want them to go away even

though they help us but i wish it wasn't run at a profit because it is a miracle that a letter can go across the country in like three days. Like we should be running out of deficit. And in fact, they stopped doing that. They're like, oh, yeah, mail is going to take longer now for the rest of time. We can't actually move a letter across the country in three days anymore. And it's all American commerce runs on this. It needs the post office to work it's just yeah so we we salute all of you mail carriers out there absolutely we're saluting

right now you and the good humor man top of my list uh up next we have snow job our talking in the hill episode and nina uh neil nevin says lifelong texan and current dallas resident can confirm that growing up if there was ever so much as this thinnest layer of ice on the roads or an inch of snow that was it schools were closed through most of the day and grocery store aisles were emptied it was fun and new as a kid but as an adult navigating it here is such a pain in the ass because of the frenzy it sends people into last year's february storm was one of the worst things i ever lived through not because of how cold it was but because of how poorly equipped our state is for it and our governor has almost I totally understand that.

Yeah, the episode was not about the government failing the people. I mean, maybe a modern episode when it comes back could be about that. Like, oh yeah, Texas is not ready for this and the the government doesn't care yeah instead it was like texas isn't ready for it and so they overestimate light snowfall as a blizzard but then they and that's the comedy of it of like well there would never be an actual blizzard blizzard and then there was and and there's been a ton of snow in the Midwest over the past month. My family lives in Ohio still, and it's been a real snowpocalypse. But also then it'll be 50 degrees for a weekend because lots of things are happening.

Yeah, we've had some warm ones here. I don't know. And you guys did have a snowy Christmas time. It hasn't been snowing as much in your area, Nina? No, that was kind of like a freak occurrence for Vancouver, which was nice. It's kind of funny that like the one time we decided to take a trip up to the mountains to see snow, that was the year that it snowed a bunch in the city. Yeah, every year I go there for Christmas, Nina sits me down and yells at me and she

says, it'll never snow here. Don't even think about it. And then it did. Yeah, and it was like a different kind of snow we usually get in Vancouver. It'll never snow here. Don't even think about it. And then it did. Yeah. And it was like a different kind of snow we usually get in Vancouver. Usually in Vancouver, it's so warm that as soon as it snows, it melts a little bit. And then it's just ice everywhere. And it's like super dangerous to walk outside. But it wasn't like that.

It was cold enough that it stayed light and powdery. It was only after Bob had left, it became dangerous to walk outside. And you did fall. Yeah, I did. Yeah, I slipped and i skinned my knee ouch man and we went to my knee too we went to i didn't skin my knee and we went to uh an even snowier place uh for post new year holidays because we thought there'd be no snow so we went to an even snowier place that was fun that was the like the first time i'd seen that

much snow in a very long time it ruled yeah. Yeah. So we have Echo Cimarron up next for Talking in the Hill Snow Job. Growing up in Oklahoma, not exactly the same as Texas, but in a lot of ways they're pretty close. I heard plenty of people, especially good old boys like Buck, call people old top as a term of affection. As for the indignity of Hank being passed over for running Strickland Propane in Buck's absence, it sucks for Hank and he's right to be ticked, but I have a feeling Buck legitimately views taking care of those spoiled rotten hounds as on par with, if not more important than, looking after his business. He even made a point of assigning Hank to the job before picking who would run the business. He probably figures any business

geek can keep the lights on for a few days. Plus, Vickers is enough of a creep to do his dirty work, like installing the tattlers on price gouging everyone in town. Buck has no love for propane, it just happens to make him money. Once Vickers starts screwing that up, Buck fires him and turns to Hank, the guy he goes to clean up his messes. He knows Hank is too honest for cold, hard business, but he's who Buck depends on when it really matters. Even in the middle of both personal and environmental disaster, all Buck cares about are his money

and his dogs, and he turns to Hank to ensure the safety of both personal and environmental disaster all buck cares about are his money and his dogs and he turns to hank to ensure the safety of both it super sucks for hank to be stuck in this weird codependent relationship with a sleazy boss but i love how well written their interactions are that's a good point uh i i just saw it as like an indignity it to hank it is an indignity to take care of those dogs but actually the way buck goes like take care of my house my house like he tell me you love him hank it actually i will uh do so it actually is very important for him like it's the first thing he cares about so it's not just meant as an insult right but hank wants to succeed at business but uh you know strickland knows you're too naive yeah you you are too nice

you're not as evil as i am you think it's about having friends yes yeah so up next we have talky futurama time keeps on slipping and maddie i believe maddie cop what does she say nina i watched the superheroes globetrotters cartoon as a kid and then someone told me they were real and i was like what and then i found out they were just normal human basketball players and i was very disappointed that's that great. She thought that they were like superheroes or they went on adventures or pulled items out of their afros, but they were just guys who play basketball.

You had to be alive to see like every tentacle of the Globetrotters marketing machine, like the live events, the movies, the cartoon series. I presume there's probably comic books too. Oh, there had to be. Yeah, there definitely were. I presume there's probably comic books, too. Oh, there had to be. Yeah, there definitely were. I would bet DC published those. Yeah, I just thought it was so funny that for just to imagine a child Maddie going like,

they're real. And then seeing like, they just play basketball. And like, they're all the new sparkles. They're not the ones that you grew up with. Yes, yeah. So Steven C. Nadel says about Time Keeps on Slipping. What does he say, Nina? I was a graduate student at IU Bloomington, Russian Studies and Library Science, by the way. I am extra edumacated. Home of Bobby Knight in the

late 90s. And he was infamous on campus for being a thug and a bully. At the time, he was increasingly on thin ice with the administration for his terrible behavior. I personally felt that he was a pathetic has-been who hadn't won a championship or even gotten far in the playoffs for over a decade. He wasn't worth the drama. Finally, the administration told him he had one last chance and then he'd be fired. Not surprisingly, within less than a month, I think he assaulted a student, not a player, and was finally canned. What was extra glorious was the very next year the new

coach a person of color no less took the Hoosiers all the way to the NCAA championship and just barely lost that playoff also was the only time I've ever given the smallest darn about college basketball that's I just to stick it to Bobby Knight and have the person who follows him actually win a championship I uh man I couldn't I only know him as like a caricature on TV yeah actually be walking the halls of like oh no Bobby Knight I don't make eye contact with him like this guy he's a pissed off old man who hasn't had success in a long time he's gonna take it out on all of us young people he became synonymous with chair throwing it's funny that he's most famous as this like

violent jerk and it's like oh yeah that got him fired he was a pilot how who'd have thought he get fired for being a violent jerk he didn't rise to power on that aspect of his life so up next we have comments for uh our what a cartoon movie about lion king 2 simba's pride uh nina what does tune j723 say about this episode the timonon and Pumbaa series had a Gargoyles-like situation in the end. The show was canceled in 96 after two seasons and 46 episodes. But somebody really wanted more episodes. So like with Gargoyles, they outsourced pre-production to a Canadian studio, Studio B, where they made 39 episodes. They were airing in Europe in 1998.

Then they eventually came to America a year later on Toon Disney. The third season is fine but it's just timon and pumbaa none of the other lion king characters make guest appearances or cameos i feel like uh they rarely did because when i was doing the podcast i looked into the series and there's like 85 episodes there's a lot of it it's all on disney plus and there are rare appearances of like your lion king friends and they're all voiced by other people of course and uh like and then eventually they just kind of get out of africa and go other places without any explanation but yeah it always like it baffled me why they made so many of these but i guess it's

like well these characters are so marketable that no matter how much we spend on the cartoon it'll eventually make us money back to know that it premiered in europe first and then went to just like tune disney so not even first run syndication in the US that tells me like the Europeans must have really loved those guys I love that me a cat you're so funny oh the fat guy he fart it is so good

and yeah that's okay sorry French people that's what they sound like you're getting it this time French people and Kaiser Beams has a comment about some lost footage or I guess uncompleted versions of the movie. Nina, what does Kaiserbeams say about this? So I did some digging through YouTube and archive.org and found that somebody uploaded an entire work print animatic of Lion King 2 to archive.org. This print included some deleted scenes.

Here are some select ones that people cropped and uploaded to YouTube. They are as follows. After Kiara's birth, Rafiki is informed by Mufasa that there is another. Zira training Kovu. Vitani and Nuka inform Zira of Kiara's birth, and Zira gives all three a more twisted take on the speech Mufasa gives Simba in the first movie. Nuka's last words are expanded. Execs nix this because they thought it sent children the wrong message

of doing dangerous things for your parents' zero's death scene you were right in that there was a cut because zero explicitly commits suicide in this scene nix for obvious reasons i thought so of course i'm certainly missing things like a few cut or altered lines but these were the big finds in the print you can watch the entire print here and then a link to the archive.org yeah thank you kaiser beams uh this did not come up in my research but i did not even think to look on archive.org for uh this material and uh yeah a lot of these were things i assume were in the movie and never made it in especially the the suicide which is is obvious to me but like we said henry there's like connective tissue missing it's such a quick cut to her falling and the look on her face is not one of like shock that i followed it's a sadist it certainly looks like a satisfied person who's like you know what i choose to kill myself

instead of letting you save me it's a it's a real so there moment which uh you know not unseen in other disney films but certainly dark and the Nuka one is so interesting to me that like he had this whole speech more about like, oh, I should have tried harder for my parents' affection, which I can see why they're like, well, that's a weird thing to tell kids. We shouldn't do that. Even though Andy Dick is hilarious,

kids don't look up to Nuka. But Kaiser Beams, you know, they are a great YouTuber as well. So I appreciate them sharing their research with us on that. Absolutely. So moving on, our last set of comments and questions are coming from the What a Cartoon episode all about the adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. We did with Ian Jones Cordy, a very fun episode that came out just in time for Valentine's Day about a giant Amazon woman who steps on you and makes your robots horny. And sorry, Nina, what does Christmas Ape say?

Is Long John Baldry the best voice actor who never gets a chance to star in a genuinely decent cartoon? Even the voice of King Koopa got to be in that Sam & Max show. Oh, well, at least we have all of these great robotic line readings. Also, I applaud Ian for making what will likely be the only reference to Princess Guinevere and the Jewel Riders that will ever appear in one of your podcasts. That was an impressive pull. I forgot that one too.

Me too. Yeah, I've never seen one second of that classic Bobot hit. We're talking about the Bobot extended universe and I want all the Bobots to come together. But yeah. But yeah, Long John Baldry, like the king, he's so good as Robotnik, just like rules. A UFO? Yeah, my real evil, like the twisting of the mustache is rolled R's, like just, yeah. He's so big in camp.

And again, it's like, it's imprinting the actor onto the character, but that made the scenes even funnier to me of catella hitting on robotnik and him not being receptive to it i like to view it as long john baldry being like i don't swing that way madam i'm glad you don't hate me oh uh yeah i was walking around alone quoting robotnik to no one in my apartment that's my life uh moving on our last comment is from joe hodgson what does he say nina i do feel it's a somewhat underplayed part on the console wars that we had Deke go from handling Super Mario cartoons to Sonic with Andy Hayward serving as the EP on both. The defection of Deke from Nintendo to Sega is surprisingly not something I can ever remember

talking about. And I only say it's surprising because basically everything was Nintendo versus Sega back then to an exhausting degree. In the world of cartoons though, I think I can safely say it's the one area Sonic consistently beat out Mario because those Mario tunes are just abysmal. It's a good time when the plumber's rap comes on, but it's all downhill from there. Yeah, I agree. I think it was a case of people in Japan seeing those cartoons and maybe not knowing about them before. Like, they did what?

They sold these? And then I think it was a mix of that and the Super Mario Brothers movie in 93 being a huge misfire. And they were like, let's just reign all this in. And maybe some French guys can make a Donkey Kong Country cartoon

in a few years. And that's it. We'll try again in a few years, but otherwise we're not into this. And then, I mean, and also Deke can just head back to sonic anyway but yeah i mean for the mario tunes we all remember the opening and also the dude the mario but everything in between is just trash just like this at least in the sonic event in adventures

of sonic they are trying to be an entertaining silly silly animal cartoon in the ren and stimmy vein with no money and a terrible time as well but as in uh schedule but they are really actually trying i you don't get the sense on mario brothers that anybody particularly cares at all absolutely not uh but hey they weren't paid enough to care so god bless them yeah and then uh but then that deke world of sonic stuff like the japan just takes that back too. And I just, I, again, really appreciate that Ian brought it up and I tweeted it out afterwards that seeming TMS pilot for its own Sonic series that they would have done digital, like looks,

it looks so good. Like seeing Sonic yelled at by Animaniacs, like bystander Human characters is so funny to see It also feels like there's very little Sonic in that It's called man of the year if you want to look it up It's mostly like Robotnik based Because he's dressing up as Sonic to cause mischief It's too bad I can see why Though Sega in the mid 90s was not

Ready to invest millions in A TMS level production of a Sonic series Absolutely not So yeah that's been another episode of Talk to the Audience. Thank you to Nina. Nina, where can we find you? What are you working on? I know you got a book coming out.

You're very busy with Fangamer. Lots of stuff is going on in your world. Oh yeah, my next book, Sparks Future Purr Effect. That's purr like in the cat purring. It's coming out March. No, not March april um it keeps getting delayed because of uh the supply chain issues no uh scholastic is like this book is too good we can't we can't make other books look bad that we're publishing it's been a rough time for

like physical book releases so uh please buy my book when it comes out uh that's coming in april and uh yeah like bob said i'm working on a bunch of Fangamer things. I released, recently we launched a bunch of Horizon Forbidden West stuff. Like I mentioned, if you just go to fangamer.com and look for my stuff on there, search for Space Coyote Collection,

you can see all the things I've been doing. And you can find me on Twitter at SpaceCoyote, that's Space Coyote with an L at the end instead of an E. Awesome, man. Thank you so much, Nina. It's so great. And I'm so glad that you got to be our first in-person guest again post-COVID.

It had to happen at some point. And thank you for doing work during your week-long vacation in Berkeley. Also that. No, no problem. It's nice to record in person with you guys again. It makes a big difference. It does. Yeah, no problem. It's nice to record in person with you guys again. It makes a big difference. It does. Yeah, it does.

You know, hey, I think our remote ones, you can barely tell the difference, especially after editing. But yeah, it makes, it is, you can feel it when someone's in the room with you. Absolutely. I can't put up a hilarious background, though. That's the only downside. That's my favorite part, is finding the most hilarious background to choose. Now, sadly, Nina's just had to look at the Avengers poster the whole time instead. But, yeah, and also, don't forget, the poll will be up soon.

Do you want us to do Roger Rabbit? Yes or no? I think I know what you're going to vote. I think we should find the people who say no. Yeah, it's true. You know, just assume it's coming. But, yes, and all that cool stuff. All opposed?

Me. Let's get them, fellas. All right, everybody. We'll see you again next time for another episode of Talk to the Audience. See you then. Wow. Infotainment.